Mainers are keeping their wood stoves well fed this winter, and that’s a good thing, for the most part. It means less oil drilling, refining and burning and more energy dollars for a local, renewable resource, among other things.

The down side is that many of those wood stoves are old, inefficient and dirty. Newer stoves – those certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – are designed to burn the fuel and the emissions more completely so that they put fewer fine particles into the air. As older stoves are replaced with newer ones, the air is getting cleaner. But it’s a slow process.

Here’s a story we ran this month about the return to wood, and the risks.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, wants to speed the transition to cleaner stoves and introduced legislation Wednesday for a $500 tax incentive. Under the bill, a family that replaces a dirty, old stove with a new, efficient one – they can easily cost $1,500 or more – would have their federal tax bill reduced by $500.

In her weekly column sent out last week, Collins said there are about 10 million wood stoves nationwide and as many as 75 percent of those are old and inefficient .

“These new wood and wood pellet stoves, which have been certified as clean-burning by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1992, can cut emissions by more than 70 percent and use as much as a third less firewood for the same amount of heat.... Making the change from an old, dirty, and inefficient wood stove to a modern, clean and safe stove is, however, an expensive undertaking, one that is especially difficult for many families today.”

A tax credit could be a tough sell, but we'll see it goes. In the meantime, operating a wood stove properly can also cut emissions, no matter how old it is. Here are tips from the Maine DEP for making any stove cleaner and more efficient.

College campuses across Maine will be participating in a national teach-in on global warming Thursday.

Focus the Nation is an effort to mobilize students to take on climate change the way they fueled the civil rights movement in the 1960s. More than 1,100 colleges and universities in all 50 states are expected to participate with rallies, lectures, speeches and movie screenings focused solutions to climate change.

At 8 p.m. Wednesday, the day before the teach-in, organizers will present a live Web cast on climate change called The 2% Solution. The title refers to the goal of reducing global warming pollution 2 percent per year.

Go to the Focus the Nation site to learn more, and look here for a digest of Maine events compiled by Susan Shell at the Pew Environment Group.

And, in a couple of weeks, students around the state will gather at Bates College in Lewiston for the Maine State Climate Summit.

Three days of discussions and events begin Feb. 8. For more information, including the full program schedule, go to the Bates Energy Action Movement Web site. To register, go to the Sierra Student Coalition Web site.

A new federal program is taking aim at the environmental impacts of commercial refrigeration. And a couple of grocery chains with local stores have volunteered to help.

Hannaford Brothers Co. and Whole Foods Market are two of 10 charter members of a new federal initiative called the GreenChill Advanced Refrigeration Partnership. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled the program today.

The new partnership is a voluntary program to develop technologies and practices that protect the stratospheric ozone layer and the earth’s climate from chemicals used in the refrigerators. The partners also will explore ways to improve energy efficiency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The EPA estimates that reducing refrigerant emissions could have benefits equivalent to taking 800,000 automobiles off the road every year. It also estimates that improvements could save the industry more than $12 million a year.

The Killington ski resort in Vermont is taking a more simple – and radical – approach with its refrigerators.

Killington spent $50,000 last summer to retrofit 10 of the resort’s walk in refrigerators with equipment that simply uses nature’s ultimate refrigerant – winter – to chill the coolers. The Freeaire Refrigeration System is expected to save the resort more than 86,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and eliminate an estimated 58 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year.

Unfortunately, the system isn’t for residential refrigerators. Here’s an interesting discussion of that idea.

When it comes to plastics, what goes around sure does come around.
Not only does the stuff tend to live on long after we have any use for it, but we also like to drag it out and punch it around every now and again.

Consider the assault on plastic grocery bags that's become a cause for environmentalists in Maine and around the world.

The bag backlash made news this week when Whole Foods Market announced that its stores will be plastic bag-free by Earth Day, April 22.

A Maine lawmaker and the Maine Grocers Association, meanwhile, are pushing the use of reusable bags as a way to keep plastic ones out of circulation.

It might sound familiar. Way back in 1989, Maine's Legislature adopted a law requiring all stores in the state to use paper bags instead of plastic ones, unless a customer specifically asked for plastic.

It’s a long way from Maine to the South Pole.

But the very bottom of the Earth is by no means the most remote place on the planet.

Ask Paul Mayewski. The University of Maine professor has earned a global reputation, for himself and the school, by going to some very cold and isolated places and coming home with discoveries about the planet and its atmosphere.

“There are plenty of places on Earth where we were the first team to ever go there,” Mayewski said. “You get the chance to be on the forefront of adventure exploration, and also scientific exploration, by doing this stuff.”

The director of UMaine’s Climate Change Institute spoke this week during a brief break in Orono between his latest Antarctic expedition and a global gathering of scientists in England.

There’s no doubt that the environment and energy issues have become big news in the past couple of years, thanks mostly to climate change.

The paper version of Monday’s Portland Press Herald is a good example. Prominent environmental stories ran on the front of all three news sections.

While more coverage of important topics like these is clearly a good thing, quality matters, too. There are more than a few potential pitfalls for reporters and newspapers who take them on.

The Columbia Journalism Review has launched a new Web site called The Observatory to focus on the quality aspect. Here’s how it describes itself:

“The Observatory will monitor science journalism – covering the coverage – with an eye toward improving the journalism and thereby improving the discourse. It will be a guide to the best and worst of science and environmental journalism; it will tell you where the press excels and makes bold innovations. And it will point out where it falls victim to spin, engages in alarmism, perpetrates false balance, misrepresents the science in peer-reviewed literature, or displays questionable priorities in news judgment.”

Check it out here.

Maine’s love-hate relationship with wind power will face a big test on Monday. Actually, a couple of them.

Two wind farm proposals could face up-or-down votes by the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission, the zoning board for northern Maine.

All bets are off about whether the projects are in for a warm hug or a cold shoulder.

Both projects would be in the hills of Franklin County, and together they would double Maine’s wind power capacity.

It's safe to say China is not known as a world leader in environmental protection.

But this week, the country joined a growing worldwide backlash against plastic grocery bags blamed for wasting oil, clogging sewers and littering streets and waterways. “China launched a surprise crackdown on plastic bags on Tuesday, banning production of ultra-thin bags and forbidding its supermarkets and shops from handing out free carriers from June 1,” according to a Reuters story from Beijing.

China joins several European countries and the city of San Francisco, which passed the first U.S. ban last year, among others. Zanzibar, Tanzania, has even attached a potential jail sentence to anyone using one of the bags.

Will Maine follow?

Rep. Ted Koffman, D-Bar Harbor, could not get a plastic bag bill introduced this year. (It would have placed a fee on the bags to pay for reusable-bag incentives.) But Koffman tells us he is continuing to work with the grocery store chains to create more incentives for shoppers to bring their own bags.

It may just be a matter of time before Maine joins the bag trend – but without surprise government crackdowns or jail sentences.

The old blog has been a little quiet lately, what with time off and holidays and all.

So it’s nice to get things flowing again with a little good news.

Maine’s loon chicks had a really good year in 2007, according to the 24th annual Maine Audubon Loon Count. The group announced today that last summer’s count recorded the highest number of loon chicks since the annual census started in 1983. Not bad considering that the 2006 count revealed the lowest number of chicks ever on record. Chick numbers jumped nearly 200 percent from 2006.

“It was great to see the numbers of young bounce back,” said Maine Audubon biologist Susan Gallo, who coordinates the army of 800 volunteers in the annual count.

Much better weather last summer was clearly a big help.

Another factor may have been a 6 percent decline in adult loons, according to Maine Audubon. Groups of non-breeding adult loons – “rogue” birds that inhabit large lakes – can threaten nesting loons, according to the group.

Rogue loon gangs notwithstanding, the bird has a lot of charisma and huge following. It’s also a valuable environmental indicator, reflecting the health of Maine’s lake systems and the effects of pollutants such as mercury.

Look at Maine Audubon's Web sitefor more about the survey results.