air pollution

Bali conference could end deforestation overnight

This post was co-written with Dorjee Sun, the head of Carbon Conservation, a company that works to protect forests in Indonesia from destruction.

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Bali, Indonesia, is the perfect backdrop for this week's climate summit. No country better embodies the immense peril of inaction -- and the immense opportunity this meeting has to make massive and immediate progress in stemming the climate crisis.

Indonesia is the world's third largest global warming polluter, behind the United States and China, and just ahead of Brazil. But in Indonesia, like Brazil and the rest of the tropical world, pollution isn't coming from factories, power plants, or cars like it is in the industrialized world. Instead, almost all of it is coming from the rapid burning of the world's vast tropical forests to make room for timber, agriculture, and especially palm oil plantations. (Despite its green reputation, palm oil is anything but: a recent study in Science found that palm oil, like other biofuels, produces two to nine times more greenhouse gases than regular old crude oil because of the forests and grasslands destroyed for its production.)

Companies like Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, Cargill and Seattle's Imperium Renewables are paying top dollar to turn palm oil into food, cosmetics and biodiesel. That global demand has driven the value of a hectare of palms above $1000 (PDF) in some cases -- providing a powerful financial incentive to corporations, investors, and farmers to raze the forests, regardless of the consequences to the climate or to the endangered orangutans, tigers, and rhinoceroses - and indigenous people -- who need them to survive.

The Bali conference could immediately eliminate that perverse accounting by making sure forests and other wild lands around the world are financially valued for the carbon they store, and not just their potential as timber or agricultural land. The way to do that is to allow polluters to get credit for protecting forests that they can apply against their pollution reduction obligations, an idea called carbon ranching or avoided deforestation.

Polluters would jump at this opportunity. Protecting forests from destruction can cost as little as 75 cents per ton of carbon dioxide - even at higher costs, it's a fraction of the price (PDF) of cleaning up most industrial pollution. In the past, some environmentalists criticized carbon ranching for this very reason: they were concerned that if polluters focused their greenhouse gas reduction efforts on forest conservation, that would divert money from necessary clean-ups in industrial pollution. That's the wrong way to look at it. Because locking up carbon dioxide by protecting forests is so cheap, it means that the world can achieve bigger reductions in global warming pollution faster and for less money. Carbon ranching should be an argument for bigger immediate pollution reductions, from both forests and industry, not a way for polluters to get around their responsibility to clean up their own pollution.

New study finds that pollution from ships kills 60,000 a year

It's surprising how much pollution ships emit: over 2,000 tons of diesel soot a year in southern California, for example, about 10 percent of the total in the region.

Worse, a new study by researchers at the University of Delaware and Rochester Institute of Technology finds that the burning of cheap, dirty, sulfurous "residual oil" on ships kills an estimated 60,000 people around the world. "Premature mortality" is the phrase used in the study.

Annual average contribution of shipping to (particulate matter) PM<sub>2.5</sub&gt concentrations for Case 2b (in µg/m³). Copyright © 2007 American Chemical Society

(h/t: The Blue Marble)

Beijing temporarily clears the air

I arrived in Beijing in late October, in time for the last days of the Communist Party's 17th National Congress. That's the top political conference that takes place once every five years, and the city was swarming with national and international visitors and press.

That day there were blue skies in Beijing. No kidding. The streets were swept clean, the sidewalk vendors gone, the DVD hawkers on holiday. There were many more police on the street, fewer cars. The sunset looked oily, a slick translucent glow to the clouds -- but the last time I visited Beijing in April, I hadn't even seen the sun through the smog.

Beijing during the Congress. Photo: Christina Larson

I spoke with a representative from the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau the following Monday who neither confirmed nor denied -- typical here -- what everyone else told me: In time for the big event, the city had ordered official cars off the road and shuttered surrounding factories. And voila, brighter skies. (As a test, I even went for a run.)

Two days later, the conference was over. The skies were grey, the sun obscured. There were once again cigarette butts and orange peels on the sidewalk; the clack-clack of sidewalk cobblers, and the men waving "Bourne Identity 3" DVDs. I coughed as I walked down the street; the air left a strange aftertaste.

California ‘cool cities’ are taking the lead on climate change

Now in her seventh term, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) represents California's 36th Congressional District.

Even sunny skies and pleasant ocean breezes over much of our state can't mask the fact that Californians breathe some of the most polluted air in the nation. California is the world's 12th largest source of carbon dioxide, the chief heat-trapping gas that causes global warming. As dirty as our air is, we are taking the lead nationally in trying to make the air cleaner and our actions greener. Last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law ambitious legislation establishing the goal of reducing dangerous emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

And yet many in Washington, D.C., are unhappy with California's efforts and are working to undermine and override state laws and regulations designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and promote cleaner fuels.

Several weeks ago, emails from the U.S. Department of Transportation suggested senior-level administrators, and possibly the secretary of transportation herself, have been lobbying on behalf of automobile interests to persuade the EPA not to issue a waiver allowing California's clean-air rules.

Currently, the Bush administration and Gov. Schwarzenegger are at odds over whether California can do its part to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from vehicles. Sixteen other states have either adopted or are planning to adopt the California standard, so if the U.S. EPA grants the waiver, it would directly impact 40 percent of the U.S. auto market. In April, Schwarzenegger sent a letter to the EPA giving them six months to act on his waiver before he would be forced to file a lawsuit. Six months have now passed, and the EPA has still not made a decision. Not one to make an empty threat, Schwarzenegger's administration filed suit today demanding that the EPA make a decision on the waiver.

It is unclear how this standoff will end, and whether the Bush administration will allow California the leeway to regulate its own emissions. Fortunately, the feds cannot impede a growing effort to address global warming now underway at the local level: the "Cool Cities" program.

Mercury pollution is driving loons crazy

This year I spent some lazy late-summer days watching loons patrol a wilderness area lake I'd backpacked to. I should have been totally relaxed and enjoying this gorgeous and remote spot in the Adirondacks, but I couldn't help wondering if these birds had succeeded in hatching a brood, with no sign of little ones about. A friend at the Biodiversity Research Institute had told me of a paper they were soon publishing, which demonstrated the negative impacts of methyl mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest on loon behavior, physiology, survival, and reproductive success in the Northeast. The most impacted pairs David et al studied showed signs of lethargy and aberrant behavior (crazy loons), and they also "fledged" 41 percent fewer young. The birds' body burden of mercury increased 8.4 percent each year during the study. Sobering and awful.

So I cheered this month when I heard that New Source Review rules had been used by my state and seven others to successfully sue an Ohio company for acid rain impacts on wildlife, ecosystems, and structures in the Northeast. While acid rain is only peripherally related to the mercury problem we have from those same plants, it's a step in the right direction, and as this article points out, it's really good news for two reasons.

Notable quotable

“I’ve been a Republican my whole life, but I’ll be doggoned if Al Gore isn’t right. Is it fair for you and me — this generation — to pollute for all the generations to come when we’re already seeing the effects — global warming, mercury, particulate matter?” — newly minted environmentalist Sammy Prim

Brundtland update finds problems unsolved

How about a big, gristly, indigestible hunk of bad news? Yeah? OK! Everything that was going to hell 20 years ago is still going to hell (sub rqd): Twenty years after the seminal … Brundtland Commission report "Our Common Future" warned of persistent global environmental degradation, the most pressing concerns facing the world’s climate and […]

Washington state caps the cost to pollute, rather than the pollution

The Sightline Institute (formerly Northwest Environment Watch) picks up a Seattle P-I report on yet another counterproductive incentive: making it cheaper to pollute in bulk.

The more hazardous waste you produce in Washington, the better the deal you can get from the state. Companies that make chemicals, oil, paint, paper and airplanes must pay a Hazardous Waste Planning Fee for the toxic substances that they pump into the air and water or send to landfills. But because the fee is capped, the top five producers pay less than $8 a ton for their dangerous waste, whereas companies producing smaller amounts can pay up to $250 a ton.

Dave’s Second Law of Sustainability Politics

Clean up coal emissions and you end up with more — and more toxic — coal ash. You get cleaner air, but you get ash that can’t be recycled (into, e.g., concrete). You breath free, but you’ve got arsenic and mercury leaching into your groundwater from coal-ash landfills. Look at this vintage coal magic: There […]