Environment

RISE takes listeners on a journey of the San Francisco Bay: underneath the surface to swim with harbor seals and phytoplankton, overhead to soar with a million migratory birds, and along the coast to explore marshlands and skyscrapers that ring the Bay. On the way, this program addresses the impact of climate change. Projected sea level rise, snow pack melt and increased storm surges threaten to flood the Bay’s coastlines, including roads and airports, shoreline cities, the Financial District and Delta farmlands.

Yet another foreign government has accused Americans of meddling in its internal affairs. It says U.S. donors are bankrolling local political activists, and it may be time for a crackdown on the political influence of outsiders.

Politically, climate change is off this year's campaign agenda. Jobs, the economy and social issues are front and center.

But scientists are working as hard as ever to figure out how much the Earth is warming and what to do about it. Some now say it's time for a new strategy, one that gets faster results.

Talk to Durwood Zaelke, for example. Zaelke is a grizzled veteran of the climate wars: He was in Kyoto in 1997 when the world's nations drafted a treaty promising to curb warming, and he has watched that promise fizzle while the planet's temperature continues to rise.

The Environmental Protection Agency has released its 2010 data of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the state.

Power plants are at the top of the list.

The EPA collected data from nine different industries that emit greenhouse gases including power plants, pulp and paper mills, landfills and other industrial sources.

All told, they produced five-point nine million metric tons of greenhouse gases in New Hampshire.

About 40-percent of that comes from just one power plant, Merrimack Station in Bow.

It burns coal.

The state’s Land and Community Heritage Investment Program, or LCHIP, has funded 23 projects across the state. But this could be the last year the program exists to help protect everything from historic buildings, to forests,  to farms.

The LCHIP managers say about $1 million in state money has leveraged about $ 13 million in projects.  Executive Director Dijit Taylor says one unusual site involves a farm on the state’s western border.

“It includes two islands in the Connecticut River, one of which has the potential to be a campsite for people canoeing down the river.”

If there is a patron saint of modern Republican tax policy, it is economist Arthur Laffer.  Laffer is best known for the  Laffer Curve – a graph of the theory that under the right circumstances, a cut in tax rates produces higher tax revenues.   The Laffer Curve was the keystone of  so called Reaganomics.

Laffer was in Manchester today to present a very different idea – one that so far Republicans have been slow to embrace.