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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

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    Responsible Death Rites

    Byoliveridley

    Can cremation be used as an offset under the Kyoto Protocol? Read on..

    Seed: New Green Pyre Promoted in India

    UN figures show close to 10 million people die a year in India, where 85 percent of the billion-plus population are Hindus who practice cremation. That leads to the felling of an estimated 50 million trees, leaves behind half a million tonnes of ash and produces eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, according to research by Agarwals Mokshda environmental group.

    The solution is to design a much more efficient wood burning stove hence satisfying religious sentiments (have to use wood to burn your body) and save lots of wood.

    Agarwal built his first pyre, a raised human-sized brazier under a roof with slats that could be lowered to maintain heat. The elevation allowed air to circulate and feed the fire.

    It gets even better…

    Mokshda hopes its projects will eventually be registered under the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism, which encourages green projects in developing countries.

    It allows industrialised countries that have committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to count reductions achieved through investments in projects in developing countries towards their undertakings.

    Really, we can get carbon credits by improving cremation practices?? That’s creative! Going all electric on the crematorium would obviously be the best thing, but Hindu religious sentiment being what it is, this is an improvement.

    If you want environmentally friendly, this has nothing on the Parsis (or Zoroastrians):

    The interior of the Tower of Silence is built in three concentric circles, one each for men, women, and children. The corpses are exposed there naked. The vultures do not take long—an hour or two at the most—to strip the flesh off the bones, and these, dried by the sun, are later swept into the central well

    Yes, that’s right, the vultures! Now, that’s energy efficient! Unfortunately, due the use of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory in livestock, vulture populations in India have declined to the point that this ancient ritual is now in serious jeopardy.

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    Green Building in India: NOT

    Byoliveridley

    There is a buzz about green buildings. But the question is: what does one mean by building green? And how does one design policies to make the green homes of our dreams?Green is not about first building structures using lots of material and energy, and then fixing them so that they become a little more efficient. Building green is about optimizing on the local ecology, using local material as far as possible and, most importantly, building to cut the power, water and material requirements.

    via Green buildings: how to redesign | Centre for Science and Environment.

    Sunita Narain makes some excellent points about building in India, and how western architecture influenced glass facades, closed buildings, etc. make little sense in India, and how traditional building concepts, optimised for local conditions would make more sense.

    Two points:

    1. Traditional buildings are not necessarily optimised for density. To fit a lot of people in a little space, you need to build up. No, not 100s of stories, but fives and tens? It would be interesting to figure out that contradiction. But I’m no architect and I don’t know the answer
    2. The glass facade concrete skyscraper jungle look is associated with aspirational prosperity, ask any affluent Indian what they like about Hong Kong, or New York, or Singapore, and the shiny buildings will figure pretty high on the list after cleanliness and shopping. This is the kind of building associated with modernity and “class”. Making a sealed glass and concrete hell hole work in regions of high heat and humidity without large amounts of energy use for air conditioning is difficult.

    It appears, though, that at least some people are thinking about this, as this book, helpfully titled Tropical Sustainable Architecture, would attest to.

    BTW,
    Sunita Narain’s editorials for the Down to Earth magazine are always thoughtful, and required reading for anyone interested in India’s development and environmental issues.

  • Drugs in the Water

    Byoliveridley

    When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000.

    And it wasn’t just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.

    Not at all surprising, considering that drug manufacturing releases tons of pollutants at high concentrations. The sources are very different from recent studies in the US where end users of the drug are the greatest source, and ciprofloxacin was again one of the drugs detected at the highest levels. At this rate, most bugs will be resistant to cipro in a few years.

    In the end, water treatment plants cannot deal with this toxic soup. They need to be cleaned up at the source, by the pharmaceutical companies before they hit any waste streams. After all, isn’t recapturing and reusing the kilos of drugs being wasted good economic sense?

  • | |

    Feds punt on Bisphenol A

    Byoliveridley

    By studiously ignoring all the subtle hormone disruption effects of bisphenol A and concentrating on easily observable neurological effects, the CERHR essentially does the industry’s bidding.

    Some risk linked to plastic chemical – Los Angeles Times

    A federal panel of scientists concluded Wednesday that an estrogen-like compound in plastic could be posing some risk to the brain development of babies and children.

    Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found in low levels in virtually every human body. A component of polycarbonate plastic, it can leach from baby bottles and other hard plastic beverage containers, food can linings and other consumer products.

    Culminating months of scientific debate, the decision by the 12 advisors of the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction — part of the National Institutes of Health — is the first official, government action related to the chemical. Their recommendation will be reviewed for a federal report that could lead to regulations restricting one of the most used chemicals.

    The scientists ranked their concerns about BPA, concluding they had “some concern” about neurological and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants and children, but “minimal” or “negligible” concern about reproductive effects. The findings put the panel roughly in the middle — between the chemical industry, which has long said there is no evidence of danger to humans, and the environmental activists and scientists who say it is probably harming people.

    For a detailed look at how bisphenol research has been corrupted by industry sponsored “focused counter research” – where the goal is to show no effects and the experiment is tiled to ensure this goal, read this excellent article in the The Public Library of Science Biology Open Source Journal. Note, because it is Open Access, you can actually read it without selling a kidney! Some highlights…

    The moment we published something on bisphenol A, the chemical industry went out and hired a number of corporate laboratories to replicate our research. What was stunning about what they did,” vom Saal says with a mix of outrage and bemused disbelief, “was they hired people who had no idea how to do the work. Each of the members of these groups came to me and said, ‘We don’t know how to do this, will you teach us?’”

    More…

    The HCRA report, commissioned before Schwartz’s tenure, concluded that “the weight of the evidence for low-dose effects is very weak” [15]. Industry groups hailed the report as a comprehensive review by independent experts and quickly disseminated its findings. Yet the “comprehensive” report reviewed just 19 of 47 studies available in April 2002, and when it was published more than two years later, three panelists asked not to be listed as authors.

    What the hell, just read the whole article, especially the bit about the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and its well documented industry shillness.

    The key to understanding bisphenol research is to realize that it is a hormone disruptor that works at low doses. At high doses, normal toxicological testing doses that is, it floods the hormone receptors and slows down the receptor pathways. So, the usual technique of testing in rats and mice at high doses and extrapolating will not work.

  • EPA not conducting Environmental Justice Reviews

    Byoliveridley

    The Environmental Justice movement was started to deal with disparities in the treatment of environmental issues that could be traced back to race/class. It’s disheartening to know that the EPA, which has a mandate to specifically deal with EJ issues has dropped the ball. The next time a landfill/hog factory gets sited near an economically depressed neighborhood, you know why.

    Environmental agency inspector criticizes agency’s lack of fairness on reviews – iht,america,US Environmental Justice – Americas – International Herald Tribune

    The Environmental Protection Agency is not conducting required reviews to ensure that low-income and minority neighborhoods get the same environmental protection as other communities. The report by the EPA’s inspector general, made public Tuesday, said senior EPA officials have not required regional offices and department heads to conduct environmental justice reviews despite a requirement for such reviews dating from 1994. A survey by the IG’s office found 60 percent of the regional offices and program departments that responded had not conducted the reviews, and 87 percent said they had not been asked to do them, according to the report. Such reviews were required by an executive order that former President Bill Clinton issued in 1994. It was reaffirmed by EPA administrators in 2001 and again last year, said the report by acting Inspector General Bill Roderick. Until adequate reviews are conducted, “The agency cannot determine whether its programs cause disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects on minority and low-income populations,” the report said.

  • | |

    Chemical Warfare

    Byoliveridley

    This story from a local Chicago TV station does an excellent job of documenting the chemical weapons dropped on Vietnam by the United States in the 1960s, the effects they still have on Vietnam, and the Americans who handled these so called “defoliants”.

    cbs2chicago.com – Agent Orange: A View From Vietnam

    During the eight years of the Vietnam War that the U.S. Military dusted the Vietnamese landscape with Agent Orange, it was only intended to kill vegetation. It was a combination of two herbicides 2,4D and 2,4,5T mixed together into the most potent plant killer ever made. It was spread over 3 1/2 million acres of forests and crops to kill the trees and vegetation so the United States troops could see the enemy. The Armed Forces were told it was harmless. But in March 1978, Bill Kurtis broke the story on CBS 2 that American veterans of Vietnam who had been exposed to Agent Orange were complaining of illnesses, birth defects among their children, skin rashes, cancer, nervous problems and respiratory problems.

    orange3_small.jpgPeople tend to blame dioxins for all the health effects. But 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, constituents of Agent Orange, are no spring chickens. Exposure during spraying, especially of the grossly excessive amounts that rained down upon Vietnam, can cause various health effects as well, not to mention long-term devastation of entire ecosystems.

    Side note: New Zealand, in 2004, apologized to New Zealand’s “veterans” for their exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. Not a word to the Vietnamese, of course.

    Side note 2: A US Federal court, in 2005, dismissed the first claims brought by Vietnamese plaintiffs against Dow Chemicals and Monsanto, here was the government’s  reasoning:

    In a brief filed in January, it said opening the courts to cases brought by former enemies would be a dangerous threat to presidential powers to wage war.

    Translation: We reserve the right to drop chemical weapons on our “enemies”, and doing anything to abrogate this right is “dangerous”.

    Image courtesy of Reuters shows a Vietnamese child, one of many with birth defects associated with Agent Orange exposure.

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