Dolly Parton's ode to the American chestnut

Superstar Dolly Parton has recorded an ode to the decimated American chestnut, once the most important tree of the Appalachian forests, for the Asheville-based American Chestnut Foundation.

The tuneful "Oh, Chestnut Tree" is available as a free download on the foundation's website.

Parton, a native of eastern Tennessee, collaborated on the song with her uncle, Nashville singer-songwriter Bill Owens. Owens has been a member of the Chestnut Foundation for 25 years and helped arrange for hundreds of chestnut trees to be planted at Parton's Smoky Mountains theme park, Dollywood.

Chestnut trees provided mountain families rot-resistant lumber and a cash crop of nuts that fed people, livestock and wildlife through bitter winters. An Asian fungus accidentally imported more than a century ago spread rapidly through Eastern forests, killing four billion trees by 1950.

"The importance of the American chestnut to the Smoky Mountain region is hard to overstate, and its loss created considerable hardship," Owens says in a release about the song.

The Chestnut Foundation used a special breeding process that in 2005 produced the first blight-resistance trees. Its 16 state chapters are now planting "restoration chestnuts" throughout the East. As Parton sings, "Thank God for second chances."

Doing the math on Duke's rate hike

Duke Energy Carolinas filed 5,012 pages of written testimony, data analyses and appendices Monday in support of its request for an overall 9.7 percent North Carolina rate hike.

Buried in all those numbers is one that's most relevant to most customers: 14 percent. That's the increase the majority of residential customers are being asked to pay.

Duke's news release said the hike, if approved by the N.C. Utilities Commission, would raise residential rates 11.8 percent. That's actually a weighted average of the five rate schedules available to residential customers, including cheaper Energy Star and time-of-use rates.

But most customers are billed under Schedule RS. According to Duke's example of the impact residential customers could expect, the typical monthly bill of $102.72 would grow by $14.27 -- a 14 percent increase.

Remember, too, that customer groups and the state's consumer advocates will pressure Duke to lower the rates it's willing to accept before the Utilities Commission votes.
 

Conservation as a constitutional right

Taking a new tack on conservation, the North Carolina Wildlife Federation and eight other sporting groups are telling budget-minded state legislators it's a constitutional requirement.

"North Carolina's sporting community looks forward to working with the new General Assembly to uphold the state constitution by preserving our state's natural assets," the groups say in a full-page ad in Wednesday's News & Observer.

The Charlotte-based Federation, which paid for the ad, quotes a 1971 legislative addition to the constitution that says it's a state function to "acquire and preserve park, recreational and scenic areas, (and) to control and limit the pollution of our air and water."

Legislators beginning the year's session this week will get copies of the ad and a resolution from the Wildlife Federation urging them to increase funding for the beleaguered Clean Water Management Trust Fund, which has been North Carolina's biggest source of conservation grants. Legislators last year slashed its funding to $10.7 million, 90 percent below its historic high, and made it a non-recurring budget item.

The Fund has helped create hundreds of thousands of state gamelands, said Federation CEO Tim Gestwicki, boosting a state hunting and fishing industry worth $3.3 billion a year in revenue.

"Many of the legislators are new, so we wanted to take this opportunity to let them know just how important land and water conservation is," Gestwicki said. "They are going to face some tough decisions, but this isn't one of them."


 

Climate change reports update U.S. conditions

Two new federal reports update the state of climate change in the United States, including the hotly-controversial subject of sea level rise.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is 90 percent confident that global sea levels will rise by 2100. But NOAA cites a vast range for that rise, from the 8-inch average since 1900 to as much as 6.6 feet -- twice the level a North Carolina science panel says the state should assume for planning purposes.

As the Observer reported in November, some experts say the quickening of sea-level rise documented by satellites since 1992 is too short a period to rely on for future estimates. NOAA also recounts the "hot-spot" of faster rise along the Atlantic coast from Cape Hatteras to Boston that a U.S. Geological Survey researcher and others have documented.

While accelerating sea-level rise is under debate, NOAA says, those reports are "sufficient to suggest" that the northeastern U.S. coast take heed.

The Environmental Protection Agency's Climate Change Indicators update shows temperatures in the contiguous 48 states rising at a rate of 1.3 inches per century since 1901, with a quickening of that rate since the late 1970s. More high-temperature records have been set since the 1980s than cold-temperature records.

EPA also illustrates (above) how the Southeast, to this point, has largely escaped the rising temperatures seen in southern California and the Northeast.  

Enviro groups launch coal-ash website

Environmental advocates have created an interactive Web guide to coal ash, the power-plant residue that burst into national focus four years ago with a billion-gallon rupture at a Tennessee plant. The site, www.SoutheastCoalAsh.org, launched Tuesday.

North Carolina hasn't seen such catastrophe, but ash is rightly an issue in a state that still heavily depends on coal power. In high doses, metals found in ash can make people and the environment sick.

Groundwater is contaminated near ash ponds at 14 Duke Energy plants, including those formerly owned by merger partner Progress Energy. Much of the contamination, such as high levels of iron, likely came from natural sources. But other elements, such as selenium, seem to point toward leaking ponds.

North Carolina is one of nine states featured on the new site, a project of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Appalachian Voices, Southern Environmental Law Center and the N.C. Conservation Network.

The Web site houses a database of 100 power plants in the Southeast, categorized by how much damage they would do if they broke. North Carolina has more "high-hazard" dams, meaning ruptures could kill people, than any other state in the Southeast.

A few clicks will take you to deeper detail, including what's known about contamination around each plant as well as local and state contacts.


  

Holman moves to Conservation Fund

Longtime North Carolina environmental leader Bill Holman will leave Duke University to become state director of the Conservation Fund next month.

Holman plied the halls of the state legislature for 18 years as an environmental lobbyist and served as secretary of the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources under former Gov. Jim Hunt. He later worked as executive director of the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, the state's largest source of conservation grants.

In 2007, Holman joined Duke's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, where he's director of state policy and collaborated on protecting the Falls Lake watershed, the source of Raleigh's water.

The Conservation Fund, which formed in 1985 and is headquartered in Arlington, Va., also has a distinguished resume. It has helped protect 7 million acres nationwide and more than 200,000 acres in North Carolina, including Grandfather Mountain, Chimney Rock, DuPont State Forest and other landmarks. Senior associate Dick Ludington, who was behind much of that work, will stay with the Fund.

Its Chapel Hill office is the Fund's largest outside Arlington and home to many of its national programs.


  

Duke agrees to consumer-friendly reliability reports

Ever wonder, Duke Energy customers, how your service compares to that of other utilities?

You're about to find out. Duke has agreed to file, for the first time, quarterly reports that compare its North Carolina power outage data to industry benchmarks.

Thirty-six other states require utilities to publicly report how often, and for how long, outages occur.

But as the Observer reported last year, it's near impossible for North Carolina customers to get that information. Duke closely monitors the data but doesn't publicly report it. To complicate matters, utilities differ in how they measure and report results to the two widely-used industry reliability indices.

The N.C. Utilities Commission's Public Staff, which advocates for consumers, recommended a change. When the commission approved Duke's merger with Progress Energy in June, it required the companies to find a way standardize the indices and report their service quality.

This week, the two Duke subsidiaries that serve the Carolinas proposed a rule they developed with the Public Staff. The rule bases quarterly performance reports on industry indices for outage duration and frequency, and sets standards to ensure the data is used consistently.

Neither the utility that serves northeastern North Carolina, Dominion North Carolina Power, nor the N.C. Electric Membership Corp., which represents cooperatives, signed on to the proposal.

It's up to the Utilities Commission to approve the rule.

At the time of the Observer's article in August 2011, the industry indexes showed Duke's outage performance in North Carolina had steadily improved since 2003. Progress Energy, now a Duke subsidiary, showed improved performance after 2006 followed by an uptick in outages in 2010.

How have they done since then? I don't know -- and, for now, neither do you.