National parks cutting their carbon footprint

TACOMA, Wash. - Thousands of cars, pickup trucks and minivans carry visitors to Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic national parks. They leave behind tons of plastic water bottles, granola-bar wrappers, and banana peels.

Mount Rainier staff have a two-hour, 60-mile drive just to get from one area of the park to another. Heating the Hurricane Ridge visitor center at Olympic costs almost $12,000 a year for diesel fuel.

Not exactly what most people would consider the "green" image expected of the National Park Service. But that's about to change. Working with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Park Service has launched the Climate Friendly Parks program to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

"Our national parks can be used to demonstrate the impacts of climate change," said Shawn Norton, who heads the climate program for the Park Service.

Raising the ante, the Western region office wants park operations to be carbon neutral by 2016, the 100th anniversary of the Park Service's creation.

It won't be an easy task. All the driving, waste and utility consumption - not to mention the energy to power employee computers, to buy fuel for snowplows, and to haul away food scraps - spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As a result, the state's three national parks have an estimated combined carbon footprint of 30,820 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

That's the equivalent of a year's worth of emissions from 2,667 households.

A carbon footprint estimates the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases. The footprints for Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks are produced by the more than 5 million people who visit and the functions needed to operate the more than 1.85 million acres at the parks.

To identify what contributes to each park's footprint and how to reduce emissions, staffers at the three parks met in workshops in February and March. The ideas are in their embryonic stage, and no cost has been calculated for them.

Scientists believe greenhouse gases are responsible for changes in the Northwest climate. The result is more frequent and stronger storms lashing the Northwest and warmer weather, resulting in more winter rain and less snow at higher elevations.

"One-hundred-year floods are now happening every 14 years," said park scientist Paul Kennard. April snowpack in the Cascades and the north Sierra have declined from 1950 to 1997. By 2020, experts predict a 27 to 29 percent loss of snowpack compared to 1980 levels.

"National parks are the canary in the coal mine," said Chip Jenkins, superintendent of the North Cascades National Park Complex. "We are places where there are leading indicators of what is going on in the United States. So if you are seeing changes in these parks, and we are, they are indicators of what you will see elsewhere in the country."