$8 billion upgrade to make GPS more precise, versatile

BY W.J. HENNIGAN - Los Angeles Times

Without it, ATMs would stop spitting out cash, Wall Street could blunder billions of dollars' worth of stock trades and clueless drivers would get lost.

Most people may associate the Global Positioning System with the navigation devices that are becoming standard equipment in cars. But GPS has become a nerve center for the 21st century rivaling the Internet - enabling cargo companies to track shipments, guiding firefighters to hot spots and even helping people find lost dogs.

"It's a ubiquitous utility that everybody takes for granted now," said Bradford W. Parkinson.

He should know. Three decades ago, as a baby-faced Air Force colonel just out of the Vietnam War, Parkinson led the Pentagon team that developed GPS at a military base in El Segundo, Calif.
Now, scientists and engineers are developing an $8 billion GPS upgrade that will make the system more reliable, more widespread and much more accurate.

The new system is designed to pinpoint a location within an arm's length, compared with a margin of error of 20 feet or more today. With that kind of precision, a GPS-enabled mobile phone could guide you right to the front steps of Starbucks, rather than somewhere on the block.

"This new system has the potential to deliver capabilities we haven't seen yet," said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst for the aerospace research firm Teal Group. "It's hard to imagine what industry wouldn't be affected."

The 24 satellites that make up the GPS constellation will be replaced one by one. The overhaul will take a decade and is being overseen by engineers at Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo.

"We know that the world relies on GPS," said Col. David B. Goldstein, the chief engineer for the upgrade.
San Diego found out firsthand in 2007, when the Navy accidentally jammed GPS signals in the area, knocking out cell-phone service and a hospital's emergency paging system for doctors.

The upgrade is designed in part to prevent such outages by increasing the number of signals beamed to Earth from satellites orbiting 12,000 miles up. By triangulating the signals from four satellites, GPS receivers -- and there are now more than a billion of them -- can pinpoint your exact location on the ground.

Besides GPS' obvious application, positioning, timekeeping for the financial industry has become a crucial use for the system. Transactions as varied as ATM withdrawals and Wall Street stock trades are time-stamped using precise atomic clocks ticking within the GPS satellites. The clocks are accurate to one-billionth of a second. On Wall Street, a fraction of a second could mean billions of dollars.

Several countries are developing their own satellites. The European Union, China and Russia are spending billions of dollars on their versions.

"GPS has truly become the lighthouse of the world," Parkinson said. 
   

Playing in dirt is good for kids

Smarter, less anxious: study; Outdoor learning experiences and school gardens help students relax and learn better, researchers suggest

By SHARON KIRKEY
Canwest News Service
May 25, 2010

Parents, here's another reason for your kids to play outdoors in the dirt: It might make them smarter.

And, as a side benefit, dirt appears to be a natural anti-anxiety drug, but without the side effects.

Mice exposed to a bacterium found in soil navigated a maze twice as fast, and with less anxiety, as control mice, in studies presented yesterday at the 110th general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.

The researchers say we've become so urbanized we risk losing a connection with an organism in nature that may actually be beneficial to humans.

Dr. Dorothy Matthews became intrigued by Mycobacterium vaccae - a natural soil microbe - in 2007, when British scientists published a study showing that when mice were injected with a heat-killed version of the organism, it stimulated neurons in the brainstem to start producing serotonin.

"Serotonin is a molecule that has a number of different effects, but one of them is modulating mood and decreasing anxiety," says Matthews, an associate professor of biology at The Sage Colleges in Troy, NY.

Serotonin also plays a role in learning. "If you're nervous, if you're frightened, you just can't think straight," Matthews said. She wondered, could M. vaccae have an effect on learning in mice?

The bacteria-exposed mice consistently ran the maze twice as fast as non-exposed mice. They also showed fewer anxiety behaviours - less freezing, wall-climbing, stopping and grooming, returning to the start, or defecation.

After the bacteria were removed, the mice started running the mazes slower than they did when they were ingesting the bacteria. "They experienced a kind of serotonin withdrawal," Matthews said. They were still faster than the controls, on average, an effect that lasted for another month of testing.

Matthews says people are exposed to M. vaccae just by virtue of being outdoors. "It's only been the last 100 years or so that we've become more urbanized and are eating our foods in a different way."

We no longer eat foods that we grow or gather ourselves, she says - foods that haven't been "washed multiple times, and dunked in hot water, or processed or grown with pesticides."

Making time in school curriculums for children to learn outdoors might decrease their anxiety and improve their ability to learn new tasks, she says.

"There's a movement now in some schools to actually have gardens that are part of the school experience."

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
 

An Excellent Point

“Every man owes a part of his time and money to the business or industry in which he is engaged. No man has the moral right to withhold his support from an organization that is striving to improve conditions within his sphere.” — Theodore Roosevelt
 

Biomass Industry Sees 'Chilling Message' in EPA's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rule

May 14, 2010

By ROBIN BRAVENDER of Greenwire

U.S. EPA's final rule determining which sources will be subject to greenhouse gas permitting requirements does not exempt biomass power, a decision that has raised concern in the biomass industry.

Issued yesterday, EPA's final "tailoring" rule determines which polluters will be required to account for their greenhouse gas emissions in Clean Air Act permits when the agency begins to formally regulate the heat-trapping gases next January (Greenwire, May 13).

Emissions from biomass or biogenic sources are treated the same as other sources of greenhouse gases in the final rule, EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn said. "We have not finalized any exemptions from applicability or different applicability thresholds for such sources at this time."

That decision "came as a bit of a surprise to us," said David Tenny, president and CEO of the National Alliance of Forest Owners.

Tenny's organization and other forestry groups had urged EPA to exclude biomass combustion from the requirements, arguing that the process is "carbon neutral."

Paul Noe, vice president for public policy at the American Forest & Paper Association, was one of several representatives from his organization who met last month with White House and EPA officials to push for a biomass exemption in the rule.

"When biomass such as wood is combusted for energy, it releases back into the atmosphere carbon dioxide that the trees had absorbed from the atmosphere during their growth," Noe said. "That is why CO2 emissions from biomass combustion are assigned an emissions factor of zero."

Without an exemption from the tailoring rule, Tenny said, "what you have is an incentive for biomass producers to turn back to fossil fuels," because they offer a more concentrated energy source.

"The question is, what is EPA going to do from here?" Tenny said. "This sends a bit of a chilling message to biomass producers."

EPA also received comments expressing concern that not all biomass combustion should be considered carbon-neutral.

Franz Matzner, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said EPA's rule must distinguish between biomass that creates carbon pollution and biomass that does not.

"The science around biomass continues to make clear that not all biomass is good from a carbon footprint perspective," Matzner said. "Some sources of biomass can theoretically be carbon-beneficial: for example, taking waste streams from agricultural crops and burning that is most likely going to give you reductions in greenhouse gases compared to fossil fuels.

"On the other side of the fence, chopping down a swath of forest that then gets turned into a parking lot and burning it puts carbon in the atmosphere that's not going to regrow."

While EPA said it lacked sufficient basis to exclude carbon dioxide emissions from biogenic sources in determining permitting applicability at this time, it also said treating biomass combustion differently warrants further exploration.

There is flexibility to apply pollution control requirements to biomass sources in ways that "recognize the inherently lower-emitting characteristics of biomass," Milbourn said, and the agency will take that into account when it issues guidance later this year about what constitutes "best available control technology," or BACT, for specific sources.

EPA said it also plans to seek further comment on addressing biogenic emissions and could take further regulatory action in the future.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack yesterday welcomed EPA's plans to seek comment on how to address biomass under the Clean Air Act.

"As this process moves forward, USDA is committed to working with EPA to ensure that rules designed to reduce the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere also encourage the development and utilization of biomass energy resources and avoid unnecessary regulatory impediments and permitting requirements," Vilsack said in a statement.

Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

For more news on energy and the environment, visit www.greenwire.com.
Greenwire is published by Environment & Energy Publishing.

 

First Large-Scale Formal Quantitative Test Confirms Darwin's Theory of Universal Common Ancestry

ScienceDaily (May 17, 2010) — More than 150 years ago, Darwin proposed the theory of universal common ancestry (UCA), linking all forms of life by a shared genetic heritage from single-celled microorganisms to humans. Until now, the theory that makes ladybugs, oak trees, champagne yeast and humans distant relatives has remained beyond the scope of a formal test. Now, a Brandeis biochemist reports in Nature the results of the first large scale, quantitative test of the famous theory that underpins modern evolutionary biology.

The results of the study confirm that Darwin had it right all along. In his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, the British naturalist proposed that, "all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form." Over the last century and a half, qualitative evidence for this theory has steadily grown, in the numerous, surprising transitional forms found in the fossil record, for example, and in the identification of sweeping fundamental biological similarities at the molecular level.

Still, rumblings among some evolutionary biologists have recently emerged questioning whether the evolutionary relationships among living organisms are best described by a single "family tree" or rather by multiple, interconnected trees -- a "web of life." Recent molecular evidence indicates that primordial life may have undergone rampant horizontal gene transfer, which occurs frequently today when single-celled organisms swap genes using mechanisms other than usual organismal reproduction. In that case, some scientists argue, early evolutionary relationships were web-like, making it possible that life sprang up independently from many ancestors.

According to biochemist Douglas Theobald, it doesn't really matter. "Let's say life originated independently multiple times, which UCA allows is possible," said Theobald. "If so, the theory holds that a bottleneck occurred in evolution, with descendants of only one of the independent origins surviving until the present. Alternatively, separate populations could have merged, by exchanging enough genes over time to become a single species that eventually was ancestral to us all. Either way, all of life would still be genetically related."

Harnessing powerful computational tools and applying Bayesian statistics, Theobald found that the evidence overwhelmingly supports UCA, regardless of horizontal gene transfer or multiple origins of life. Theobald said UCA is millions of times more probable than any theory of multiple independent ancestries.

"There have been major advances in biology over the last decade, with our ability to test Darwin's theory in a way never before possible," said Theobald. "The number of genetic sequences of individual organisms doubles every three years, and our computational power is much stronger now than it was even a few years ago."

While other scientists have previously examined common ancestry more narrowly, for example, among only vertebrates, Theobald is the first to formally test Darwin's theory across all three domains of life. The three domains include diverse life forms such as the Eukarya (organisms, including humans, yeast, and plants, whose cells have a DNA-containing nucleus) as well as Bacteria and Archaea (two distinct groups of unicellular microorganisms whose DNA floats around in the cell instead of in a nucleus).

Theobald studied a set of 23 universally conserved, essential proteins found in all known organisms. He chose to study four representative organisms from each of the three domains of life. For example, he researched the genetic links found among these proteins in archaeal microorganisms that produce marsh gas and methane in cows and the human gut; in fruit flies, humans, round worms, and baker's yeast; and in bacteria like E. coli and the pathogen that causes tuberculosis.

Theobald's study rests on several simple assumptions about how the diversity of modern proteins arose. First, he assumed that genetic copies of a protein can be multiplied during reproduction, such as when one parent gives a copy of one of their genes to several of their children. Second, he assumed that a process of replication and mutation over the eons may modify these proteins from their ancestral versions. These two factors, then, should have created the differences in the modern versions of these proteins we see throughout life today. Lastly, he assumed that genetic changes in one species don't affect mutations in another species -- for example, genetic mutations in kangaroos don't affect those in humans.

What Theobald did not assume, however, was how far back these processes go in linking organisms genealogically. It is clear, say, that these processes are able to link the shared proteins found in all humans to each other genetically. But do the processes in these assumptions link humans to other animals? Do these processes link animals to other eukaryotes? Do these processes link eukaryotes to the other domains of life, bacteria and archaea? The answer to each of these questions turns out to be a resounding yes.

Just what did this universal common ancestor look like and where did it live? Theobald's study doesn't answer this question. Nevertheless, he speculated, "to us, it would most likely look like some sort of froth, perhaps living at the edge of the ocean, or deep in the ocean on a geothermal vent. At the molecular level, I'm sure it would have looked as complex and beautiful as modern life."
 

First Quarter Lumber Recovery

FRA Bulletin - May 14, 2010
Volume 12, Number 6

"Prospects for sawmill profitability have increased significantly in 2010, leading curtailed and closed sawmills in the South to reopen," observes Forest2Market in a May 6 news release, pointing to a "gap between input and output prices" in Southern yellow pine although indeed noting rising sawtimber prices. Forisk Consulting reported a 6.1% increase in pine sawtimber consumption in the South during the first quarter, and a 1.1% demand increase for pulpwood, venturing: "Look for pulpwood demand to reach pre-decline levels by 2013, as OSB and bioenergy facilities increase consumption."

First-quarter reports from paper companies generally included optimistic forecasts, including from the fine papers sector, although in the meantime the recent rise in the value of the dollar against the euro may mean that the protection currency factors have provided to U.S. basic industries' international competitiveness may soon fall away.
 

World's biggest beaver dam discovered in northern Canada

by Michel Comte and Jacques Lemieux Michel Comte And Jacques Lemieux  

Wed May 5, 7:46 pm ET

OTTAWA (AFP) – A Canadian ecologist has discovered the world's largest beaver dam in a remote area of northern Alberta, an animal-made structure so large it is visible from space.

Researcher Jean Thie said Wednesday he used satellite imagery and Google Earth software to locate the dam, which is about 850 metres (2,800 feet) long on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park.
Average beaver dams in Canada are 10 to 100 metres long, and only rarely do they reach 500 metres.

First discovered in October 2007, the gigantic dam is located in a virtually inaccessible part of the park south of Lac Claire, about 190 kilometres (120 miles) northeast of Fort McMurray.

Construction of the dam likely started in the mid-1970s, said Thie, who made his discovery quite by accident while tracking melting permafrost in Canada's far north.

"Several generations of beavers worked on it and it's still growing," he told AFP in Ottawa.

Mike Keizer, spokesman for the park, said rangers flew over the heavily forested marshlands last year to try to "have a look." They found significant vegetation growing on the dam itself, suggesting it's very old, he said.

"A new dam would have a lot of fresh sticks," Keizer explained. "This one has grasses growing on it and it's very green."

Part of the dam may have been created by naturally felled trees, and the beavers "opportunistically filled in the gaps."

Thie said he recently identified two smaller dams sprouting at either side of the main dam. In 10 years, all three structures could merge into a mega-dam measuring just short of a kilometer in length, he said.

The region is flat, so the beavers would have had to build a massive structure to stem wetland water flows,

Thie said, noting that the dam was visible in NASA satellite imagery from the 1990s.

"It's a unique phenomenon," he said. "Beaver dams are among the few animal-made structures visible from space."

North American beavers build dams to create deep, still pools of water to protect against predators, and to float food and building materials.

A 652-meter structure in Three Forks in the US state of Montana previously held the record for world's largest beaver dam.

Thie said he also found evidence that beavers were repopulating old habitats after being hunted extensively for pelts in past centuries.

"They're invading their old territories in a remarkable way in Canada," he said. "I found huge dams throughout Canada, and beaver colonies with up to 100 of them in a square kilometer."

"They're re-engineering the landscape," he said.
 

Find Happiness At Work

Jenna Goudreau, 03.04.10, 5:30 PM ET

10 Tips To Find Happiness At Work

Achieving happiness at work is a skill that can be acquired, says Jane Howard, chief people officer of San Francisco-based Joie de Vivre Hotels. She flexed her happiness muscle recently--one cold February morning in a not-so-pleasant airport terminal.

Howard had woken at 3:30 a.m. to catch a flight to Los Angeles, which would be followed by an oft-contentious meeting with the leadership of a workers union. First on her agenda was to try to negotiate some $700,000 in concessions from the union leaders to help ensure the hotel partnership avoided bankruptcy. Previous union meetings had devolved into vulgar screaming matches, and Howard had every reason to believe this one would be the same, or worse.

So she changed her approach. While waiting to board, she pulled out her journal and reflected upon everything in her life she felt grateful for. She then extended those feelings to the union leaders. Rather than visualizing them as the enemy, she focused on their commonalities. Both she and the union leaders were concerned for the employees' well-being, and everyone was just trying to do their jobs.

Come meeting time, she was rid of her usual nerves and says she "floated" through the discussion. The talk turned thoughtful rather than forceful, and she was able to truly listen and move the conversation forward. The ease and effectiveness of the potentially horrible meeting elated Howard, setting the foundation for her belief that happiness on the job matters.

Happiness is in vogue, and everyone--from psychologists to academics and career coaches--has advice on how to find it and how to keep it. Juxtapose that with a workforce that is more stressed out and cynical than ever. After a recession where millions of jobs were lost, remaining workers are doing more work with fewer resources and a heavy helping of distrust in management. Is it possible to find happiness at work these days? These experts say: Yes. Start now.

In her new book Happiness At Work (Wiley-Blackwell), Jessica Pryce-Jones calculates that workers will spend an average of 90,000 hours at work in their lifetimes. In an attempt to make that time more pleasant, she pinpoints the major elements that contribute to a person's happiness or discontent. She believes if a worker has high levels of confidence, commitment, conviction, contribution and culture fit, paired with feelings of recognition, pride and trust in the company, they will achieve their potential at work.

"These items are low right now because of the economic climate we're in," says Pryce-Jones. "I'd advise thinking about the tasks and relationships in your job that you really enjoy, and figure out how to maximize them."

In her research, based on recent studies, interviews and case studies, Pryce-Jones was surprised to find that women are generally happier at work than men. Women report being happy 66% of the time, a significant improvement over men's 53%. Women also say they are focused and on-task 72% of the time, compared with men's 66%, and work four hours less per week than male counterparts. Status and longer hours contributed to men's happiness, while active learning and shorter hours were likely to make women happier.

Conversely, women feel less resilient, says Pryce-Jones, which is a good predictor of general happiness. To improve resiliency, she suggests carving out restorative time each day, whether it's exercise, meditation or quiet reflection. Also, she says, you feel least resilient when you feel lack of control. The simple act of writing out a to-do list and working on tasks in order will give you a sense of control and composure. "Alcohol and TV won't help," Pryce-Jones adds.

Other approaches to happiness are centered more on attitude and perception. "We expect that something has to happen in order for us to be happy," says Srikumar Rao, professor at the London Business School and author of upcoming Happiness At Work (McGraw-Hill). Rao says that while we push our prospects of happiness into the future--I'll be happy once I get a promotion, my bonus, the corner office--we're missing out on the chance of happiness at work right now. "We don't recognize that we have tremendous control over our happiness."

The biggest obstacle to women's happiness at work, Rao says, is the desire for perfection and guilt over not fulfilling it. Moreover, both women and men have a constant stream of reactive thoughts, termed "mental chatter" by Rao, who says they are often "brutally negative."

To combat this barrage of negativity, Rao advises workers to stop labeling things as good or bad. "The moment you say something is a 'bad' thing, you experience it that way," he says. "You live your life in a constant cycle reinforcing itself." He rejects the theory of positive psychology--thinking happy thoughts will make it so--because he says it's a form of self-deception. Rather, he suggests accepting situations as they are.

So the next time you go to the coffee machine and find it's out of water, rather than grumbling at your thoughtless coffee-hogging colleagues, you may find more contentment in accepting it as a fact of life. Plus, events that seem to be bad at first often evolve into good things in the future, he says. In the spirit of mental wellness, throwing out labels will be helpful toward developing happiness on the job.

Working toward goals seems to work, too. Professor of psychology at San Francisco State University Ryan Howell co-authored a study last year which found that working hard to improve a skill or ability may induce greater stress in the moment but also grants greater happiness on a daily basis and in the long-term. "No pain, no gain," he says. "If tasks aren't enjoyable in the moment, the sense of accomplishment when the task is over changes that perspective."

Howell found that reaching the goal isn't even necessary to increase happiness--the process of trying and stretching yourself is enough. It seems the theory has a practical application in today's market, too. Learning new skills may make you happier, but it also makes you more valuable to your employer.

Current work atmospheres certainly don't lend themselves to parties at your desk, though. Organizational psychologist and New York University professor Ben Dattner believes the balance of power that may have previously favored employees has shifted back to companies, and companies have let employee satisfaction fall by the wayside.

But individuals can still thrive. He says: "People who derive meaning from their work or feel commitment to their organization's mission are people who are much more immune to the dissatisfaction of the economic environment."

For those who really can't relate to the company mission, Pryce-Jones suggests you reconnect with your personal mission. You always have the choice not to go to work, she says. So why do you go everyday? Is it to provide a stable and secure home for your children or family? Is it to build the resources to be able to travel, or to buy a house that will fill you with pride? "Tap into your deeply held values," she says. "Connect to what is worthwhile to you."
 

Lack of sleep linked to early death: study

Yahoo News

 

Wed May 5, 9:44 am ET

 

LONDON (AFP) – People who get less than six hours sleep per night have an increased risk of dying prematurely, researchers said on Wednesday.

Those who slumbered for less than that amount of time were 12 percent more likely to die early, though researchers also found a link between sleeping more than nine hours and premature death.

"If you sleep little, you can develop diabetes, obesity, hypertension and high cholesterol," Francesco Cappuccio, who led research on the subject at Britain's University of Warwick, told AFP.

The study, conducted with the Federico II University in Naples, Italy, aggregated decade-long studies from around the world involving more than 1.3 million people and found "unequivocal evidence of the direct link" between lack of sleep and premature death.

"We think that the relation between little sleep and illness is due to a series of hormonal and metabolical mechanisms," Cappuccio said.

The findings of the study were published in the Sleep journal.

Cappuccio believes the duration of sleep is a public health issue and should be considered as a behavioural risk factor by doctors.

"Society pushes us to sleep less and less," Cappuccio said, adding that about 20 percent of the population in the United States and Britain sleeps less than five hours.

Sleeping less than six hours is "more common amongst full-time workers, suggesting that it may be due to societal pressures for longer working hours and more shift work"

The study also found a link between sleeping more than nine hours per night and premature death, but Cappuccio said oversleeping is more likely to be an effect of illness, rather than a cause.

"Doctors never ask how much one sleeps, but that could be an indicator that something is wrong," said Cappuccio, who heads the Sleep, Health and Society Programme at the University of Warwick.

Research showed no adverse effects for those sleeping between six and eight hours per day. 

Sleep Journal
  

Industry, Enviro Groups Spar Over Senate Climate Bill's Biomass Provisions

---

April 23, 2010

By PATRICK REIS of Greenwire

Environmentalists and the timber industry are taking their long-running battle over biomass energy into the Senate climate debate.

At issue is how legislation being written by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) will treat the harvest of forest materials for biomass-power production in the bill's renewable-energy sections. The bill is scheduled for release Monday.

Nearly 100 forestry organizations urged the three senators this week to place no limits on the harvest of biomass from private property. Signing the letter were timber giants Weyerhaeuser Co. and Plum Creek Timber Co.; trade groups, including the American Forest Resource Council and the National Alliance of Forest Owners; and utilities like Duke Energy Corp. and Xcel Energy Inc. that have invested in wood-biomass electricity.

The imposition of new biomass regulations on the industry would add costs and discourage the harvest of forest wastes, said Dan Whiting, spokesman for the National Alliance of Forest Owners.

"If you start layering on new regulations and sustainability standards, landowners are just not going to participate because at some point it won't be profitable," Whiting said.

The Senate bill should maximize opportunities for private foresters to sell timber products, or else landowners will find it more profitable to sell their properties to developers, Whiting warned. "If there's not a market for those trees, they're going to use that land for something else," he said.

The best way to protect the climate is to give private property owners, who control 57 percent of the nation's forests, financial incentives to keep their trees standing, Whiting said.

The House-passed climate bill contains several incentives for biomass harvesting, including a renewable energy standard and a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions that would not require biomass-electricity plants to buy emission credits.

That bill -- sponsored by Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts -- would ban biomass extraction on federally designated wilderness tracts and "roadless" areas, but it includes an amendment from House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) lifting harvest restrictions on private property.

The Peterson amendment won key votes for the climate bill from farm-state moderates last summer, but it infuriated environmental groups.

"The heart of the issue is that climate and energy legislation -- putting a price on carbon, creating a renewable energy standard and a renewable fuel standard -- all does one thing: It puts an enormous new pressure and incentive to use biomass to create energy," said Franz Matzner, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Guidelines mandating "sustainable forestry" could ensure biomass energy is clean energy, Matzner said, but without the guidelines, the climate bill could become a massive driver of deforestation.

Clearing forests to generate biomass fuel would quickly outpace environmental gains from the switch to biomass from fossil fuels, said Michael Degnan, a Sierra Club policy analyst.

But Whiting said market realities would prevent deforestation as landowners keep trees to protect long-term yields.

"The reality is that markets for forest products are the reason we still conserve forests," Whiting said.

Degnan called trusting the foresters on that matter is a "big gamble."

"If we're confident that foresters want to use sustainable management practices," Degnan said, "then why not embrace safeguards precisely designed to ensure this sustainability?"

Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

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