You know what I think about Cliffside, the coal plant Duke Energy is trying to build. Here’s a video created by Brian Russell that summarizes the problem and exhorts you to action.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twaFDdOr3pc]
Do it!
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Tags: DukeEnergy, Cliffside, North Carolina, Environment
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.
Lung problems rife among WTC responders – Yahoo! News
NEW YORK – Nearly 70 percent of recovery workers who responded to the attacks on the World Trade Center suffered lung problems during or after their work at ground zero, a new health study released Tuesday shows. Less than a week before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Mount Sinai Medical Center issued the results of the largest study on related health effects. It found, among other things, that the ailments tended to be worst among those who arrived first at the site, and that high rates of lung “abnormalities” continued years later. The study focused mostly on what has been dubbed “World Trade Center cough,” which was little understood immediately after the attacks but became a chief concern of health experts and advocates.
Not surprising at all, considering all the fine particles, asbestos, PAHs, elemental Carbon, PCBs, and numerous other nasties that were released in a couple of catastrophic explosions, and the utter unpreparedness of the first responders, who were, after all, going in to save other peoples’ lives, not looking out for the air they were breathing. Calling this major air pollution related health disaster the “World Trade Center Cough” is a little like calling World War II the “Skirmish with Germany, Part Deaux”, but what do I know about the power of language and framing!
Liquid coal is back in the news (at least my news!). Via the excellent Grist, Jon Tester (D-Montana – think coal!) casts a principled vote to kill an amendment that would have “mandated” a certain amount of liquid coal be used as part of an omnibus energy package bill.
Thomas accused Tester and other Democrats of failing to act on their words of praise for transportation fuels made from coal. But Tester said he couldn’t support the amendment because it would have scuttled the entire bill to which it was attached.
Tester voted against the provision during a meeting of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to assemble an energy package. The legislation contains measures boosting biofuels, energy efficiency and research and development on carbon capture and storage technology.
Thomas’s amendment would have required 21 billion gallons of coal-based fuels to be used annually by 2022. The bill already had a provision mandating 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. The amendment was defeated on a 12-11 party-line vote.
The Democratic and Republican heads of the Energy Committee had tried to prevent the coal-to-liquids issue from coming up during the panel’s meeting. They wanted to pass a bill out of committee easily and deal with contentious issues, including that one, during debate on the Senate floor
With such powerful friends, this amendment will not go away. Expect it to be brought back on to the senate floor when it leaves committee. The coal senators of Illinois, West Virginia, Kentucky and the mountain west love the money this will bring to their states. They can pretend to look away from all the devastating effects of coal mining, and the CO2 emissions, etc. by invoking “energy security”. I give you senator Craig Thomas (R-Coal):
“The bill we’re talking about of course does not include coal and the new opportunities to change the process for developing coal, which would not only enhance our security but it would also reduce and help with the global warming situation,” Thomas said. “I really think if we don’t deal with one of our most abundant resources then we fail to deal with energy security.”
Yes, using liquid coal will “reduce and help with the global warming situation”. I mean, can’t you at least come up with a plausible half-truth?
Liquid coal produces more CO2 than gasoline, so how will it help with the global warming situation? Seriously…
A study by the Alberta Research Council that investigated the plume of contaminants emanating from a Canadian oil refinery using high-tech sniffing equipment found the facility dramatically underestimated its releases of dangerous air pollutants.The refinery, which wasn’t identified but is believed to be in Alberta, released 19 times more cancer-causing benzene than it reported under Environment Canada disclosure regulations, about 15 times more smog-causing volatile organic compounds, and nine times more methane, a greenhouse gas, according to the study.The testing is believed to be the first at a North American refinery using the sophisticated technology relying on lasers, and is considered state-of-the art. The technology, developed by British Petroleum, has been in widespread use in Europe for nearly two decades.
globeandmail.com: Oil refineries underestimate release of emissions, study says
Serious stuff, this. As the report points out, this is old news, here’s a workshop report from the EPA last year about this very issue (no, don’t read it, 303 pages long). Volatile organic compounds are inputs into air pollution models that measure ozone levels. When your local agency tells you that Tuesday is going to be a code orange ozone day, they rely on ozone models such as CMAQ. Now, without proper inputs, you are going to make some serious errors in prediction. These errors are somewhat mitigated by the tuning of these models with measured concentrations. So, there is some error compensation going on within the model.
More importantly, by underestimating fugitive emissions, refineries can reduce their leak monitoring, reporting and mitigation costs. There is also the issue of conflict of interest here. The current technique was developed by the American Petroleum Institute!
Do we expect measurement based techniques to start being used in the US and Canada? One would hope so, but, don’t hold your breath!
Federal Study Finds Accord on Warming – New York Times
A scientific study commissioned by the Bush administration concluded yesterday that the lower atmosphere was indeed growing warmer and that there was “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.”
Wait, we still need to study this more, we need to eliminate all uncertainty before we act, we need more proof, we need to be more certain :-;
In places that rely heavily on coal for electricity, such as West Virginia or China, the researchers say switching to CFLs can reduce mercury emissions significantly. But cleaner-powered places like California and Norway would do better to stick to incandescent bulbs when it comes to reducing mercury. “The places known for sustainability are the places that have the potential to do the most harm by bringing this technology in,” says environmental engineer Julie Zimmerman of Yale, a coauthor of the study.
Do compact fluorescent bulbs reduce mercury pollution?.
The good news is that in general, CFLS reduce mercury emissions significantly compared to using regular bulbs in most cases. Very unfair on CFL mercury! This works if you assume that every mg of mercury in a CFL is going to be released into the air, which is bogus. They can be, and are recycled, or they end up being landfilled, where they will not escape for a while. I’ve never broken one in many years of use. This is not a fair comparison at all, and if you have to reach to California and Norway to make a point, you’ve lost it. The reason California and Norway (more about Norway in a later blog post) are more energy efficient is because they use more energy efficient systems (like CFLs) in the first place. Therefore, they do not have to rely on coal for energy requirements. Of course, they are also lucky to have hydroelectric/geothermal sources, but they avoid coal for good reason.
If you reduce power usage by increasing efficiency, you don’t have to build more power plants (clean or otherwise) and that is good for everyone concerned.
Yes, the take home message is that due to the presence of a hazardous ingredient, CFLs need to be viewed as a bridge technology to LEDs. Point taken, but given that they have all those advantages over regular light bulbs, this is no bridge to nowhere!