Pollution // Current

Obama to skip UN climate talks

A bit of bad news for those seeking quick action on climate change under the new presidential administration: Barack Obama is not... more

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UN climate chief say, World on track to meet Kyoto goals

Emissions by the 40 industrialised nations(EXCEPT THE US) that agreed binding cuts in pollution are down 5% on 1990 levels... more

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Pollution fears over Delhi smog

We have to start cleaning up our atmosphere...and we need to start NOW!! * * * For days the Indian capital, Delhi, has... more

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Climer promotes portable toilets for Everest

Dawa Steven Sherpa is promoting eco-friendly climbing on Mount Everest with a portable toilet. Everest has no toilet facilities,... more

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In a stirring column in Mondays New York Times, editorial writer Lawrence Downes urged former Obama campaign volunteers to enlist in another tour of duty.

The country is not in the best shape to simultaneously fix a sinking economy, a withered government and an ailing planet. But it has no choice, and not much time. So why wait until January to get started?

Downes is right -- we cant wait. Thats why the citizens of Coal River Mountain, West Virginia are already working on building their own future with clean power. I cant think of another place anywhere in the U.S. where such clear distinctions can be drawn between Americas energy past and future.

Nearly 500 mountains have been destroyed throughout Appalachia by mountaintop removal coal mining. Now, West Virginia-based Massey Energy plans to blow up Coal River Mountain piece by piece over the next 14 years so it can extract the coal underneath. When its all done, another mountain will be destroyed, ten square miles devastated, at least 18 miles of streams will be buried or contaminated, and Massey will have supplied less than a quarter of one percent of U.S. annual electricity demand, as estimated by Coal River Mountain Watch.

The citizens of Coal River Mountain have a very different vision: to stimulate the local economy with investments in clean, renewable wind power. Coal River Mountain is blessed with high wind speeds that offer the potential to produce up to 440 megawatts of power without a single stick of dynamite or a whiff of greenhouse gas emissions. Hundreds of jobs would be created; county tax revenues would increase by up to $3 million, and more than a million tons of CO2 would be kept underground each year.

Although Massey has received permits to commence mining, pressure is mounting to consider alternatives, as evidenced by a recent demonstration at the state capitol and a lawsuit to stop the project before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The battle in West Virginia is a microcosm of what is happening across the country. Communities from Appalachia to Arizona are organizing to resist destructive mining practices, stop the construction of new coal plants, and promote a just transition to clean energy. As Times Bryan Walsh reported in the magazine's special election issue:

Environmentalists are fighting new plants with every weapon in their arsenal, from launching lawsuits over CO2 regulations to lobbying financiers to stop investing in coal.

Walsh wrote how Americans are learning lessons from history:

For many green activists, climate change is fundamentally a moral issue. To accept a new generation of polluting coal plants is to doom future generations to an impoverished planet. So the response should be fundamentally moral as well, using the same tactics--civil disobedience, nonviolent protest--as those of the civil rights movement.

If the citizens of Coal River Mountain can do it, so can the rest of us.
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All those thousands of young people who were so captivated and motivated by Barack Obama need to then continue to be motivated for their planet. Now that the election is over the work must begin. And it does not all fall on any one person. To truly make change not just for the sake of saying it but to really mean it, those who went to rallies must now hold the ones they voted for accountable to their promises and hold their feet to the fire if those promises are not adequate to meet the threat of climate change. It is encouraging to see so many groups around the country beginning to awaken to the dangers of continuing fossil fuel use and working to move our country into the future.In a stirring column in Mondays New York Times, editorial writer Lawrence Downes urged former Obama campaign volunteers to enlist... more

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3 days ago

Marine dead zones set to expand rapidly

Rising levels of carbon dioxide could increase the volume of oxygen-depleted 'dead zones' in tropical oceans by as much as 50% before the end of the century — with dire consequences for the health of ecosystems in some of the world's most productive fishing grounds.

At depths between several tens and hundreds of metres, large parts of the tropical oceans are poorly supplied with dissolved oxygen, and are therefore hostile to most marine life. Scientists suspect that these zones are sensitive to climate change, but previous studies have arrived at conflicting conclusions regarding exactly how and why a more CO2-rich world affects oceanic oxygen content.

A team led by Andreas Oschlies of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, has now used a global model of climate, ocean circulation and biogeochemical cycling to extrapolate existing experimental results of the effects of altered carbon and nutrient chemistry on dissolved oxygen to the global ocean1. They found that a CO2-rich world will only have a small impact on waters at middle and high latitudes. But in all tropical oceans the volume of 'oxygen-minimum' zones will substantially increase as ocean bacteria feed on the algae that will flourish as a result of the elevated CO2 levels.

Sporadic measurements in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific suggest oxygen-depleted zones have been slowly expanding over the past 50 years2. But none of the previously assumed physical causes, such as ocean warming and reduced circulation, completely accounts for the effect. This prompted Oschlies and his colleagues to examine how the ocean's biology would be affected by rising CO2 levels. Their results are published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

"Nobody really has ever modelled the feedback of rising CO2 on oceanic oxygen concentrations in such a credible way," says Gian-Kaspar Plattner, a carbon-cycle modeller at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH). "A 50% volume increase of oxygen-poor zones is much more than I would have expected. But further studies, with different climate parameters, are needed to add robustness to these results and reduce uncertainty."

Meanwhile, researchers aboard two German research vessels, the Meteor and the Maria S. Merian, are investigating the matter further. In the waters off western Africa and Peru, which are rich in marine life, teams from the University of Kiel and the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, also in Kiel, will study the physical and biological processes that are thought to drive oxygen loss in tropical oceans.

The coastal economies in these regions rely heavily on fishing. For now, says Oschlies, local fisheries may not feel any downturn because fish stocks can probably evade the dead zones by moving further up in the water column. But if oxygen and nutrient levels continue to drop, that could hit the region hard within a few decades.

Oceanic oxygen levels have varied considerably throughout Earth's past. During the end of the Permian period, around 250 million years ago, catastrophic oxygen losses triggered mass extinction of terrestrial and marine life.Rising levels of carbon dioxide could increase the volume of oxygen-depleted 'dead zones' in tropical oceans by as much... more

jefftego
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4 responses

3 days ago

3-kilometre-thick layer brown cloud Asian cities darker and worse

Vast “brown clouds” of pollution are making Asian cities darker, melting Himalayan glaciers and intensifying regional... more

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9 responses

3 days ago

Environmentalists win big EPA ruling on coal emissions

Hoping this ruling keeps new coal plants from being built in this country. We have enough pollution and toxicity to deal with already. Coal plants contribute at least 30% of the carbon emissions that precipitate climate change. They should be responsible for what they burn as well as the lives they ruin and the mountains they destroy. It is about time. It is about time America leads the way to a new renewable energy future. There is a better way.
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From the article:

Environmentalists have long known that when it comes to climate change, coal will be a dealbreaker. The carbon-intensive fossil fuel provides nearly half of the United States' electricity, and is responsible for some 30% of the country's greenhouse gas emissions. That's just due to the coal plants already operating — as the U.S. looks to expand its energy supply to meet rising demand in the future, over 100 coal plants are in various stages of development around the country. If those plants are built without the means to capture and sequester underground the carbon they emit — and it's far from clear that such technology will be commercially viable in the near-term — our ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avert climate change will be meaningless.

That's why a decision issued on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Environmental Appeals Board is so important. Responding to a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club over a new coal plant being build on American Indian reservation land in Utah, the board ruled that the EPA has no valid reason to refuse to regulate the CO2 emissions that come from new coal-powered plants. The decision pointed to a May 2007 ruling by the Supreme Court that recognized CO2, the main cause of climate change, is indeed a pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act and therefore needs to be regulated by the EPA.

In the months since that landmark decision, the EPA — with the support of the Bush Administration — has doggedly refuse to regulate CO2, much to the dismay of environmentalists. The board's decision will force the EPA to consider CO2 when issuing permits for new power plants, potentially making it — at least in the short-term — all but impossible to certify new coal power plants. That's because the EPA will need to reconfigure its rules on dealing with CO2, which is found in greater concentrations in coal than any other fossil fuel, that force plants in the permitting process to be reevaluated, delaying them for months or longer. "In a nutshell it sends [new plants ]back to the drawing board to address their CO2 emissions," says Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club's National Clean Coal campaign. "In the short term it freezes the coal industry in its tracks."Hoping this ruling keeps new coal plants from being built in this country. We have enough pollution and toxicity to deal with... more

JanforGore
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4 days ago

Study: Air pollution inflicts heavy economic losses on California

Air pollution inflicts losses of about 28 billion U.S. dollars annually on the economy of California, according to a study released on Wednesday.

The heavy losses were caused mainly by premature deaths and pollution-linked illnesses, says the study by researchers at the California State University in Fullerton.

California sees roughly 3,000 smog-related deaths each year, which costs about 25 billion U.S. dollars, according to Jane Hall, a professor of economics and co-director of the university's Institute for Economics and Environment Studies.

Other losses were due to such factors as emergency room visits, asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses, she added.

The study, which focuses on the South Coast and San Joaquin air basins, finds that the two regions rank among the lowest in the country on air pollution.

It also underlines the economic benefits of meeting federal air quality standards at a time when lawmakers and regulators are struggling with California's commitment to protecting public health in a weak economy.

"We are going to pay for it one way or the other. Either we pay to fix the problem or we pay in loss of life and poor health," said Hall, the team leader of the study, who is also a nationally recognized environmental economist.

"This study adds another piece to the puzzle as the public and policy-makers try to understand where do we go from here," Hall added.

The California Air Resources Board is scheduled to vote on Dec.11 to decide whether or not to adopt broader rules which will force more than 1 million heavy-duty diesel truckers to install filters or upgrade their engines.

Truckers and agribusinesses have argued against stricter regulation, saying it is too expensive for them to invest in clean vehicles at a time of economic uncertainty.

The study suggests that attaining the federal standard for exposure to particulates would save more lives than lowering the number of motor vehicle fatalities to zero in most of the regions examined.

Microscopic particulates discharged from tailpipes, factory smoke stacks, diesel trucks and equipments are considered the most lethal forms of air pollution, which can penetrate through lungs and enter bloodstream, the study shows.

Exposure to these fine particles is connected with severe asthma, cancer and premature deaths from heart and lung diseases.Air pollution inflicts losses of about 28 billion U.S. dollars annually on the economy of California, according to a study... more

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5 days ago

Giant Asian smog cloud masks warming impact: U.N.

A three-kilometer thick cloud of brown soot and other pollutants hanging over Asia is darkening cities, killing thousands and damaging crops but may be holding off the worst effects of global warming, the U.N. said on Thursday.

The vast plume of contamination from factories, fires, cars and deforestation contains some particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth, cutting its ability to heat the earth.

"One of the impacts of this atmospheric brown cloud has been to mask the true nature of global warming on our planet," United Nations Environment Program head Achim Steiner said at the launch in Beijing of a new report on the phenomenon.

The amount of sunlight reaching earth through the murk has fallen by up to a quarter in the worst-affected areas and if the brown cloud disperses, global temperatures could rise by up to 2 degrees Celsius.

But the overall effect of slowing climate change is not the silver lining to a dark cloud that it appears to be.

The choking soup of pollutants may hold temperatures down overall, but the mix of particles means it is also speeding up warming in some of the most vulnerable areas and exacerbating the most devastating impacts of higher temperatures.

The complex impact of the cloud, which tends to cool areas near the surface of the earth and warm the air higher up, is believed to be causing a shortening of the monsoon season in India while increasing flooding there and in southern China.

Soot from the cloud is also deposited on glaciers, which are at the center of environmentalists' and politicians' concerns because they feed Asia's key rivers and provide drinking water for billions who live along them.

There the particles capture more solar heat than white, reflective snow and ice -- speeding up melting of a key resource. At a monitoring station near Mount Everest, soot has been found at levels which scientists say would be expected in urban areas.

There is also a high human cost. The report estimates round 340,000 people are dying prematurely because of damage to their lungs, hearts and risk of cancer.A three-kilometer thick cloud of brown soot and other pollutants hanging over Asia is darkening cities, killing thousands and... more

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5 days ago

Is Beijing Fudging Its Pollution Numbers?

A report has been published suggesting that the Chinese government may have falsified statistics in reporting decreases in air... more

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6 days ago

Baby born with sixteen toes

A pair of expectant parents in China's Guangdong province must have got quite a shock last week when the mother gave birth to... more

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38 responses

6 days ago

Ten-Year Probe Reveals Oceans in Peril

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 11 (IPS) - A thousand points of light are being shone into the dark ocean depths as scientists from 82... more

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7 days ago

Concord councilwoman wants city to curb "urban noise"

CONCORD — This isn't about leaf blowers and barking dogs, Councilwoman Helen Allen said. But she wants city... more

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8 days ago

Following The Trail Of Toxic E-Waste - 60 Minutes

60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth - a place government officials and gangsters don't... more

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5 responses

9 days ago

Trapped in black tar: How the oil sands made Canada a suburb of Fort McMurray

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Russia or Nigeria, I swear to god." Andrew Nikiforuk is on stage at the Capilano Performing Arts Theatre, reflecting on life in Alberta as an outspoken critic of the tar sands. Yet one of the most decorated magazine writers in the country spared little as he carved up the captains of industry and politicians behind Alberta's massive oil boom, in front of about 200 people on Oct. 26.

Drawing on his new book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, Nikiforuk forcefully outlined a very ugly business. He described the tar sands development as the largest capital project in the world, at $200 billion since 1996 when the associated pipelines and refineries are rolled in.

Then he set out the stakes. The development of the world's dirtiest oil has made Canada the biggest supplier of the United States' massive energy needs for the last seven years. "While we were having our donuts at Tim Hortons, we were becoming what Stephen Harper calls an 'emerging energy superpower.' "

Nikiforuk also set out the consequences. Not just the environmental ones -- we'll get to those. The political ones. "We are now a petro-state," Nikiforuk declared, with a wildly fluctuating petro dollar, noting that in Nigeria, Venezuela and Russia the consequences are not too subtle. "In Alberta, it's a little more subtle."

The implications of all that oil lucre sloshing loosely about in politics and society are rather profound, Nikiforuk argued, noting that the only real democracies in the Middle East are the countries without any oil. In British Columbia, he says, our complicity is being bought with the tar sands' dirty money. Toxic sour-gas wells that feed the tar sands' own enormous energy demands are putting $2 billion a year in the B.C. government's coffers. The feds are getting $5 billion to $6 billion a year in tar sands-related corporate tax revenue, Nikiforuk estimates. "They've used it to lower your taxes."

He quoted Thomas Friedman's twist on preacher Jonathan Mayhew's famous 1750 dictum: "There is no representation without taxation." In other words, if oil companies are the ones improving governments' accounts, then governments will do the oil companies' bidding, not ours.

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A 2008 industry-funded study suggested that the "steam-assisted gravity drainage" projects (as opposed to the open-pit mines) could extirpate caribou, bear, moose and fish from between one and three million acres. Water in the Athabaska region is in decline by 30 percent since the 1960s, Nikiforuk said. The process of extracting oil from the sand requires vast quantities of water, and produces enormous volumes of toxic waste. Nikiforuk said a dozen tailings ponds cover 50 square kilometers, held back by sand dams that rival the Three Gorges dam in size. "They're all leaking."

Nikiforuk asserts that efforts to monitor the effect on the Athabaska watershed, part of the third-largest river system in the world, is pathetic. In 2004, Nikiforuk said, federal scientists declared that the monitoring program "was designed to find nothing."

"This is Third World," Nikiforuk observes. "It's really disturbing that this would happen in a country like Canada."

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2008/11/06/BlackTar/
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It boils down to this: Canada is now America's drug dealer and making a good profit from it ( the government that is) at the expense of our climate balance, human health, and biodiversity. There is no more stark an example of human greed and political audacity than this. As this speaker asks: how could this happen in a country like Canada? So the next question then is: what will the Obama policy be on tar sands? And if it is continued, how does that make any plan to bring "green jobs" here sustainable with this kind of environmental devastation continuing to be allowed by this government with them profiting from it? This must stop. This country needs an intervention!Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Russia or Nigeria, I swear to god." Andrew Nikiforuk is on stage at the Capilano... more

JanforGore
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12 responses

9 days ago

Current Presents Digg Dialogg: Global Warming

In this portion of Current presents Digg Dialogg, Kevin Rose interviews former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore... more

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1 response

11 days ago

Why small plastic particles may post a big problem in our oceans

Over the past few years, scientists have begun to realize that the increasing volume of plastic materials slowly decomposing in the world's oceans may present a long-term problem for marine food chains already reeling from overfishing and other anthropogenic insults. Partly as a result of a pair of influential papers published in ES&T, scientists are now exploring the role that fragments of plastic trash may play in transporting marine pollutants.

NOAA MARINE DEBRIS PROGRAM
Microplastic debris isn't unattractive, but research shows that it can be highly toxic.

The first international conference about this newly emerging microplastics problem was held in September and sponsored by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Attendees from six countries agreed to define microplastics as plastic pieces or fragments smaller than 5 millimeters. Sources of microplastics include both the small plastic particles used in products like body washes and cosmetics and the weathering of larger plastic flotsam and jetsam, says conference organizer Joel Baker of the University of Washington Tacoma, where the event was held.

Larger plastic debris tends mainly to float on the surface, but microplastics also can be found in the water column and on the seabed, says Richard Thompson, a researcher at Plymouth University (U.K) and a coauthor of both ES&T papers.This distribution, together with the smaller size, means that a wider variety of organisms could be exposed to [microplastics], he says. Thompson has been at the forefront of developing methods to definitively identify plastic fragments as small as 20 micrometers.

As plastic items break down, any toxic additives they contain including flame retardants, antimicrobials, and plasticizers may be released into the ocean environment, Thompson explains. Plastics can act like sponges to collect hydrophobic persistent organic pollutants, such as PCBs, adds Holly Bamford, director of NOAA's Marine Debris Program. Microplastic particles have been shown to hold concentrations of PCBs more than 1 million times higher than those in the surrounding water, Baker says.

At the recent conference, Hideshige Takada of the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology presented persuasive data that microplastics can impact marine food chains; the results came from a feeding experiment with streaked shearwaters, a common seabird in Japan and Australia. Takada's group, which has analyzed plastic pellets found on beaches around the world, fed chicks living in their natural environment a diet of fish laced with PCB-laden polyethylene resin pellets collected from Tokyo Bay. The pellet-consuming chicks took in up to 3 times the concentrations of lighter-weight PCB compounds, or congeners, as did chicks fed fish alone, he reported.

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The world now uses 230 million pounds of plastic annually, Thompson says, noting that much of this is for one-trip packaging that is thrown out within a year of production, on average. Because the plastic that enters the ocean tends to fragment, it is likely to remain in the environment for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, he says.
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I have to wonder, just where did the corporations producing these items with these toxins think it would break down and go to? Did they not think, know, or care where it went? Who has the bigger responsibility here? The producers of these plastic items, or the consumer? I went shopping this morning and saw a woman loading four, FOUR large cases of bottled water into her cart and I just couldn't help myself... I went over to her and nicely told her where Poland Spring comes from, how Nestle gets it, and where those bottles will go when she is done with them, and that bottled water on the whole is really no different than tap water and she would do much better with a Brita. She put two cases back... it's a start. ;-).Over the past few years, scientists have begun to realize that the increasing volume of plastic materials slowly decomposing in... more