Eek!

Make that Years of the Bat.

What? You didn’t hear? Have you been living in a cave?

Fifteen months ago, the United Nations declared 2011 and 2012 as the International Year of the Bat to promote awareness about the under-appreciated insect gobbler, pollinator and seed disperser. The bat, you see, has fallen on hard times. There’s no easy way to explain this, so we hope you’re sitting down. Or upside down. Here it goes: Statistics show more than half of bat species in the United States are either suffering steep population declines or they are already listed as endangered. A major reason why is white-nose syndrome — a mysterious disease that is wiping out bats by the millions.

On New Year’s Eve in New York City, a 15-second ad trumpeting 2012 as the International Year of the Bat flashed on the 20-foot-tall CBS JumboTron on 42nd Street in Times Square. The public service announcement will be playing on the big screeen once an hour for 18 hours a day until April.

Here in Colorado, well, you’re reading it. But don’t mistake the dearth of bat publicity in this state for a dearth of bats. Colorado has bats. Lots of them. Depending on who is counting, there are anywhere between 18 and 20 species of bats in Colorado, and all but five of them are vulnerable to white-nose syndrome. The disease derives from a fungus that infests bat faces and wings. It strikes while bats hibernate in the winter, when their immune systems are suppressed and body temperatures are low.

The Townsend's big-eared bat lives in Colorado. (Source: U.S. Government)

At least two of the insectivorous hibernating species of bats that live in Colorado, the big brown bat and little brown bat, have been affected by white-nose syndrome back east. And the fungus that causes it is moving this way. Oklahoma and Missouri are the closest states where it has been confirmed.

“We presume that the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome will continue spreading westward through their populations into Colorado in the coming years, if it is not here already,” Cryan said Tuesday. “Many of the other … species of hibernating bats that occur in Colorado are only found in western parts of North America and have not yet been exposed to the fungus, as far as we know, so it remains to be seen how susceptible they might be if and when the disease arrives here in Colorado.”

Biologists have learned a lot about bats. The nocturnal creatures, for example, use echolocation to bounce sound waves off objects in order to navigate and hunt. More recently, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Southern Denmark discovered that bats also have “superfast” muscles, which were previously thought to only be found in the noise-making organs of rattlesnakes, birds and fish. Bats are the only known mammal to possess “superfast” muscles.

But as much as scientists know about bats, there is a lot they don’t know.

“We certainly need more funding to do more survey work and we need to figure out where our bats are and what our bat populations look like so we can tell if something is going on,” said Tina Jackson, species conservation coordinator for Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “We need baseline data.”

Last month, Congress allotted $4 million to study the outbreak of white-nose syndrome. Other government grants also bankroll bat research. But officials say more money is needed.

“We always need more funding,” Jackson said. “We didn’t even know about white-nose syndrome five years ago. There’s a lot of information we need to know about the fungus and the die-off.”

As a preventative measure, the U.S. Forest Service closed some caves and abandoned mines in Colorado to protect bats from the white-nose syndrome fungus that researchers say humans can transmit from clothing and equipment. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has not taken such an action.

“Before the merger, the Division of Wildlife didn’t have any caves in its inventory last winter,” Jackson said. “Parks does have a couple so I’m meeting with former State Parks staff next week to talk about how we can do some surveys, see what’s going on and assess the risk for white-nose syndrome.”

The Sierra Club is determined to reduce U.S. oil dependence. (Flickr, The Sierra Club)

The Sierra Club is in the process of trying to answer that question. For the past six months, it has worked on a massive study on how to reduce the United States’ oil dependence in an economically and environmentally beneficial way. The group is also building a coalition of environmental advocates and lawmakers to support the project, which will quantify potential oil-use reductions across every industrial sector.

“Over the next 20 years, how steep can we make cuts in oil consumption while allowing the economy to flourish and while creating more jobs rather than penalizing individual workers or communities?” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune asked. “So, this will be a major priority of the club over the next several years — to build a broad based coalition of organizations and elected officials who will want to stand up for a very thoughtful and pragmatic, but visionary and aggressive plan to get off oil.”

Brune, who took over his post just one month before the oil spill started, recently sat down for an interview with me. He outlined the organization’s oil study, talked about the prospects for energy legislation and previewed the upcoming mid-term elections.

Here is an edited-down version of our talk:

What is the major issue going forward for the Sierra Club right now?
Our top issue remains fighting climate change in a way that increases the availability of clean energy like solar and wind, while also improving the public health benefits associated with decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels.

Is the focus now on Environmental Protection Agency regulations, Congress or both?
I would say both for sure. We see great opportunity in EPA rulemakings to increase public health benefits by forcing utilities in particular to account for the cost of their pollution. A top priority right now is organizing around EPA’s hearings on coal ash, to make sure that coal ash is treated as a hazardous waste. But, over the next couple of years, we’ll be looking at a whole series of rulemakings, many of which are focused on stationary sources like coal plants, but we’re also looking at EPA rulemakings to cut our dependence on oil.

Is there a serious concern about challenges to EPA’s regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act going forward?
Yeah, certainly many threats have been made to EPA’s authority to act under the Clean Air Act, attempts either to gut the Clean Air Act or eliminate EPA’s authority. So, we’re taking those threats very seriously. We also think that should there be a public debate about these issues that the public overwhelmingly supports strong, effective and cost-effective regulations that have come out of the EPA for the last 40 years under the Clean Air Act. We think there’s broad public support for retaining its authority.

In terms of Congress, it doesn’t seem that anything is going to happen on cap-and-trade any time soon. Is that your thinking as well?
Well, you know, I think it is difficult to predict too far into the future. We think Congress should act. We know that members were put into office with the expectation that there would be a meaningful, substantive response to climate change and that Congress would enact laws that would put a down payment on scaling up clean energy. So, we know that the demand is there. But whether or not senators in particular will respond remains to be seen.

Putting aside cap-and-trade, there’s been talk of a narrower energy bill. It looks like Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Sen. Brownback (R-Kans.) are introducing a renewable energy standard that they are hoping to get passed. Is there a specific RES target that you would like to see or is it that the policy needs to move forward as soon as possible?
Well, let me make a general point. There was far too much of a focus earlier this spring on a single bill to address climate change economy-wide. And, in reality, there are dozens of things that Congress can do to fight climate change and to increase energy security in the country. In regards to this particular RES bill, our focus is primarily on keeping it clean. We want to see a renewable energy standard that is focused on truly clean energy and doesn’t have absurd giveways to nuclear power or so-called clean coal or any one of the other handful of options. And then of course to increase those investments as quickly as possible.

Is there a number that’s being thrown around among your members now?
Yeah, but it’s not something I really want to discuss in the public right now.

What other things are you focusing on in Congress?

I’d say the top thing is a plan to get off oil. We just experienced the largest environmental disaster in our country’s history and in response, Congress has done nothing. There’s not even a plan to fully reform what used to be called MMS and there’s not yet a plan to hold oil companies fully accountable and to lift the liability cap. And most importantly, there’s no effective plan right now to significantly reduce our dependence on foreign oil. So, if there’s one thing that Congress can do in the next couple of months, it would be to challenge the oil industry and deliver us a plan to get off oil.

It’s been sort of an uphill battle trying to get an oil spill response bill to pass, something that is incredibly popular with the American people. And you’re right, it seems like the bill is getting held up on this idea of liability, whether or not an oil company should be held 100 percent liable for spilling thousands of gallons of oil into the ocean. What are your thoughts on that?
We shouldn’t be privatizing the gain and sharing the risk with the public. If oil companies are going to be benefiting from oil drilling, they also have to be able to absorb any of the risks associated with drilling.

Do you expect that Congress will pass an oil spill bill this year?
We do.

I wanted to also touch on the mid-term elections. It’s on everybody’s mind right now. What is the Sierra Club doing in terms of working with individual candidates?
So, there’s lots that we’re doing. The Sierra Club has 1.4 million members and supporters, so over the next several weeks, a big job of ours will be to educate our supporters about what’s at stake Nov. 2., trying to get people out to the polls and to engage our members to become volunteers. So, the Sierra Club endorses specific candidates.

We get very heavily involved in local and state propositions. Arguably our biggest priority this year is to defeat Prop 23, which would undermine the Global Warming Solutions Act, AB32, that was passed in California a few years ago. With that, we’re doing a massive voter mobilization drive. Individual members will be calling voters to encourage them to get out. We are also part of a coalition of groups that is doing advertising, thought we’re not doing any ourselves.

Are there any other races that are of particular concern for you?
We’re looking at the Senate races in Nevada and Missouri. Obviously, Harry Reid has been excellent in fighting the coal industry as well as supporting big investments in clean energy. We are also looking at the Florida race. Democratic Senate candidate Meek has a 100 percent League of Conservation Voting score. He’s been strongly in favor of Florida’s solar bills as well as the ban on offshore oil drilling. There’s obviously dozens or even hundreds of races in which the environmental voice is an important one.

There has been a lot said by the oil industry and Gulf coast lawmakers about the Obama administration’s offshore drilling moratorium’s impact on jobs, though there was a report that came out last week that said job losses might not be quite what people estimated. What’s the Sierra Club’s position on all of this? Should the moratorium be lifted?
No, I think that a full moratorium should be put in place. We’re mindful of the fact that we need to make stronger investments in clean energy jobs so that those who work in the oil industry who want to put food on the table for their families have viable alternatives in growing industries that they can work in.

To be clear, we’re not advocating turning off the spigot in the Gulf. There are more than 4,0000 rigs operating in the Gulf right now and we are not saying there should be no oil drilling in the Gulf, not until we have a clear plan to get off oil. But what we’re saying is that since it’s been proven now that oil drilling offshore is dirty and it’s dangerous and it’s deadly, we need to tighten up the safety regulations to make sure that disasters like this don’t happen in the future. And we need to stop investing in exploring for new oil and instead explore much more carefully and aggressively investments in solar and wind so that we’re not poisoning our coastlines as we’re trying to keep our lights on.

On pipeline safety. There have been a couple major disasters this year. Of course, the natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, Calif. And before that there was an oil spill in Michigan from an oil sands pipeline. Looming over this you have a massive proposed pipeline project, the Keystone XL project, that is going to go from Canada to Texas. Has the Sierra Club been looking at the issue of pipeline safety through a new set of eyes now that we’ve had these disasters?
Yes, we have. There’s two things that we’re doing. Clearly, the cost of our reliance on oil — when you talk abut the Michigan spill, the Gulf oil spill and the Keystone pipeline — is so much higher than what we pay at the pump when you consider the foreign policy implications, the fact that our entire economy is held hostage to wild fluctuations in oil prices.

So, what we’ve done over the last six months since I started at the Sierra Club is to build out a much more aggressive, comprehensive plan for how our country can get off oil. Over the next 20 years, how steep can we make cuts in oil consumption while allowing the economy to flourish and while creating more jobs rather than penalizing individual workers or communities. So, this will be a major priority of the club over the next several years — to build a broad based coalition of organizations and elected officials who will want to stand up for a very thoughtful and pragmatic, but visionary and aggressive plan to get off oil.

And then, regarding natural gas, we don’t think we can simultaneously phase out coal, oil and gas at the same time. Gas will need to stick around for a while. But there the challenge is to have much higher and much tighter safety standards so we’re not in this disastrous position again and again and again where people are losing their lives due to an industry is ineffectively regulated.

On oil sands or, as some call them, tar sands. There were senators in Canada last week reviewing oil sands production in there. Is there a message you would like to send to them in terms of how oil sands should be treated? Because there’s an argument out there that it’s better to get oil from Canada, despite the high greenhouse gas emissions of oil sands production, because we’re no longer reliant on the Middle East.
I think that’s just misguided thinking. The Pentagon says that climate change is one of the top national security threats in the 21st century. We have to deal effectively with climate change. Importing oil from the tar sands is 2-3 times more greenhouse gas intensive than conventional oil. You don’t solve a problem by making it worse. So, I understand that the notion that we have oil that is under the sands of our neighbors to the north is attractive to people who think we can have a simply pipeline solve a lot of problems. But the reality is that if we rely too much on a different source of oil that is dirtier, that will accelerate climate change rather than reduce it’s impacts, we’re only going to be replacing one set of problems with an entirely different set of problems. The only effective way to address this problem systemically is to adopt a plan to get America off oil.

Can you be more specific about this plan?
We’ll have a plan that we can introduce probably in the next 3-6 months. It looks at every major industrial source of oil consumption, from the oil that’s used in medium- and heavy-duty trucks, light trucks, cars and SUVs, the oil used for pesticides and paints. Whatever the major source of consumption is, we’re looking at a major, comprehensive plan to phase it out where and whenever possible.

What’s the time frame of this phase-out?
The big challenge is political will. For example, clearly it is technically possible, one would presume, to produce nothing but plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles in the next couple years. Whether that’s politically possible, of course remains to be seen. If the United States were to mobilize as we did in World War II and completely transition the entire automobile fleet to produce a new technology, clearly that could be done.

What we need to do is measure the distance between what we can do and what we’re willing to do as a country and develop what we feel as responsible and pragmatic, but also aggressive tactics to achieve energy independence. To help inform that decision we would look at the cost of different decisions under different time scenarios, the benefits economically, environmentally or socially depending on our foreign policy and what would the oil savings be in real-world terms. Then we’d highlight a few different options. We’ll have the data shortly. Then we’ll figure out how to use it. We’ve commissioned this first study just as the Sierra Club, but we anticipate doing more with a broad coalition.

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But those petitioneers-for-hire may have ruined MIC’s bid to place a TABOR-like amendment on the Show-Me-State’s November ballot. Oh, they turned in the requisite number of signatures, more than 200,000 of’m; they just neglected to submit them to the Sec’y of State in the proper format.

“The petitions have to be separated out by county,” says Amy Blouin, executive director of the Missouri Budget Project, which ran a fierce opposition campaign. “And the pages all have to be numbered. They didn’t do that for all of their signatures; a lot of them were just thrown into boxes completely at random.”

Even the boxes themselves were less than distinguished — containers not fit for moving a freshman out of her dorm room. Several were all beat to sh*t, the Kansas City Star reports; one had originally been used to pack martini glasses.

Apparently $1.5 million in out-of-state contributions doesn’t buy what it used to.

The sigs were so badly organized that Missouri Sec’y of State Robin Carnahan — daughter of the late governor Mel Carnahan — had a legal right, nay duty, to disqualify the whole lot of them.

Which, good and wise Democrat that she is, Carnahan did back on May 25.

The MIC chairman, Patrick Tuohey, promptly sued Carnahan’s office in an attempt to get the signatures deemed valid, and there the matter rests. A state judge heard preliminary arguments in the case last Friday; there’s another hearing scheduled for this week.

I love this quote from Tuohey: “I believe that if I walked into the secretary of state’s office with a trash bag full of petitions and dumped them on the floor, it’s her job to facilitate [the counting of the signatures.]“ Sure, that makes sense: Propose an amendment to starve the state of funds on one hand, and on the other demand that the state spend hours of staff time sorting through wadded-up petitions one at a time.

That’s a formula for good government.

MIC hired Colorado Springs-based political consultancy Kennedy Enterprises for the home stretch of the signature-gathering drive, paying the firm $35,000 for its services. On the opposite side, the Missouri Budget Project brought in former Colorado representative Brad Young, a one-time Joint Budget Committee chair and perhaps the Republican Party’s most vocal TABOR critic.

Nearly 15 years after its passage, TABOR remains a primary political issue in Colorado — and now, increasingly, across the nation. Missouri is one of seven states that may have a TABOR-like amendment on its ballot this November, and it’s generating some full-contact politics at every venue.

And Blouin, of the Missouri Budget Project, thinks the battle has only begun.

“I don’t think they’re serious about getting these initiatives on the ballot this year,” she says. “They started late and never built any in-state organization. I think they’re just using these campaigns as a tool for 2008 — as a way to build those grassroots networks. They may lose this year, but they’ll be back. And that scares me more than anything.”

There’s some excellent backstory on the Show-Me battle at Fired Up Missouri, which last week detailed some of the shoddy tactics signature farmers were using in the name of participatory gov’t.

Check out TABOR on Trial II: Montana