air pollution
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Dog bites man
West Virginia’s two U.S. senators say it’s possible to promote coal and clean air initiatives at the same time. Uh … WTF else are they going to say?
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Climate change justice is contentious
As this round of the IPCC unfolds, developing countries are scurrying to relieve themselves of any major responsibility for historic emissions and, consequently, aggressive mitigation policies.
For example, China has requested inserting language that formally recognizes the percentage of emissions for which developed countries are responsible -- 95 percent from the pre-industrial era until 1950, and 77 percent from 1950 to the start of the millennium.
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Superfund broke thanks to bankrupt polluters
The Center for Public Integrity continues with their massive report on the state of Superfund with a new story today on the $700 million tab that bankrupt polluters have skipped out on.
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New report says federal cleanup program wasting away
Image reprinted with permission from the Center for Public Integrity. A drop-off in both government action and funding has all but stopped the push to clean up America’s most toxic sites, posing health and environmental threats all over the country, according to a comprehensive series of reports released last week by the Center for Public […]
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Why we should ban compressed chemical dusters
I have an untidy habit of eating while I'm working on my computer. Heck, I'm eating a doughnut while I write this post.
Unfortunately, my habit inevitably results in little crumbs of sandwich or potato chips or whatever making their way onto my computer keyboard. Every once in a while I look down at my crumb-ridden keyboard, get disgusted, and embark on a cleaning frenzy. And as many office workers may know, one of the easiest ways to clean a keyboard is with those compressed chemical canister thingies (pictured above). So the other day, while I was merrily blasting away at my keyboard I decided to read the contents. Big mistake.
My little 10-ounce canister contains 100 percent tetrafluoroethane, a greenhouse gas that's sometimes known as HFC-134a (meaning it's a form of hydrofluorocarbon). Before your eyes glaze over, just keep in mind that over a 20-year period, HFC-134a is roughly 3,300 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Nice.
So unless I missed something in the number crunching, using up my 10-ounce can of cleaner will have the same climate-changing effect over the next 20 years as burning at least 100 gallons of gasoline. With that much gas I could drive my trusty Honda Civic from Seattle to New York City. And then back to Chicago. And I would likely still have plenty of fuel left over for side-trips.
All that, packed into a canister retailing for $10.99 at the Office Depot around the corner.
This is not a good idea.
And it strikes me as an instance where the best remedy is pretty simple: just ban it.
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If you won’t go after them, we will
The IPCC reports are some of the most highly anticipated of 2007. An obvious sign? Within two weeks of one report's release, papers are already covering a leak from the next.IPCC Working Group III's focus is on mitigation, meaning a fair number of policy implications can be derived from its conclusions. So here's a hint for America's auto industry: the report calls for urgent action on road pollution.
In the United States, there are 483 passenger cars per 1,000 people (EarthTrends). The world average is about 100, and few countries outnumber our car count (Australia, for example, had 492 in 1996).
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Report from India
Daphne Wysham, co-director of the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network sends the following from Angul, Orissa, the heart of India's Coal Belt, on March 15, 2007:
The smell of burning coal in household fires hangs in the air. Bicyclists carry heavy bags of coal from the mines to sell for a few rupees. They are overtaken by huge lorries carrying more than the tonnage they are supposed to carry -- all part of the black market in coal -- down busy streets, with cattle lying nonchalantly on the road.
We visited communities that were literally on the edge of the coal mines, who had nowhere else to go, having received no compensation for their land, taken by the coal companies and the World Bank. In the heat of the summer they tell us, the temperature in these communities can reach over 130 degrees F. Spontaneous combustion of coal in the open-pit mines cannot be extinguished. Water is polluted and far away. Health care and education is non-existent. Heavy energy-intensive industry is everywhere in Angul: aluminum smelters, steel mills, sponge iron factories.
As we drove to a village on the outskirts of the dirtiest aluminum smelter in the country, Nalco, we were forced to stop as a parade of men dressed in bright orange dress, paint on their faces, were banging drums and cymbals, celebrating the festival of holi, the arrival of spring. They celebrate in colorful garb in their villages as they do every spring although just down the road, on the outskirts of the state-owned Nalco smelter, their cattle are dying in droves from bone-crippling fluorosis -- caused by the excessive fluoride produced from smelting aluminum -- and other undiagnosed diseases.
The people and animals have small tumors on their bodies; the women complain of arthritis-like symptoms and swollen joints that make it hard to do their daily work; the children show signs of genetic malformations. One boy we saw had seven fingers on each hand, and six toes on each foot. Another boy was deaf and retarded, his teeth also weakened, possibly by the fluoride. All the malformed children were born after the aluminum smelter was established here. Many of the women cannot be married if the men learn where they are from; similarly, cattle cannot be sold from this community. it is well-known that here a severe poisoning has taken place at the hands of Nalco.
