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Environmental Racism, Global Warming Edition

Byoliveridley

As armchair critics debate endlessly on the virtues and vices of carbon trading versus carbon taxes, they are in no danger of losing their armchairs (or their homes, or their money, or their livelihood). Africa and Asia, not so lucky.

Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms – New York Times

Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries. Those and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers and floatable homes, and in grains and soybeans genetically altered to flourish even in a drought. In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments. As the oceans swell with water from melting ice sheets, it is the crowded river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, along with small island nations, that are most at risk.

I read another story about Bangladesh recently, apparently in Bangladesh, there will be both flooding and drought due to cimate change!

We are fighting climate change on the front line,” Professor Nishat
told The Independent earlier this year. “But the battle has to be
integrated across all countries.”

Bangladesh has good reason to feel aggrieved at global warming. Its
annual carbon emissions only 0.172 tons per capita, compared to 21 tons
in the US.

If the rivers dry up, it would leave Bangladesh completely at the mercy of the rains.

What is to be done? There are no simple answers, but this is a global issue that requires a global solution. There needs to be a relentless push for efficiency and conservation, with technologies being made available sans intellectual property and patent protection to help India and China control emissions. Efficiency is where the low hanging fruit are. This wikipedia article is a decent compendium of options.

Europe has started on the control path already. The U.S has to act, will it do anything this year? Or do we have to wait for this? I am very cynical about the West’s ability and willingness to act in this regard. When the prime contributors and benefiters of a harmful action are not the same as the ones who will face the worst consequences, where’s the will? As life in the third world becomes more miserable, the rich countries can always build more walls.

No fun and games here!

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    Byoliveridley

    Courtesy the grist, my favorite environment related website…

    GreenScanner

    This site is a public database of opinions about the environmental friendliness of various products. It has been designed for use with network-enabled mobile devices so you can use it at the food store. Type in a UPC code and hit “Go” to see what people think about the product (1 is bad, 5 is good). Then you can then add a comment and score of your own!

    This is a start. What we need (I was thinking about this making dinner yesterday) is an easy link between a product’s UPC and its Life Cycle Analysis, if it even exists…

  • Tar sands smog seen worsening

    Byoliveridley

    Pollution will continue to plague Alberta’s oil sands despite plans to pipe harmful greenhouse gases deep underground, according to documents obtained by the Toronto Star.

    Part of the task of cleaning up the oil sands involves capturing carbon dioxide emissions and storing them in geological reservoirs in western Canada.

    But chemicals linked to acid rain, respiratory problems and ozone depletion could escape into the atmosphere at an even faster rate, thanks to an estimated tripling of production from one million barrels a day in 2007 to 3.4 million barrels a day in 2017. That could occur despite proposed national caps on air contaminants.

    By capturing about 200 megatonnes a year of carbon dioxide, sequestration as carbon dioxide storage is known is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by almost 80 per cent in 2017, says an Environment Canada study obtained under the Access to Information Act.

    But, the study notes, “there are emissions of CO2 and air contaminants resulting from the generation of the energy required by carbon capture and storage facilities. The CO2 emissions offset the volumes captured by the facilities, while the air contaminant emissions add to the load on the environment.

    Note that two out of the three main political parties in Canada (The Conservatives and the Liberals) support the expansion of this environmental disaster. Also, resource exploitation is controlled by the individual provinces and Alberta is almost united in support for its prime bread winner. So nothing will happen unless there is external (Read American) pressure. Harper is making a lot of noise about working with Obama on energy and climate policy in an effort to get ahead of this pressure, so we shall see what happens. If the US moves ahead aggressively on policy, the Tar Sands could lose its biggest customer and that would be all she wrote.

  • Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times

    Byoliveridley

    Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times

    When air pollution in a city declines, the city benefits with a directly proportional drop in death rates, a new study has found.

    In other news, Dog bites man (I have never typed “dog bites man” into google news before – shocking…)

    Well, the Dockery and company published a seminal set of articles on the 6 city study back in the 90s that are the gold standard of air pollution epidemiology. It takes large long-term studies like these to establish even tenuous correlations, and their graphs connecting particle concentrations and mortality were beautiful straight lines.

    This follow up is pretty cool because the cities had made most of the reductions in the 70s and 80s after the passage of the Clean Air Act and this study clearly demonstrates that the bar for lowering mortality/cancer rates by lowering fine particle levels has not been reached yet. The abstract of the paper is below the fold.

    Read More “Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times”

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    Smoking bans in North Carolina?

    Byoliveridley

    After this morning’s post about Tennessee, I got curious and wanted to see what we were doing in North Carolina on smoking bans. So, I looked up my very own NC General assembly homepage and used their full text bill search function (key word smoking!). Here’s what I found.

    In the State Senate

    Great! Senate Bill S635 will ban smoking in all public places indoors except in tobacco shops, designated smoking rooms in hotels and for “research”. Follow the progress of this bill using the bill’s very own rss feed!

    In the House

    Not so good, House bill H259 has been referred to committee. But it has giant loopholes for all bars and “private clubs”. It has its very own rss feed too.

    Observations

    1. It is good to see that my representatives Kinnaird (we share a yoga class on Monday nights!) and Insko are co-sponsors on the bills. But I live in that bastion of progressivism (in the South, anyways!) Chapel Hill/Carrboro, so this is pretty unsurprising!
    2. My question to the House is this: Why are bartenders, employees of bars and private clubs, and patrons of such establishments considered not worthy of protection from second hand smoke? As someone who goes out drinking often, this is where all my exposure to second hand smoke occurs.
    3. Kudos to North Carolina for designing an accessible and easily searchable bill repository complete with rss feeds, way to go!

    Once I hear back from Sen. Kinnaird on the prospects of legislation this session, I’ll be sure to post about it.

    Update: See this. The House and Senate bills have gotten a lot closer, and most of the loopholes are gone.

  • Rolling Stone Magazine Expose' on the Pork Industry

    Byoliveridley

    Excellent article, read in full, and let the next mass market pig you eat weigh on your conscience a little bit.

    I have attended meetings organized by the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network recently, and Smithfield foods is high on their agenda for the mind blowing pollution that overwhelmingly affects the poor and rural African-American communities, for their appalling safety record, and early American style treatment of its workers. See this PBS video for more. It is truly heartbreaking to hear testimony from people who live near hog farms, how the stench is overwhelming, omnipresent, and travels in your clothes and system wherever you go.

    Some Excerpts:

    Rolling Stone : Pork’s Dirty Secret: The nation’s top hog producer is also one of America’s worst polluters

    Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

    To appreciate what this agglomeration of hog production does to the people who live near it, you have to appreciate the smell of industrial-strength pig shit. The ascending stench can nauseate pilots at 3,000 feet. On the day we fly over Smithfield’s operation there is little wind to stir up the lagoons or carry the stink, and the region’s current drought means that lagoon operators aren’t spraying very frequently. It is the best of times. We can smell the farms from the air, but while the smell is foul it is intermittent and not particularly strong.Unsurprisingly, prolonged exposure to hog-factory stench makes the smell extremely hard to get off. Hog factory workers stink up every store they walk into. I run into a few local guys who had made the mistake of accepting jobs in hog houses, and they tell me that you just have to wait the smell out: You’ll eventually grow new hair and skin. If you work in a Smithfield hog house for a year and then quit, you might stink for the next three months.

    Epidemiological studies show that those who live near hog lagoons suffer from abnormally high levels of depression, tension, anger, fatigue and confusion. “We are used to farm odors,” says one local farmer. “These are not farm odors.” Sometimes the stink literally knocks people down: They walk out of the house to get something in the yard and become so nauseous they collapse. When they retain consciousness, they crawl back into the house.

    Successful Farming magazine warned — six years ago. There simply is no regulatory solution to the millions of tons of searingly fetid, toxic effluvium that industrial hog farms discharge and aerosolize on a daily basis. Smithfield alone has sixteen operations in twelve states. Fixing the problem completely would bankrupt the company. According to Dr. Michael Mallin, a marine scientist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who has researched the effects of corporate farming on water quality, the volumes of concentrated pig waste produced by industrial hog farms are plainly not containable in small areas. The land, he says, “just can’t absorb everything that comes out of the barns.” From the moment that Smithfield attained its current size, its waste-disposal problem became conventionally insoluble.

    Nice, huh! Still eating factory pork?

  • Canada's only proposed Carbon Targets in Danger

    Byoliveridley

    Bill C-311, Canada’s Climate Change Accountability Act, is back in the “news” (no silly, not the media, who have more important things to worry about). I had written about this before the Copenhagen meeting. This bill sets Canada up with greenhouse gas emission reduction targets that would put Canada in a respectable mainstream position, 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. But the Conservatives, in one of their classic legislative gambits, have forwarded the vote for April 14th, Wednesday. If the bill doesn’t pass here, it’s dead, and 4 years of countless committee readings, and multiple votes to pass would be wasted. And Canada will not have any climate change legislation whatsoever.

    Serious business, isn’t it? Climate Action has more, including what you need to do (I know, short notice, that’s apparently how important decisions get made around here).

    The Liberals hold the key. It was they who voted with the Conservatives the last time to scuttle the pre-Copenhagen vote. As of writing this post, no official word from the Liberals on their position.

    A call to Michael Ignatieff’s office, (613) 995-9364 gives me little hope of passage. I was told that the MPs had met, that Mr. Ignatieff would not be voting (apparently, because it’s a private member’s bill, leaders don’t vote, weird). Also, the official position of the party is that because it is a private member’s bill, that every MP would be free to vote on their “conscience”. Given that the Liberal party could not even defend women’s health in a recent whipped vote, I wonder where their conscience is on this.

    A call to David McGuinty’s (the Liberal Environmental Critic) Office, (613) 992-3269, elicited the rather helpful response that they would not be commenting on their stand till after the vote.

    Of our local MPs, both Denise Savoie (NDP) and Dr. Keith Martin (Liberal) will be voting to preserve the bill, they are on record saying this at a forum on climate change last week. Of course, Gary Lunn (Conservative) is not part of the equation here, pointless.

    So, call, call and call away, the Liberals need to hear about this. They don’t appear to understand the most basic rule of opposition politics, you get no points for supporting the government, except from pundits in the mainstream media. Only if you inflict some defeats on the government will the people of Canada take you seriously.

    David McGuinty – (613) 992-3269
    Michael Ignatieff – (613) 995-9364

    As always, remember that it is the Liberals that will be blamed for this bill’s demise, we all know the Conservative position on climate change. The NDP and Bloc Quebecois have voted repeatedly to pass this legislation. It is Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals who will stand in the way of Canada’s environmental progress.

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