Dot Earth Blog: Pete Seeger is Gone, but His Circles of Song Ring On

Pete Seeger spent his life surrounded by circles of song with varying dimensions.

He often created them himself, putting a hand to his ear as a signal that he expected any audience encircling a stage to drown him out.

Beacon, N.Y., his longtime home town, is like the center of a swirling circular galaxy of music these days, most of it written and sung with a better world in mind and most of it inspired in some way by his example.

I was humbled to be among those who were able to pay Pete a visit over the last several days at New York-Presbyterian Hospital as his heart and body failed at age 94. (He died peacefully last night around 9:30 p.m., family members told me; His wife Toshi died last July.)

When I arrived on Monday afternoon, he was at the center of a healing circle of song once again. My friend Steve Stanne, an environmental educator and masterful musician, led in the singing of Bill Staine's "River" as the Hudson that Pete for so long worked to restore flowed by, icy and glinting, outside the windows:

Someday when the flowers are blooming still
Someday when the grass is still green
My rolling waters will round the bend
And flow into the open sea

So, here's to the rainbow that's followed me here
And here's to the friends that I know
And here's to the song that's within me now
I will sing it wherever I go

River, take me along in your sunshine, sing me a song
Ever moving and winding and free
You rolling old river, you changing old river
Let's you and me, river, run down to the sea. [Full lyrics]

Click here for Jon Pareles's fine obituary in The Times.

There's much more that will be said and written — and sung — in coming days about his songwriting and politics, his bubbling humor and hammer-hard determination.

But I wanted to initiate some reflections on Pete's music and mission, and his extraordinary heart. Only the physical heart gave way last night.

He's best known, of course, for his use of songs as a shield and weapon, but to get the full Pete Seeger you had to see him sing "Abiyoyo" as he danced on his long pipe-cleaner legs through the children gathered on Little Stony Point, a vest-pocket park that he helped create along the Hudson.

Soon after I moved from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley in 1991, I began frequenting the Beacon Sloop Club, the little sister to the Clearwater organization that he launched in 1967. Every first Friday of the month, the club potluck supper and meeting would be followed by a singalong. Pete was almost always there.

My marriage owes its existence to his pull. I met my wife through my friend David Bernz, who grew up around the Seegers and carries on Pete's sound in the closest thing I know to a folk tribute band, Work o' the Weavers.

Pete was a force for change and a bard celebrating nature and humanity's bright and dark sides. But he also had a generous ear always cocked to hear a promising new song by someone else. Click here for his generous scribbled suggestions on a 2005 draft of "Arlington," my song about cycles of war and the growing pains at Arlington National Cemetery.

[Insert 8:48 a.m.| Among his prime attributes were these: boundless energy and unwavering optimism that the future holds great promise. One of the most surprising, and wonderful, things I ever heard Pete say came when I videotaped a conversation at his house in which Andrew Blechman of Orion Magazine asked this:

What gives you hope when you think of the future, when you think of the next 30 years?

His immediate reply? "The Internet."

Read (or watch) his elaboration on this here: "30 Ways to Foster Progress on a Finite Planet." It's all about "knowosphere."]

Pete's voice has been silenced, but his circle of song is unbroken.

I'll end this post with "To My Old Brown Earth," a song he wrote in 1958 that I consider one of his masterpieces — as simple and scintillating as a finely cut gem:

To my old brown earth
And to my old blue sky
I'll now give these last few molecules of "I."

And you who sing,
And you who stand nearby,
I do charge you not to cry.

Guard well our human chain,
Watch well you keep it strong,
As long as sun will shine.

And this our home,
Keep pure and sweet and green,
For now I'm yours
And you are also mine.

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Dot Earth Blog: A Critique of an Upbeat Assessment of Nuclear Power’s Prospects

The spent fuel pool at the Indian Point 3 reactor 35 miles north of New York City.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group long focused on risks attending the use of nuclear energy, has posted a critique of the pro-nuclear letter from four longtime analysts that was the focus of a recent piece here titled "More Views on Nuclear Power, Waste, Safety and Cost."

Here's the rebuttal, by David Wright, co-director and senior scientist in the group's Global Security Program:

The authors state that "… nuclear power can deliver electric power in a sufficiently safe, economical and secure manner to supplement supply from other carbon-free sources."

UCS is deeply concerned about climate change and its impact on humanity and the Earth. We believe that nuclear power must remain on the table as a means of combating climate change.

However, new reactors are not currently economical compared to electricity generation from natural gas or from other low-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar. The environmental community, which some blame for crippling nuclear power, has in fact pushed for a price on carbon as a way of building the societal costs of continued carbon emissions into the economics of electricity production. This would in effect create a significant incentive that is currently missing for nuclear power compared to natural gas. Congress has stymied such proposals, and until that changes it is difficult to see what will drive growth in nuclear power, regardless of concerns about carbon or the variability of solar and wind power.

The economics of nuclear power would look even worse if there were another nuclear accident. TEPCO, the owner of the Fukushima plant, estimates that compensation costs for the tens of thousands of people displaced by the accident in Japan will exceed $50 billion and that it will cost about $20 billion to decommission the plant. This does not include the cost of eventually decontaminating the surrounding area, which may also run to $50 billion.

We do not believe nuclear reactors are yet sufficiently safe and secure. UCS has served as an industry watchdog for over four decades, and we have repeatedly seen that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) does not enforce its own safety regulations. For example, half of U.S. reactors do not currently comply with fire safety regulations, which were first put in place in 1980. Yet according to the NRC, fire represents half the risk of accidents that result in core damage.

In discussing the issue of nuclear waste, the authors of the letter point to geological storage and the Blue Ribbon Commission's recommended path toward interim and final storage as the solution, but there is currently no movement forward on this front. An effort by the Senate to legislate the Commission's recommendations is faltering and is likely dead. In the meantime, nuclear waste continues to accumulate at nuclear reactor sites, with nearly three-quarters of it sitting in increasingly crowded cooling pools, with no end in sight.

While there are clear steps to increase the safety of spent fuel while waiting for long-term storage—such as moving a large fraction of it from cooling pools to dry casks—the industry refuses to implement these steps on its own and the NRC refuses to require them. A recent NRC report purports to show that the risks of continued spent fuel storage in pools is very low, but does not, for example, include the possibility of a terrorist attack on the pool. The NRC analysis is not convincing.

More generally, the authors talk about the possibility that future technologies will provide reactor designs that are safer, more secure, and less of a proliferation risk. However, as we have pointed out in our analyses, whether that is true depends not just on the technology but on the safety and security requirements for these new designs. In particular, if cost considerations result in the industry cutting corners on safety or security systems, then the situation in the future could be worse than today, not better.

Dr. Kadak and his colleagues argue for an increased role for nuclear power, but gloss over problems that can and must be addressed to make the industry adequately safe and secure. Proponents of increasing nuclear power should be pushing the industry to meet higher safety and security standards, and for the NRC to require the plants to meet the regulations it is supposed to enforce. [UCSusa.org.]

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Dot Earth Blog: Fresh Views on Climate Scientists as Advocates

Updated, 4:54 p.m. | "If You See Something, Say Something," is the headline on a Sunday Op-Ed article by Michael E. Mann, the Penn State climate scientist who, after years of attacks from groups fighting restrictions on greenhouse gases, has become a prominent climate and political campaigner, as well.

The piece appropriately defends the right of scientists to be citizens, fighting disinformation and pressing for action — a theme explored here starting with a 2008 contribution from Richard Somerville, a longtime climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

This section is particularly valuable:

In fact, there is broad agreement among climate scientists not only that climate change is real (a survey and a review of the scientific literature published say about 97 percent agree), but that we must respond to the dangers of a warming planet. If one is looking for real differences among mainstream scientists, they can be found on two fronts: the precise implications of those higher temperatures, and which technologies and policies offer the best solution to reducing, on a global scale, the emission of greenhouse gases.

For example, should we go full-bore on nuclear power? Invest in and deploy renewable energy — wind, solar and geothermal — on a huge scale? Price carbon emissions through cap-and-trade legislation or by imposing a carbon tax? Until the public fully understands the danger of our present trajectory, those debates are likely to continue to founder.

There's a troubling section, however, in which Mann creates a flawed dichotomy, hailing a paper by James Hansen and Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University (and others) pressing for deep carbon cuts and criticizing a peer,* Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, for complaining that the paper failed the Stephen Schneider / Gavin Schmidt test for distinguishing between the "is" of science and the "ought" determined by individual feelings about the state of the world and how to shape it.

I asked Caldeira if he'd like to elaborate on his views and you can read his thoughts below.

If Mann had wanted to point to an opposite end to the spectrum of ways in which scientists can contribute to public discourse on global warming science and risks, a better choice (in my view) would have been Susan Solomon's handling of the rollout of the 2007 science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In a 2007 profile of Solomon, I included this passage from the Paris news conference:

When a reporter asked Dr. Solomon "to sum up what kind of urgency this sort of report should convey to policy makers," she gave the furthest thing from a convenient sound bite. "I can only give you something that's going to disappoint you, sir, and that is that it's my personal scientific approach to say it's not my role to try to communicate what should be done," Dr. Solomon said. "I believe that is a societal choice. I believe science is one input to that choice, and I also believe that science can best serve society by refraining from going beyond its expertise.

"In my view, that's what the I.P.C.C. also is all about, namely not trying to make policy-prescriptive statements, but policy-relevant statements."

Climate scientists, like all of us, come in all shapes and sizes and demeanors. I agree with Mann that it's unwise for scientists to avoid the public debate over drivers of climate risk and options for reducing it. But I agree with Caldeira (and Gavin Schmidt and the departed Steve Schneider) that it's counterproductive to blur lines between observations based on science and values-based views on solutions.

Here's Caldeira's note:

The issue of going beyond expertise is an important one.

There is a disease wherein one develops expertise in one area and then feels free to pontificate on other areas about which one knows nothing. This is an affliction of many senior scientists, common even among Nobel Prize winners, and an affliction to which I have not been immune.

If someone is speaking with great confidence while uttering pure hogwash, this does tend to reduce confidence in the utterances of the scientist.

So, there is a cost to science and to our personal credibility when scientists make poorly supported assertions in areas outside of their expertise.

In any case, scientists should be clear when they are making an assertion that is an empirical fact and when they are simply expressing their values and political opinions.

Human beings do have a responsibility to speak out on issues that we feel strongly about.

One way to thread the needle is for climate scientists to speak out loudly and in detail about the areas we know something about — climate change and its consequences — but then speak with a greater degree of generality when coming to prescriptions about what exactly we should do.

In other words, it is one thing to say (as a human being who happens to be a scientist) that we need to stop using the sky as a waste dump for our greenhouse gas pollution. It is another thing entirely to wegh in on specific policy instruments (taxes versus cap-and-trade versus regulations), specific energy technologies, and so on.

It is fine for climate scientists to say (as human beings) that we need policies to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, that to do this we will need energy technologies with near-zero emissions, etc, and that we need to do all of this very soon.

It disturbs me when anyone, including climate scientists, (1) fails to distinguish between matters of empirical fact and matters of values and political opinion, and (2) speaks with an air of authority on topics about which they are largely ignorant.

I do not claim to be entirely innocent of either of these transgressions. Although I work to try to keep myself on the straight and narrow, I do sometimes succumb to temptation.

Postscript, 5:00 p.m. *| At the asterisk above, my characterization of Mann's positions, as Mann and others have said on Twitter, was indeed too caricatured — although I maintain that his piece could easily be interpreted as very sympathetic to one approach and critical of the other.

Ken Caldeira offered this note in the comment thread:

Michael Mann and I largely agree on what needs to be done, and our primary differences relate to what we do in the role of 'informed citizen' and what we do in the role of 'scientist'.

I was thankful that he quoted me, airing alternate views in his Op-Ed piece. Michael Mann may or may not be critical of my viewpoint, but I see no evidence that he is critical of me as a person. Some of my best friends are people I strongly disagree with.

A more difficult question is what a scientist should do when we feel strongly about something but have no special relevant expertise. For example, if I feel strongly that Obama should pardon Edward Snowden, should I make public statements on this matter? Would I be using my standing as a climate scientist to communicate about civil liberties and national security issues about which I am not expert? Is this bad? Is keeping quiet about injustice that I perceive a greater evil? In any case, it seems important for scientists to make clear that our political statements are in our roles as ordinary people, not in our role as climate scientists.

Postscript, 12:32 p.m. | Nick Kristof's column today explores his readers' leading candidate for "neglected topics," which, of course, is climate change.

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Well: Landscapes Tainted by Asbestos

Poison Pen

Deborah Blum writes about chemicals and the environment.

For the past few years, Brenda Buck has been sampling the dust blowing across southern Nevada. Until recently, she focused on the risks of airborne elements such as arsenic. But then she started noticing an oddity in her samples, a sprinkling of tiny, hairlike mineral fibers.

She found them on herself as well. After a ride on horseback down a dirt road 20 miles south of Las Vegas, her clothes and boots were dappled with the fibrous material. Dr. Buck, a professor of geology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, turned to her colleagues to help identify it.

Their verdict: asbestos. And lots of it.

In a paper published late last year, titled "Naturally Occurring Asbestos: Potential for Human Exposure, Southern Nevada, USA," Dr. Buck and her colleagues reported that the fibers were similar to those found at asbestos-contaminated Superfund sites and warned that they "could be transported by wind, water, cars or on clothing after outdoor recreational activities." The research raises the possibility that many communities in the region, including Las Vegas, may face a previously unknown hazard.

Dr. Buck and her co-author Rodney V. Metcalf, a fellow U.N.L.V. geology professor, are now trying to quantify the range and the danger posed by natural asbestos-bearing mineral deposits spread across 53,000 acres, stretching from the southern shore of Lake Mead to the edges of the McCullough Range. "Nobody wants bad news — we're all hoping the health risks will be very low," Dr. Buck said in an interview. "But the fact is, we don't know that yet."

Similar concerns are arising in an unexpectedly wide swath of the United States: Naturally occurring asbestos deposits now have been mapped in locations across the country, from Staten Island to the foothills of the Sierras in California.

Elongated asbestos fibers are created by natural mineral formations. When they turn up in industrial products, it is because people have excavated them and refined them for use — a practice dating back more than 2,000 years. Ancient Greeks used asbestos to strengthen everything from napkins to lamp wicks.

Stories of asbestos-linked illnesses date back almost as long. But it was the post-World War II embrace of these fibers, in products ranging from insulating materials to ceiling tiles to roofing shingles, that provided undeniable evidence of health effects. By the 1960s, scientists had demonstrated that a chain of occupational illnesses, including a lung cancer called mesothelioma, could be directly linked to the presence of such mineral fibers.

The term asbestos technically refers to a group of six silicate-based fibrous minerals. But this definition may underestimate the extent of naturally occurring risks, scientists say. The mineral erionite, for instance, also forms needlelike structures, which have been linked to startlingly high levels of mesothelioma in Turkey and which have recently been discovered in the oil-and-gas boom regions of North Dakota. The discovery of airborne erionite fibers in North Dakota recently led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to describe it as "an emerging North American hazard."

"Essentially, these fibers flow aerodynamically into the deep lung tissue and lodge there" said Geoffrey Plumlee, a geochemist with the United States Geological Survey in Denver. They remain embedded for years, like needles in a pincushion, spurring the onset of not only mesothelioma but also other lung cancers and diseases of the respiratory system.

By the 1970s such health effects were so well documented that the Environmental Protection Agency moved to limit asbestos use, and in 1989 the agency banned almost all industrial use of the minerals. But a recent cascade of research has renewed scientific worries.

For one thing, recent soil studies show that residential developments have spread into mineral-rich regions. California's state capital, Sacramento, for example, spilled into neighboring El Dorado County, where, it turned out, whole neighborhoods were built across a swatch of asbestos deposits.

And sophisticated epidemiological studies have shown that this was more than an occupational health issue. The small mining town of Libby, Mont., provided one of the most dramatic case studies. Almost a fifth of the residents have now received diagnoses of asbestos-linked illnesses, from mesothelioma to severe scarring of lung tissue.

When these conditions began cropping up across the entire town in the late 1990s, investigators assumed that those sickened were all workers at a nearby mine. But the illnesses weren't appearing only in mine workers. Family members were stricken, too, as were residents of the town who had nothing to do with the mining business.

Investigations by alarmed government agencies — including the E.P.A, the Geological Survey and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences — established that miners brought asbestos fibers back to town with them on clothes, vehicles and other possessions. But residents were also exposed to fibers blowing about the surrounding environment — and, to the dismay of researchers, people were being sickened by far smaller exposures than had been thought to cause harm.

"Libby really started the new focus on the issue," said Bradley Van Gosen, a research geochemist with the Geological Survey in Denver. Dr. Van Gosen has been put in charge of a new U.S.G.S. mapping project, an ambitious effort to trace the minerals not only across Western mining states but also elsewhere, from the Upper Midwest to a rambling path up the Eastern Seaboard, starting in southern Appalachia and stretching into Maine.

Dr. Van Gosen said that most of the Eastern deposits were linked to an ancient crustal boundary, perhaps a billion years old, that underlies mountain ranges like the Appalachians. Wherever they are found, though, minerals in the asbestos family tend to form when magnesium, silica and water are transformed by superheated magma from the earth's mantle.

In Western states, such filamented minerals tend to result from volcanic activity. In the Midwest, where fibers have recently turned up associated with mining interests in Minnesota and Wisconsin, geologists suspect they originated in ancient magnesium-rich seafloors. A recent study in Minnesota linked an increased risk of death among miners to time spent working in mines contaminated by such deposits.

"It has the potential to be a huge deal," said Christopher P. Weis, toxicology adviser to the director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences. "And we want to get the word out, because this is something that can be addressed if we tackle it upfront."

Dr. Buck's discovery of similar hazards in southern Nevada was the first time that naturally occurring asbestos had been reported in the region. At this point, she and her colleagues are simply trying to figure out the extent of the problem. A leading mesothelioma researcher, Dr. Michele Carbone of the University of Hawaii, is analyzing the fibers to help establish the magnitude of any health risk. Dr. Buck and Dr. Metcalf are expanding their sampling deeper into the Nevada desert, trying to build a better map of the hazardous regions.

"We live here. Our children are here," Dr. Buck said. "We want very much to get this right."

And they are approaching their discovery with personal caution. They now wear protective gear while sampling, and Dr. Buck has decided against taking her graduate students out for what appears to be risky fieldwork.

On a larger scale, researchers are investigating alternatives to creating large forbidden zones, such as wetting down roads or requiring that people in high-exposure areas wear protective masks and gear. But even small measures, like bathing after exposure and washing contaminated clothing separately, may help, Dr. Weis said.

"We can be smart and efficient about this, both at the government and at the personal level," he said.

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Well: Landscapes Tainted by Asbestos

Poison Pen

Deborah Blum writes about chemicals and the environment.

For the past few years, Brenda Buck has been sampling the dust blowing across southern Nevada. Until recently, she focused on the risks of airborne elements such as arsenic. But then she started noticing an oddity in her samples, a sprinkling of tiny, hairlike mineral fibers.

She found them on herself as well. After a ride on horseback down a dirt road 20 miles south of Las Vegas, her clothes and boots were dappled with the fibrous material. Dr. Buck, a professor of geology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, turned to her colleagues to help identify it.

Their verdict: asbestos. And lots of it.

In a paper published late last year, titled "Naturally Occurring Asbestos: Potential for Human Exposure, Southern Nevada, USA," Dr. Buck and her colleagues reported that the fibers were similar to those found at asbestos-contaminated Superfund sites and warned that they "could be transported by wind, water, cars or on clothing after outdoor recreational activities." The research raises the possibility that many communities in the region, including Las Vegas, may face a previously unknown hazard.

Dr. Buck and her co-author Rodney V. Metcalf, a fellow U.N.L.V. geology professor, are now trying to quantify the range and the danger posed by natural asbestos-bearing mineral deposits spread across 53,000 acres, stretching from the southern shore of Lake Mead to the edges of the McCullough Range. "Nobody wants bad news — we're all hoping the health risks will be very low," Dr. Buck said in an interview. "But the fact is, we don't know that yet."

Similar concerns are arising in an unexpectedly wide swath of the United States: Naturally occurring asbestos deposits now have been mapped in locations across the country, from Staten Island to the foothills of the Sierras in California.

Elongated asbestos fibers are created by natural mineral formations. When they turn up in industrial products, it is because people have excavated them and refined them for use — a practice dating back more than 2,000 years. Ancient Greeks used asbestos to strengthen everything from napkins to lamp wicks.

Stories of asbestos-linked illnesses date back almost as long. But it was the post-World War II embrace of these fibers, in products ranging from insulating materials to ceiling tiles to roofing shingles, that provided undeniable evidence of health effects. By the 1960s, scientists had demonstrated that a chain of occupational illnesses, including a lung cancer called mesothelioma, could be directly linked to the presence of such mineral fibers.

The term asbestos technically refers to a group of six silicate-based fibrous minerals. But this definition may underestimate the extent of naturally occurring risks, scientists say. The mineral erionite, for instance, also forms needlelike structures, which have been linked to startlingly high levels of mesothelioma in Turkey and which have recently been discovered in the oil-and-gas boom regions of North Dakota. The discovery of airborne erionite fibers in North Dakota recently led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to describe it as "an emerging North American hazard."

"Essentially, these fibers flow aerodynamically into the deep lung tissue and lodge there" said Geoffrey Plumlee, a geochemist with the United States Geological Survey in Denver. They remain embedded for years, like needles in a pincushion, spurring the onset of not only mesothelioma but also other lung cancers and diseases of the respiratory system.

By the 1970s such health effects were so well documented that the Environmental Protection Agency moved to limit asbestos use, and in 1989 the agency banned almost all industrial use of the minerals. But a recent cascade of research has renewed scientific worries.

For one thing, recent soil studies show that residential developments have spread into mineral-rich regions. California's state capital, Sacramento, for example, spilled into neighboring El Dorado County, where, it turned out, whole neighborhoods were built across a swatch of asbestos deposits.

And sophisticated epidemiological studies have shown that this was more than an occupational health issue. The small mining town of Libby, Mont., provided one of the most dramatic case studies. Almost a fifth of the residents have now received diagnoses of asbestos-linked illnesses, from mesothelioma to severe scarring of lung tissue.

When these conditions began cropping up across the entire town in the late 1990s, investigators assumed that those sickened were all workers at a nearby mine. But the illnesses weren't appearing only in mine workers. Family members were stricken, too, as were residents of the town who had nothing to do with the mining business.

Investigations by alarmed government agencies — including the E.P.A, the Geological Survey and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences — established that miners brought asbestos fibers back to town with them on clothes, vehicles and other possessions. But residents were also exposed to fibers blowing about the surrounding environment — and, to the dismay of researchers, people were being sickened by far smaller exposures than had been thought to cause harm.

"Libby really started the new focus on the issue," said Bradley Van Gosen, a research geochemist with the Geological Survey in Denver. Dr. Van Gosen has been put in charge of a new U.S.G.S. mapping project, an ambitious effort to trace the minerals not only across Western mining states but also elsewhere, from the Upper Midwest to a rambling path up the Eastern Seaboard, starting in southern Appalachia and stretching into Maine.

Dr. Van Gosen said that most of the Eastern deposits were linked to an ancient crustal boundary, perhaps a billion years old, that underlies mountain ranges like the Appalachians. Wherever they are found, though, minerals in the asbestos family tend to form when magnesium, silica and water are transformed by superheated magma from the earth's mantle.

In Western states, such filamented minerals tend to result from volcanic activity. In the Midwest, where fibers have recently turned up associated with mining interests in Minnesota and Wisconsin, geologists suspect they originated in ancient magnesium-rich seafloors. A recent study in Minnesota linked an increased risk of death among miners to time spent working in mines contaminated by such deposits.

"It has the potential to be a huge deal," said Christopher P. Weis, toxicology adviser to the director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences. "And we want to get the word out, because this is something that can be addressed if we tackle it upfront."

Dr. Buck's discovery of similar hazards in southern Nevada was the first time that naturally occurring asbestos had been reported in the region. At this point, she and her colleagues are simply trying to figure out the extent of the problem. A leading mesothelioma researcher, Dr. Michele Carbone of the University of Hawaii, is analyzing the fibers to help establish the magnitude of any health risk. Dr. Buck and Dr. Metcalf are expanding their sampling deeper into the Nevada desert, trying to build a better map of the hazardous regions.

"We live here. Our children are here," Dr. Buck said. "We want very much to get this right."

And they are approaching their discovery with personal caution. They now wear protective gear while sampling, and Dr. Buck has decided against taking her graduate students out for what appears to be risky fieldwork.

On a larger scale, researchers are investigating alternatives to creating large forbidden zones, such as wetting down roads or requiring that people in high-exposure areas wear protective masks and gear. But even small measures, like bathing after exposure and washing contaminated clothing separately, may help, Dr. Weis said.

"We can be smart and efficient about this, both at the government and at the personal level," he said.

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The Lede: Some West Virginia Residents Can Finally Use Water Again

After officials in West Virginia announced on Monday that a ban on tap water was being lifted, many residents were excited to take a shower again.

But the ban was being lifted slowly, zone by zone, starting with hospitals. Most of the 300,000 people who were affected by the chemical spill last Thursday were still waiting to find out when the ban would be lifted in their neighborhood.

On Monday at 9 p.m., West Virginia American Water announced that a fourth zone of customers in North Charleston could begin to flush their systems. A map on the company's website showed the exact areas where the ban had been lifted, with the blue region cleared to use water and the red regions still under the water ban.

UPDATE: The "do not use" water order has been lifted for the North Charleston customer zone, which includes… http://t.co/EPIP8hYNxg

— WV American Water (@wvamwater) 14 Jan 14

The water ban had been lifted for about 26,000 customers on Monday, officials said. The system needed time to settle so operators could measure how it was reacting so far. Additional zones will receive permission to use water on Tuesday.

After five days without water, the first priority for many was a shower.

Very happy camper right now. I'm now flushing my water & will soon be able to take a shower at home. Thank u #wvwater!

— Tiffany Brown (@tabrownwv) 14 Jan 14

For days, residents have been relying on water distribution centers in Charleston, the state capital, and nine surrounding counties. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has delivered hundreds of thousands of gallons of potable water to centers set up by local fire departments like this one, where water was still being passed out on Monday:

Pinch Fire's water distribution center still going strong at Crossings Mall. #WVWaterCrisis http://t.co/One3Qec5ST

— Pinch Vol. Fire Dept (@PinchFire2) 13 Jan 14

The water company has given residents detailed instructions on how to flush their plumbing before they can start to use water again. Still, some were afraid to drink the water.

Water is NOT safe when your zone is called. It just means you can flush your system. Even then, I'm not drinking the water. #WVWaterCrisis

— Dr. Susan Gardner (@PhDSus) 14 Jan 14

Bottled water is now a permanent part of my grocery list.

— Dr. Susan Gardner (@PhDSus) 14 Jan 14

Others said that the water still had the smell of licorice, from the chemical 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCHM, that seeped into a local river.

Flushing now with hot water. Nothing like the smell of hot, steamy licorice in air. Smell-o-meter at level 1.5. #wvwatercrisis #wvchemleak

— Linda Bodie (@LindaBodie) 13 Jan 14

And some residents reported that the water had a green tint.

Water still very green and has strong smell. #KeepFlushing #WVWaterCrisis #wvchemleak

— Ric Cavender (@RicCavender) 13 Jan 14

@CartneyRenn Yes. Not as bad as earlier, but still tinted green. http://t.co/kALxVqvqkY

— Ric Cavender (@RicCavender) 13 Jan 14

Many were optimistic that the ban would be lifted in their neighborhoods on Tuesday.

Didn't get the green light for my water tonight. Hoping for tomorrow! Very grateful to those working hard to make it happen. #WVWaterCrisis

— Kristin Ketchell (@KristinKetchell) 14 Jan 14

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Dot Earth Blog: How the Obama Administration Can Get Bluefin Tuna Off the (Wrong) Hook

Lee Crockett, who directs the U.S. Oceans program of The Pew Charitable Trusts, sent a compelling "Your Dot" piece on addressable problems with United States fishing regulations that are perpetuating wasteful catches of bluefin tuna on longlines set for other species. He notes that you can weigh in with a comment to the relevant agency until Friday. Here's his post:

Environmental and fishing communities have long been concerned about the massive waste of Atlantic bluefin tuna caught incidentally by surface longline fishermen targeting swordfish and yellowfin tuna. Fortunately, the public still has until January 10 to comment on proposed regulations to help avert this tragedy.

The issue came to a head in 2012 when surface longline vessels in this fishery caught, killed, and discarded overboard nearly a quarter of the United States' entire bluefin quota, an estimated 239.5 metric tons of dead Atlantic bluefin tuna. The worst part was that this waste, or bycatch, was completely preventable.

In August 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service issued proposed fishing regulations for Atlantic bluefin tuna that could help stop the waste of this remarkable yet severely depleted fish. The bad news is that the proposal does not go far enough and needs improvements to fully achieve its conservation potential.

The most controversial part of the proposal is a large increase in the quota for the fishermen who use surface longlines, which can stretch 40 miles, carry more than 750 baited hooks, and float unattended for up to 18 hours. Their method of fishing has essentially been the problem. Our U.S. quota is set by an international management body, of which the United States is a member. N.O.A.A. then divides that quota among groups of commercial and recreational U.S. bluefin fishermen who use a variety of types of gear, including rod-and-reel, harpoons, and purse seines (nets).

Fishermen employing indiscriminate surface longlines also get a piece of the quota to cover their incidental catch of bluefin, although they are not allowed to directly target those fish. Yet N.O.A.A.'s proposed regulation would unfairly give surface longline fishermen as much as 191.4 additional metric tons of quota to make up for their waste, effectively denying these fish to bluefin tuna fishermen who use selective gear.

In short, N.O.A.A.'s solution to the incidental catch of bluefin tuna by surface longline fishermen is to allow them a larger share of the quota. That's not conservation, that's a giveaway.

Fortunately, a better approach lies within the agency's proposed regulations. N.O.A.A. recognizes that there are two hotspots for bluefin tuna bycatch. The first is in the Gulf of Mexico, the only known spawning area for the western population of these fish. The agency proposes to restrict indiscriminate surface longline fishing in this area during April and May to reduce bycatch. The second is an area off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, where surface longline fishing would be off-limits for some fishing vessels, but not all, from December through April. Both are laudable proposals designed to protect the oldest and largest bluefin on their migration to the Gulf of Mexico and while they are there spawning.

But if N.O.A.A. really wants to stop the waste of bluefin tuna on surface longlines it needs to expand protections. First, the agency should extend the gear-restricted area to the entire Gulf of Mexico and this restriction should include the month of March. Second, the agency should not let any surface longline fishermen have access to the gear-restricted area off North Carolina from December through April. Finally, N.O.A.A. needs to keep its new proposed enforceable cap on the amount of bluefin tuna that can be caught on surface longlines to ensure that this sector stays within its quota.

By expanding these protections, N.O.A.A. would not need to proceed with the most controversial aspect of its proposed regulation, which is the quota reallocation to the surface longline fishery. The public has until January 10 to weigh in on this issue. Bringing back bluefin tuna to healthy population levels in order to create new fishing opportunities is a shared goal of environmentalists and fishermen. A surefire way to do that is to end the waste of bluefin tuna. Please add your voice to this issue by submitting an official comment.

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Slowly, Asia’s Factories Begin to Turn Green

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — When Intel went about setting up its chip factory in Vietnam, it found an oddity: Local laws did not govern every aspect of the building.

The government had no comprehensive standards, for instance, on refrigerant chemicals, which in the United States are typically regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. In fact, officials asked Intel whether the company had any ideas on the subject that might be useful to other manufacturers operating in the country.

Yet today, Intel's $1 billion plant, about 10 miles from downtown Ho Chi Minh City, embraces environmental and sustainability measures far beyond those required by Vietnam's laws. Opened in 2010, the complex has the country's largest operating solar array. Company officers say a new water-reclamation system could soon help it reduce water consumption as much as 68 percent. It is also vying for certification by the U.S. Green Building Council

Intel didn't have to go to these lengths, but the motivation for these measures is simple, said the complex's general manager, Sherry Boger: "It turns out, what's good for the environment is also good for business."

Western multinationals — and in some cases, their Asian suppliers — have in the last five years started to build more environmentally sound factories in developing countries, green-building experts say. The U.S. Green Building Council, a leading global certifier, reports that only about 300 manufacturing facilities in Asia are certified or waiting for certification through its rating tool, called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED.

Efficiency consultants in Asia say it is difficult to estimate how much energy or money an average multinational saves by having a green-certified factory building. But the certification trend is potentially significant in Asia because so many consumer and industrial goods are manufactured in the region, offering enormous potential for energy savings if the practice becomes widespread, experts say. And a trickle of factory data suggests the energy savings at certified facilities are significant.

Intel, for example, has reduced its global energy bill by $111 million since 2008 as a result of $59 million worth of sustainability investments in 1,500 projects worldwide, Ms. Boger said. The projects have offset carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to the amount produced by 126,000 American households per year, she added, and Intel's $1.1 million solar array at the Vietnam facility offsets each day an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that emitted by about 500 of Vietnam's motorbikes.

In 2011, an efficiency survey found that compared with a typical factory, a LEED-certified shoe factory in southern Vietnam that produces exclusively for Nike uses 18 percent less electricity and fuel and 53 percent less water, according to Melissa Merryweather, the lead sustainability consultant for the project. The factory is owned by Taekwang Vina, a joint venture of the South Korean manufacturer Taekwang and a Vietnamese partner.

Stephanie Clark, a spokeswoman for the American consumer products giant Colgate-Palmolive, provided statistics indicating that the company's seven LEED-certified factories worldwide had reduced construction waste and lowered water and energy use. Ms. Clark added that four more such factories were under construction, and the company's website shows that its 11 total LEED projects worldwide — five of them in Asia — represent about a third of the company's manufacturing sites.

Malaysia's government has certified about 750,000 square feet of factory space since 2009, according to the Malaysia Green Building Confederation, representing about 1 percent of its total building certifications. And Kevin Mo, director of the China buildings program at the Energy Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, said that Chinese authorities had included 8 factories among the 742 buildings it certified by the end of 2012. Most of the others were residential or commercial, he said; other factories were in the pipeline.

A market for industrial efficiency upgrades is also growing in India, where many factory owners worry about power outages, said Prashant Kapoor, principal industry specialist for green buildings at the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank. He added that demand for upgrades was now consistent enough there that a few domestic contractors were beginning to specialize in it.

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World Briefing | Antarctica: Stuck Ships Break Free Near Antarctica

Two ships immobilized by ice floes near Antarctica broke free on Tuesday, news agencies reported. The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long was trapped Friday after its helicopter evacuated 52 passengers from a Russian research ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, that had been icebound since mid-December. The BBC reported Tuesday that shifting winds had opened a path for the research ship to free itself. Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, reported Tuesday evening that the Xue Long was also working its way out of the pack ice a short distance away. At the request of Australian maritime authorities last week, a United States Coast Guard icebreaker has been making its way toward the two ships, but was still several days away.

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$18 Billion Price Put on Effort to Block Carp

Chris Young/The State Journal-Register, via Associated Press

The closest sighting of Asian silver carp on the Illinois River was 55 miles from Lake Michigan.

The most effective methods of keeping Asian carp from invading the Great Lakes via Chicago's web of waterways could cost up to $18.4 billion and take 25 years to put in place, the federal Army Corps of Engineers concluded in a study released Monday.

But a corps official cautioned in a telephone briefing for journalists that there was no guarantee that the carp or other unwanted species would not get into the lakes by then.

The agency's 210-page study, first ordered by Congress in 2007, laid out eight options to prevent the carp and other unwanted species from entering Lake Michigan, ranging from continuing existing efforts to building barriers that would seal the lake from the five Chicago-area streams that are linked to it.

Either blocking the lakefront waterways or blocking their two sources further inland would offer the greatest protection from invading species, the report said. But both options would prevent barges and other boats from using those routes, and would increase pollution in the lake and the waterways.

Most of the other options would be cheaper and would preserve some access to the lake, but would be somewhat less effective.The report arrived amid growing concern that some so-called nuisance species, led by two strains of the carp, may already have bypassed existing barriers and entered Lake Michigan. The carp, which multiply quickly and eat huge amounts of plankton, are seen as a threat to commercial and sport fish that feed on plankton during at least some stages of their lives.

A water sample collected last May near Green Bay, Wis., contained DNA fragments of silver carp. After that discovery, senators from Great Lakes states called for immediate action to block a carp invasion. In 2012, Congress ordered the secretary of the Army to start designing and preparing to build an effective barrier should it be deemed justified.

Corps officials said Monday that no barrier would be built without holding public hearings, consulting the many government agencies with a stake in the matter and getting Congress's blessing.

Conservation groups generally want carp and other invasive species to be blocked as quickly as possible, but commercial shippers and recreational boat organizations have expressed concerns about options that would seal off the lake.

Officials have taken a number of steps to keep the carp out of the lake, including physically removing scores of thousands of them from the Illinois River, the source of all five waterways, and installing an underwater electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal inland from the five streams.

The electric barrier was once believed to be effective, but a recent report by the Army Corps and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service said entire schools of fish frequently slip through it, swept along by barge wakes or in water beneath metal boat hulls where the electric current is weakened.

Federal officials say there is no evidence that carp have entered Lake Michigan, noting that the closest sighting of the fish in the Illinois River was still 55 miles from the lake.

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Halton C. Arp, Astronomer Who Challenged Big Bang Theory, Dies at 86

Halton C. Arp, a prodigal son of American astronomy whose dogged insistence that astronomers had misread the distances to quasars cast doubt on the Big Bang theory of the universe and led to his exile from his peers and the telescopes he loved, died on Dec. 28 in Munich. He was 86.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Kristana Arp, who said he also had Parkinson's disease.

As a staff astronomer for 29 years at Hale Observatories, which included the Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain observatories in Southern California, Dr. Arp was part of their most romantic era, when astronomers were peeling back the sky and making discovery after discovery that laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the expansion of the universe.

But Dr. Arp, an artist's son with a swashbuckling air, was no friend of orthodoxy. A skilled observer with regular access to a 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain, he sought out unusual galaxies and collected them in "The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies" (1966), showing them interacting and merging with loops, swirls and streamers that showed the diversity and beauty of nature.

But these galaxies also revealed something puzzling and controversial. In the expanding universe, as discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929, everything is moving away from us. The farther away it is, the faster it is going, as revealed by its redshift, a stretching of light waves — like the changing tone of an ambulance siren as it goes past — known as a Doppler shift.

Dr. Arp found that galaxies with radically different redshifts, and thus at vastly different distances from us, often appeared connected by filaments and bridges of gas. This suggested, he said, that redshift was not always an indication of distance but could be caused by other, unknown physics.

The biggest redshifts belonged to quasars — brilliant, pointlike objects that are presumably at the edge of the universe. Dr. Arp found, however, that they were often suspiciously close in the sky to relatively nearby spiral galaxies. This suggested to him that quasars were not so far away after all, and that they might have shot out of the nearby galaxies.

If he was right, the whole picture of cosmic evolution given by the Big Bang — of a universe that began in a blaze of fire and gas 14 billion years ago and slowly condensed into stars, galaxies and creatures over the eons — would have to go out the window.

A vast majority of astronomers dismissed Dr. Arp's results as coincidences or optical illusions. But his data appealed to a small, articulate band of astronomers who supported a rival theory of the universe called Steady State and had criticized the Big Bang over the decades. Among them were Fred Hoyle, of Cambridge University, who had invented the theory, and Geoffrey Burbidge, a witty and acerbic astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Arp survived both of them.

"When he died, he took a whole cosmology with him," said Barry F. Madore, a senior research associate at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif.

Halton Christian Arp was born on March 21, 1927, in New York City, the only son of August and Anita Arp. His father was an artist and his mother ran institutions for children and adolescents. Halton grew up in Greenwich Village and various art colonies and did not go to school until fifth grade. After bouncing around public schools in New York, he was sent to Tabor Academy, on Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts, a prep school for the United States Naval Academy.

After a year in the Navy, he attended Harvard, where he majored in astronomy. He graduated in 1949 and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in 1953 at the California Institute of Technology, which had started an astronomy graduate program to prepare for the advent of the 200-inch telescope.

At Harvard, he became one of the best fencers in the United States, ultimately competing in world championship matches in Paris in 1965. Cutting a dashing figure, he would adopt a fencer's posture when giving talks. "He would strut across the stage and then strut back, as if he were dueling," Dr. Madore said.

Dr. Arp married three times. He is survived by his third wife, Marie-Helene Arp, an astronomer in Munich; four daughters, Kristana, Alissa, Andrice and Delina Arp; and five grandchildren.

Dr. Arp became a staff astronomer at the Hale Observatories after stints as a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science and Indiana University. His breakthrough occurred, as he recalled, on a rainy night at Palomar in 1966, when he decided to investigate a chance remark by a colleague that a lot of his peculiar galaxies had radio sources near them in the sky. Looking them up in the Palomar library, he realized that many of those radio sources were quasars that could have been shot out of a nearby galaxy, an idea first explored by the Armenian astronomer Victor Ambartsumian a decade earlier.

"It is with reluctance that I come to the conclusion that the redshifts of some extragalactic objects are not due entirely to velocity causes," Dr. Arp wrote in a paper a year later.

He combed the sky for more evidence that redshifts were not ironclad indicators of cosmic distance, knowing that he was striking at the heart of modern cosmology. He turned out to be an expert at finding quasars in suspicious places, tucked under the arm of a galaxy or at the end of a tendril of gas.

One of the most impressive was a quasarlike object known as Markarian 205, which had a redshift corresponding to a distance of about a billion light years but appeared to be in front of a galaxy only 70 million light years away.

The redshift controversy came to a boil in 1972, when Dr. Arp engaged in a debate, arranged by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, with John N. Bahcall, a young physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study. Timothy Ferris described the event in his book "The Red Limit" (1977): "When the debate was over, it was difficult not to be impressed with Arp's sincerity and his love for the mysterious galaxies he studied, but it was also difficult to feel that his case had suffered anything short of demolition."

As Dr. Arp's colleagues lost patience with his quest, he was no longer invited to speak at major conferences, and his observing time on the mighty 200-inch telescope began to dry up. Warned in the early 1980s that his research program was unproductive, he refused to change course. Finally, he refused to submit a proposal at all on the grounds that everyone knew what he was doing. He got no time at all.

Dr. Arp took early retirement and joined the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics near Munich, where he continued to promote his theories. He told his own side of the redshift story in a 1989 book, "Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies."

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Nuclear Fuel Storage Remains Safe, Panel Members Say

WASHINGTON — Most members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicated on Monday that they considered it safe to continue storing most spent nuclear fuel in pools, even though concerns remain about potential accidents and terrorist attacks.

At a commission meeting, four of the five members indicated that storage in the pools was safe enough, at least compared with moving some of the fuel into giant steel and concrete casks, where they can be stored dry, with no reliance on water, pumps or filters to keep them cool.

Concerns about the safety of spent fuel pools grew after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan nearly three years ago, when the possibility of damage to a pool there led the State Department to advise Americans to stay more than 50 miles from the plant. Before then, the National Academy of Sciences, in a study ordered by a worried Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, found that a successful terrorist attack on a spent fuel pool was plausible and that regulators should consider reducing the loading in spent fuel pools, which hold far more radioactive materials than nuclear reactors do.

"It's legitimate to describe spent fuel pools at reactors in the United States as pre-emplaced radiological weapons," Gordon R. Thompson, the executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Mass., and a research professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., told the commissioners. The spent fuel pools are a magnet for terrorists, he said.

But David A. Heacock, the chief nuclear officer of Dominion Nuclear, which operates reactors in Virginia and elsewhere, said that the probability of an event that would damage a spent fuel pool was "effectively zero" and that the steps needed to mitigate such an accident were simple, with preparations already made.

"This is not a complicated mitigation, nor is it difficult," he said. "It's basically, just add water."

Nuclear fuel is barely radioactive when it is put into a reactor, but when uranium is split, the fragments, materials like strontium and cesium, are unstable and seek to return to stability by giving off energy, or subatomic particles, for as long as centuries. The particles continue to produce heat so they must be stored under water for a few years.

When the reactors now in service were built, the plan was to remove the fuel after a few years, but because the government has failed to provide a place to bury the spent fuel, utility companies have had to squeeze more and more of it into the spent fuel pools. At Fukushima Daiichi unit 4, which suffered a hydrogen explosion, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission came to believe that the pool was dry or almost dry, and engineers feared that a fire would spread the radioactive materials widely.

As it turned out, the pool at Fukushima Daiichi was full all the time.

But Mr. Thompson said that if water was drained from a spent fuel pool, the radiation field would be so intense that it would deliver a fatal dose to a worker within minutes, making "mitigating action" impossible. The nuclear industry, however, disagreed.

The nuclear commission's chairwoman, Allison M. Macfarlane, was the sole commissioner of the five whose questions indicated she might be open to moving more fuel to dry casks, which are already in wide use. Before she was named to the commission, Ms. Macfarlane spoke favorably of that idea, as did her predecessor, Gregory Jaczko, before he was named chairman. But both backed off when they assumed leadership of the commission.

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Spain’s Solar Pullback Threatens Pocketbooks

Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

Justo Cruz Rodríguez faces ruin after investing in solar power in the Spanish town of Águilas.

ÁGUILAS, Spain — Six years ago, Justo Cruz Rodríguez, who runs a small business here designing signs, was looking for a way to generate a steady, if modest, pension for himself and his father.

So when the government passed a law offering attractive rates for solar energy — and guaranteed them for the next 25 years — he mortgaged his house, his father's house and even his workshop to install half a dozen rows of solar panels in his father's garden, with the idea of selling his excess electricity.

"It seemed so safe," he said recently. "It was a government guarantee."

But the Spanish government has changed its mind. It plans to pay less, a lot less. Under legislation that goes into effect this year, it will drop its per-kilowatt-hour payment system altogether and effectively impose retroactive cuts in payments. It also plans to make solar power producers pay a charge on electricity they generate and use themselves, a measure that angry protesters have named the "sun tax."

Spain has good reason for wanting to take action. It is facing a growing deficit — about $40 billion now — because it has never passed on the true cost of producing energy to its consumers, a problem that has ballooned with the economic crisis. If it does not do something, that deficit will only grow, experts say.

Energy experts across Europe are watching Spain's actions closely, however, wondering if they amount to folly. Thousands of solar energy investors large and small will doubtless face insolvency, and perhaps just as worrisome, experts say, the new charges for those using their own electricity may set off a rush by owners of solar panels to find ways to sell or use their electricity without reliance on the national grid at all, further reducing its customer base.

Nor is Spain's abrupt U-turn likely to go over well with future investors, experts say.

"When a government changes the terms of existing contracts, that's a bad move," said Toby Couture, a solar energy consultant with E3 Analytics in Berlin, who believes that the government will have trouble when it wants to develop public-private partnerships to fund water treatment plants, highways or pipelines, for instance.

"There are reasons we live by contract rules," he said. "If you keep changing the rules of the game, then, after a while, your friends don't want to play. The government has lost credibility."

Spain was once at the forefront of the solar energy movement. It barreled into the renewable-energy business, winning over thousands of investors big and small with its guarantees. Experts say the country has already come close to the European Union's goal of 20 percent reliance on renewable energy by 2020.

But experts say the government never expected so much investment and never came up with a way of paying for it. When the economic crisis hit, in 2008, and demand for energy went down, the deficit widened at an even faster rate.

Spanish officials say they have no choice now but to reduce the payments, which were once offered to spur investment in solar energy but are now considered overly generous, especially since the cost of solar panels has dropped precipitously in recent years.

The new government payment system has left thousands of investors, like Mr. Cruz, 51, in a state of shock.

"I am going to lose everything," Mr. Cruz said, standing near the panels he thought would make his old age easier. "I will be homeless. At my age, homeless."

The government has proposed cuts to other parts of the energy sector as well, and has taken other steps to reduce the energy deficit, including asking Spaniards to pay more for the electricity they use. But no other measures are as drastic as the reduction of payments to the nearly 60,000 producers of solar power, 50,000 of which are small-time investors like Mr. Cruz, according to the Spanish Solar Power Union.

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Colorado River Drought Forces a Painful Reckoning for States

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

To help the Colorado, federal authorities this year will for the first time reduce the water flow into Lake Mead, the nation's largest reservoir, created by Hoover Dam.

LAKE MEAD, Nev. — The sinuous Colorado River and its slew of man-made reservoirs from the Rockies to southern Arizona are being sapped by 14 years of drought nearly unrivaled in 1,250 years.

The once broad and blue river has in many places dwindled to a murky brown trickle. Reservoirs have shrunk to less than half their capacities, the canyon walls around them ringed with white mineral deposits where water once lapped. Seeking to stretch their allotments of the river, regional water agencies are recycling sewage effluent, offering rebates to tear up grass lawns and subsidizing less thirsty appliances from dishwashers to shower heads.

But many experts believe the current drought is only the harbinger of a new, drier era in which the Colorado's flow will be substantially and permanently diminished.

Faced with the shortage, federal authorities this year will for the first time decrease the amount of water that flows into Lake Mead, the nation's largest reservoir, from Lake Powell 180 miles upstream. That will reduce even more the level of Lake Mead, a crucial source of water for cities from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and for millions of acres of farmland.

Reclamation officials say there is a 50-50 chance that by 2015, Lake Mead's water will be rationed to states downstream. That, too, has never happened before.

"If Lake Mead goes below elevation 1,000" — 1,000 feet above sea level — "we lose any capacity to pump water to serve the municipal needs of seven in 10 people in the state of Nevada," said John Entsminger, the senior deputy general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Since 2008, Mr. Entsminger's agency has been drilling an $817 million tunnel under Lake Mead — a third attempt to capture more water as two higher tunnels have become threatened by the lake's falling level. In September, faced with the prospect that one of the tunnels could run dry before the third one was completed, the authority took emergency measures: still another tunnel, this one to stretch the life of the most threatened intake until construction of the third one is finished.

These new realities are forcing a profound reassessment of how the 1,450-mile Colorado, the Southwest's only major river, can continue to slake the thirst of one of the nation's fastest-growing regions. Agriculture, from California's Imperial Valley to Wyoming's cattle herds, soaks up about three-quarters of its water, and produces 15 percent of the nation's food. But 40 million people also depend on the river and its tributaries, and their numbers are rising rapidly.

The labyrinthine rules by which the seven Colorado states share the river's water are rife with potential points of conflict. And while some states have made huge strides in conserving water — and even reducing the amount they consume — they have yet to chart a united path through shortages that could last years or even decades.

"There is no planning for a continuation of the drought we've had," said one expert on the Colorado's woes, who asked not to be identified to preserve his relationship with state officials. "There's always been within the current planning an embedded hope that somehow, things would return to something more like normal."

Unfortunately, the Colorado during most of Lake Mead's 78-year history was not normal at all.

Studies now show that the 20th century was one of the three wettest of the last 13 centuries in the Colorado basin. On average, the Colorado's flow over that period was actually 15 percent lower than in the 1900s. And most experts agree that the basin will get even drier: A brace of global-warming studies concludes that rising temperatures will reduce the Colorado's average flow after 2050 by five to 35 percent, even if rainfall remains the same — and most of those studies predict that rains will diminish.

Already, the drought is upending many of the assumptions on which water barons relied when they tamed the Colorado in the 1900s.

The Colorado basin states tried in the 1920s to stave off future fights over water by splitting it, 50-50, between the upper-basin states of Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming and the lower-basin states of Arizona, Nevada and California.

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A Resisted Pill to Prevent H.I.V.

SAN FRANCISCO — Over a cup of tea at a downtown Starbucks, Michael Rubio recalled how four friends became H.I.V. positive through unprotected sex, all within a year. The news shocked Mr. Rubio, a 28-year-old gay man, into trying a controversial new form of H.I.V. prevention: a daily pill that studies show is highly effective in protecting people from infection.

"With my inner circle so affected in the last year, it was a no-brainer to consider this for my life right now," said Mr. Rubio, a front-office coordinator at the Positive Resource Center, a social service agency for people with H.I.V.

The very existence of that option represents a startling turn in the too-long history of the AIDS epidemic. Many health experts hoped that the medication — Truvada, a combination of two antiviral drugs that has been used to treat H.I.V. since 2004 — would be exuberantly embraced by H.I.V.-negative gay men. Instead, Truvada has been slow to catch on as an H.I.V. preventive in the 18 months since the strategy's approval by the Food and Drug Administration. In some quarters, the idea that healthy gay men should take a medication to prevent infection — an approach called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP — has met with hostility or indifference.

"It's gotten tons of attention at H.I.V. meetings as a new tool for prevention, and I consider it an important option for the right person," said Dr. Lisa Capaldini, a primary care doctor here who treats many gay men. "And yet there's been very little interest among my patients. There's a fascinating disconnect."

For 30 years, public health officials have aggressively promoted condom use during every sexual encounter as the only effective method, apart from abstinence, for preventing H.I.V. transmission. Still, 50,000 new infections are occurring annually in the United States; sexual transmission between men accounts for more than half of them, and a disproportionate number among African-Americans and other minorities.

Many experts hailed Truvada as an opportunity to reduce new infections among high-risk groups like young gay men, people in relationships with H.I.V.-positive partners, and prostitutes. The F.D.A. called for prescriptions to be accompanied by counseling, frequent H.I.V. testing, and continued promotion of safer sex, although research suggests that daily use of the pill alone confers close to full protection.

For many gay men, and for some public health officials, the new option has brought both hope and confusion.

"We've had several decades of the recommendation to use condoms," said Dr. Kenneth H. Mayer, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and the medical research director at Fenway Health, a community center in Boston with many lesbian and gay patients. "Now we're saying, 'Here's a pill that might protect you if you don't use condoms.' So it's flying in the face of community norms."

Certainly, fewer people have tried PrEP than many experts had anticipated. According to an analysis by Gilead Sciences, which makes the drug, data from more than half of retail pharmacies nationwide indicated that 1,774 people filled prescriptions for Truvada for H.I.V. prevention from January 2011 (it could be prescribed off-label before the F.D.A. approval) through March 2013. The numbers did not include the thousands already receiving the drug as research participants.

Almost half of the prescriptions were for women, a surprise to those who expected gay men to be the early adopters. Dr. Deborah Cohan, an obstetrician and gynecologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has prescribed it to several women with H.I.V.-positive partners, including one seeking to get pregnant.

"It's beautiful that we have this intervention that works for women who need it," Dr. Cohan said.

So why haven't more gay men signed up?

Some men have reported receiving negative reactions from their health care providers when they brought it up. Use of the drug as a preventive can be stigmatizing among gay men as well: the term "Truvada whore" has been bandied about on some social networks.

And many simply may not know much about the strategy. Gilead has not launched a public campaign to market Truvada for prevention, but has instead sponsored activities by other organizations. Fenway Health, for example, has received Gilead funding for some PrEP-related education and research.

Potential side effects like kidney damage and a loss of bone density, although rare, are also a concern. And Truvada is expensive: more than $1,000 a month. So far, private and public insurers, including state Medicaid programs, have generally covered the drug for prevention. (Gilead also provides it to some patients who cannot afford it.)

But a generational shift in attitudes toward H.I.V. among gay men may also be playing a role, some experts say. With advances in treatment, many younger men who did not experience the worst years of the epidemic are less fearful of the consequences of infection. Moreover, current medications can lower viral levels in H.I.V.-positive people to the point where the risk of transmission is negligible, further reducing the perceived need for PrEP among H.I.V.-negative partners.

Damon Jacobs, a New York psychotherapist, began taking Truvada following the breakup of a long-term relationship. "I found that I was no longer as consistent with condom use as I had been in earlier days, and that scared me greatly," said Mr. Jacobs, 42, who maintains a Facebook page promoting PrEP. He said that he has not missed a dose in two years; he also acknowledged that he was now much less likely to use condoms.

That sort of acknowledgment makes some health care experts nervous, despite Truvada's efficacy when used daily. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a major H.I.V. services provider based in Los Angeles, lobbied against F.D.A. approval of Truvada for H.I.V. prevention, arguing that men taking the medication would be likelier to pursue riskier sexual practices.

Certainly, "condom fatigue" among gay men is real. The proportion who reported unprotected anal sex in the previous year rose to 57 percent in 2011 from 48 percent in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But a recent study found that men in a large clinical trial who believed they were taking Truvada rather than placebo did not increase their risky behavior. For his part, Mr. Rubio, the San Francisco coordinator, said he remained "adamant" about using condoms. "For me, this is a whole other layer of protection," he said.

Adherence to the drug regimen is another thorny issue. The major trial that confirmed Truvada as an effective H.I.V. preventive among men who have sex with men, also found that many participants did not take the pill every day, leaving them more vulnerable to infection.

Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, warned that drug adherence will continue to be a problem, likely leading to more infections and the emergence of drug-resistant H.I.V. strains. "If you don't take the medication every day and you don't use condoms, and you're highly sexually active, you're going to get infected," Mr. Weinstein said.

Advocates for PrEP argue, without substantial evidence to date, that people now taking and starting Truvada for prevention may be more likely to follow instructions because they know that it works, unlike participants in the early clinical trials.

In any event, the protocol for pre-exposure prophylaxis is itself likely to undergo significant changes as findings emerge from current and upcoming research into other formulations of Truvada such as gels or injectables, less frequent dosing regimens, and the use of other medications altogether.

"People are not lining up, but I'm not pessimistic," said Dr. Mayer of Fenway Health. "It's going to take time. It's really early days."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 6, 2014

An article on Tuesday about Truvada as an H.I.V. preventive therapy referred incorrectly to Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Though he has an honorary doctoral degree, he is not a medical doctor and therefore is not Dr. Michael Weinstein.

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Bracing for Carp in Great Lakes, but Debating Their Presence

John Flesher/Associated Press

Asian carp, jolted by an electric current from a research boat, in the Illinois River. The Army Corps of Engineers is about to release a proposal to keep the carp from migrating into the Great Lakes.

After decades of increasingly dire warnings, countless studies and countermeasures, scientists are beginning to mull over hints of something that few of them wish to contemplate: The despised Asian carp may have finally arrived in the Great Lakes.

"May have" are the operative words. The latest hint consists of a single water sample, one of scores taken last May from Lake Michigan, that tested positive for remnants of DNA from one particularly destructive species, silver carp. Experts debate the significance of that one hit, which was disclosed in late October, and a thorough resampling of the same waters in November turned up nothing, scientists were told late last month.

But the sample came atop a handful of other clues, some dating to the 1990s, that suggest that the silver carp and a similarly nasty cousin, the bighead, may be coming to parts of the lakes. On Monday, the Army Corps of Engineers will issue a lengthy study proposing ways to keep the carp and other invasive species, now common in the Mississippi and Ohio River basins, from migrating into the lakes at points where their waters are linked.

The positive sample was collected in Sturgeon Bay, a small indentation in a finger of Lake Michigan that includes Green Bay, Wis., during a month when the carp are active. False positives can occur if a sample is contaminated, but experts largely agree that the material actually came from a silver carp.

The question is how it got there. On that point, some of the leading scientists who track the carp's presence in the Upper Midwest have differing opinions.

"The most plausible and probable explanation for the DNA of Asian carp is the presence of live fish," Lindsay Chadderton, a scientist for the Nature Conservancy, working at the University of Notre Dame, said in an interview last month. Mr. Chadderton was among those who took the May samples that turned up the carp's DNA.

Timothy Strakosh, a biologist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Green Bay, was less certain. "I'd say the highest probability of the eDNA source is most likely not a fish," said Mr. Strakosh, who was part of the team that sampled Lake Michigan in November.

The term eDNA is shorthand for environmental DNA — genetic material that is not drawn directly from a fish but turns up in the water after shedding from its scales, gills or other sources. Detecting it, Mr. Strakosh said, is somewhat akin to setting off a smoke detector. "Picture it coming off a fish as smoke, off the slime, off the scales and feces," he said. "But just because you have some smoke doesn't necessarily mean you have a fire."

Genetic material has other ways of moving around, he noted. Birds could have eaten small carp elsewhere and deposited the DNA in the lake via their droppings. Boats could have transported the DNA on their hulls from a carp-infested river to the lake; the area around Sturgeon Bay is popular with recreational boaters and fishermen.

Mr. Chadderton, however, said that DNA shed directly from a fish was likely to be more widespread and longer-lasting than anything that had passed first through a bird's digestive system. "That plume of DNA is going to be far easier to detect than a single dropping by a cormorant that has lower-quality DNA," he said.

A single positive hit would be less worrisome were there not other clues that at least some carp have sneaked into the lakes. Fishermen caught three bighead carp in Lake Erie in the 1990s and in the early part of the last decade. The catches were originally dismissed as flukes (insignificant accidents, that is, not flathead fish), Mr. Chadderton said, but bone analyses indicated later that they had lived in the lake — and apparently thrived — for at least several years.

In 2009, experts turned up several carp DNA samples in Lake Michigan just south of downtown Chicago, at the mouth of the Calumet River. The Calumet flows into the Illinois River, a Mississippi River tributary that has been home to carp for decades. Since 2010, state workers have hauled more than 115,000 carp from a stretch of the river that ends about 30 miles southwest of Lake Michigan.

Should silver carp establish themselves in the lake, it could be cause for concern. The fish are insatiable consumers of plankton, the same food that sustains perch, walleye and whitefish during parts of their life cycles, and those fish are linchpins of the lakes' $7-billion-a-year fishing industry.

Because the carp reproduce so quickly and eat so much — they eat up to 10 percent of their weight daily and can grow as large as 60 pounds — they could crowd out those and other species native to the lakes.

Originally brought from China to clean up algae-ridden fishponds, the carp escaped, were first sighted in the Arkansas River in 1976 and have been moving steadily up the Mississippi toward the lakes ever since. Besides its tendency to upend the ecological balance in places it invades, the silver carp is best known for its spectacular and bizarre habit of leaping well out of the water by the hundreds when riled by motorboats or other disturbances. Flying carp have on occasion smacked into passing boaters and even injured them.

In the end, the question of whether silver carp have made it into Lake Michigan is likely to be settled in one of two ways: obtaining a multitude of positive samples from one spot or actually catching a fish.

Scientists will return this May to Sturgeon Bay for more sampling. Snaring a carp is another matter: The carp are the Houdinis of the fish world, said Duane C. Chapman, a carp expert at the United States Geological Survey in Columbia, Mo.

Mr. Chapman recalled once spending two days and using three boats in an effort to retrieve carp that had been equipped with tracking devices. "You could track them around," he said. "We had multiple nets; we had fish trapped between them. We had multiple electric fishers," which are current-generating devices used to herd fish into nets. "And we could not catch those fish."

Nor is anyone likely to catch a carp around Sturgeon Bay any time soon. Even if they are there, silver carp need quite specific conditions to spawn and years to become established, assuming the environment suits them. Whether carp might like the area enough to hang around remains to be seen.

"If there's any fish up there," Mr. Chapman said, "we know they're darned few."

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A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Greggor Ilagan initially thought a ban on genetically modified organisms was a good idea.

KONA, Hawaii — From the moment the bill to ban genetically engineered crops on the island of Hawaii was introduced in May 2013, it garnered more vocal support than any the County Council here had ever considered, even the perennially popular bids to decriminalize marijuana.

Public hearings were dominated by recitations of the ills often attributed to genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s: cancer in rats, a rise in childhood allergies, out-of-control superweeds, genetic contamination, overuse of pesticides, the disappearance of butterflies and bees.

Like some others on the nine-member Council, Greggor Ilagan was not even sure at the outset of the debate exactly what genetically modified organisms were: living things whose DNA has been altered, often with the addition of a gene from a distant species, to produce a desired trait. But he could see why almost all of his colleagues had been persuaded of the virtue of turning the island into what the bill's proponents called a "G.M.O.-free oasis."

"You just type 'G.M.O.' and everything you see is negative," he told his staff. Opposing the ban also seemed likely to ruin anyone's re-election prospects.

Yet doubts nagged at the councilman, who was serving his first two-year term. The island's papaya farmers said that an engineered variety had saved their fruit from a devastating disease. A study reporting that a diet of G.M.O. corn caused tumors in rats, mentioned often by the ban's supporters, turned out to have been thoroughly debunked.

And University of Hawaii biologists urged the Council to consider the global scientific consensus, which holds that existing genetically engineered crops are no riskier than others, and have provided some tangible benefits.

"Are we going to just ignore them?" Mr. Ilagan wondered.

Urged on by Margaret Wille, the ban's sponsor, who spoke passionately of the need to "act before it's too late," the Council declined to form a task force to look into such questions before its November vote. But Mr. Ilagan, 27, sought answers on his own. In the process, he found himself, like so many public and business leaders worldwide, wrestling with a subject in which popular beliefs often do not reflect scientific evidence.

At stake is how to grow healthful food most efficiently, at a time when a warming world and a growing population make that goal all the more urgent.

Scientists, who have come to rely on liberals in political battles over stem-cell research, climate change and the teaching of evolution, have been dismayed to find themselves at odds with their traditional allies on this issue. Some compare the hostility to G.M.O.s to the rejection of climate-change science, except with liberal opponents instead of conservative ones.

"These are my people, they're lefties, I'm with them on almost everything," said Michael Shintaku, a plant pathologist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, who testified several times against the bill. "It hurts."

But, supporters of the ban warned, scientists had not always correctly assessed the health and environmental risks of new technology. "Remember DDT?" one proponent demanded.

Ms. Wille's bill would ban the cultivation of any genetically engineered crop on the island, with the exception of the two already grown there: corn recently planted by an island dairy to feed its cows, and papaya. Field tests to study new G.M.O. crops would also be prohibited. Penalties would be $1,000 per day.

Like three-quarters of the voters on Hawaii Island, known as the Big Island, Mr. Ilagan supported President Obama in the 2012 election. When he took office himself a month later, after six years in the Air National Guard, he planned to focus on squatters, crime prevention and the inauguration of a bus line in his district on the island's eastern rim.

He had also promised himself that he would take a stance on all topics, never registering a "kanalua" vote — the Hawaiian term for "with reservation."

But with the G.M.O. bill, he often despaired of assembling the information he needed to definitively decide. Every time he answered one question, it seemed, new ones arose. Popular opinion masqueraded convincingly as science, and the science itself was hard to grasp. People who spoke as experts lacked credentials, and G.M.O. critics discounted those with credentials as being pawns of biotechnology companies.

"It takes so much time to find out what's true," he complained.

So many emails arrived in support of the ban that, as a matter of environmental responsibility, the Council clerks suspended the custom of printing them out for each Council member. But Mr. Ilagan had only to consult his inbox to be reminded of the prevailing opinion.

"Do the right thing," one Chicago woman wrote, "or no one will want to take a toxic tour of your poisoned paradise."

Distrust on the Left

Margaret Wille, 66, had the island's best interests at heart when she proposed the ban, Mr. Ilagan knew.

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Dot Earth Blog: Food, Genes and the Feeling of Risk

Updated below, Jan. 4, 4:57 p.m. |
Six months ago, Nathanael Johnson, the author of "All Natural" and food blogger for Grist, an unabashedly liberal website, took on the task of digging deep on the risks and rewards of genetic modified organisms in agriculture. Grist summarized the results this way:

Panic-Free GMOs. It's easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there's the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that's in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you've found the trove.

And Johnson indeed produced a rich series of reports, which he summarized to end the year in a series of convenient linked bullet points: 

It's prize-worthy journalism by a trusted guide for an important audience in the debate over how to feed 9 billion people around 2050 — or your own family tonight. And his conclusion is, with a small asterisk, that GMOs are not only safe (with a very small asterisk), but are reducing pesticide dangers (if not amounts of herbicide) and not necessarily hampering farmers' freedoms. Please click the links above to get the full depth and scope.

The latest news in this arena came just yesterday, when General Mills announced that it has added this label to its plain-Jane Cheerios cereal: "not made with genetically modified ingredients" — a task made easy because there are no genetically modified variants of the prime ingredient, oats. The company's blog post stressed that this is about consumer interest, not safety.

But will Johnson's reporting matter to entrenched foes of this technology?

Keith Kloor, who has dived deep on these questions in Slate and on his main blog at Discover, asked very important questions yesterday about the ramifications of Grist's great coverage, including this one:

What I wonder, though, is if [Johnson's] sober exploration of GMOs has made a difference with progressives and environmentalists (Grist's audience). Have these readers–many who are predisposed to believe that GMO = Frankenfoods–been moved to rethink their own assumptions and biases? Perhaps more importantly, has Johnson's dilligent work influenced anti-GMO thought leaders? Yes, I'm looking at you, Michael Pollan.

It helps that Johnson is a member of good standing in the same tribe as Pollan and Grist readers. That makes him trustworthy. Still, anyone familiar with the psychology of risk perception on the GMO issue knows that even a credible messenger bearing facts will make only so much headway.

He also cited a New Yorker piece on "The Psychology of Distrusting GMOs" that included this important context:

Psychologists have long observed that there is a continuum in what we perceive as natural or unnatural. As the psychologist Robert Sternberg wrote in 1982, the natural is what we find more familiar, while what we consider unnatural tends to be more novel—perceptually and experientially unfamiliar—and complex, meaning that more cognitive effort is required to understand it. The natural is seen as inherently positive; the unnatural is not. And anything that involves human manipulation is considered highly unnatural—like, say, G.M.O.s, even though genetically modified food already lines the shelves at grocery stores.

One can only hope that more folks follow Kloor's advice and try to get comfortable with the facts about their feelings on technology and food instead of just continuing to debate the science from positions shaped by their feelings.

There's a broader point to ponder here. The interplay of Johnson's reporting and that of other writers, including Kloor, is more illuminating than any single voice.

That, to me, is evidence of the power of collective knowledge-building. I won't use the term "collective intelligence" because intelligence is only one factor — and often not the dominant factor – shaping how we consider, embrace or reject information on sources of risk. The word knowledge feels better, to me.

This line of writing on food and genetics also reinforces the value of blogs and Twitter, which facilitate interlaced inquiry and discourse in a way that static, standalone pieces can't.

Postscript, Jan. 4 5 p.m.| I also urge you to ready Amy Harmon's superb feature on a Hawaiian legislator's lonely search for reality in the face of a campaign to ban genetically modified crops in the state.

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