EPA not conducting Environmental Justice Reviews

Well, looks like old fashioned regulation actually stands up to Cost Benefit analysis. The problem is that the costs are to Industry, a well organized bunch of folks with lobbies, scientists, and such, and the benefits are primarily to the general population, well, they get a choice every few years!

Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News – Budget Office Reports On Regulations:

Budget Office Reports On Regulations EPA air pollution rule helps boost overall societal benefits of federal actions Cheryl Hogue A 2005 air pollution rule is a major reason why benefits from federal regulations continue to outpace costs, says a draft White House Office of Management & Budget report released on April 13. Federal regulations issued between 1996 and 2005 generate total annual benefits estimated to be between $94 billion and $449 billion, the OMB report says. Costs of those rules, which range from health and education standards to transportation and labor regulations, are estimated to be between $37 billion and $44 billion yearly, the draft report says. The document is the 2006 installment of an analysis that OMB by law must prepare each year for Congress. The ratio of benefits to costs is higher for the 1996–2005 decade than it was between 1995 and 2004 primarily because of a single rule reducing air pollution from power plants, the draft report says. That EPA regulation requires 28 eastern states and the District of Columbia to control sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, two key pollutants released by coal-fired power plants. According to the draft report, that rule will generate from $50 billion to $60 billion a year worth of health benefits by reducing public exposure to fine particulate matter. This rule will cost about $1.8 billion annually to implement. Most of the costs and benefits of federal regulation are due to EPA rules, the draft report adds. During the 1996–2005 decade, the annual benefits of the agency’s rules are calculated to be between $59 billion and $394 billion, while estimated costs ranged from $24 billion to $26 billion. The draft report is available at www.whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg/reports/2006_draft_cost_benefit_report.pdf. Chemical & Engineering News ISSN 0009-2347 Copyright © 2006 American Chemical Society

As part of blog action day, today’s a day when every blog features a post about the environment. Turns out that this is an environmental blog where most of the posts are about the environment. But nothing like a deadline for a noble cause to make me blog, so here goes…

What the rich use and throw away, the poor are reduced to scavenging to earn a meager living. Yes, while climate change rightly takes up a lot of attention, more mundane problems including landfills in poor communities, the export of waste from the first world to the third world, and the “shocking” poverty that drives this export of waste all deserve their fair share of attention.

U.N.: ‘Shocking’ conditions at Kenya dump – World Environment – MSNBC.com

“Willis Ochieng, 10, scavenges through smoking refuse piled as high as a house at one of Africa’s biggest rubbish mountains, his friends sitting nearby sucking on dirty plastic bottles of noxious yellow glue.

Located near slums in the east of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, the open dump receives some 2,000 tons of garbage daily. A U.N. study published on Friday says it is seriously harming the health of children and polluting the city.”

And boy, do the people there suffer. Asthma, anemia, high levels of lead in the blood, chronic cough, and a smorgasbord of other acute and chronic conditions.

This dump is not alone, of course. Landfills are a feature of every country, and in my current home state of North Caroiina, are located with disproportionate frequency in African American communities. the free market advocate would say that this represents an opportunity for the people in the community to gain some employment and make some money. The truth of the matter, however, is that we do not pay the right price for waste generation. The people who live near, and make a living off the “dump” subsidize our profligate selves.

Let Cooler Heads Prevail

Read the column, take a deep breath and marvel at the utter dishonesty. George Will is supposedly one of the less extreme conservative columnists out there. But I guess when it comes to this issue, he has no qualms about misleading, setting up strawmen, and actually lying. I don’t think I can add any to the rebuttal from Progress Report…

On Sunday, conservative pundit George Will used prime space in the Washington Post and other major papers to suggest that not only is global warming not the result of human activity, but that global warming may not exist at all. There is no evidence to support Will’s claim, so he resorted to distortion.

WILL SUGGESTS GLOBAL WARMING MIGHT NOT EXIST: George Will notes that global temperatures have risen about one degree over the last 100 years, but that “might be the margin of error when measuring the planet’s temperature.” Embarrassingly, the only support Will provides for this statement is a crude analogy. (“To take a person’s temperature, you put a thermometer in an orifice or under an arm. Taking the temperature of our churning planet, with its tectonic plates sliding around over a molten core, involves limited precision.”) There is not a shred of scientific evidence to support Will’s position that the earth is not warming. Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus that the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity.

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND GEORGE WILL’S CITATIONS: The highlight of Will’s column is a list of citations from the 1970s of publications that purportedly warn of “global cooling.” (Nevermind that, even if it were all true, it does not function as an analytic rebuttal to scientific evidence of global warming caused by human activity.) The first such citation is from a December 1976 edition of Science Magazine which warned of “extensive Northern Hemispheric glaciation.” The use of this quote is outrageously dishonest. First, the article in question deals with variations in the earth’s climate based on variations in the earth’s orbit over periods of 20,000 years or longer. Second, the article explicitly excludes the effect of humans on the climate. (The article states its predictions apply “only to the natural component of future climatic trends — and not to such anthropogenic effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels.) George Will is clearly counting on the fact that most of his readers will not have access to a 1976 edition of Science Magazine.

And it goes on to rebut every one of his bromides. Read it! Here’s a media issue that Will brings up:

About the mystery that vexes ABC — Why have Americans been slow to get in lock step concerning global warming? — perhaps the “problem” is not big oil or big coal, both of which have discovered there is big money to be made from tax breaks and other subsidies justified in the name of combating carbon.

Perhaps the problem is big crusading journalism.

Perhaps the problem is utter lack of federal leadership on this issue. To use my favorite “If they can put a man on the moon” line of reasoning, Armstrong did not make it to the moon because a bunch of Americans on the street were “quick to get in lock step concerning the Moon program” (ah, to use Will’s own words). It took a coordinated effort on the part of government to establish clear targets, pump in a lot of money, and marshall the scientific resources towards achieving the target. And this was an engineering problem with a specific target and solution. Deal with the complex, only partly characterized beast that is global climate and even an idiot would conclude that no amount of individual awareness, innovation or market effort is going to be sufficient.

Dealing with climate change requires a lot of effort on the part of a lot of people, it will require individual ingenuity, sacrifice and market forces, but it starts with the will to do it (and the George Will to not stand in the way!), and the will, as has been the case with many projects in the country starts with federal leadership and the injection of the federal dollar.

If the president stood up every day and beat the drum about climate change at half the intensity with which he talks about “Exporting Democracy”, most people would listen and get in “lock step”. In this respect I guess we live in an idea monarchy! It has everything to do with who’s doing the convincing!

Update

 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=90

The folks at RealClimate rebutted this very same comment from Will in December 2004, so this is an old, recycled lie. When will these pundits realize that in this day and age of a million fact checkers and gotcha people, you can’t really get way with this kind of BS. On the other hand, I guess he does not care.

Now if I were a journalist, that is the tag line I would use, not the lame byline used in this article. Greater is always good, right!

Greater Role for Nonscientists in E.P.A. Pollution Decisions – New York Times

The Environmental Protection Agency has changed the way it sets standards to control dangerous air pollutants like lead, ozone and tiny particles of soot, enhancing the role of the agency’s political appointees in scientific assessments and postponing the required review by independent scientific experts.

Now let’s see which famous “Industry advocacy group” may be behind this one…

The change, which largely tracks the suggestions of the American Petroleum Institute but also adopts some recommendations of the agency’s independent scientific advisers, was announced yesterday afternoon by the agency’s deputy administrator, Marcus Peacock. Mr. Peacock said it would streamline a cumbersome process and bring it “into the 21st century.”

Ah, the 21st century, where scientists know nothing and it is best for groups that will gain most from a weakening of legislation actually write the rules. This way, there’s no pesky “scientist” using “knowledge” to shape policy, only rules written for the short term gain of a few.

It gets worse

For one thing, agency scientists will no longer produce their own independent review of the latest science to start the process of deciding whether a pollution standard — for lead, say, or ozone — is tough enough to protect public health. Instead, initial reviews will now involve both agency scientists and their political bosses and will produce a synopsis of “policy-relevant” science, agency officials said.

“They are using this idea of streamlined and expedited decision-making as a Trojan horse to infect the most important decisions the administrator makes with politics,” Ms. Patton said.

In addition, she said, the role of the independent panel of scientific advisers — who act as auditors, reviewing the document produced by agency scientists and advising top management — has been diminished. The panel, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, will now comment on the agency’s proposed actions after the public has been notified of them, giving the scientists essentially the same kind of participation as industry lobbyists and environmental groups.

(Emphasis mine). And they wonder why morale at the EPA is low. There are hordes of good (not great, but good!) scientists at the EPA who spend all their lives working on each of their scientific niches, and to take away any decision making or policy input from them is dehumanizing their work. Wonder why the EPA has a lot of trouble attracting talent.

I tend to be a bad news blogger, so when some good news comes along, I really should mention it…  A plugin hybrid (PHEV) is a gasoline car with a battery that can be charged. So, you go 30 miles or so on battery power before switching to gasoline, and plug the cars in at night so that they will be ready to go again the next morning. The average American commute is 16 miles (one way), so the amount of gas used for work and back for me will be reduced from around 1.2 gallons (assuming about 28 mpg city for my current car) to around 0.1 gallons. Think about that!

The good thing about these batteries is that they seem to be built with ruggedness (10 year, 150,000 miles) in mind.

The Energy Blog: A123Systems Announces Li-ion Automotive Batteries

A123Systems today introduced its 32-series Nanophosphate™ Lithium Ion cells, specifically designed for Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) use. These batteries leverage the company’s existing low-cost, high-volume manufacturing techniques to offer the electric drive industry a new level of price-performance.

Hope they work as advertised. My next car is definitely a PHEV.

Meanwhile, America’s most experienced, most accomplished and most sensible presidential candidate gives a truly forward looking speech on energy policy, and nobody notices. I guess he’s just not good looking enough.