environment – Page 6 – B12 Solipsism

Chicago Prepares for a Warmer Future Due To Climate Change

May 23, 2011May 23, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

Baton Rouge? Yikes. I’ve been to Baton Rouge, and that was pretty steamy. But what is Baton Rouge going to be like?

Regardless, this Chicago initiative is pretty smart. Are other cities this far along? I assume any government run by Republicans will have their head in the sand, pretending that the earth’s climate isn’t changing, despite evidence.

The Windy City is preparing for a heat wave — a permanent one. City planners in Chicago have been told that as temperatures rise, some plants native to the region will die out. Climate scientists have told city planners that based on current trends, Chicago will feel more like Baton Rouge than a Northern metropolis before the end of this century.

So, Chicago is getting ready for a wetter, steamier future. Public alleyways are being repaved with materials that are permeable to water. The white oak, the state tree of Illinois, has been banned from city planting lists, and swamp oaks and sweet gum trees from the South have been given new priority. Thermal radar is being used to map the city’s hottest spots, which are then targets for pavement removal and the addition of vegetation to roofs. And air-conditioners are being considered for all 750 public schools, which until now have been heated but rarely cooled.

(click here to continue reading With Eye on Climate Change, Chicago Prepares for a Warmer Future – NYTimes.com.)

and one more snippet, but you should read the whole, interesting article (free using this link).

As the region warms, Chicago is expecting more frequent and extreme storms. In the last three years, the city has had two intense storms classified as 100-year events.

So the work planned for a six-point intersection on the South Side with flooding and other issues is a prototype. The sidewalk in front of the high school on Cermak Road has been widened to include planting areas that are lower than the street surface. This not only encourages more pedestrian traffic, but also provides shade and landscaping. These will be filled with drought-resistant plants like butterfly weed and spartina grasses that sponge up excess water and help filter pollutants like de-icing salts. In some places, unabsorbed water will seep into storage tanks beneath the streets so it can be used later for watering plants or in new decorative fountains in front of the high school.

The bike lanes and parking spaces being added along the street are covered with permeable pavers, a weave of pavement that allows 80 percent of rainwater to filter through it to the ground below. Already 150 alleyways have been remade in this way.

The light-reflecting pavement is Chicago’s own mix and includes recycled tires. Rubbery additives help the asphalt expand in heat without buckling and to contract without cracking.

And I know this would have been a drop in a bucket, considering, but still, would have been nice if it would have happened for reasons other than climate change:

Among the ideas rejected, Ms. Malec-McKenna said, were plans to immediately shut down local coal-powered energy plants — too much cost for too little payback.

Fear, Not Radiation, Seen As Risk to Japanese Sushi

May 12, 2011May 12, 2011 Seth Anderson2 Comments

I’ve noticed that the Japanese restaurants I frequent have been much less busy recently. I wondered if the Japanese earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant disaster was effecting the fish, and this was a danger I should pay attention to. Apparently, not so much, instead, irrational fear of the unknown is a bigger reason why people are not eating sushi this spring.

NPR posed the question to Masashi Kusakabe, director of the Nakaminato Laboratory for Marine Radioecology not far from Tokyo. The research center is devoted to figuring out precisely what happens to radioactive material that gets into the ocean.

Kusakabe says what’s been getting into the Pacific Ocean near Fukushima is mostly radioactive iodine. It dissolves in water, and experiments have shown that the iodine tends to concentrate in algae. Then it gets even more concentrated as it works its way up the food chain.

Kusakabe says that might sound bad, “but the iodine we’re talking about now is iodine -131, which has a very short half-life at eight days.”

Every eight days, half of the iodine goes away. So after a few weeks, there’s not much iodine-131 left in a fish. Kusakabe says radioactive cesium is a lot worse: Its half-life is measured in decades, not days. But so far, much less cesium has gotten into the ocean at Fukushima. Also, the ocean is so vast that radioactive materials are heavily diluted by the time they travel even a few miles.

So the Japanese fish most likely to become contaminated are the ones that spend their entire lives right near the Fukushima power plant. And the government isn’t letting fishing vessels anywhere near the place.

But what about the ocean-going fish that show up on sashimi platters — fish like salmon and tuna? Might they be contaminated by radioactive material from the power plant?

“I don’t think so,” he says, “because tuna move everywhere. They travel, you know, maybe hundreds of kilometers, so they never stay there.”

A tuna might swim by the Fukushima plant. But it wouldn’t hang around long enough to become seriously contaminated.

Kusakabe says the biggest threat to the Japanese fishing industry right now isn’t radiation. It’s fear.

(click here to continue reading Sushi Science: Fear, Not Radiation, Seen As Risk : NPR.)

Obama EPA orders cleanup of the Chicago River

May 12, 2011May 12, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

Awesome news, actually. Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel will have a good way to start helping the City of Chicago improve…

Michael Hawthorne reports:

The Obama administration is ordering an ambitious cleanup of the Chicago River, a dramatic step toward improving an urban waterway treated for more than a century as little more than an industrialized sewage canal.

In a letter obtained Wednesday by the Tribune (PDF), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency demands that stretches of the river must be clean enough for “recreation in and on the water,” a legal term for recreational activities including swimming and canoeing. The order also applies to two connected waterways, the Cal-Sag Channel and Little Calumet River.

If state officials fail to adopt more stringent water quality standards, the “EPA will promptly do so itself” by invoking its authority under the federal Clean Water Act, the agency’s top water official told Lisa Bonnett, interim director of the Illinois EPA.

“A decade of investments in walkways, boat ramps and parks have provided people with access to the water,” Susan Hedman, the U.S. EPA’s regional administrator, said in a statement. “And now we need to make sure the water is safe.”

Federal officials have been suggesting the river improvements for more than a year but took more aggressive action because they believed state regulators haven’t gone far enough. Complying with the order likely will require more expensive sewer bills in Chicago and the Cook County suburbs, where homeowners and businesses pay among the nation’s lowest costs for treating human and industrial waste.

The nine-page order goes far beyond standards adopted last year by the Illinois Pollution Control Board, a state rule-making panel. The state’s plan limits disease-causing bacteria in the river, but only to a point considered safe enough for paddlers and boaters who briefly fall into the water.

What the Obama administration is envisioning sets the bar higher. As a result, two of the Chicago-area’s massive sewage-treatment plants would need to be overhauled to disinfect partially treated human and industrial waste that churns endlessly into the waterways. Chicago is the only major U.S. city that skips that important germ-killing step. Until now, the river and its connected waterways have been exempt from the toughest provisions of the Clean Water Act because it was long assumed that people wouldn’t want to come near the fetid channels.

(click here to continue reading Water pollution: Obama EPA orders dramatic cleanup of the Chicago River – chicagotribune.com.)

A few photos of the Chicago River. More here

USDA suggests Monsanto police itself

April 27, 2011April 27, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

Lovely. What’s next? Asking ExxonMobile to conduct its own environmental studies for the EPA? Asking G.E. to do its own tax audits for the IRS? We expected better than this from Obama’s administration.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration introduced a pilot project in the Federal Register this month which would allow biotech seed companies to perform their own environmental impact studies of novel seed varieties before deregulation. The USDA’s move seems to be a response to a decision last August by Federal Judge Jeffrey White which banned the planting of genetically modified sugar beets until an environmental study assessed the impact of commercial cultivation. White ruled that the USDA’s approval of the beets violated the National Environmental Policy Act.

Proponents of the USDA’s project believe the decision will make the biotech industry less vulnerable to legal challenges and speed the registration process of new GE crops. “A big deterrent to future lawsuits would be if the USDA were to win some of them,” said Karen Batra, director of communications at Biotechnology Industry Organization, to Capital Press. “The more information the department has, the better case they can make.”

Most recently The Center for Food Safety challenged the USDA’s unregulated approval of GE-alfalfa saying the decision puts organic and conventional farmers at risk. The case is pending.

Organic advocates believe the USDA’s pilot will slow what they believe to be an already ineffective process and encourage more legal challenges.

“There’s virtually no chance, in the current political climate, that the idea of expanding the role of biotech is going to speed up approval,” said Chuck Benbrook, chief scientist for The Organic Center. “The fact of the matter is there are many good reasons not to trust science from Monsanto. Almost inevitably the first assessments carried out under this pilot program will be challenged in court—probably successfully.”

Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, said the USDA’s proposal would make an already poor process worse.

“This decision would give us additional incentive to challenge a seed up for deregulation, subject to other factors,” he said. “We might actually challenge the process itself. This decision seems to go against some pretty basic scientific integrity guidelines. Letting a company do its own assessment is a pretty obvious conflict of interest.”

(click here to continue reading USDA suggests Monsanto do its own environmental impact studies | Farming content from New Hope 360.)

GOP Wins Deep Cuts in Environment Spending, Earth Loses

April 13, 2011April 13, 2011 Seth Anderson1 Comment

Yes, the GOP won, in the short term. But I’d argue we all lose if the air we breathe is tainted with toxicity, if the water we drink is full of carcinogens, if the soil our food is grown is destroyed with heavy metals, or worse. So I wouldn’t want to start doing a jig in celebration. I’d rather mourn that so-called conservatives have no interest in conserving the only planet we have.

In negotiating the budget deal that averted a government shutdown, Democrats and the White House claimed a big victory in preventing Republicans from blocking a set of environmental regulations. But as details of the compromise became known Tuesday, it was clear Republicans had won deep reductions in spending at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Under the deal headed to House and Senate votes by the end of this week, the EPA’s 2011 budget would be reduced by 16% from 2010 spending, taking it to $8.7 billion.

That reflects the kind of tradeoffs each side made in the negotiations over the bill. The legislation doesn’t include most of the policy provisions that Republicans proposed to block funding for key administration priorities on health care, the environment and other issues. But Republicans found Democrats moving more than halfway in the compromise over how much to cut spending in the $1.05 trillion bill for the remaining six months of the 2011 fiscal year.

…

The EPA was also a major focus of both parties. The deal didn’t include a Republican-backed measure that would have stripped the agency of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases and other pollutants. But the bill cuts $1.6 billion from the agency.

“The Obama administration has dumped money into the EPA over the past two years, and what the American people have seen as a result is a slew of new regulations pouring out of the agency,” said Rep. Mike Simpson (R., Idaho). Mr. Simpson, chairman of the Interior subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, helped fashion the EPA cut in the spending deal.

On Mr. Obama’s watch, the EPA’s budget has risen sharply, to $10.3 billion in the 2010 fiscal year, after years in which its funding hovered between $7.5 billion and $7.7 billion.

Most of the EPA cuts will reduce aid to help states implement health and environmental-protection laws. Mr. Obama had proposed cutting those programs, but only by about $200 million.

“These federal cuts make our job to provide a clean environment that much harder,” said R. Steven Brown, the agency’s executive director, who said the practical effect would be to derail roughly $1 billion in improvements to sewage-treatment and drinking-water plants.

The deal also cuts by $149 million, or 33%, a federal fund for buying land for environmental purposes. Programs related to climate change would be cut by $49 million, or 13%.

The position of the president’s special adviser on climate change would be eliminated.

(click here to continue reading GOP Wins Deep Cuts in Environment Spending – WSJ.com.)

Sickening. The EPA is already short-staffed and underfunded; intentionally gutted so as to not be able to enforce existing regulations. Now big businesses will have even less of a fear of being cited for destroying the environment. Again, we all lose.

Coal Subsidies and Congressional Liars

February 3, 2011February 3, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

Speaking of hidden costs and corporations getting a free ride, compare and contrast the coal-owned Congressman from West Virginia on the one hand…

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), the newest member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, claimed today that the coal industry doesn’t receive any government subsidies, unlike every other form of energy. The former governor of coal-state West Virginia, who famously fired a rifle at clean energy legislation in a campaign ad, argued that the Obama administration has “villainized” coal. In a hearing on energy markets, Manchin went on to criticize the Environmental Protection Agency — which has issued regulations to limit the catastrophic impact of mountaintop removal mining and the existential threat of global warming pollution — for putting up “roadblocks” on the “greatest source” of energy in the nation:

What I don’t understand is the subsidies. The subsidies of energy, whether it be to oil, gas, wind, solar, biofuels, ethanol. The only energy source — which is the greatest source that we have so far as we’re dependent on — is coal. It doesn’t get a penny of subsidies. But it’s been villainized by this administration and so many people and it’s the one we depend on the most. It gives back more than it takes. I can’t figure it out.

We’re trying to use it in so many different forms, in super-critical heating, and things of this sort. We’re running into roadblocks with the EPA from every turn that we go. We’re trying to use it in conjunction with our natural gas productions, and trying to look at the changing the fleet to compressed natural gas, I think that’s very doable. Do you all have a comment on why that one source of energy which is the most dependent upon in this nation has no types of subsidies but the others demand so many subsidies?

(click here to continue reading Wonk Room » Manchin Claims Coal ‘Doesn’t Get A Penny Of Subsidies’.)

and on the other hand, facts:

In reality, the coal industry is heavily subsidized by the federal and state governments, enjoying explicit subsidies of billions of dollars a year, plus the indirect subsidy of free pollution that costs the United States 10,000 lives a year, destroys the land and water of mining communities, and destabilizes our climate. In September 2009, the Environmental Law Institute identified coal industry “subsidies of around $17 billion between 2002 and 2008″:

Credit for Production of Nonconventional Fuels ($14,097,000,000)– IRC Section 45K. This provision provides a tax credit for the production of certain fuels. Qualifying fuels include: oil from shale, tar sands; gas from geopressurized brine, Devonian shale, coal seams, tight formations, biomass, and coal-based synthetic fuels. This credit has historically primarily benefited coal producers.

Characterizing Coal Royalty Payments as Capital Gains ($986,000,000) – IRC Section 631(c). Income from the sale of coal under royalty contract may be treated as a capital gain rather than ordinary income for qualifying individuals.

Exclusion of Benefit Payments to Disabled Miners ($438,000,000) – 30 U.S.C. 922(c). Disability payments out of the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund are not treated as income to the recipients.

Other-Fuel Excess of Percentage over Cost Depletion ($323,000,000)– IRC Section 613. Taxpayers may deduct 10 percent of gross income from coal production.

Credit for Clean Coal Investment ($186,000,000)– IRC Sections 48A and 48B. Available for 20 percent of the basis of integrated gasification combined cycle property and 15 percent of the basis for other advanced coal-based generation technologies.

Special Rules for Mining Reclamation Reserves ($159,000,000) – IRC Section 468. This deduction is available for early payments into reserve trusts, with eligibility determined by the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act and the Solid Waste Management Act. The amounts attributable to mines rather than solid-waste facilities are conservatively assumed to be one-half of the total.

84-month Amortization Period for Coal Pollution Control ($102,000,000) – IRC Section 169(d)(5). Extends the amortization period used in calculating the deduction from the generally applicable 60-month period available for other types of pollution control facilities.

Expensing Advanced Mine Safety Equipment ($32,000,000) – IRC Section 179E. The costs of qualifying mine safety equipment may be expensed rather than recovered through depreciation.

Black Lung Disability Trust Fund ($1,035,000,000)– As industry excise tax payments did not sufficiently cover early benefits payments, the BLDTF was given “indefinite authority to borrow” from the U.S. General Fund, and bailed out for $6.498 billion, 13 percent of which is relevant to the 2002-2008 period.

In addition, Synapse Energy Economics found that the government subsidizes the coal industry through several other avenues:

Financial support for the World Bank and other international financial institutions that finance fossil fuel use and extraction. Since 1994, these institutions have provided $137 billion in direct and indirect financial support for new coal-fired power plants.

U.S. Treasury Department’s backing of tax-exempt bonds and federally subsidized taxable Build America Bonds for use in the electric sector. $81 billion in tax-exempt debt was issued between 2002 and 2006 for electric power, most for coal plants.

U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service provision of loans, loan guarantees, and lien accommodations to public power companies that are investing in new or existing coal plants.

Tax credits, loans, and loan guarantees through the U.S. Department of Energy. In 2009, DOE issued $5.9 billion in loan guarantees for advanced coal projects.

Furthermore, cash-strapped state governments give millions of dollars in subsidies to coal, including $115 million from Kentucky, and $26 million from Virginia. In 2008, then-Gov. Manchin himself offered Appalachian Fuel $200 million in subsidies for a liquid coal plant.

So I guess you can do your own math and decide if these constitute pennies worth of government subsidies, or just pixie dust.

The Man With the Snow Job

February 3, 2011February 3, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

Proving once again that Illinois elected a moron for our Senator, Mark Kirk blamed Al Gore’s divorce for the lack of climate change bill in Congress. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to me either.

Gail Collins writes, in part:

Al Gore, on the phone between plane flights Wednesday, of course, pointed to global warming. “Here’s a basic fact,” he said. “There is about 4 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere today than there was in 1970.” That extra water, he said, is because of warmer oceans and warmer air, and is returning to earth as extra-heavy rain and snow.

Remind me again why we aren’t fighting global warming? It’s win-win. Even if all the hordes of scientists are wrong in believing that human beings are causing climate change, the remedies would still be good for the environment and for energy independence.

…We could blame President Obama for doing health care reform instead of global warming, but Congress is even more afraid of the energy lobby than the insurance companies. The president seems to be planning to do what he can by regulation. That prospect makes Republicans so angry that they’re introducing legislation to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from using its powers under the Clean Air Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Obviously, there is nothing more nefarious than having the agency in charge of protecting the environment use the clean air law to keep harmful gases out of the atmosphere.

The Senate sponsor is James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who recently claimed that the supercold winter proves that theories about global warming are “an intellectual fraud.” We could blame Senator Inhofe, but he really isn’t all that satisfactory a villain. It’d sort of be like blaming nuclear proliferation on gophers.

Another opponent of E.P.A. action, Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, used to be aligned with the environmentalists — until he left his moderate House district to run in a Republican Senate primary and abruptly switched positions. Defending himself in a recent interview with Greenwire, Kirk claimed that there was no longer real support for a climate change bill because of “the personal and political collapse of Vice President Gore.”

In other words, environmental warrior Al Gore is responsible for the weather, as well as the pathetic wimpiness of Mark Kirk.

(click here to continue reading The Man With the Snow Job – NYTimes.com.)

Really? Facts are facts, but because someone who popularized the fact went through a public divorce, the facts don’t matter anymore? Lame.

Arctic Waters Warmer Than in 2,000 Years

January 28, 2011January 28, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

The Climate Denialists will be working overtime to discredit these findings

Water flowing from the North Atlantic into the Arctic Ocean is warmer today than at any time in the past 2,000 years, a new study shows.

Nicolas van Nieuwenhove, IFM-Geomar, Kiel A research vessel moving through the Fram Strait northeast of Svalbard. The waters of the Fram Strait, which runs between Greenland and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, have warmed by roughly 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, the study’s authors said. The water temperatures are about 2.5 degrees higher than during the Medieval Warm Period, a period of elevated warmth between A.D. 900 and 1300.

The findings are another indication that recent global warming is atypical in the context of historical climate fluctuations, said Thomas Marchitto, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a co-author of the study.

“It doesn’t necessarily prove that the change that we see is man-made, but it does strongly point toward this being an unusual event,” Dr. Marchitto said. “On a scale of 2,000 years, it stands out dramatically as something that does not look natural.”

The scientists used cores of ocean sediment containing fossils of microscopic shelled organisms called foraminifera to reconstruct past water temperatures in the strait. They found that the abundance of a species of warmer-water foraminifera rose sharply in the past 100 years, becoming dominant over a cold-water variety for the first time in 2,000 years.

The scientists also tested the shells for levels of magnesium, which rise in tandem with water temperature.

“Both of those approaches gave us the same answers,” Dr. Marchitto said.

(click to continue reading Arctic Waters Warmer Than in 2,000 Years – NYTimes.com.)

Topsy-Turvy Weather

January 25, 2011January 25, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

Regional weather aberrations like the snow fall in New York make for good copy, but the earth is bigger than just the Eastern Seaboard of the US:

For two winters running, an Arctic chill has descended on Europe, burying that continent in snow and ice. Last year in the United States, historic blizzards afflicted the mid-Atlantic region. This winter the Deep South has endured unusual snowstorms and severe cold, and a frigid Northeast is bracing for what could shape into another major snowstorm this week.

Yet while people in Atlanta learn to shovel snow, the weather 2,000 miles to the north has been freakishly warm the past two winters. Throughout northeastern Canada and Greenland, temperatures in December ran as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Bays and lakes have been slow to freeze; ice fishing, hunting and trade routes have been disrupted.

Iqaluit, the capital of the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, had to cancel its New Year’s snowmobile parade. David Ell, the deputy mayor, said that people in the region had been looking with envy at snowbound American and European cities. “People are saying, ‘That’s where all our snow is going!’ ” he said.

The immediate cause of the topsy-turvy weather is clear enough. A pattern of atmospheric circulation that tends to keep frigid air penned in the Arctic has weakened during the last two winters, allowing big tongues of cold air to descend far to the south, while masses of warmer air have moved north.

The deeper issue is whether this pattern is linked to the rapid changes that global warming is causing in the Arctic, particularly the drastic loss of sea ice. At least two prominent climate scientists have offered theories suggesting that it is.

(click to continue reading Topsy-Turvy Weather – U.S. Is Frigid, and Arctic Warmer Than Usual – NYTimes.com.)

and because the Climate Change Deniers are so vocal and well funded by various business interests, they get a special shout-out

Bloggers who specialize in raising doubts about climate science have gleefully pointed to the recent winters in the United States and Europe as evidence that climatologists must be mistaken about a warming trend. These commentators have not been as eager to write about the strange warmth in parts of the Arctic, a region that scientists have long predicted will warm more rapidly than the planet as a whole.

(click to continue reading Topsy-Turvy Weather – U.S. Is Frigid, and Arctic Warmer Than Usual – NYTimes.com.)

Chicago coal plants blamed for cancer, premature deaths

January 21, 2011January 21, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

I wouldn’t want to live near this plant, despite what apologists like to claim. Being able to see the plume is bad enough.

The Clean Air Task Force, a national nonprofit atmospheric pollution task force, estimated that 27 people died prematurely in 2010 because of emissions from Crawford. The task force said the annual mortality rate attributed to Crawford ranges from 25 to 75 persons.

Nearby Fisk plant in Little Village saw 15 premature deaths in 2010, the task force estimated. In Cook County there were 150 premature deaths and nearly 3,000 heart attacks attributable to existing power plants, the group said.

Both the Crawford and Fisk plants are owned by Chicago-based Midwest Generation, a subsidiary of Edison International.

“We do not believe our plants have any health effects,” said Susan Olavarria, director of governmental affairs and communications at Edison International. “We look at every complaint and we take them very seriously.”

(click to continue reading South Side coal plants blamed for cancer, premature deaths | News | Chicago Journal.)

Coal Tar Toxic, EPA Indifferent

January 18, 2011January 18, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

If only there was some regulatory agency that protected the interests of people and the environment…

Michael Hawthorne of the Trib writes:

If a company dumped the black goop behind a factory, it would violate all sorts of environmental laws and face an expensive hazardous-waste cleanup.

But playgrounds, parking lots and driveways in many communities are coated every spring and summer with coal tar, a toxic byproduct of steelmaking that contains high levels of chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems.

Nearly two decades after industry pressured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to exempt coal tar-based pavement sealants from anti-pollution laws, a growing number of government and academic studies are questioning the safety of the widely used products. Research shows that the tar steadily wears off and crumbles into contaminated dust that is tracked into houses and washed into lakes.

In Lake in the Hills, a fast-growing McHenry County suburb about 50 miles northwest of Chicago, researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey found that driveway dust was contaminated with extremely high levels of benzo(a)pyrene, one of the most toxic chemicals in coal tar. The amount was 5,300 times higher than the level that triggers an EPA Superfund cleanup at polluted industrial sites.

(click to continue reading New doubts cast on safety of common driveway sealant – Chicago Tribune.)

…because profits for industry always seem to trump petty health concerns as far as the EPA is concerned:

Despite the EPA’s long-standing worries about the chemicals, industry successfully lobbied to exempt coal tar pavement sealants when the agency tightened hazardous-waste rules for coke ovens during the early 1990s. The little-noticed change made it easier for manufacturers to keep selling the products, which can contain as much as 30 percent coal tar by weight.

Agency spokesmen declined to make anyone available to discuss the exemption, but said in a statement there are no plans to revise it. “EPA regulations allow for the legitimate recycling of coal tar under certain specified parameters,” the statement said.

Scientists started to track the movement of coal tar sealants into homes and lakes about a decade ago, after pinpointing the source of alarmingly high levels of PAHs in Barton Springs, a popular swimming hole in Austin, the Texas capital. Tom Bashara, an environmental investigator, noticed that pollution hotspots in a creek flowing into the pool were near parking lots coated with coal tar.

…

In Austin, the scientists also found that dust inside apartments next to parking lots coated with coal tar was 25 times more contaminated than the dust in units next to lots coated with asphalt or left unsealed. Young children could be the most vulnerable to exposure, the researchers concluded, because they play on or near floors where dust collects.

Sick kids? Who cares? Got to ensure quarterly profit margins increase…

Side note, home testing sounds fairly easy:

Q. Is there a test to check if I have coal tar sealant on my driveway?

A. A definitive test is expensive, but officials in Austin, Texas, came up with an alternative. Use a screwdriver or razor blade to scrape off a small amount of pavement sealant and place it in a glass vial filled with mineral spirits. Seal the vial, shake it and allow it to sit for 30 minutes. If the liquid is dark and coffee-colored, the sealant likely is asphalt-based. If it looks like amber-colored tea and remains more clear, assume it’s coal tar-based.

…

The only definitive way to tell is by checking the CAS number on the product’s material safety data sheet, usually available online or from contractors. The CAS number for coal tar is 65996-93-2.

Fiji Water Sued for Greenwashing

January 8, 2011January 8, 2011 Seth Anderson0 comment

A novel strategy. Will it change anything? Probably not, unless people stop purchasing Fiji Water.

A Southern California woman has sued the FIJI Water Company in a class action complaint that alleges the firm’s claim of having a carbon-negative product amounts to false and misleading advertising that sways consumers to buy the pricey bottled water.

The law firm Newport Trial Group filed the suit on December 20 in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on behalf of Southern California resident Desiree Worthington, who is described as having purchased FIJI Water repeatedly in the past four years — a period that roughly coincides with the start of FIJI’s carbon-negative marketing campaign.

FIJI Water announced the campaign in November 2007 as part of a broader plan to make the bottling, packaging and transportation of the product more environmentally responsible.

(click to continue reading FIJI Water Sued Over Claim That Product is Carbon Negative | Reuters.)

The complaint says:

“Defendants’ carbon-negative claim is deceptive and misleading … reasonable consumers of FIJI water understand Defendants’ ‘carbon-negative’ claim as meaning that FIJI water’s current operations remove more carbon from the atmosphere than they release into it. This is simply not the case; in reality, FIJI water’s operations do not remove more carbon from the atmosphere than they release into it. Instead, they use a discredited carbon accounting method called ‘forward crediting.’

“To reduce their carbon footprint, corporations purchase carbon ‘offset credits,’ which is a generic term for any tradable certificate or permit representing the right of the purchaser to emit one ton of carbon dioxide. ‘Standard offset credits’ represent carbon reductions that have already taken place. By contrast, ‘forward offset credits’ represent carbon reductions that may or may not take place up to several decades in the future.”

And Mother Jones adds:

Despite selling, you know, water, Fiji Water is not the most transparent corporation. The company, the subject of a groundbreaking investigative feature we ran in 2009, is now the target of a lawsuit for deceptively marketing itself as “carbon-negative.” A US District Court class-action suit filed by a Newport, California, firm on behalf of a Santa Ana woman named Desiree Worthington accuses Fiji Water of using a practice known as “forward crediting”: essentially, giving yourself credit for carbon reductions that haven’t happened yet.

In the lawsuit, Worthington argues that she paid more for Fiji Water specifically because it advertised itself as a carbon-negative product. She says she expected that the “carbon-negative” label meant that Fiji was currently taking more carbon out of the environment than it was producing. This is consistent with the company’s view: Fiji Water claims on its website to have been “a carbon-negative brand” since 2008, “under which we will continue to offset 120% of our emissions” (emphasis mine). However, under the forward crediting model, the offsets do not need to be currently occurring, they can simply be anticipated actions. Indeed, Fiji Water has said in a press release that the offsets necessary to make it “carbon-negative” will not be realized until 2037.

(click to continue reading Fiji Water Sued for Greenwashing | Mother Jones.)

What’s in Your Water

December 20, 2010December 20, 2010 Seth Anderson0 comment

If you are curious what toxic chemicals are in your water, the New York Times took the data from the Environmental Working Group and turned it into a slick little database. Click through, and check out your community:

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal. Examine whether contaminants in your water supply met two standards: the legal limits established by the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the typically stricter health guidelines. The data was collected by an advocacy organization, the Environmental Working Group, who shared it with The Times.

(click to continue reading What’s in Your Water – Interactive Feature – The New York Times.)

hexavalent chromium found in drinking water in Chicago and elsewhere

December 19, 2010December 20, 2010 Seth Anderson0 comment

[Lake Michigan, near Green Bay, WI]

Hexavalent chromium¹ found in drinking water in Chicago and elsewhere, and yet the EPA refuses to add it to their list of toxins to pay attention to. Criminal oversight, if you ask me.

Michael Hawthorne writes, in part:

The cancer-causing metal made infamous by the movie “Erin Brockovich” is turning up in tap water from Chicago and more than two dozen other cities, according to a new study that urges federal regulators to adopt tougher standards.

Even though scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and National Toxicology Program have linked the ingestion of hexavalent chromium to cancer, the EPA doesn’t require Chicago or other cities to test for the toxic metal. Nor does the EPA limit the dangerous form of chromium in drinking water.

To take a snapshot of what is flowing through taps across the nation, the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization, hired an independent laboratory that found the metal in treated drinking water from 31 cities. The amount in Lake Michigan water pumped to 7 million people in Chicago and its suburbs was 0.18 parts per billion, three times higher than a safety limit California officials proposed last year.

A handful of other cities were significantly above the proposed California limit, including Norman, Okla.; Honolulu; Riverside, Calif.; and Madison, Wis., according to a report to be released Monday. Levels in Milwaukee water were the same as in Chicago.

(click to continue reading Pollution: Dangerous form of chromium found in drinking water in Chicago, other cities – chicagotribune.com.)

We’ve used a reverse osmosis water filter for many years, I hope it filters out hexavalent chromium. Seems like it does

So what is the main cause of this pollutant? Besides a lax, underfunded EPA that is? Industry, of course. Industry that spends millions of dollars defeating regulations that would at least mitigate some of this contamination.

Last year alone, records show, the U.S. Steel and Arcelor Mittal mills dumped a combined 3,100 pounds of chromium into Lake Michigan and its tributaries, less than 9 miles away from Chicago’s water-intake crib off 68th Street. (The federal Toxics Release Inventory doesn’t require industry to report specific types of the metal, but chromium-6 and chromium-3 convert into the other form and back in the environment.)

Indiana officials once sought to relax limits on chromium discharges from U.S. Steel’s massive Gary Works, the largest industrial polluter on the Great Lakes.…Industry has fought for years to block tougher federal and state limits on chromium, which has contaminated drinking water supplies across the country. The award-winning movie “Erin Brockovich” dramatizes one of the most high-profile cases: a miles-long plume of hexavalent chromium dumped by a utility in rural Hinkley, Calif., that led to a $333 million legal settlement over illnesses and cancers.

Update:

If you are curious what specific toxic chemicals are in your water, the New York Times took the data from the Environmental Working Group and turned it into a slick little database. Click through, and check out your community:

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal. Examine whether contaminants in your water supply met two standards: the legal limits established by the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the typically stricter health guidelines. The data was collected by an advocacy organization, the Environmental Working Group, who shared it with The Times.

(click to continue reading What’s in Your Water – Interactive Feature – The New York Times.)

Footnotes:

aka chromium-6, a clear cause in stomach cancers [↩]

China’s Push Into Wind Worries U.S. Industry

December 16, 2010December 16, 2010 Seth Anderson0 comment

Well, on the one hand, the Chinese government fully supports and subsidizes its green power industries, and on the other hand, the U.S. government, and especially the Tea Baggers and Oil Slurper Republicans are dismissive of any energy policy that doesn’t focus solely on highways, natural gas, coal and oil. So, do the math: Chinese companies are going to be lapping the innovations of American companies until something changes. And it probably won’t.

Goldwind and other Chinese-owned companies plan a big push into the American wind power market in coming months.

While proponents say the Chinese manufacturers should be welcomed as an engine for creating more green jobs and speeding the adoption of renewable energy in this country, others see a threat to workers and profits in the still-embryonic American wind industry.

“We cannot sit idly by while China races to the forefront of clean energy production at the expense of U.S. manufacturing,” Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said during a debate this year over federal subsidies for wind energy.

(click to continue reading China’s Push Into Wind Worries U.S. Industry – NYTimes.com.)

and World Trade Organization threats notwithstanding, China is serious:

American wind output still meets only a small portion of the nation’s overall demand for electricity — about 2 percent — compared with countries like Spain, which gets about 14 percent of its electrical power from the wind.

And the tepid United States economy, rock-bottom natural gas prices and lingering questions about federal wind energy policy have stalled the American wind industry, which currently represents only about 85,000 jobs. Even the American market leader, General Electric, reported a sharp drop in third-quarter turbine sales, compared with the same period last year.

All of which might indicate that dim market prospects await the wave of wind-turbine makers from China. But the Chinese companies can play a patient game because they have big backing from China’s government in the form of low-interest loans and other blandishments — too much help, in the critics’ view.

…

In the case of China, the Obama administration is investigating whether the Chinese may have violated World Trade Organization rules in subsidizing its clean-energy industry.

Mr. Rowland’s company, Goldwind, is the fledgling American arm of a state-owned Chinese company that has emerged as the world’s fifth-largest turbine maker: the Xinjiang Goldwind Science and Technology Company.

To help finance its overseas efforts, Xinjiang Goldwind raised nearly $1 billion in an initial public stock offering in Hong Kong in October — on top of a $6 billion low-interest loan agreement in May from the government-owned China Development Bank.

Goldwind, which set up a sales office in Chicago, has hired about a dozen executives, engineers and other employees so far. Most, like Mr. Rowland, are Americans already experienced in the wind energy field.

Not sure where exactly the Goldwind U.S. HQ will be located, but somewhere near me presumedly. Google Maps says on W. Washington, which is probably correct, but Goldwind’s site doesn’t yet reflect this.

Another major international player in the wind energy business will soon be calling Chicago home, as Chinese manufacturer Goldwind has announced plans to locate its North American headquarters in the city.

Goldwind’s move to the Windy City is the latest in a string of major wind firms that have looked to Chicago as the most logical business center for their US operations, attracted by the city’s central location, international airports, strong legal and financial expertise, and an experienced, educated workforce.

The firm also announced it has hired a talented pair of new executives to head the company, including Tim Rosenzweig as CEO and Matthew Olive as Director of Sales, both well-seasoned wind industry officials.

(click to continue reading Goldwind to Locate US Headquarters in Chicago, Hires Executive Staff – News – The Illinois Wind Energy Association.)

However, honestly, as a consumer, I’d happily purchase a home windmill from any manufacturer, regardless of geopolitical concerns. Jingoism doesn’t really factor in. And I’d be happy if my cousin got a job with Goldwind, or some other foreign green energy company. If the US is too short-sighted to encourage alternative energy companies, well, c’est la vie.

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