Although President Joe Shirley Jr. has put one foot down, signing an agreement with the Citizen Enterprises Corporation to produce more than 500 megawatts of sustainable wind energy on Navajoland, the air is not quite clean yet.

Why is it that he said that Navajos "do not want to sit by (and) watch another generation of mothers and fathers die" regarding uranium mining on Navajo land? How about the Desert Rock Plant? How about using precious water to slurry coal?

The Desert Rock Plant and slurrying coal with precious water are also not welcome by many of his people on their land. Also, many species of animals, including man globally, depend on him putting his other foot down.

Desert Rock Plant will put the Navajo Nation in the category of man living luxuriously off the energy-rich land, like a spoiled child off wealthy parents.

I attended the Longest Walk 2 forum at Northern Arizona University on March 26, 2008. When the panel discussion ended, it ended on a negative note: that most of the tribal governments do not support increasing awareness of the consequences of high-energy consumption.

It is quite obvious the Navajo Nation is not an exception. Money for gold rings and travel expenses is what seems to drive them, just like kings. However, they need to remember that they are our servants, that they were elected to serve the Navajo people.

I also read the Longest Walk 2 founder Dennis Banks' story about how the growth of his wild rice plantation is growing shorter every year. He made it quite clear that global warming is real.

Many of us are scratching our heads and asking, "How can President Joe Shirley Jr. sit by and watch mothers and fathers and their children die from the pollution from another power plant, the Desert Rock Plant?"

The time has come for President Joe Shirley Jr. to put the other foot down on Desert Rock Plant. Otherwise in the Navajo custom it is considered that one is out of balance in his intellectual approach and leadership - specifically for a people whose elders strongly believe that they are the keepers of Mother Earth and who have elected him to serve them.

Erma Yellowman-McCabe
Flagstaff, Ariz.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2008) — The top twenty carbon dioxide-emitting counties in the United States have been identified by a research team led by Purdue University.

The top three counties include the cities of Houston, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric science at Purdue University and leader of the carbon dioxide inventory project, which is called Vulcan, says the biggest surprise is that each region of the United States is included in the ranking.

"It shows that CO2 emissions are really spread out across the country," he says. "Texas, California, New York, Florida, New Mexico, the Midwest — Indiana, Illinois, Ohio — and Massachusetts are all listed. No region is left out of the ranking, it would seem."

The listing of the counties includes the largest city in each county. The numbers are for millions of tons of carbon emitted per year.

Harris, Texas (Houston) — 18.625 million tons of carbon per year
Los Angeles, Calif. (Los Angeles) — 18.595
Cook, Ill. (Chicago) — 13.209
Cuyahoga, Ohio (Cleveland) — 11.144
Wayne, Mich. (Detroit) — 8.270
San Juan, N.M. (Farmington) — 8.245
Santa Clara, Calif. (San Jose) — 7.995
Jefferson, Ala. (Birmingham) — 7.951
Wilcox, Ala. (Camden) — 7.615
East Baton Rouge, La. (Baton Rouge) — 7.322
Titus, Texas (Mt. Pleasant) — 7.244
Carbon, Pa. (Jim Thorpe) — 6.534
Porter, Ind. (Valparaiso) — 6.331
Jefferson, Ohio (Steubenville) — 6.278
Indiana, Pa. (Indiana) — 6.224
Middlesex, Mass. (Boston metro area) — 6.198
Bexar, Texas (San Antonio) — 6.141
Hillsborough, Fla. (Tampa) — 6.037
Suffolk, N.Y. (New York metro area) — 6.030
Clark, Nev. (Las Vegas) — 5.955
The current emissions are based on information from 2002, but the Vulcan system will soon expand to more recent years.

Gurney says Vulcan, which is named for the Roman god of fire, quantifies all of the CO2 that results from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline. It also tracks the hourly outputs at the level of factories, power plants, roadways, neighborhoods and commercial districts.

"It's interesting that the top county, Harris, Texas, is on the list because of industrial emissions, but the second highest CO2 emitting county, Los Angels, California, is on the list because of automobile emissions," Gurney says. "So it's not just cars, and it's not just factories, that are emitting the carbon dioxide, but a combination of different things."

Gurney notes that some counties on the list are there but they are producing goods or power for occupants of a different area.

"Counties such as Titus, Texas, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Clark, Nevada, are dominated by large power production facilities that serve populations elsewhere," he says.

"My favorite one on the list is Carbon, Pennsylvania," Gurney adds.

The three-year project, which was funded by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy under the North American Carbon Program, involved researchers from Purdue University, Colorado State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The Vulcan data is available for anyone to download from the Web site at http://www.eas.purdue.edu/carbon/vulcan. Smaller summary data sets that offer a slice of the data and are easier to download also are available for non-scientists on the Vulcan Web site. These can be broken down into emission categories, such as industrial, residential, transportation, power producers, by fuel type, and are available by state, county, or cells as small as six miles (10 kilometers) across.

Adapted from materials provided by Purdue University.