Supreme Court to decide if CO2 is a “pollutant”

Byoliveridley

Well, I am not sure if the Clean Air Act has all the right tools to regulate CO2, but the kind of vehicle-to-vehicle and plant-to-plant focus that the Clean Air Act brings could be a good starting point. If the court decides in favor of the states, and the EPA can get its rule making together, we can start seeing regulation in 5 years. I am not sure if this is early enough, and it is definitely insufficient. A “pollutant” as ubiquitous as CO2 needs a a comprehensive national and global policy effort even bigger than the Montreal Protocol to be effective. Kyoto was meant to be a starting point, but is stalled at the moment.

Forcing motor vehicles to lower their emissions and increase efficiency is a no-brainer. If it takes the Clean Air Act to make this happen, I am all for it! But this will not really address the power plants that are the other huge contributor, most of the existing plants will be grandfathered in and as we know from previous experience, these grandaddies are bionic and immortal!

Any chance that the Supreme Court will find in favor of this addition? I don’t think so. I predict 6-3 for the government on this one.

Supreme Court to Hear Key Environment Case – New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court’s most important decisions on the environment. A dozen states, a number of cities and various environmental groups asked the court to take up the case after a divided lower court ruled against them. They argue that the Environmental Protection Agency is obligated to limit carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles under the federal Clean Air Act because as the primary ”greenhouse” gas causing a warming of the earth, carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

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  • Why land use is critically important for climate change

    Byoliveridley

    That’s the argument from a new paper published in Science today, written by Princeton University’s Tim Searchinger and others. The upshot? Clearing out forests to use the wood for bioenergy clearly has an environmental cost, but that’s simply not accounted for in any of the prevailing climate-change programs. Kyoto, the European cap-and-trade plan, and the House climate bill all treat bioenergy as carbon-neutral; nobody counts the effect of disappearing forests.

    via Environmental Capital

    In my long blog post earlier this morning, I briefly alluded to the fact that proposed Canadian climate change legislation explicitly excludes land use. Well, bad idea! I am surprised this is being trumpeted as a major new finding, hasn’t it been obvious for at least the last few years that biofuel carbon neutrality is very dependent on how land use patterns change?

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    Organic agriculture can feed the world

    Byoliveridley

    That’s the conclusion reached by the authors of this study based on 293 examples in the developing and developed world.The authors also conclude that yields in the developing world are higher for organic agriculture than for conventional agriculture. Why? Well, since the paper is not open access, I can’t read it, or critique it, I’ll have to wait to get to the library before I can download it. But, maybe it’s because organic agriculture tends to be more labor intensive than conventional agriculture as practised by the developed world, and in the developing world, labor is cheap!

    Anyway, this is a good news study and should be examined a little more thoroughly.

    CJO – Abstract – Organic agriculture and the global food supply

    The principal objections to the proposition that organic agriculture can contribute significantly to the global food supply are low yields and insufficient quantities of organically acceptable fertilizers. We evaluated the universality of both claims. For the first claim, we compared yields of organic versus conventional or low-intensive food production for a global dataset of 293 examples and estimated the average yield ratio (organic:non-organic) of different food categories for the developed and the developing world. For most food categories, the average yield ratio was slightly 1.0 for studies in the developing world. With the average yield ratios, we modeled the global food supply that could be grown organically on the current agricultural land base. Model estimates indicate that organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base. We also evaluated the amount of nitrogen potentially available from fixation by leguminous cover crops used as fertilizer. Data from temperate and tropical agroecosystems suggest that leguminous cover crops could fix enough nitrogen to replace the amount of synthetic fertilizer currently in use. These results indicate that organic agriculture has the potential to contribute quite substantially to the global food supply, while reducing the detrimental environmental impacts of conventional agriculture. Evaluation and review of this paper have raised important issues about crop rotations under organic versus conventional agriculture and the reliability of grey-literature sources. An ongoing dialogue on these subjects can be found in the Forum editorial of this issue.

  • Obama and Harper, saving a tree

    Byoliveridley

    Canada hopes to achieve a North American climate-change deal with U.S. president-elect Barack Obama and will begin working on the file within weeks, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Wednesday.Meantime, officials told The Canadian Press the Harper government has been waiting for the departure of President George W. Bush to work with his successor on an integrated carbon market.While states and provinces have been cobbling together a patchwork of approaches, federal officials said they have been eyeing a continent-wide solution for some time.

    globeandmail.com: Canada to seek climate deal with Obama

    Interesting and potentially promising news. I have thought for a while that Canada would have no choice but to start some kind of emissions cap/trade or carbon tax, given the way the wind was blowing down south. Harper, for all his reliance on Alberta’s oil votes, realises that with or without his say, the country’s leading trading partner is going to impose a carbon tax (a cap and trade is a price on carbon, or a tax, semantics aside) on Canadian-US trade.

    It is also interesting that this statement came out right after Obama’s election, and the foreign minister went out of his way to say that they were waiting for Bush to get out of the way. Nice cozying up, Harper, making up for all your stupid previous statements about Obama. But do not worry, this new emperor is more gracious than the previous one!

    We are going to be living in interesting times, good ones, finally.

  • USGS Releases Study on US Well Water

    Byoliveridley

    The actual journal paper seems to be behind a subscription wall. But, here’s a summary…

    ScienceDaily: Chemical Quality Of Self-Supplied Domestic Well Water

    Since the water quality of domestic wells is not federally regulated or nationally monitored, this study provides a unique, previously nonexistent perspective on the quality of the self-supplied drinking water resources used by 45 million Americans in the United States. This national reconnaissance study is based on a compilation of existing data from a very large number of wells sampled as part of multiple USGS programs.

    Well water is not held to the same standards as municipal water, which means it is not normally tested for nasties such as arsenic.

    gwmr_89_f4.gif
    Well (no pun intended!), looky here, but arsenic levels in well water exceed EPA Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) more than 10% of the time. If, and this is a big if, you extrapolate these results to the whole country, as much as 5 million people may be exposed to higher than allowed arsenic levels. Arsenic is a notorious contaminant with an MCL of 0.01 mg/L, down a factor of 5 as of January 2006 due to data that indicates effects at even lower doses.

    If I drank well water, I would get it tested for arsenic.

    gwmr_89_f1.png
    Most of the results are from the North East, which means that outside research circles (and behind subscription walls), groundwater arsenic levels could be a significant problem that not too many people are aware of.

    All figures are from the paper.

    Reference

    Focazio, Michael J., Tipton, Deborah, Dunkle Shapiro, Stephanie & Geiger, Linda H. (2006) The Chemical Quality of Self-Supplied Domestic Well Water in the United States. Ground Water Monitoring & Remediation 26 (3), 92-104. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-6592.2006.00089.x

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    ES&T Online News: E-waste recycling spews dioxins into the air

    Byoliveridley

    ES&T Online News: E-waste recycling spews dioxins into the air

    When computers, televisions, music systems, and other electronic products reach the ends of their lives, they often end up in China or other developing countries as e-waste. Such waste is a serious environmental threat in these parts of the world because of the poorly regulated conditions under which the waste is dismantled. A new study published in ES&T (DOI 10.1021/es0702925) shows that Guiyu, a major e-waste recycling center in China, has the highest documented levels of atmospheric polychlorodibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and polychlorodibenzofurans (PCDFs) in the world.

    In e-waste recycling centers in China, discarded products are dipped into open pits of acid and heated over grills fueled with coal blocks to extract precious metals, such as gold. These processes often release toxic metals, such as lead, and organic compounds, such as dioxins. The emissions are not regulated, and occupational exposure is high because of the poor working conditions for e-waste recycling laborers.

    In March 2007, researchers at Hong Kong Baptist University showed that soil at e-waste recycling sites in China has high levels of dioxins and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants. (Read the paper at ES&T‘s ASAP website.) More recently, another study published in ES&T showed that the workers at these sites have blood levels of the heavy PBDE, BDE–209, 50–200 times higher than those previously reported. Whereas dioxins are potentially carcinogenic for humans, PBDEs affect thyroid metabolism and brain development.

    In the current study, Ping’an Peng of the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry (China) and his colleagues sampled the air from Guiyu for a week in both the summer and the winter and analyzed the samples for 2,3,7,8-PCDD/Fs. The levels varied between 64.9 and 2765 picogram per cubic meter (pg/m3). The toxic equivalents (TEQ)—a value used to account for the different levels of toxicity of the individual dioxins—was 0.909–48.9 pg TEQ/m3. Given that Guiyu has no municipal or medical solid-waste incinerators, which are known to be major sources of dioxins, the authors attributed the elevated dioxin levels to e-waste recycling.

    The team also found that the dioxin concentrations in the air around Guiyu were 12–18 times higher than those in Chendian, a town 9 kilometers (km) from Guiyu, and 37–133 times higher than those in Guangzhou, which is 450 km from the e-waste site. The results suggest that dioxin pollution from e-waste recycling is spreading to nearby areas.

    When they calculated the exposure of adults to dioxins through inhalation, the researchers found that it (68.9 and 126 pg TEQ per kilogram per day in the summer and winter, respectively) was a whopping 15–56 times higher than the World Health Organization recommended maximum of 1–4 pg TEQ/kg/day.

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    Chinese coal mines in BC: Missing the forest for the trees

    Byoliveridley

    The story of a Chinese company in BC hiring Chinese workers has received a lot of attention. Much of the attention has focused on the company’s decision to game the temporary worker system in order to avoid hiring “Canadian” workers. Many of the objections are made on nationalistic grounds, “OMG, THEY”RE TAKING CANADIAN JOBS”, which then leads down the path of racist anti-Chinese sentiment. This Tyee article (disclaimer: I am a Tyee monthly funder, but obviously have no editorial input!) summarizes the issues involved very well. Recent changes to Canada’s immigration laws make this kind of hiring logical, because it is now okay to pay temporary workers with little/no bargaining power 15% less than you would pay locals. Of course you have to document that there were no qualified locals, but as this particular incident indicates, there’s little/no actual enforcement unless a fuss is made.

    I find temporary worker programs to be problematic because they provide no path to citizenship, no permanence for the people who want it, and cause ugly divisions in the community. If you think there are not enough “workers” in your community, open your borders, let them in and pay well, you’d be surprised.

    I wanted to highlight two obvious issues that to my mind are as important:

    1. Carbon Bomb. It’s a coal mine! How many people in BC, which preens gloriously on its carbon tax, are aware that coal is BC’s Number One export? What is the point of having a carbon tax for consumers when producers get to make money off that carbon for free? Whether the coal is burned in BC, or in China, it causes the same damage. Whether the coal is used to generate power, or to make steel, it puts out the same amount of carbon dioxide. Whether the mine uses Chinese workers or locals, it produces the same climate changing emissions. So, why instead of making coal producers pay the real costs of their product, are we enabling them to evade carbon taxes, royalties, and save even more money by reducing wages? Also, coal mining is not employment intensive, as countless other people have pointed out. So it’s not really about the jobs either. Kevin Washbrook of StopCoal made this point as well in the Tyee article I linked to earlier.
    2. Does this mine have right to be there? The West Moberley First Nation, part of a Treaty 8 band is opposed to the project on its land. That should be the end of the story. The state of Canada has responsibilities as a settler entity to obtain free, prior and informed consent on development from the people it colonized. The US is a bit more honest in this regard as it regards the colonization as a thing of the past and gives its indigenous peoples little/no rights. Canada’s different, the indigenous here have specific standing because of Canada’s existing colonial links and Canadian governments and courts routinely confirm this standing. The BC government is currently negotiating treaties with many First Nations communities including the West Moberley First Nation.

    We’re trying to set up a climate and environment disturbing, cost and tax evading coal mine on land that belongs to someone else using easily exploited temporary workers we can be racist towards.

    coal