TransCanada swears that once the Keystone XL pipeline is operational, it will be totally safe. The company is apparently so confident — despite already having had to dig up and replace faulty stretches of the pipeline’s southern leg — that it doesn’t see the need to invest in state-of-the-art spill-detection technology. TransCanada is like that obnoxious seventh-grade skateboarder too confident in his sick moves to bother with a helmet.

The internal spill detectors TransCanada currently uses — in which sensors alert remote operators if pressure along the pipeline drops — are standard for the industry, but they’re designed to catch high-volume spills. Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

Keystone XL would have to be spilling more than 12,000 barrels a day — or 1.5 percent of its 830,000 barrel capacity — before its currently planned internal spill-detection systems would trigger an alarm, according to the U.S. State Department, which is reviewing the proposal.

New external technology, on the other hand, can identify much smaller leaks. For example, acoustic sensors can pick up the sound of oil escaping through a pinhole-size opening. And helicopters doing flyovers can be fitted with trash-can-size devices that detect oil vapors in infrared sunlight, potentially spotting leaks flowing at rates of less than 10 barrels per day.

Bloomberg Businessweek calculated that it would cost about $705,000 — $5,000 per mile — to install advanced fiber-optic cable technology along 141 critical miles of the pipeline, areas where drinking water, ecosystems, and population centers are at risk. That’s hardly a drop in the bucket compared to the overall $5.3 billion cost of the pipeline. And investing in better spill-detection technology pays off:

Equipment available to spot spills more quickly would have cut 75 percent off the estimated $1.7 billion toll in property damage caused by major incidents on oil lines from 2001 to 2011, consultants said in a December report prepared for the [U.S. Transportation Department].

Though the U.S. EPA recommended these new external detection tools be used on Keystone XL, a TransCanada representative told Bloomberg that they haven’t yet been sufficiently tested on projects the scale of Keystone, and that they produce too many false positives to be reliable. But it’s not like the current system is doing a bang-up job, either:

Internal systems such as the one planned for Keystone XL have a spotty record catching leaks, according to the Transportation Department’s report, prepared by the engineering firm Kiefner & Associates Inc., of Worthington, Ohio. Members of the public reported 23 percent of the 197 oil and liquids pipeline leaks between January 2010 and July 2012, according to the study, compared to 17 percent identified by the pipeline companies.

TransCanada claims to be studying, at the EPA’s request, whether it could implement the new technologies along environmentally sensitive portions of the pipeline.

The company has had its share of safety issues — record numbers of leaks and a shutdown on the original Keystone pipeline, an explosion of a natural-gas pipeline, accusations that it cuts corners on construction. And a report by researchers at Cornell estimates that we could see 91 major spills over 50 years from Keystone XL. So maybe it couldn’t hurt for TransCanada to spring for some new and improved safety features this time around.

Since the 2007 release of PlaNYC, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s sustainability vision, the city has chipped away steadily at its carbon emissions, cutting them to 13 percent below 2005 levels already. But nothing New York does on its own to mitigate climate change can save the city from future Sandys and the sea-level rise that will make such storms even more destructive going forward.

Last week, Bloomberg unveiled an ambitious, expensive plan to fortify the city against the kind of extreme weather that’s fast becoming the “new normal.” The event amplified a message more local leaders are embracing: Climate change is already upon us, and adapting to it will be essential to prevent massive losses of money and life.

On Monday, the mayors of Washington, D.C., Denver, Nashville, and 42 other U.S. cities signed a “Resilient Communities for America” agreement, pledging “to prepare and protect their communities from the increasing disasters and disruptions fueled by climate change.” According to a press release about the campaign, $1 spent on disaster preparation saves $4 in potential losses (consider that Hurricane Sandy caused almost $20 billion of damage). The local leaders also called for more support and cooperation from the federal government. Although, as Bloomberg himself has pointed out, cities are in an ideal practical position to start taking immediate climate action, the scale of work to be done to strengthen urban infrastructure requires all the federal dollars they can get.

The Associated Press explains how, in green circles, a focus on adaptation was once frowned upon, out of concern that it would distract from efforts to address the source of the problem or downplay its importance. That concern still exists, but as a climate-changed world becomes reality much faster than a global climate solution, government officials figure they’d better prepare for the worst.

Plus, discussions about disaster planning are less polarizing than debates about how to slow down climate change, the AP reports:

Now officials are merging efforts by emergency managers to prepare for natural disasters with those of officials focused on climate change. That greatly lessens the political debate about human-caused global warming, said University of Colorado science and disaster policy professor Roger Pielke Jr. …

“If you keep the discussion focused on impacts … I think it’s pretty easy to get people from all political persuasions,” said Pielke, who often has clashed with environmentalists over global warming.

It’s hard to argue against preparing your town for disaster. That makes adaptation plans easier to agree on than schemes to reduce carbon emissions, for example. But that doesn’t mean adaptation plans are easy to fund.

And sometimes the steps that cities can afford to take are not popular. The AP again:

For poorer cities in the U.S., what makes sense is to buy out property owners, relocate homes and businesses and convert vulnerable sea shores to parks so that when storms hit “it’s not a big deal,” [S. Jeffress Williams, University of Hawaii geophysicist and former sea-level rise expert for the U.S. Geological Survey,] said.

But relocating homeowners does not tend to be a politically palatable solution. From another AP article:

A University of Virginia report released last year that was based on community feedback from [Virginia Beach] city residents said the least socially feasible way of addressing the problem was the purchase of development rights, while the most likely option to help the city prepare for sea level rise was to provide greater education and updated zoning.

Updated zoning could mean new requirements like one under consideration in Norfolk, Va., that would mandate a 20-foot setback from the mean high-water mark for new homes, or one already on the books in Virginia Beach that requires new construction or major expansions to be elevated one foot above base flood levels. Many other seaside cities are encouraging homeowners to put their houses on stilts.

But even struggling cities in the lower 48 have it easier than many more vulnerable communities around the world, where the threat is more urgent but resources to address it are scarcer. Take Newtok, Alaska, which could be entirely underwater by 2017, but where plans to relocate its 63 houses have stalled in the absence of state and federal relocation assistance.

A recent U.N. report emphasized the moral imperative to provide relocation assistance to at-risk communities, according to Reuters:

The report says: “Because the poorest people are already struggling with day-to-day survival, the poorest countries will face more difficulties as they attempt to overcome the damage done by climate change — flood, storm, rainfall, weather-related illnesses — and to find ways to adapt themselves”.

Read more from the AP about what cities around the world are doing to prepare for climate change. Whatever strategies communities adopt, one thing is certain: There’s no time to waste.

Canadian artist Franke James knows how to convey gloomy information without being a downer. She takes a relentlessly cheerful, self-deprecating approach to issues too often screamed about by scolds and trolls. (It’s an approach we here at Grist admire.) Her illustrated essays call out individuals, corporations, and governments for their inadequate responses to environmental threats, but in an unfailingly good-natured way more likely to make you grin than grimace. Though her art reaches a wide audience, James is no subversive revolutionary; she herself says, “I don’t like to get in trouble for what I do.” So it’s hard to believe the Canadian government would be keeping its eye on her, much less interfering with her work.

In the U.S., Canada, and beyond, environmentalists of all kinds have been the subjects of increased government attention in recent years — especially as opposition to fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline grows more intense. (Earth Island Journal has a great in-depth report on this trend, giving a typical example of how a small and civil local anti-fracking group that strove to avoid inflammatory rhetoric found itself featured in intelligence bulletins compiled by a private security firm and distributed to Pennsylvania state and local authorities.)

James didn’t know she was on the government’s radar until promised federal funding for a traveling show of her art in Europe was mysteriously yanked, and the Croatian nonprofit organizing the show was pressured to scrap it. By filing Access to Information requests (the same as a U.S. Freedom of Information request) and poring over internal government emails, James discovered that her art, and its criticism of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s tar-sands-boosting administration, didn’t sit so well with the feds. Her book Banned on the Hill tells the tale as only she can: in a series of illustrated essays, some of which were published a few years ago and cited by bureaucrats in their email exchanges as examples of James’ unacceptable artistic dissent.

We caught up with James — whose work has been featured on Grist — to learn what it’s like to be the unlikely target of misplaced government paranoia.

Q. Why do you make art the way you do?

A. There are a lot of people who don’t really like to sit down and read a book, and putting it together the way I [do], with words and pictures, gives a certain amount of fun to it. It makes for a very easy read.

Q. When did you start exploring environmental themes in your work?

A. Going back to 2003, that’s when I started to do [online] political games. My husband and I — he’s an artist and a programmer — we did this crazy “Whack the PM” game for three elections. The challenge was that you were supposed to whack the politician on the head that said the stupidest thing. And by the end of the game you would have decided who you hated the most, and the game helped you to figure out who to vote for.

I didn’t start to do environmental work until 2006. It was triggered by a home renovation that we were doing. I started to look into the whole idea of energy efficiency, and I’m reading all these articles on global warming, going, this is huge! This is the biggest elephant in the room and nobody’s talking about it! I have to tell people! So I started to write really long articles for my blog, but nobody was paying any attention. So in January of 2007, I published my first visual essay that basically was a personal story that talked about climate change. It was called “A Green Winter: Will Global Warming be Good for Canada?” I [had] interviewed Steven Levitt [author of Freakonomics]. I had met him at a conference. I asked him, “How would you tackle global warming?” And he went, “Why would you even worry about it? Global warming is gonna be good for Canada!” And I went, “WHAT!” So that was the beginning of that whole essay.

Q. Tell us about what happened when the government tried to shut you down.

A. Nektarina, [a] Croatian NGO, contacted me in early 2011 and asked if they could buy my art for a touring show in Europe. So I started to get the pieces ready, and then in mid-May, I sensed that we weren’t moving ahead maybe quite as fast as we were supposed to. I asked [Nektarina director Sandra Antonovic] what was going on, and she said that she had gone to the Canadian embassy and asked for a little bit of help — $5,000 in funding. And that she had heard that the grant had been approved, but then it had been cancelled. The cultural officer [at the Canadian embassy in Croatia] told Sandra, “Don’t you know this artist speaks against the Canadian government?” She told Sandra that when Ottawa heard that they were going to support my show in any way, they said, who’s the idiot who approved of an art show by that woman Franke James?

Q. Did you have any idea the government was even aware of you and your art?

A. I had no idea whatsoever. I was just blissfully going along, creating my stuff. I’d done “Whack the PM,” the online election game, and I’d written a letter to the prime minister, but I had no idea that they’d even noticed my work. So I was shocked to hear that they were trying to trip up my art show.

The fact that they were warning the nonprofit not to show my work was just incredible. They really stepped over the line in doing that. It’s one thing not to approve of the grant. But I really didn’t think that bureaucrats would be skulking in the background, warning the show producer not to show my art. When people hear that I didn’t get funded, a lot of people just shrug their shoulders and go, “Well, what do you expect, it’s a petro-state.” But the funding is not the issue, the issue is that they interfered in a private business deal and warned the show producer not to show my art.

Sandra and I thought that the show could still go on, because that $5,000 didn’t make any difference. But they continued to pressure and bully the Nektarina nonprofit. So we ended up cancelling the show in August of 2011.

Q. So what did you do in response?

A. I did two things. I decided, one, I need to file access requests to get the truth. I need to dig for evidence. I need to be able to prove to people that this really happened. In that respect I think that my book could be really useful to people who are putting in freedom of information requests, to see how I did the digging.

And the second thing [I decided was], I better get public about this. I decided to do [an] outdoor poster show on the streets of Ottawa.

Q. What was the process of filing the Access to Information requests like? What did you learn? I thought the section of your book where you detail all the ways government officials cover their tracks and avoid disclosing information was really interesting.

A. I found the whole process to be really fascinating, and in some ways inspiring. Which is exactly what the government didn’t want.

Those documents proved that the government was not telling the truth. Publicly they’d been saying that the funding had never been approved. And then the actual documents, which are in the book [pages 174-5], were able to show that it was approved internally, and then it was killed by the climate change office.

It was a real shocker to get the access documents and see this [one] heavily redacted email thread with the subject line “Franke James is your fault.” To me, [that] is one of the clearest examples of how undiplomatic the diplomats were.

We’ve got the government spokesperson saying internally, “The artist’s work dealt mostly with climate change and was advocating a message that was contrary to government policy.” If art has to agree with government policies, then art equals government propaganda.

Q. What was the response to the poster show like?

A. The response was fantastic. In my campaign, I didn’t limit it just to myself — I said, “Stop blacklisting environmental messengers; artists and scientists are the planet’s early warning system.” Because the Harper government isn’t just silencing me. Anybody who has a dissenting voice and could potentially be off-message from what the government wants to say is being silenced.

Q. Tell me more about what the Harper administration does to quash dissent.

A. In 2007, the Harper government instituted a new communications policy in Environment Canada, which basically said there should be one department, one voice. And so instead of a reporter being able to call up any scientist they want to and speak to them, they had to go through a central source and be approved and have their questions approved, and the process could take weeks, if not months. And this type of message control has been carried beyond Environment Canada to other government departments.

In a private corporation, you could have strict controls about brand messaging, what the company’s message is, what employees are allowed to say, etc. But in a democracy, you don’t expect to assert that type of message control. And I certainly am proving that their muzzling and censorship of me is not working.

I’m really proud that I’ve actually moved people to action. In my book I say that 7,924 letters have been sent to Harper and to the MPs [members of parliament]. I mean, these guys really know who I am now. I’m a thorn in their side.

Q. I’m kind of surprised they didn’t find some way to keep your poster show in Ottawa from happening.

A. I was concerned about that. I wasn’t being specific about when the show was going to take place, or exactly what we were buying or where. If you look back at my tweets from then, I really wasn’t saying very much until the show was actually up. So the government wouldn’t have known why I was going to Ottawa.

Q. You were surprised to find out that you were being watched by the Canadian government. What was your reaction to news of PRISM and the U.S. government’s surveillance of its citizens?

A. I think it’s scary. They will say that it’s just the metadata, but I think that it is beyond that in lots of ways and we’re just not hearing it yet.

I think one problem is that people will look at someone like me, and they’re gonna say, “Franke tells a good story, but I don’t think I want to speak up about climate change because I don’t want to get followed by the government. I don’t want to have them monitoring my phone calls and emails.” So I think that it’s really important for us to step up and say that privacy is important, and that they shouldn’t be treating environmentalists like they’re radicals. Because they’re not. There’s nothing radical about wanting clean air and water. And there’s nothing radical [about] expecting that polluters should pay. And that we should demand accountability and transparency.

Q. What’s next for you?

A. We did the show in Ottawa. The posters are up til the end of June. The big push that I’d like to do now is go to another city. I think the best city would be Washington, D.C. If we went to Vancouver, I’d get a ton of support. Lots of people would be very receptive to the message because they’re really against the pipeline. Calgary, I think I’d probably just get shut out. They’d try to ignore me as much as possible, because it’s really in the heart of the tar sands and the oil industry up there. So I think that Washington is probably the best city to make a difference. I’d like to arrange to have a bit of an art show. Then it brings together the greenwashing of the tar sands, the silencing of environmental voices, and the Keystone XL.

Check out James’ indiegogo campaign to raise money to bring her “Banned on the Hill” poster show to another city — maybe Washington, D.C.!

As if climate disruption, air pollution, health problems, and landscape destruction weren’t bad enough, here’s another reason to hate the coal industry: Coal companies are shortchanging U.S. taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars they should be paying for the rights to mine federal land.

A new report [PDF] from the inspector general of the Interior Department reveals that the Bureau of Land Management routinely underestimates the value of coal, letting companies like Peabody and Arch Coal snap up federal mining rights for a song, often with little or no competition. More than 80 percent of coal leases up for auction in the past 20 years received only one bid, the report found.

The New York Times reports:

The report said that the process by which the value of the leases is computed is faulty, costing the government millions. At the current rate of coal leasing, the inspector general found, every penny-a-ton undervaluation costs the taxpayers $3 million.

Further, the Bureau of Land Management allows coal companies to expand their leaseholdings by as much as 960 acres with no competitive bidding and little oversight, the report says. The bureau has approved 45 such lease modifications since 2000 without adequate documentation, the report states, potentially costing taxpayers $60 million.

Allowing coal companies to pay bargain-basement prices for mining rights supposedly keeps coal-fired power cheap for Americans. But as we turn to cleaner and increasingly cheaper sources of energy, coal’s share of the electricity market is falling — from 50 percent to 40 percent over the past decade. That’s leading U.S. coal companies to ship their goods to Asia, where coal sells for four to seven times more than it does in the U.S., yet the BLM isn’t properly accounting for that higher export value, the report found.

Interior is conducting a separate investigation into whether coal being exported to Asia is properly valued by the BLM. Meanwhile, at the request of Congress, the Government Accountability Office is taking its own look at coal leasing programs.

Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association called the loss of value highlighted by the inspector general’s report a “rounding error” compared to the $2.4 billion in royalties and lease payments the government collected from the coal industry last year. Hardly. An independent study published in 2012 estimated that the BLM’s consistent undervaluing of coal cost the government $30 billion over the last 30 years. Add in all the hidden external costs of coal mining and production, and this is looking like a really terrible deal for taxpayers.

The BLM says it’s revamping it process and convening a task force to consider how it values coal leases. Green groups like the Sierra Club are unimpressed; they’re calling for a moratorium on all coal leasing on federal land.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg laid out an ambitious plan today to fortify the city against the extreme weather and storms we can expect thanks to a changing climate. “This is a defining challenge of our future,” Bloomberg said in a speech at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The plan, estimated to cost $20 billion, includes 250 recommendations in all, covering everything from erecting bulkheads and levees to retrofitting old buildings to protecting the city’s power infrastructure. (Fifty-three percent of NYC’s power plants currently sit within the 100-year floodplain, and by the 2050s, 90 percent could be in that danger zone.)

The New York Times reports:

The plan covers so many different parts of the city and calls for such a wide array of proposals that the estimated price tag could change – and given the history of large infrastructure projects, that means the cost is likely to grow.

The price estimate also does not include some of the more ambitious projects envisioned in the report that require further study, like the construction of a so-called Seaport City, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan, modeled after Battery Park City, which would protect Lower Manhattan but cost billions.

The administration said that roughly half of the currently estimated $20 billion cost of the next decade would be covered by federal and city money that had already been allocated in the capital budget and that an additional $5 billion would be covered by expected aid that Congress had already appropriated. Most of that money was allocated, through a variety of programs, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, according to the report.

While a $20 billion price tag sounds staggering, Bloomberg pointed out that Hurricane Sandy alone did $19 billion in damage to the city, and that a future storm could cause as much as $90 billion worth of destruction.

Bloomberg presented the plan a day after the New York City Panel on Climate Change — formed in 2008 to address climate change as part of PlaNYC, the mayor’s long-term sustainability vision — released an updated set of data [PDF] about how the Big Apple can expect to fare in a hotter and more volatile climate. The new findings, the AP reports, “echo 2009 estimates from the scientists’ group … but move up the time frame for some upper-end possibilities from the 2080s to mid-century.” And those upper-end possibilities — even the mid- and low-range predictions, for that matter — are certainly scary enough to justify an ambitious big-picture solution. From another New York Times article:

Administration officials estimated that more than 800,000 city residents will live in the 100-year flood plain by the 2050s. That figure is more than double the 398,000 currently estimated to be at risk, based on new maps the Federal Emergency Management Agency released Monday.

Administration officials said that between 1971 and 2000, New Yorkers had an average of 18 days a year with temperatures at or above 90 degrees. By the 2020s, that figure could be as high as 33 days, and by the 2050s, it could reach 57 …

In 2009, [the panel] projected that sea levels would rise by two to five inches by the 2020s. Now, the panel estimates that the sea levels will rise four to eight inches by that time, with a high-end figure of 11 inches.

New York is already trying to do its part to slow climate change; the city is halfway to its goal of a 30 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. But, given the latest projections of what climate change will look like for the rest of this century, Bloomberg and co. recognize that they need to start preparing for climate change as well as fighting it.

Funding and implementing Bloomberg’s plan will largely fall to his successor; he can’t run again, so a new mayor will take the helm in January. But he hastened the plan’s development after Hurricane Sandy. “We refused to pass the responsibility for creating a plan onto the next administration,” he said in his speech.

Ironically, the Bloomberg administration has spent hundreds of millions of public dollars to revitalize waterfront districts and lure upscale condo developers, while at the same time warning of the risks of such development given rapidly rising sea levels. More people living along the city’s shoreline complicated evacuation efforts before Hurricane Sandy.

Bloomberg’s speech today at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was preceded by introductory speakers and videos that struck a resolutely uplifting theme of resilience, suggesting that a changing climate should not force anyone to leave the greatest city in the world. But some homeowners are already grappling with the cost of staying, forced to choose between paying a small fortune to have their houses raised up on stilts or paying soaring flood insurance costs. AP reports that many of them don’t believe more big storms are coming: “They think” — or perhaps hope against hope — “Sandy was a fluke, a storm to end all storms, the kind they won’t ever see again.”

The climate-change panel’s report makes painfully clear how wrong they are.

It’s no secret that fracking companies engage in some shady behavior. But a report in The New Republic reveals just how low they’ll sink in the rush to exploit natural gas: Energy companies in eastern Ohio — home to the world’s largest Amish population and billions of dollars worth of oil and gas reserves — have been convincing Amish farmers to sign away drilling rights to their land for far less than they’re worth, knowing that because their religious tradition frowns on lawsuits, the landowners will have little recourse for justice once they realize they’ve been duped.

Lloyd Miller, for example, an Amish farmer near Millersburg, Ohio, said an agent from Kenoil offered him $10 an acre to drill for shale gas on his 158 acres, promising it was the best deal around. Strapped for cash at the time, Miller and his wife said yes, figuring, “Hey, that’s $1,500 we didn’t have,” Miller explained. But they soon found out many non-Amish farmers in the area were leasing drilling rights for as much as $1,000 an acre. Miller consulted with a lawyer, who told him the agent had committed fraud by promising that $10 an acre was the best he could get. The Millers had grounds to sue — but that’s something that, in accordance with their Amish beliefs, they’d never do. Of the Kenoil agent, Miller said: “He’s got to live with his conscience.”

The New Republic explains:

Their prohibition on the courts derives from the portion of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus instructs his followers to turn the other cheek, and if they are sued for their coats, to give up their cloaks, too. The Amish interpret this to mean that the court is no place to right wrongs. In 2011, for example, after the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a local man, Monroe L. Beachy, with running a Ponzi scheme that wiped out nearly $17 million in Amish retirement savings, a committee representing his some 2,500 Amish creditors asked a judge to dismiss his bankruptcy case so that they could resolve his debts amongst themselves.

Lest you’re tempted to give fracking companies the benefit of the doubt, a lawyer for Columbia Gas Transmission Corp. told The New Republic that the Amish restriction on litigation is “a known fact to us.”

One local father-and-son law firm said it had consulted with dozens of Amish landowners in the area who had been misled by energy companies in a manner similar to the Millers. The Amish are willing to consult with lawyers, and negotiate tough contracts to minimize the possibility of fraud, but once a contract is signed, even if it’s breached, there’s little they can do.

To make these ripoffs more egregious, the hazards of fracking can have an outsize effect on Amish farmers. A fracking site can take up as much as 10 acres, a sizable chunk of the typical Amish farm, which is usually less than 150 acres. And because the Amish don’t rely on modern farming technology, making a profit on their land is a constant struggle, so being cheated out of tens of thousands of dollars is especially painful.

Some say the Amish should know better than to agree to such clearly undervalued leases. But in some cases, energy companies have made it especially difficult for them by capitalizing on decades-old leases that are technically expired. Proving a lease is expired can require landowners to appear in court — again, something the Amish won’t do.

One possible workaround exists:

Aware of the complications caused by a prohibition on lawsuits, some [Amish] bishops have decided that their flock can pursue what’s known as a declaratory judgment, in which a judge merely interprets a contract. Many are still uncomfortable with that … The process still unfolds in a courtroom, but the arrangement is more palatable because there are no monetary awards involved and no jury.

I wouldn’t count on the fracking companies to suddenly be overcome with remorse and decide to put a stop to this exploitation. But maybe as word gets out about how their neighbors are getting fracked, Amish landowners will tread more carefully.

Because any positive economic activity that happens in Detroit is apparently national news, the opening of a Whole Foods Wednesday in the city’s Midtown neighborhood has caused more fanfare than possibly any grocery-store debut in history. Hundreds reportedly waited in line to enter the store, and Whole Foods Co-CEO Walter Robb was present for the occasion, accompanied by “a marching band, speeches by civic leaders, specialty food vendors handing out samples of pickles, granola and other products, and a festive air of celebration,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

Why all the hoopla? After all, as Aaron Foley at Jalopnik Detroit points out in a level-headed post, the city, despite being labeled a “food desert,” already has its share of real grocery stores, including independent chains like Ye Olde Butcher Shoppe, not to mention its famous Eastern Market, the largest permanent farmers market in the U.S. So it’s not like Whole Foods is suddenly swooping in to deliver fresh vegetables where only Twinkies and Top Ramen existed before.

Much has been made of Whole Foods’ potential to attract further economic development, “a magnet for retail, in particular, and for development more generally,” as Free Press editor Stephen Henderson puts it. “A grocery store as a creator of density.” But would a concentration of high-end retail and condos in one neighborhood do anything to address this troubled city’s structural problems? Local investors and government officials seem to be betting so; the store was financed with the help of $5.8 million in state and local grants and tax credits.

But really, what seems to be causing the freakout over Whole Foods’ unlikely new location is just that: its unlikeliness, and the racist and classist assumptions underlying that assessment. Just listen to Kai Ryssdal of public radio’s Marketplace question CEO Robb at the opening. Ryssdal calls Whole Foods “a place that does not have the reputation of perhaps being a place where people would shop in Detroit,” and even asks, “Did you have to teach people how to shop here?” — as if navigating a Whole Foods requires some special sixth sense not innate to black and low-income people. Ryssdal, assuming Detroit doesn’t have the kind of customer base that could support a Whole Foods, goes on to ask Robb what the company plans to do if the store starts losing money. Robb responded that they’ve made a 25-year commitment to the location. “People perceive Whole Foods as only serving particular communities, and I don’t like that,” he said.

We’re all for Whole Paycheck making an effort to be more accessible. But Robb went so far as to say that Whole Foods, with its Detroit store, is “going after elitism, we’re going after racism.” The notion that a bourgie grocery store could meaningfully address racial inequality is ridiculous. If it has any effect at all, it could just as easily set in motion the kind of unchecked gentrification that deepens racial divisions.

Foley, for his part, sees the new Whole Foods neither as a vehicle for economic rebirth nor as a harbinger of hipster domination:

I was paying more attention to what people were wearing rather than the color of their skin. Lots of people – black, white, whatever – were there representing food co-ops, urban farms and other local initiatives proudly on T-shirts. …

What I realized [Wednesday] is that Detroit’s healthy-eating, locavore crowd is much bigger than I realized. Yes, I know – Whole Foods is a corporation, they have a bottom line, all corporations have dirty secrets, got all that. Still, if it’ll serve a market here in Detroit, then it’s still a nice option. Whole Foods’ biggest challenge is not the potential “Whole Foods effect” but how this community will respond and adapt to its presence.

And if the community response surprises both the skeptics and the cheerleaders, that may be the best outcome. Foley continues:

Detroit’s not saved, but it looks a little bit better. My only hope after this? That reporters won’t use Whole Foods as a constant reference point when giving progress reports about the city’s comeback.

Noted.

If you’re a lover of outdoor urban activity, might we suggest a move to Minneapolis? Not only does the burg have a bike culture to rival Portland’s, it boasts the best park system of any major U.S. city, according to rankings released Wednesday by the Trust for Public Land in its second-annual ParkScore Index.

Minneapolis didn’t appear on last year’s inaugural ParkScore list, which ranked only the 40 largest U.S. cities (Minneapolis comes in at No. 48). But this year, TPL looked at 50 cities, and Minneapolis took top honors, bumping San Francisco, last year’s winner, to third place. New York City moved up from third to second.

Here’s the top 10:

1. Minneapolis

2. New York City

3. Sacramento & San Francisco & Boston (a three-way tie)

6. Washington, D.C.

7. Portland, Ore.

8. Virginia Beach

9. San Diego

10. Seattle

Most of the cities in the Top 10 are either older Eastern towns shaped by Frederick Law Olmsted’s legacy of urban design (such as New York and Boston) or newer Western ones with urban wilderness and open space to spare (Portland, San Diego, Seattle).

In calculating the rankings, ParkScore gives equal weight to three main categories: acreage (median park size and park land as a percentage of overall city area), services and investment (park spending per capita and playgrounds per 10,000 residents), and access (how many people live within a 10-minute walk of a park). Fresno, Calif., brought up the rear for the second year in a row. In that city, park land constitutes only 2 percent of the city area — compared to 15 percent in Minneapolis — and roughly half of every income and age group lacks easy access to a park. But Fresno’s not even the worst city in terms of access — that honor goes to Charlotte, N.C., where less than 30 percent of the population lives within a 10-minute walk of a park.

New York is by far the biggest city in the top 10. L.A. sits all the way down at No. 34; Chicago came in No. 16. Virginia Beach is the only Southern city in the Top 10; Midwestern and Western cities are more evenly distributed. You can compare all the cities’ scores in each main category here; click on a city for a breakdown of its rankings.

In general, cities known for their car-loving culture (L.A., Atlanta, basically every city in Texas) don’t appear to give much love to parks.

ParkScore rankings aren’t meant just to celebrate or shame certain cities; TPL says its website should serve as “a roadmap to guide park improvement efforts.” The detailed analysis shows city leaders which aspects of their park system deserve the most focus. Let’s hope, for the sake of the people in Fresno, that they’re paying attention.

While environmental groups have been pouring energy into opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, a less talked-about fight in Alaska is bubbling over into what The Washington Post says “may be one of the most important environmental decisions of President Obama’s second term”: whether to allow construction of a massive mine near Bristol Bay, one of the most productive salmon fisheries in the world (supplying half the world’s sockeye salmon) and home to potentially vast reserves of gold and copper.

Politico explains:

The focus of this fervor is buried near the headwaters of the Kvichak and Nushagak rivers, where massive deposits of gold, copper and molybdenum lie in a watershed that feeds into Bristol Bay. The Pebble Partnership, which owns the land, wants to dig an open-pit mine that could stretch for miles and would need roads, a power plant and a port.

In a 2006 feature, Mother Jones elaborated on what that would look like:

The proposed Pebble Mine complex would cover some 14 square miles. It would require the construction of a deepwater shipping port in Cook Inlet … and an industrial road—skirting Lake Clark National Park and Preserve and traversing countless salmon-spawning streams—to reach the new harbor. At the site’s heart would be an open pit measuring two miles long, a mile and a half wide, and 1,700 feet deep. Over its 30- to 40-year lifetime, the Pebble pit is projected to produce more than 42.1 million ounces of gold, 24.7 billion pounds of copper, 1.3 billion pounds of molybdenum—and 3 billion tons of waste.

Not only would the Pebble mine be North America’s biggest, it would be 20 times larger than all other mines in Alaska combined. And the companies behind it aren’t even American. The Pebble Partnership is a joint venture between Anglo American, a British mining firm currently facing a class-action lawsuit from South African gold miners, and Northern Dynasty, a Canadian company whose interest in the Pebble Partnership is its principal asset.

Opposition to the project has united the fishing industry and local tribes, two groups often at odds. Mother Jones said the Kvichak is “known to anglers as the most abundant salmon stream on the planet and as home to some of Alaska’s most gargantuan rainbow trout.” For native communities, the hunting and fishing supported by this watershed provide a crucial source of food and a link to traditions.

As oil production, long a profitable mainstay of Alaska’s economy, has slowed in the state, leaders are increasingly turning to mineral extraction as a less-lucrative but better-than-nothing supplement. But that doesn’t make it an easy sell, even to impoverished rural villages desperate for sources of income. Polling by mine opponents found 58 percent of Alaskans overall, and 80 percent of Bristol Bay residents, do not support the project — a sharp contrast, Politico noted, to the majority who support drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. You just don’t mess with salmon. The notoriously conservative Seattle Times editorial board recently came out against the mine, pointing out how Alaska’s fishing industry is intertwined with Washington state’s economy (many companies that process Alaskan seafood are based in Seattle).

In a report [PDF] released last week, Pebble Partnership stated that the operation would generate almost 5,000 jobs in Alaska during construction and at least 2,750 permanent ones. But Tim Bristol, the aptly named director of Trout Unlimited’s Alaska program, told The Washington Post that 14,000 jobs depend on a healthy salmon fishery, and that Pebble has “a well-established track record of … exaggerating the benefits” of the mine.

Concern about mining in the area has intensified since 2005, when the Alaska Department of Natural Resources reclassified much of the Bristol Bay area’s state-owned land to make it more open to mining. Pebble leases the mineral rights of the land it currently occupies from the state, but has held off on securing other permits necessary to forge ahead with mining.

In 2010, at the request of six Alaskan tribes, the Environmental Protection Agency took the unusual step of launching an assessment of the impacts of mining in the watershed, even though Pebble has yet to apply for a federal permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. The Post reports:

In an early environmental assessment, the EPA estimates the mine would probably cause the loss of between 54 and 89 miles of streams and between four and seven square miles of wetlands. Any accidents, the assessment continued, could result “in immediate, severe impacts on salmon and detrimental, long-term impacts on salmon habitat.”

In May 2012, EPA submitted its initial findings to a peer review panel, which released an updated assessment in April basically confirming what the agency had already found. Comments on the revised assessment are now being accepted through June 30.

Mine opponents want EPA to use its authority under the Clean Water Act to block the project — something the agency has only done 13 times since 1972, and only once during the Obama administration.

Both sides are already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year lobbying; Pebble has spent at least $450,000 each year since 2008. Stakeholders are anxiously waiting for Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) to come down on one side or the other, but Begich, who faces a tough reelection fight next year, has been cagey aside from offering the opinion, shared by his fellow Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), that EPA shouldn’t preemptively veto the mine.

Pebble says it hopes to apply for a federal permit this year.

Connecticut is poised to become the first state to require labeling of genetically engineered food — in theory, at least.

On Monday, the state House of Representatives passed an amended version of a labeling bill that the state Senate approved two weeks ago, and Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) has said he’ll sign it. The bipartisan bill passed unanimously in the Senate and 134-to-3 in the House, with little debate in either chamber — a major contrast to California’s contentious GMO-labeling ballot initiative that ultimately failed last year. Differences between the two states aside, it goes to show you how much more difficult passing such progressive measures becomes once corporate money and gullible voters are involved.

The Hartford Courant’s political blog reports that “Immediately after the vote, cheers could be heard outside the Hall of the House from advocates who had been pushing the labeling requirement.” The bill’s success is certainly an important victory for the GMO-labeling movement, which seems to have been motivated, not discouraged, by last year’s loss in California. Thirty-seven labeling proposals have been introduced in 21 states so far this year.

But the final version of the Connecticut bill includes quite a crucial catch: The labeling requirement won’t actually go into effect until similar legislation is passed by at least four other states, one of which borders Connecticut. Also, the labeling adopters must include Northeast states with an aggregate population of at least 20 million. So if, say, New York passed a labeling law, that would help a lot, as New York borders Connecticut and has a population of 19.5 million, which, combined with Connecticut’s 3.5 million, easily passes the population target.

This “trigger clause” is meant to allay fears that Connecticut could suffer negative economic impacts by going it alone — higher food prices and lawsuits from major food companies. Lawmakers are counting on safety in numbers, and hoping their state’s precedent will encourage others to follow suit. The Connecticut Post reports:

“Somebody has to go first and say it’s OK to do it with some kind of trigger,” [Senate Minority Leader John McKinney (R-Fairfield)] said. “This gives great momentum for advocates in Pennsylvania and New York, for example, for GMO labeling, because if they’re successful in New York we’ll probably see it along the entire East Coast.”

OK, Pennsylvania, New York, and all those other states considering GMO labeling: It’s on you now.