Environmental Racism Strikes

Data courtesy World Resources Institute. As you can see, the people of up and coming powers India and China use barely use 10% the energy per person compared to the US/Canada and will be thirsting for more in the coming years. Of course, they will never get to the same per capita use because population density and crowded housing makes for a lot of energy efficiency.

China is going coal in a big way. A NY Times article last week spent 5+ pages on this subject. Coal is dirty, dirty, dirty. Coal puts out copious amounts of CO2. Of course, conventional coal fired power plants also pollute in ways that temporarily mask greenhouse effects, both from direct particle emissions and sulfate formation from sulfur in the coal. These effects are localized and temporary, and have pretty serious short term health consequences.

India is going coal too, being the third largest producer in the world. At least, there is lip service being paid to clean coal/gasification, and increased use of natural gas.

The world is going to get worse before it gets better…

Improving engine efficiency and reducing pollutant emissions are extremely important. Here, we report our fuel injection technology based on the new physics principle that proper application of electrorheology can reduce the viscosity of petroleum fuels. A small device is thus introduced just before the fuel injection for the engine, producing a strong electric field to reduce the fuel viscosity, resulting in much smaller fuel droplets in atomization. Because combustion starts at the droplet surface, smaller droplets lead to cleaner and more efficient combustion. Both laboratory tests and road tests confirm our theory and indicate that such a device improves fuel mileage significantly. The technology is expected to have broad applications, applicable to current internal combustion engines and future engines as well.

Electrorheology Leads to Efficient Combustion.

According to the press release, this is a very simple device. It has one small advantage over the usual snake oil, it is academic research and has been peer reviewed.

Good stuff, hope this is an easy after market addition to any vehicle with fuel injection. However, the press release also notes that the prototype is being developed for diesel engines only, and that the research was based mainly on diesel, wonder why…

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.

Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News – Bisphenol A May Trigger Human Breast Cancer

Soto and her colleagues exposed pregnant rats to bisphenol A at doses ranging from 2.5 to 1,000 µg per kg of body weight per day. By the time the pups exposed at the lowest dose reached the equivalent of puberty (50 days old), about 25% of their mammary ducts had precancerous lesions, a proportion three to four times higher than among the nonexposed controls. Mammary ducts from all other exposure groups showed elevated levels of lesions. Cancerous lesions were found in the mammary glands of one-third of the rats exposed to 250 µg/kg/day.

Bisphenol A is used in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. It is found in many food and beverage containers, including baby bottles. It is also found in canned food linings and dental composites, and it leaches from all of these products. In one study, Soto notes, urine samples from 95% of the human subjects contained the chemical.

The Environmental Protection Agency has set a safe human intake dose of 50 µg/kg/day for bisphenol A. “On the basis of the effects observed in recent studies, this seems to be an unsafe level,” Soto says.

Bisphenol A is old news, BTW, people have known for a while about this chemical’s propensity to carcinogenicity. Of course, there’s that whole argument about pregnant mice being more susceptible to chemicals than humans, etc. So, the jury is still out. but Soto is right, 50 µg/kg/day seems to not provide enough of a safety factor. The EU uses 10 µg/kg/day, though they do say that

realistic worst-case estimates of consumer exposure via foodstuffs, range from 0.00048 mg/kg bw/day for adults to 0.0016 mg/kg bw/day for infants, which is well below the maximum exposure level

Of course, who knows what additive effects this chemical may have with the multitude of other chemicals floating around. Doing tests of single chemicals and trying to link that to epidemiological data is a perilous undertaking, the connections are tenuous most of the time and the plastics companies routinely fund studies that prove otherwise, because as you know, if you know what you’re going to find before you study it, you will find it!

Read the wikipedia stub on polycarbonates. Us yuppies who drink religiously from Nalgene bottles to avoid phthalates and nasty tastes would do good to take note! I guess glass is the best, though it does have that annoying tendency to shatter when dropped… Water from glass bottles do have the best taste, though.

Via the grist blog. Apparently, there has never been a cyclone in recent memory in this area.

What if Hurricane Katrina had hit the Persian Gulf coast? | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist

Well, we might find out, according to an exclusive from The Oil Drum and Chuck Watson of KAC/UCF, also using a weather blog, where Margie Kieper writes:

An unusual event is happening over the next 48 hours, as the first tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and major hurricane-force winds at that, is approaching the Gulf of Oman, to strike the eastern coast of Oman, curve northward, and make landfall on the coast of Iran. In the tropical cyclone best tracks and the modern era of weather satellites, there is no record of such an occurrence.
As the Oil Drum writer comments:

Why might [Cyclone] Gonu matter? Well, that answer begins with the fact that the world production of petroleum plateauing around 85 mbbl/day, any slight blip in supply or exporting could be quite noticeable on the world markets. A sizable portion of the world’s petroleum exports go through the Gulf of Oman.
Hmm … could global warming have something to do with it? Will global warming lead to higher oil prices and scarcer gasoline?

Statutory Disclaimer: I do not actually believe in the concept of the rapture!