Category: environment

Coverage of environmental issues may include climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource depletion etc.

Cheney Sought to Deny Climate Change

Seth Anderson0 comment

Wouldn’t want to be caught doing anything that might help our planet, would we now, Mr. Cheney?

A disclosure Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office sought to alter a federal official’s prepared testimony about the health consequences of global warming intensified an increasingly open conflict between the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House over how to respond to climate change.

The latest in a series of disclosures about internal disputes within the Bush administration came as President George W. Bush was in Japan with other leaders of the Group of Eight nations to forge an agreement on combating climate change. But back home, Mr. Bush’s critics contend that his aides are working to ensure that any actions his administration takes in response to climate change will have a limited impact.

The disclosure about Vice President Cheney’s role came from Jason Burnett, who until last month was the EPA’s associate deputy administrator

[From Cheney Sought to Alter Climate Discussion – WSJ.com]

snip

In his letter, Mr. Burnett notes that at the time of Dr. Gerberding’s testimony “there was extensive debate” over how the EPA should respond to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Mr. Burnett says the White House Council on Environmental Quality suggested to him that he could best serve the EPA “if I would convince CDC to delete particular sections of their testimony.”

In an interview, he declined to elaborate on the assertions in his letter, but said he left the EPA because “I thought I’d done as much constructive work as could be done under this administration” in response to the Supreme Court ruling.

Administration officials said in March that before declaring greenhouse gases endanger health or welfare, the government should first seek public comment. The EPA has yet to do so, however, largely because of a dispute between EPA officials and a White House office that reviews proposed regulations over how to frame the issue, people familiar with the matter said.

Dick Cheney is a truly horrible, corrupted man, though I guess we’ve known that since 1974.

Green Merchandise Mart

Seth Anderson3 Comments

Green Exchange
Cool1. I’ve always meant to take a photo of this building. Now I have more reason to – I think this is a great idea.

Green light goes on at old Cooper lamp factory | Crain’s Chicago Business :

A Chicago real estate developer aims to turn the former Frederick Cooper Lamp Co. factory in Logan Square into a green Merchandise Mart, with showrooms featuring eco-friendly products and services.
After churning out lamps for 35 years, the 250,000-square-foot building alongside the Kennedy Expressway would become the Green Exchange, housing a building supply business, a furniture maker, a printing company and other environmentally conscious businesses, says developer David Baum, who bought the property with his brother Douglas last year. The companies will have greater marketing power under one roof than they would apart, he says.
“If you’re a customer that wants to buy paint that has no toxins, you may also have interest in using a green architect and investing in a socially responsible mutual fund,” David Baum says. “I think we’re hitting a tipping point in environmentalism and it’s becoming mainstream.”
…
He says he won’t seek city subsidies for the project. Several businesses have signed non-binding “letters of interest” to lease space in the building, including Consolidated Printing Co., which uses an environmentally sustainable printing process, and Greenmaker Supply, which sells eco-friendly building supplies.

(H/T)
—
Website www.greenexchange.com

and another repost2 : We wrote about this previously, the Tribune has more details.

Going green: Project envisions eco-friendly shopping center :

When David Baum decided last year to convert the old Cooper Lamp factory in Logan Square into a one-stop shopping center of green businesses, he knew it would be a risky and expensive proposition.

“Wind turbines don’t necessarily make economic sense today, but we want to engage the imagination,” said Baum, who plans to spend more than $30 million renovating the sprawling yellow brick structure where craftsmen once turned out custom-made lamps. “We do still plan to make a profit, albeit a small one.”

Baum is aiming to tap into the growing consumer demand for eco-conscious merchandise and services. Dubbed the Green Exchange, he wants his project to become one of the first places in the nation to offer an entirely green space for entirely green work.

Baum envisions places like an organic restaurant, an environmentally friendly building supply store, green-friendly architects and eco-design firms. There could even be a sustainable clothing store, a bicycle shop and a car showroom, he said.

The project would be three times larger than The Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center in Portland, Ore., where roughly 20 tenants, including Patagonia, offer sustainable goods and services in a 70,000-square-foot facility.

Continue reading “Green Merchandise Mart”

Footnotes:
  1. Reposted from my old blog to house a new photo [↩]
  2. combining two entries into one [↩]

White House Blocks EPA Emissions Draft

Seth Anderson0 comment

Withered and Died

The White House, on its way out to the dustbin of history,1 wants to gut the Clean Air Act before the end of the year. Lovely.

WASHINGTON — The White House is trying to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from publishing a document that could become the legal roadmap for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S., said people close to the matter.

The fight over the document is the latest development in a long-running conflict between the EPA and the White House over climate-change policy. It will likely intensify ongoing Congressional investigations into the Bush administration’s involvement in the agency’s policymaking.

The draft document, which has been viewed by The Wall Street Journal, outlines how the government, under the Clean Air Act, could regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from mobile sources such as cars, trucks, trains, planes and boats, and from stationary sources such as power stations, chemical plants and refineries. The document is based on a multimillion-dollar study conducted over two years.

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has asked the EPA to delete sections of the document that say such emissions endanger public welfare, say how those gases could be regulated, and show an analysis of the cost of regulating greenhouse gases in the U.S. and other countries.

[From White House Blocks EPA Emissions Draft – WSJ.com]

Non WSJ subscribers use this Digg-enabled link to full article which includes some colorful charts.

Cheney wants to ensure his oil buddies won’t have to alter any of their polluting practices until after the Rapture:

“Clearly [White House officials] don’t want to leave behind a blueprint that suggests that the Clean Air Act could offer a potential pathway in a cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” said one of the people close to the matter who supports the EPA document’s analysis. “Leaving a blueprint behind could leave the next administration a document they could work from, and that’s not in their interest,” the person said.

If the agency establishes a policy direction in this phase of the rule-making but later changes direction in the proposed rule, it could create opportunities for legal challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act, said Peter Robertson, a former deputy administrator at the EPA and a partner at the Pillsbury law firm specializing in environmental public policy.

“There wouldn’t be a reason for OMB to monkey with this document if it weren’t going to be an important step in the process now and later on,” Mr. Robertson said.

Footnotes:
  1. and that’s being very kind [↩]

Justices Cut Damages Award in Exxon Valdez Spill

Seth Anderson0 comment

Gears Grind Slow

Nice to have the profits to be able to afford teams of highly compensated corporate attorneys to work on the case for almost 20 years (spill occurred in 1989).

The commercial fishermen, Native Alaskans, landowners, businesses and local governments involved in the lawsuit have each received about $15,000 so far ”for having their lives and livelihood destroyed and haven’t received a dime of emotional-distress damages,” their Supreme Court lawyer, Jeffrey Fisher, said when the court heard arguments in February.

First-quarter profits at Exxon Mobil Corp. were $10.9 billion. The company’s 2007 profit was $40.6 billion.

[From Justices Cut Damages Award in Exxon Valdez Spill – NYTimes.com]

The Supreme Court reduced damages from $2,500,000,000 way down to $500,000,000. Exxon Mobil’s legal fees for this matter were probably another $400,000,000 or so, meaning somebody’s having a party tonight with nearly $2 billion dollars. Assholes.

Estimated by Amerian Law Daily as $400,000,000:

Those expenses are nothing when compared to the bills Exxon has been paying during the last two decades to firms like O’Melveny & Myers, its primary outside counsel on the litigation. In 1990 alone, according to a feature story in The American Lawyer following the jury verdict, Exxon reportedly paid $60 million in defense fees. O’Neill estimates that Exxon has likely spent about $400 million defending the case during the last two decades, citing numbers that one of his team’s lawyers saw during litigation that was related to the case. Exxon spokesman Tony Cudmore declined to confirm that figure. “We have not released a figure for legal costs,” he says. “I can tell you they have been significant, but I am not able to provide a number.”

Plaintiffs attorneys are crying tonight, as are all the residents of Alaska.

Oil Boondoggle

Seth Anderson1 Comment

pump primer frostpocket 1995

Continuing on a theme, David Fuller of Peotone, Illinois writes in to Altercation to say:

Turns out that the oil companies currently hold 10,000 drilling permits right now, and have leases to 68 million acres of land that is going undrilled — no need to “open up ANWR or the Gulf Coast right now” as Newt Gingrich would have everyone believe. (Drilling permits are apparently what happens right before the drill bit hits the ground — so oil companies are confident that oil is there.) Check out this June 2008 report [PDF] from the Committee on Natural Resources.

Among the most interesting points:

  • Drilling on federal lands has steadily increased since the 1990s
  • Drilling permits have gone from 3,802 five years ago to 7,561 in 2007
  • Oil and gas companies have shown that they cannot keep pace with the rate of drilling permits (so opening the Gulf and ANWR would help how, exactly?)
  • Although permits have gone up, the price of gas has ALSO gone up, refuting the idea that more drilling will automatically reduce prices
  • The Bureau of Land Management has issued 28,776 permits to drill on public land; yet, only 18,954 wells were actually drilled (a difference of 9822)
  • Of the 47.5 million acres of on-shore federal lands that are currently being leased by oil and gas companies, only about 13 million acres are actually in production
  • Offshore, only 10.5 million of the 44 million leased acres are currently producing oil or gas
  • According to the Minerals Management Service, of all the oil and gas believed to exist on the Outer Continental Shelf, 82% of the natural gas and 79% of the oil is located in areas that are currently open for leasing
  • Nearly 91 million acres are currently open to leasing in the Arctic region of Alaska, including onshore and offshore lands. Oil and gas companies have leased only 11.8 million of the 91 million acres.

  • The report goes on to say that just drilling in these 68 million acres (this excludes the Alaska acreage, because much of it is still unleased by the oil companies even though it is available to lease) of untapped areas without drilling anywhere else would likely produce six times the amount of oil in ANWR. Yes, that’s right: SIX TIMES what ANWR is estimated to be able to produce at peak production. And if they’d bother to lease the Alaska areas that are available, that number would undoubtedly go much higher.

    There’s much more in the report, but suffice to say, the next time one of us hears the claim that we need to drill in ANWR or off the coast of Florida to reduce our oil dependence and affect pricing, we should (confidently!) ask why in the world we aren’t making use of the 10,000 permits already issued and the 68 million acres of unused, currently leased land to drill on first, and why the additional drilling we’ve already done since the 90s hasn’t reduced prices at all.

    Shock Doctrine, indeed — don’t fall for it. Educate folks on this, so our politicians can confidently vote “No” to the Gingrich nonsense with the knowledge that the American people have been sufficiently educated about this issue to know better than the lines we’re being fed by the oil companies and those shilling for them.

    [From Media Matters – Slacker Friday]

So why isn’t this sort of analysis being made in the corporate media? I’ve read some stories explaining that if new oil leases are sold, in the Great Lakes, and off the coast of Florida, and of course, in Alaska, the new leases won’t start producing meaningful oil for 20-30 years, but why isn’t that fact contrasted to the existence of 10,000 permits already in place that aren’t producing meaningful oil either? Crazy. He who asks the questions sets the agenda, presumedly, and Bush/McCain/Gingrich were the first out of the gate leveraging complaints re: high consumer gas prices against Big Oil’s future drilling rights. A shame that there isn’t push-back on the topic, except in obscure corners of the web (echoed in even more obscure corners of the web, such as this humble webzine).

McCain’s Driller Instinct

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Wrong Bus
[Wrong Bus, Juneau, Alaska.]

Paul Krugman piles on to McCain’s stupid energy policy pronouncements.

In his Monday speech on energy, Mr. McCain tried to touch all the bases. He talked about conservation. He denounced the evils of speculation: “While a few reckless speculators are counting their paper profits, most Americans are coming up on the short end.” A weird aspect of the current energy debate, incidentally, is the fact that many of the same market-worshipping conservatives who first denied that there was a dot-com bubble, then denied that there was a housing bubble, are utterly convinced that nasty speculators are responsible for high oil prices.

The item that made news, however, was Mr. McCain’s call for more offshore drilling. On Tuesday, he made this more explicit, calling for exploration and development of the currently protected outer continental shelf. This was a reversal of his previous position, and it went a long way toward aligning his energy policy with that of the Bush administration.

That’s not a good thing.

As many reports have noted, the McCain/Bush policy on offshore drilling doesn’t make sense as a response to $4-a-gallon gas: the White House’s own Energy Information Administration says that exploiting the outer shelf wouldn’t yield noticeable amounts of oil until the 2020s, and even at peak production its impact on oil prices would be “insignificant.”

But what I haven’t seen emphasized is the broader picture: Mr. McCain has now aligned himself with an administration that, even aside from its blame-the-environmental-movement tendencies, has established an extensive track record as the gang that couldn’t think straight about energy policy.

Remember, they didn’t just insist that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators; on the eve of the Iraq war, administration officials were also adamant that regime change in Iraq would add millions of barrels a day to the world oil supply, driving oil prices way down. (In fact, Iraq’s oil output took five years just to recover to preinvasion levels.)

[From Paul Krugman – Driller Instinct – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

Krugman also points out the energy companies aren’t so keen to drill in the frozen tundra of Alaska in any case.

Big Pander to Big Oil

Seth Anderson2 Comments

I like to eat paste

An interesting study in contrasts. The reliably corporate-friendly New York Times editorial board comes out strongly against the idea that $4 a gallon gasoline price is easily reduced by drilling for oil off of the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific states, and in Alaska. In other words, the case for increased domestic drilling must be pretty weak. The truth is that even if all suspected domestic untapped oil reserves were jumped upon tomorrow, actual oil wouldn’t start flowing for many years (2030, or later). So any politician who proclaims drilling is the short-term answer is either a liar or deluded, or in the case of George Bush, both.

It was almost inevitable that a combination of $4-a-gallon gas, public anxiety and politicians eager to win votes or repair legacies would produce political pandering on an epic scale. So it has, the latest instance being President Bush’s decision to ask Congress to end the federal ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along much of America’s continental shelf.

This is worse than a dumb idea. It is cruelly misleading. It will make only a modest difference, at best, to prices at the pump, and even then the benefits will be years away. It greatly exaggerates America’s leverage over world oil prices. It is based on dubious statistics. It diverts the public from the tough decisions that need to be made about conservation.

There is no doubt that a lot of people have been discomfited and genuinely hurt by $4-a-gallon gas. But their suffering will not be relieved by drilling in restricted areas off the coasts of New Jersey or Virginia or California. The Energy Information Administration says that even if both coasts were opened, prices would not begin to drop until 2030. The only real beneficiaries will be the oil companies that are trying to lock up every last acre of public land before their friends in power — Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — exit the political stage.

The whole scheme is based on a series of fictions that range from the egregious to the merely annoying. Democratic majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, noted the worst of these on Wednesday: That a country that consumes one-quarter of the world’s oil supply but owns only 3 percent of its reserves can drill its way out of any problem — whether it be high prices at the pump or dependence on oil exported by unstable countries in Persian Gulf. This fiction has been resisted by Barack Obama but foolishly embraced by John McCain, who seemed to be making some sense on energy questions until he jumped aboard the lift-the-ban bandwagon on Tuesday.

A lesser fiction, perpetrated by the oil companies and, to some extent, by misleading government figures, is that huge deposits of oil and gas on federal land have been closed off and industry has had one hand tied behind its back by environmentalists, Democrats and the offshore protections in place for 25 years.

The numbers suggest otherwise. Of the 36 billion barrels of oil believed to lie on federal land, mainly in the Rocky Mountain West and Alaska, almost two-thirds are accessible or will be after various land-use and environmental reviews. And of the 89 billion barrels of recoverable oil believed to lie offshore, the federal Mineral Management Service says fourth-fifths is open to industry, mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan waters.

Clearly, the oil companies are not starved for resources. Further, they do not seem to be doing nearly as much as they could with the land to which they’ve already laid claim. Separate studies by the House Committee on Natural Resources and the Wilderness Society, a conservation group, show that roughly three-quarters of the 90 million-plus acres of federal land being leased by the oil companies onshore and off are not being used to produce energy. That is 68 million acres altogether, among them potentially highly productive leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.

With that in mind, four influential House Democrats — Edward Markey, Nick Rahall, Rahm Emanuel and Maurice Hinchey — have introduced “use it or lose it” bills that would force the companies to begin exploiting the leases they have before getting any more. Companion bills have been introduced in the Senate, where suspicions also run high that industry’s main objective is to stockpile millions of additional acres of public land before the Bush administration leaves town.

This cannot be allowed to happen. The Congressional moratoriums on offshore drilling were put in place in 1981 and reaffirmed by subsequent Congresses to protect coastal economies that depend on clean water and clean coastlines. This was also the essential purpose of supplemental executive orders, the first of which was issued by Mr. Bush’s father in 1990 after the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill the year before.

Given the huge resources available to the energy industry, there is no reason to undo these protections now.

[From Editorial – The Big Pander to Big Oil – Editorial – NYTimes.com]

and in contrast, the also corporate-friendly, but slightly more Republican, Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Silva writes an entire article basically repeating George Bush’s assertion that the answer to $4 gallon is just to start drilling, with barely a mention that drilling’s payoff, such as it is, won’t occur until 20-30 years later.

Just a few months ago, President George W. Bush said he “hadn’t heard” that gas might reach $4 per gallon.

But now that the $4-and-climbing price of summer gas has become a flash point for deep public anxiety in a presidential election year, the departing Republican president wants everyone to hear what his party hopes to do about it. That includes offshore oil drilling, an approach long off-limits for fear of environmental disasters and alienating a huge bloc of voters.

The pinch of rising gas prices is such a politically powerful symbol of an economy on the wrong track that the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, has shifted course to embrace offshore drilling, long politically taboo in coastal states.

Even in environmentally minded Florida, Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, a McCain ally, is willing to “take a look” at drilling in the Gulf of Mexico as an answer to America’s energy woes.

[From Bush leads calls to drill off U.S. shore — chicagotribune.com]

Now, it is possible, albeit unlikely, that Mr. Silva wrote a few more words about the long payoff for increased drilling, and his editors redacted this explanation. I doubt it though.

Chicago Center for Green Technology

Seth Anderson0 comment

Took a trek out to the very cool Chicago Center for Green Technology at 445 N. Sacramento Boulevard yesterday to inquire about green roofs and to solicit advice re: Neighbor Space parks.

Chicago Green Tech’s building was originally constructed in 1952. Since then a number of different companies have owned the building. When it came to the attention of the Chicago Department of Environment (DOE) in 1995, the building and its 17 acres were owned by Sacramento Crushing, a company which had a permit to collect limited construction and demolition debris. The Department of Environment became involved because Sacramento Crushing had gone far beyond the scope of its permit and had filled all 17-acres with illegally dumped debris. The site was littered with 70-foot high piles of rubble, one of which was so dense it sank 15 feet into the ground.

The Department of Environment successfully fought Sacramento Crushing in court and not only closed down their operation but also became the owner of the site itself. It was then DOE’s job to clean up this Brownfield. The clean up took 18 months to complete and cost about $9 million. In this process, the site was cleared of over 600,000 tons of concrete, which took 45,000 truck loads to remove. The city recouped some of the clean up cost by selling the concrete and other materials to recycling firms and to other city departments for use in their projects. For example, some of the crushed concrete was used by the Chicago Department of Transportation to lay the foundation of the parking garage at the new Millennium Park.

In 1999, DOE was the proud owner of a cleaned site and vacant building. Rather than simply renovating the building using traditional methods, DOE seized the opportunity to create an energy efficient building using the highest standards of green technology available. The Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment formed a design team for the project. This team of local architects, led by Farr Associates, designed the building using a set of guidelines established by the US Green Building Council called LEED (Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design).

[From Chicago Center for Green Technology – History]

Apparently, some of the mounds of debris were over 70 feet tall, and compressed the ground below another 15 feet. Anyway, the building is worth a visit if you are into such things. Plus they gave us each 2 LED light bulbs.

Vegetative Green Roof – Chicago Center for Green Technology. Wild chives, succulents, and clover, I believe.
Vegetative Green Roof - Chicago Center for Green Technology

Vegetative Green Roof closeup- Chicago Center for Green Technology
Vegetative Green Roof closeup- Chicago Center for Green Technology

We didn’t get much help regarding Neighbor Space parks and City of Chicago plant and soil resources, but we learned a lot about green roofs. I’d love to be able to install a meadow on our roof like this one, but the roof would need to be able to support 40 lbs/sq. foot, which might not be easily accomplished. Maybe, though, so a next step would be to ask a structural engineer to investigate. There are also the smaller modular vegetative green roof options: a box about 12 inches by 12 inches, filled with a few inches of soil and covered with succulents. You would use as many as you needed, they weigh less, and are easier to remove if necessary. The meadow concept is more fun though – I’d be napping up there right now if I could.

Another thought would be to install a rain water cistern and drain system, so as to utilize the water to keep plants moist at the street level (where our Neighbor Space park allegedly will be located).

Solar Panels – Chicago Center for Green Technology
Solar Panels - Chicago Center for Green Technology

Solar panels would be cool, even if the technology isn’t advanced enough to supply all of our electric needs, we still could ameliorate some of our electric costs (and have backup power if ComEd has problems as they so often do).

Money to pay for it all? Ha, that’s what home equity loans are for. There are a few tax credits available (Federal, some state programs, even less at the City level) for installing solar and green roofs, but the national demand is much greater than the supply of money available, so one’s application has to be blessed with the support of somebody politically connected to get approval. Got to fund wars in the desert, don’t you know; we as a country don’t really want to encourage sustainable living. Unfortunately.

Makers of Baby Bottles Sued

swanksalot0 comment

Deregulation of government has real effects.

Four parents have filed a federal lawsuit against makers of baby bottles, claiming the bottles were made from a harmful chemical that led to Congressional hearings and prompted the world’s largest retailer to phase out the products. The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Columbus, alleges the companies knew that a chemical known as bisphenol A was associated with health problems but did not disclose the risk. It cites scientific studies that conclude BPA, as the chemical is also known, seeps from bottles and sippy-cups into liquid.

[From National Briefing – Midwest – Ohio – Makers of Baby Bottles Sued – NYTimes.com]

Public perception is that the FDA is corrupted, and only cares about profits of industry. I haven’t seen much evidence contradicting this perception.

White House and Amtrak veto

Seth Anderson0 comment

Train I Dont Rides (sic)
[Train I Don’t Rides (sic)]

Bush and his oil buddies want to eliminate train service, or reduce its functionality, because otherwise, if trains are reliable, clean, run on time, yadda yadda, people won’t drive three hours to go somewhere, and oil companies won’t have record-breaking profits, quarter after quarter. Simple, right? Never mind that more cars means more pollution, more energy use, more congestion, more forests destroyed (for roads), and a whole litany of effects. Screw that: the Bush-ites are only interested in encouraging gasoline/auto consumption.

The White House is threatening to veto legislation that would fund Amtrak for the next five years.

The Bush administration says House members didn’t include language in the bill making the railroad more accountable for its decisions.

The legislation would authorize more than $14 billion dollars and set up a program of federal matching grants that states could use to set up or expand rail service.

But the White House says the measure provides little opportunity for competition on existing Amtrak routes and doesn’t include provisions that would condition Amtrak’s funding based on the progress of reforms.

The Bush administration has pushed for ending Amtrak subsidies and eliminating unprofitable lines, while supporters in Congress argue there’s no major national railway in the world operating without government subsidies

[From White House threatens Amtrak veto ]

Via Atrios

Death at Blommer Chocolate

Seth Anderson5 Comments

The ABCs of Chocolate
[The ABCs of Chocolate-across from Blommer Chocolate Company]

First off, I have great sympathy for Gerardo Castillo’s family, that’s got to be a hard way to die.

Chicago officials and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration hunted Monday for the cause of a fatal gas release that killed a North Side man and hospitalized two others at a chocolate factory on the Near West Side over the weekend. Gerardo Castillo, 30, was killed Sunday in the second fatal accident since 2001 at Blommer Chocolate Co., 600 W. Kinzie St.

Castillo of the 1700 block of West Olive Avenue was pronounced dead at Northwestern Memorial Hospital after a release of ammonialike fumes at the factory. A substance mixed into the chocolate somehow triggered a gaseous chemical reaction, a Chicago Fire Department spokesman said.

[snip]

OSHA last inspected the facility in 1994, said federal compliance officer Tricia Railton, who was reading from a report. Those safety investigations had to do with workers who were cleaning a piece of equipment that either had not been disconnected or was not marked as being potentially dangerous to the cleaners if turned on. It was not immediately clear if an injury prompted that inspection, Railton said. In 2005, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sent an inspector to check the factory after a neighbor complained about the aroma of burnt chocolate. The unidentified complainant also noted a powder-filled plume churning out of a roof duct.

Based on what the inspector saw two mornings in early September, the EPA cited Blommer for violating limits on opacity, or the amount of light blocked by the factory’s grinder dust.

[From U.S., city probing death at chocolate factory — chicagotribune.com]

But this EPA thing has been ongoing for a while. In fact, we mentioned it to Alderman Reilly when we met him in his office just prior to Reilly being sworn in, and his staff was going to look into it. Pollution and particulates are pollution and particulates, even if they smell like chocolate, and shouldn’t be allowed to permeate the lungs of local residents (like myself, ahem). I am curious as to what the details of this September investigation actually were.

Previous coverage of Blommer on my old blog

Blommer Continue reading “Death at Blommer Chocolate”

Junk journey highlights plastic soup of Pacific

swanksalot0 comment

One of these days we’ll have to do something about the sea of plastic polluting the ocean.

Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn’t waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.

The activists wanted more people to share their disgust about plastic litter that swirls, relatively unexplored, in continent-size patches of ocean.

To that end, they have built a motor-less craft from 15,000 recycled beverage bottles, fishing nets, and the cockpit of a Cessna, and are sailing it more than 2,000 miles from southern California to Hawaii. They left Long Beach, Calif., on Sunday.

[From Junk journey highlights ‘plastic soup’ of Pacific Ocean | Green Tech – CNET News.com]

We are all affected by global pollution, whether we realize it or not.

 

On the last Pacific voyage that ended in February, Eriksen and Paschal helped marine researcher Charles Moore assess the extent of pollution in the waters leading up to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris some estimate to be as large as the United States.

In early tests, a sample showed 48 parts of plastic to each part of plankton.

“They haven’t finished processing the samples, but there was an exponential increase in the plastic,” said Anna Cummins, who was also aboard and serves as Algalita’s education adviser. “What looked on the surface like clean water, when you pulled it up, it looked like plastic soup. It was disgusting.”

Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn’t well understood because satellites can’t spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more.

“No one really knows what’s out in the other gyres,” Cummins said. “In the north Pacific alone there’s Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members.”

Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.

Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.

I had only heard of one gyre, five is even worse. Maybe we should test putting Daniel Burd’s decomposition microorganism in one of the gyres.

Speaking of Dirty Tricks

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Flavin tunnel with Marty Spellerberg

Al Gore has some enemies who don’t want his name even mentioned as a possible compromise candidate at the Denver 2008 Convention.

Al Gore’s opulent lifestyle and his virtuous plea to save the planet from global warming don’t mesh, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which announced plans yesterday for a new national advertising campaign to showcase the contrast before the American public.

…

Yet his name is also being bandied about in some Democratic and progressive circles for a presidential “dream team” ticket pairing him with Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

The CEI ad will highlight Mr. Gore’s “hypocrisy,” said Sam Kazman, general counsel of the free-market public policy group.

The spot, which begins airing Tuesday on several cable networks, is also meant to counter a new outreach by the Alliance for Climate Protection, an umbrella organization founded by Mr. Gore last year. The group is planning a massive music festival in July and will spend a reported $10 million on advocacy ads promoting the “climate crisis” and eco-consciousness.

[From Ad to challenge Gore’s planet-saving image – – The Washington Times, America’s Newspaper aka The Mooney Times]

So who exactly is the Competitive Enterprise Institute? and more importantly, who funds their efforts? Before I looked, I guessed ExxonMobil, and apparently, was right.

In its IRS Form 990 for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2004, CEI reported revenues totalling $2,919,537, including donations from individuals, foundations and corporations. Its net assets were $1,670,808.…

According to page nine of a report from the CEI contained on the University of California, San Francisco’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL), the following companies and foundations were among those listed as supporting CEI’s work with annual contributions of at least $10,000, currently the CEI’s “Entrepreneurs” level:

Aequus Institute, Amoco Foundation, Inc., Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Coca-Cola Company, E.L. Craig Foundation, CSX Corporation, Earhart Foundation, Fieldstead and Co., FMC Foundation, Ford Motor Company Fund, Gilder Foundation, Koch Family Foundations (including the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation), Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc., Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, Philip Morris Companies, Inc., Pfizer Inc., Precision Valve Corporation, Prince Foundation, Rodney Fund, Sheldon Rose, Scaife Foundations (Carthage Foundation and Sarah Scaife Foundation), and Texaco, Inc. (Texaco Foundation).

Other documents in the LTDL show that CEI has received funding directly from various tobacco companies.[7],[8],[9] For example, the listing on the Philip Morris Glossary of Names: C gives the note “Received public policy grant from Philip Morris (1995); Pro-market public interest group dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government.”

ExxonMobil Corporation was a major donor to CEI, with over $2 million in contributions between 1998 and 2005. [10] In 2002 the company gave $405,000;[11] in 2004 it gave CEI $180,000 that was earmarked for “global climate change and global climate change outreach.” [12] In 2006, the company announced that they had ended their funding for the group.[12]

[From Competitive Enterprise Institute – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

A veritable rogues gallery of corporate evil-doers. The most surprising name (to me anyway) is Ford Motor Company. I thought Ford had turned a new leaf, and was promoting green ventures? Seems that was only propaganda, and behind the scenes Ford is still dragging their feet, fighting regulation that would tackle global climate change.

Sourcewatch says of CEI

It postures as an advocate of “sound science” in the development of public policy. However, CEI projects dispute the overwhelimng scientific evidence that human induced greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change. They have a program for “challenging government regulations”, push property rights as a solution to environment problems, opposed US vehicle fuel efficiency standards and been a booster for the drug industry.

[snip]

CEI belongs to various conservative alliances, including the Alliance for America, Get Government Off Our Backs, Townhall.com, the National Consumer Coalition (a pro-corporate front group headed by Frances B. Smith, the wife of CEI founder Fred Smith), and the Environmental Education Working Group (EEWG), a national umbrella group for organizations working to undermine environmental education in schools. It is linked to the UK-based rightwing thinktank, the International Policy Network, via shared staff and an identical US contact address. It also sponsors several other subsidiary organizations, including:
The Center for Private Conservation, a green-sounding front group that opposes environmental regulations by claiming that “free market” solutions work better.

The Cooler Heads Coalition, chaired by former CEI director Marlo Lewis and directed by Myron Ebell, CEI’s Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy. The Cooler Heads Coalition was formed on May 6, 1997, “to dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis.” In March 2001, the nonprofit Clean Air Trust named Ebell its “clean air villain of the month,” citing his “ferocious lobbying charge to persuade President Bush to reverse his campaign pledge to control electric utility emissions of carbon dioxide.”

and this list of funders/enemies of the planet:

CEI does not publish a list of its institutional donors. However, in a CEI report sent to Philip Morris, the think tank identified a range of companies and foundations as having given $10,000 or more. [21] Contributors included: Aequus Institute
Amoco Foundation, Inc.
Coca-Cola Company, contributions were $25,000 per annum for the period 1991-1995;
E.L. Craig Foundation
CSX Corporation
Fieldstead and Co.
FMC Foundation
Ford Motor Company Fund
Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation
Philip Morris Companies, Inc.
Pfizer Inc.
Precision Valve Corporation
Prince Foundation
Sheldon Rose
Texaco, Inc.
Texaco Foundation
Alex C. Walker Foundation

In a 2006 profile of CEI and other global warming skeptics, Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach noted that “the most generous sponsors” of CEI’s 2005 annual dinner were “the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Exxon Mobil, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and Pfizer. Other contributors included General Motors, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Plastics Council, the Chlorine Chemistry Council and Arch Coal.”

More Plastic Water Bottle Blues

Seth Anderson0 comment

Do Not Attempt This At Home

That’s it, I’m sticking with beer, wine and Jameson’s from now on…..

Alina Tugend writes:

The type of plastic bottle that typically holds water, soda and juice is made from polyethylene terephthalate, a petroleum-based material also known as PET that is labeled No. 1.

The trouble with reusing those plastic bottles is that each time they are washed and refilled they become a little more scratched and crinkly, which can lead them to degrade. That can cause a trace metal called antimony to leach out, said Frederick S. vom Saal, a professor of biology at the University of Missouri who has studied plastics for years.

[snip]

But perhaps a better alternative — in terms of health and the environment — is to use the hard plastic bottles made with polycarbonate plastic, often known by the brand Nalgene. It has the numeral 7 stamped at the bottom and is the same type of material used to make some baby bottles, the lining of tin cans and other products. I have some of those around the house. They are just too big to fit into our car cup holders so I retired them to the basement.

Time to dig them out?

Not quite. Environmental groups and some scientists have raised concern that such plastic can leach bisphenol A, an endocrine-disrupting chemical.

[Click to read more of The (Possible) Perils of Being Thirsty While Being Green – New York Times]

Which plastic bottle to use then? Can’t always count on having the


“Sigg Samurai Spirit Water Bottle” (Sigg)

“If I was to use plastic, I would stay with No. 2 and No. 5,” Professor vom Saal said. No. 2 is high-density polyethylene; No. 5 is polypropylene. Both are used in margarine tubs and yogurt containers for example.

But, he warned, do not heat anything in any type of plastic in the microwave.

If you do use these hard No. 7 plastic bottles, the Green Guide, published by the National Geographic Society, advises you to avoid washing them in a dishwasher or with harsh detergent to limit wear and tear.