Environment

Public comments on Purdue’s Comprehensive Energy Master Plan are being reviewed by university administrators.

The proposal aims to improve energy efficiency while still meeting heating and cooling needs on campus.

A hearing was held last night in Stewart Center, allowing the community members to give feedback in person.

In addition, the university has been fielding written comments on the plan since it was made available to the public January 10th.

In the next few weeks Purdue officials are preparing to release an online response to the input they have received so far.

If the proposal moves forward as currently outlined, it would cost nearly $105-million over the next decade.

The problem is we don't see the problem.

Because coral reefs sit below the water line, when they start to disintegrate (from pollution, overfishing, climate change, ocean acidification ... the list is long) most of us wouldn't notice. Or — and here's an irony — the more we notice, the more they disintegrate.

Some coral reefs are so overvisited, they are harmed by our attention.

What to do? Well, this is where the sculptors and weavers come in.

That's right, sculptors and weavers. Unappointed, spontaneously in their different ways, artists from all over the world are trying to remind us that reefs are in trouble and keep us from making things worse.

Score one for the pigs. The news that McDonald's will require its U.S. pork suppliers to phase out the use of gestational crates should add a lot more momentum to efforts to end the practice of confining sows while pregnant.

An environmental group at Purdue is asking the administration to include greener measures in the university’s Energy Master Plan.

The Sierra Student Coalition is presenting more than one-thousand public comments on how to provide additional clean energy options.

Organizer Alexis Boxer says the goal is to bring Purdue’s practices in line with some of its neighboring schools.

Boxer says there are prime opportunities now to raise funding for alternative energy efforts without increasing tuition for students.

She says there are grants and the possibility of setting up a student green fund, which would accept Boilermakers’ donations.

Gray wolves were taken off the endangered species list in Idaho and Montana last year and put under state control. But they're still on the list in neighboring Wyoming. That's because Wyoming has been the most aggressive about wanting to kill wolves.

Wyoming has finally struck a deal with the federal government for how wolves will be treated once the state takes over. But environmentalists believe the agreement denies wolves an important refuge.

There weren't any wolves in Wyoming until the federal government reintroduced them in the 1990s. Now there are at least 329 in the state. But the state is eager to shrink the population because wolves kill livestock and game.

A Purdue expert says Indiana’s winter wheat crop is healthy and right on track despite wet weather at planting time last fall.

Agronomist Herb Ohm says the acreage for wheat is slightly reduced, but in very good shape.

He says Indiana farmers planted about 430-thousand acres of winter wheat for 2012, compared with the nearly 460-thousand for 2011.

Ohm says the wet fall delayed planting a bit, but the mild winter has allowed the crop to grow.

But he says if the warmer–than-normal temperatures persist, it could also lead to higher incidences of foliar disease.

Ohm says one thing he *doesn’t* expect to be a problem is the Hessian fly, a pest that can severely damage winter wheat.

The boom in cheap natural gas in this country is good news for the environment, because relatively clean gas is replacing dirty coal-fired power plants. But in the long run, cheap natural gas could slow the growth of even cleaner sources of energy, such as wind and solar power.

Natural gas has a bad rap in some parts of the country, because the process of fracking is not popular. But many people looking at cheap natural gas from the global perspective see it as a good thing.

Henry Jacoby, an economist at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT, says cheap energy will help pump up the economy.

There's a new lava dome forming on top of Alaska's Cleveland Volcano, and the Alaska Volcano Observatory bumped up its aviation warning level to orange. That means the volcano is "exhibiting heightened or escalating unrest with increased potential of eruption".

It's not clear if the volcano will actually erupt and the observatory says no one has spotted any current ash emissions. It's known as Cleveland Mountain, part of an uninhabited Aleutian Island more than 900 miles southwest of Anchorage, according to USA Today.

Backup diesel generators are powering one of the two nuclear reactors at the Byron Station facility in northern Illinois. Unit Two came offline yesterday after it inexplicably lost power. The facility's operator, Exelon, declared the incident an "unusual event" - the lowest of four emergency status declarations set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.