Kentucky is stepping up research on storing harmful carbon dioxide emissions underground. Three private energy companies will put up additional funding and expertise to help carry out the carbon storage test. Included are Peabody and ConocoPhillips, which are in the preliminary stages of designing a plant that would convert coal into gas for electricity. That plant will be outfitted to capture carbon dioxide before it escapes into the atmosphere. But geologists must prove it can be stored efficiently, and near the plant. Survey head Dave Harris says the challenge will be the amount of CO2 underground chambers might need to handle.
“Five million tons of CO2 per year is a good ballpark number for the amount of CO2 that a plant like that would produce. I mean that’s a lot of CO2 you’ve got to get rid of. Until we get this well drilled we really don’t know how many wells you’re going to have to drill, and how much each well can actually handle per year,” Harris said.
To find out, geologists will drill a mile-and-a-half deep well in western Kentucky and then inject it with a small volume of carbon dioxide. Even if the well can hold a substantial volume and no leaks develop, Harris says commercial-scale carbon storage is still 5 to 10 years away.
From Kentucky Public Radio’s Tony McVeigh
The search for a new president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education is moving forward. Earlier this year, former CPE president Brad Cowgill resigned under pressure at the urging of Governor Beshear. Beshear said Cowgill’s hiring was illegal because a national search was not conducted.
Now, a Florida firm has been hired to help find a new president. Search committee chair John Hall says Dr. Jan Greenwood of Greenwood, Asher and Associates will help locate qualified candidates.
“She’ll be talking to various members of state government and members of the CPE and then she’ll be trying to identify candidates,” he said.
Hall says the committee would like to start interviewing candidates this fall and have a new president onboard by December. In the meantime, Dr. Richard Crofts is serving as interim president. Crofts is not a candidate for the permanent post.
Recent flooding in southern and central Indiana will likely mean hundreds of millions of dollars in crop losses for Hoosier farmers. A new report released today by the US Department of Agriculture predicts the Hoosier State’s corn harvest will be down four percent from a pre-flood estimate in March, and ten percent from last year.
But Ken Klemme with the Indiana Department of Agriculture says it will take some time to get a clear picture of the flood’s impact.
“Farmers are still continuing to do some replanting, its too early to know how the acres that farmers chose to leave how those fields will yield, how the replanted fields will yield, so there’s just so much unknown right now, it’s really hard day to day to know whether to feel better or worse than you did the day before,” he said.
The Indiana Department of Agriculture estimates total crop losses could go as high as 800-million dollars.
The Ryder Cup won’t be the only international golf competition played in the Louisville area this September.The first-ever Humana Fightmaster Cup, featuring the best one-armed golfers from North America and Europe, will be played in Shelby County. It’s named for Louisvillian Don Fightmaster, who taught himself to play golf after losing an arm in 1954 automobile accident.
Fightmaster, who will captain the North America
n team, says the competition will follow the Ryder Cup format.
“We’re going to have the same amount of members, we’ll have twelve from the North American team and the European team, and we’ll have the same matches as the Ryder Cup,” he said.
The Humana Fightmaster Cup matches will be played September 12-14 at the Cardinal Club in Simpsonville.
The Ryder Cup begins September 16 at Valhalla Golf Club in Eastern Jefferson County.
Kentucky’s gas tax is set to increase tomorrow.
The gas tax can be adjusted quarterly, and goes up and down with the wholesale price of gasoline. Starting Tuesday, Kentucky’s gas tax goes up another penny-and-a-half per gallon – to 21-point-1 cents. Jill Midkiff with the Kentucky Finance Cabinet says the tax goes straight to motorists.
“It’s remitted at the wholesale level, by licensed dealers, and then the tax is passed through to the retailer and then passed on to the consumer,” she said.
Last year at this time, the excise tax went up one-point-three cents. The money from the gas tax goes into the state road fund. The formula that calculates the state’s gas tax hasn’t been changed since 1988.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Tony Kushner
Religion, war, AIDS, politics – the themes playwright Tony Kushner explores in his work read like a list of what never to bring up at a dinner party. Kushner hasn’t shied away from presenting difficult issues through theater, and his Pulitzer Prize, Emmy Award, and two Tony Awards mean he must be doing something right. This Monday we’ll revisit our conversation with “Angels in America” author Tony Kushner, about his life and work. Today’s show is from our archives, so we won’t be taking phone calls.
Related Links:
Looking for an older episode? Browse the State of Affairs Audio Archive.
(Listen to the story.)
Ah! The sound of the forest….the urban forest, that is.”This is a lace bark elm…”
On this steamy afternoon, grad student Alvin Rentsch is methodically traveling the sidewalks of downtown Louisville with a clipboard and a hand-held GPS. He’s been trained to identify tree species, and mark each tree’s location, health, and size.
“It’s a 20 feet in canopy, does it have enough canopy space, is there any impediment from the building, what is the growing space, and we’ll call that a well and give it 8 feet.”
Rentsch’s and others data will go into a new database the city is creating with this inventory of downtown trees. The main idea is to paint the bigger picture: what trees are performing well and where. With that baseline, city landscapers can establish a regular maintenance schedule for each tree, depending on its species and age and condition. They can make better decisions about which trees to plant where. Public works spokeswoman Betty Yoonis says inventorying trees now should improve the way the city manages its trees over the long term.
“Certainly there’s a system to it, but it’s more, you know, we get a call from a concerned citizen, or one of our staff sees a tree that might have an issue. We were dealing with it that way. This program and the management plan which is resulting from it allows us to be proactive instead of reactive.”
University of Louisville mapping expert Bob Forbes says the data will also help the city calculate the extent to which trees are cleaning up the atmosphere… and even help city arborist Mark White maximize those efforts.
“There are computer programs that allow us to calculate how much oxygen are we actually creating from all these trees, what pollutants and how much are we actually filtering out of there, so that when Mark decides what kind of trees to plant, he can look at the database, he can look at those trees that are the most efficient, and use that as a guide to future plantings.”
For now the city’s tree inventory is limited to the central business district, downtown. But what might the inventory look like in the neighborhoods? Rich neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods? University of Louisville grad student Shannon Scroggins is part of research team trying to answer those questions.
In the muggy side yard of a St. Matthews brick home, Scroggins takes some tree measurements. She flips through a tree brick to identify the species—an eastern red cedar, with lacy needles and blueberry-colored cones. This is on of several plots she’ll hit this summer. Scroggins says it’s one of 10 metro council districts chosen for the study, each with a different racial make-up, income levels, education levels, and age of the housing stock. 
“And then we’re going to use those socio-demographic variables to see if there’s any patterns across these council districts with what we’re finding with tree cover, etc.”
U of L professor Margaret Carreiro leads the study. She’s interested, for example, in whether or not rental properties have more or less tree cover than homeowner properties, and how trees have been managed or mismanaged in poor neighborhoods. Carreiro’s research will go beyond the city’s inventory in that she’s looking at the direct relationship between a tree and its nearby building.
“Based on direction and the size of the tree, the size of the building, they can tell the extent to which, in your latitude, that tree is cooling you, cooling that building, in the summer.”
She will even be able to translate that into a dollar value.
“You put things into dollar signs, then planners and policymakers can compare those values with other land use options – development in one sector vs. another—or for developing ordinances to protect our trees.”
With two major tree surveys underway in the city, planners should soon have a wealth of information about how to manage our urban forest for decades to come. It’s a sign that cities are beginning to recognize that trees do more than fill public spaces.
