Adult Supervision

I've been looking around for some different blogs to read, because if I'm going to waste my time I at least want to be entertained, and I have developed a very low tolerance for earnest progressive chest-beating. Barack Obama inviting homophobic pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration isn't something to get the vapors over, as the time for that is if the policies aren't getting us out the very deep hole Republicans everywhere have dug for us.

Who is IOZ ruminated on another blogger's ruminations about Star Trek, and it's overall spirit of optimism and human endeavor, so reminiscent of JFK at least while Gene Roddenberry was running things. Later on, though, TNG and DS9 would get pretty grim and militaristic. Recalling how Kirk said to Trelaine, the immortal, godlike six-year-old how he was missing out on "the terror of murder, the suspense - the fun",** I guess the producers just couldn't hold out, giving in to the notion that watching shit get blown up was more fun than optimism and human endeavor.

IOZ skewers the fatuousness that would infect particularly the later Star Trek programs, saying,

You'll often hear the claim that Star Trek posits an ideal of a cooperative, post-scarcity, universally tolerant and largely utopic future, when in fact its fictive universe presents a deracinated, militaristic hierarchy as humanity's destiny. Which, when you think about it, is Kennedy-esque, isn't it? Star Trek was mostly zippity-doo space opera, and I feel a little guilty for picking on its tissue-paper politics, but you do have to wonder why enlightened humanity chooses to whisk among the stars in a bad facsimile of a 19th-century navy? In that regard, the missing detail is a realistic portrayal of sodomy.

In that same vein, other missing details in a realistic portrayal of a 19th-century navy were rum and the lash.

While it's nice to speculate about the hope of a post-scarcity utopia, we're going to have to get through the scarcity phase, which we're beginning to make the transition into. This brings me back to President-elect Obama selecting a homophobic bigot as the pastor to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. I find it deplorable, but in a tiresome sort of way because it distracts progressives whose energies should be devoted to other areas such as, say our unsustainable way of life, a topic that is relentlessly ignored by the media. Unfortunately, we as progressives are going to have to be the adults here (since the Rick Warrens of the world apparently aren't enlightened enough for that yet), which means sometimes sucking it in for certain aspects of life such as, say a finger stuck in the eye of homosexuals everywhere, to focus on bigger picture stuff. . . such as, say our unsustainable way of life. Being dead from starvation, disease or conflict makes it harder in the long run to combat hate and bigotry.

Therefore, I'm much more impressed with President-elect Obama appointing Jane Lubchenco as administrator of NOAA, than I am discomfited by selecting the Purpose-Driven-Life guy to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Very adult-like.

** And if that just went past you, you need to question how much of a Trekkie you really are.

Greetings to President-Elect Obama's Transition Team

Hi President-elect Obama’s transition team and thanks for stopping by. You’re asking people for their ideas on energy and the environment, and here’s my contribution. My apologies in advance for not using the dinky comment box provided on your website, but this does allow me to develop ideas a little more fully. I’ll be brief.

Vapor intrusion is a growing problem with hazardous waste sites being cleaned up under Superfund and RCRA Corrective Action. Vapor intrusion occurs where there is contamination of soil or groundwater with volatile chemicals such as the solvent TCE, the dry-cleaning chemical PCE or petroleum hydrocarbon constituents such as benzene. If there are buildings located near the volatile contaminants in soil and groundwater, these can migrate into indoor air and can be inhaled by the occupants. Residents in communities affected by vapor intrusion are concerned about the health risks from inhaling these volatile chemicals. I speak about this issue as someone who has investigated vapor intrusion at hazardous waste sites across the U.S., and has participated in many national conferences on vapor intrusion sponsored by EPA, Air and Waste Management Association and other organizations.

One solution to vapor intrusion is to install engineering controls to prevent the volatile chemicals from entering a building. These are the same types of engineering controls that have been used for many years to prevent radon from entering buildings. These engineering controls work by preventing the leakage of air through the floors and walls of a building, a fact which spawned the idea of linking mitigation of vapor intrusion with building energy conservation. “Green building” techniques increase energy efficiency and improve indoor air quality in buildings by eliminating air leakage and by reducing the pressure differences between outdoors including the subsurface and indoors - the same strategy as used for mitigating vapor intrusion.

Linking green buildings concepts and vapor intrusion provides a significant opportunity to promote vapor mitigation and reduce health risks, while achieving co-lateral environmental benefits such as energy conservation with corresponding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. An example of the growing importance of building optimization is shown in the principles of building design that are incorporated into Executive Order (EO) 13423, enacted in January 2007. This EO requires federal agencies to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and energy use. Some of these reductions will occur through the sustainable design and operation of buildings.

There are some barriers that need to be overcome to achieve this linkage of hazardous waste cleanup and energy conservation. Guidance and new regulations may be needed to change the mind-sets of regulatory agencies which don’t see these engineering controls as permanent measures for reducing vapor intrusion risks. A regulatory bias against vapor-resistant construction as a remedial measure for controlling vapor intrusion can delay final cleanup decisions and can represent a barrier to the development of brownfield sites. There may also be research needs to fully integrate building energy conservation methods with the control of vapor intrusion. Another important question to be answered is how to give responsible parties – those on the hook for cleaning up the Superfund or RCRA sites – “credit” for doing and paying for more work than what’s specifically required for cleanup.

Green jobs and new forms of collaboration and teamwork in hazardous waste site cleanup are some of the benefits from linking vapor intrusion and building energy conservation. I am working with my colleagues to flesh out these ideas, and give them wider visibility. I cordially invite you to be a part of that effort. Thank you.

Sweating the Small Stuff

As with many others, I’ve watch the value of my 401K account drop as markets tumble through greed, fraud and incompetent financial practices. I’m glad I’m eating my vegetables and taking my antioxidants and fish oil to give me a long working lifetime to rebuild my assets after the “meltdown” has subsided.

So the financial markets tank because the Masters of the Universe have been strip mining them, and Congress and the administration drop everything to wrestle with the resulting crisis (does anyone know if they’ve passed the 2009 federal budget yet?). The current financial upheaval is being used by climate-change-denier-fugitive-from-reality Rep. James Imhofe as an excuse to put global climate change mitigation on the blocks, an unbelievably stupid idea, since climate change mitigation represents the largest public works opportunity since the Bureau of Reclamation started building dams, potentially putting millions to work.

I’m sure that people across the country worrying about their retirement accounts aren’t interested in hearing about this, but in perspective, the financial crisis is the small stuff. The BBC has recently reported on a study recently published by the EU which estimates that the global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis.

That study, titled The Cost of Policy Inaction: the case of not meeting the 2010 biodiversity target (COPI for short), part of the first phase of the EU’s The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program, is well-written and densely informative. Sound bites do not jump out of it, so it completely unsuited for American short attention spans, and I wonder if anyone on this side of the pond is going to bother to read even the 16 page executive summary. The 2010 biodiversity target refers to the EU’s Potsdam Initiative proposed by the German government during a meeting in March 2007 of the environmental ministers of the G8 countries and five major newly industrializing countries. The Potsdam Initiative recognizes the economic importance of biodiversity and “ecosystem services”. Ecosystem services include water purification, sequestration of greenhouse gases, natural products (pharmaceuticals), fisheries, timber, erosion control and nutrient cycling. These are public goods with no markets and no prices, so unlike toxic mortgages, there are no economic warnings that go up when ecosystem services are imploded.

A taste of what the COPI report provides is with the trends in fisheries. The executive summary of the COPI report contains this cheery plot of the unsustainability of global marine fisheries, projecting that they are all fully exploited, over-exploited or have crashed. In terms of the societal consequences of collapsing fisheries, the report states:

It is estimated that 1 billion people worldwide are dependent on fish as their sole or main source of animal protein, while fish provided more than 2.6 billion people with at least 20 percent of their average per capita animal protein intake. The expected decline of ocean fisheries will therefore have severe social consequences.

And speaking of where my next bottle of fish oil will be coming from from, the report didn’t even get into the cognitive decline from inadequate consumption of omega-3-fatty acids, which are essential for brain development in children. So, we’re not only starving succeeding generations but leaving them less equipped to deal with global ecological crises.

Since a lot of people can’t come to grips with this issue in terms of starvation and human suffering, the COPI report thoughtfully breaks this down monetarily. The study concluded that the world is expected to have lost land-based ecosystems services (such as forests) worth around 1% of the world Gross Domestic Product in 2010 or 545 billion Euros (733 billion dollars), due to biodiversity losses between 2000 and 2010. This is acknowledged to be an underestimate, and one objective of the second phase of TEEB is to account for what’s missing (oceans, coral reefs, watersheds, ecotourism, pollination services, invasive species (biodiversity as pest control), biochemicals and pharmaceuticals. There are also cumulative impacts not accounted for; one example is that much of the land-based losses are in carbon storage, which increases climate change impacts, and there may be costs associated with adapting to impacts from climate change (think about the disaster response and recovery from Hurricane Katrina). And, according to a new report from the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Federation), climate change is accelerating faster than predicted in the most recently published IPCC report.

So, we have to mount the most revolutionary economic and social transformation of the human species ever seen in recorded history to respond to the twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, with the time available to intervene running short. And, based on all of the indicators, we can’t even get it started.

I’m full of good news today.

Wrong Answer

A few days back I was driving around running an errand and happened to catch on the radio “MarketPlace”, that annoyingly smug business program carried on NPR stations. I try not to listen to NPR any more, but it’s one of those things that’s hard to stop once you’ve started, like cigarettes or heroin. Anyway, they carried a story about energy independence blah blah blah, and how someone was trying to commercialize plasma gasification as a waste to energy technology. Plasma gasification uses high temperatures to convert organic materials into “syngas”, or a gas stream composed mostly of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These two substances then can be catalytically rearranged to form methane, hydrogen, and hydrocarbon fuels. It's been tried as a means of biomass conversion in a few places.

There was a hint of conspiracy theory about why this technology just isn’t all over the place, making truckloads of money for its proponents.

You know, we would be taking away a large business for the landfill people and the incinerators, so waste company do not want to see this technology come out. On the other hand, if we produce power, we will be infringing on the coal business and fossil fuel burning business.

I guess the energy consumption and expense involved have little to do with it. The other point that was brought up in the article as a reason we “need” this technology is that we’re running out of landfill space. . . .

The “running out of landfill space” argument is always a sign that you’re talking to someone who doesn’t really know much about environmental issues. We’re not running out of landfill space these days, so much as we’re running out of political will to site landfills where they are needed. Landfills also are a sign of mismanaged resources. For example, a significant chunk of the copper from the entire lithosphere is in landfills, a fact coupled with rising demand in China, which helps explain why thieves are starting to strip copper fittings out of abandoned forclosed homes. This article points to more examples of metals whose stocks may be approaching exhaustion. I found it from a Daily Kos diary “Peak Metal”, which has a nice analysis of the problem, but then mars it by indulging in liberal handwringing about how hard metals reclamation will be, and engaging in NIMBY-ism about how you don’t want a landfill mine as a neighbor (knee-jerk NIMBY thinking being another sign you’re talking to someone who doesn’t really know much about environmental issues).

So, we don’t need to be melting garbage to make fuel or electricity – we have other ways of getting those things. However, we are probably past the point where we need to start reclaiming and reusing the crap we’ve been tossing away so blithely. Noone yet is talking seriously yet about landfill mining, but if we’re arresting people for stealing copper, digging up landfills for it can be only a matter of time.

The Other Story About the Airline Debacle

Last year, I was on the road about 30% of the time. I grew to loathe airline travel, the cramped accommodations on planes, security theater, boredom, hurry up and wait, the nutritional dead zones called airports, the physical effects from disrupted sleep, eating and exercise habits, and that was before airlines started grounding their fleets to check the planes and make sure they aren't going to fall out of the sky. My sympathies are with the travelers inconvenienced by American Airlines. I may be one with you soon - I'm scheduled to fly towards the end of this month. However, one bright spot is that the present disruptions - grounded fleets and bankrupt airlines - might crystalize in peoples' minds just how broken air travel really is. Maybe they'll even start to think about how unsustainable air travel really is.

There's no way to sugar coat that last one. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution published an analysis of the impacts of air travel back in the dim past of 2002. That report raises concerns about air travel providing a disproportionate contribution to global climate change compared with other human activities and modes of transportation, in particular rail and marine. Global climate change is increasingly being viewed as a national security issue (here's the latest rumination from that corner), suggesting that matters such as air travel cannot solely be left up to CEOs; of course as events have shown in Iraq, it also may not be a good idea to leave such matters up to the national security technocrats, either.

With a new call for reducing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to 350 ppm (James Hansen's paper on the topic can be found here), it might be time to begin viewing air travel as something that becomes rare in our future. There are alternatives that can offset flying less, such as videoconferencing and high speed rail, but pressure needs to be applied, particularly to get high speed rail going in the US. Of course, this means airline executives will have to find something else to do, and probably see a decrease in their bloated standard of living in the process. Don't expect them to go down quietly, though.

Seven Ideas Lost on Americans

Americans aren’t stupid. I have come to the conclusion that we are either in a state of perpetual denial or in a fog of permanent confusion. Whatever the case, we are overlooking some pretty important ideas that contribute to the current environmental crisis.

Jerald Schnoor, the editor of Environmental Science and Technology and the author of those words is going pretty easy on us. A reasonable person probably couldn’t rule out the possibility that we Americans are stupid. However, he makes up for it in his list of seven ideas lost on Americans. I’ll summarize here, with my own perspective, but the article should be read on its own merits (go ahead, it’s not behind the firewall).

1. Our unsustainability is immense. It’s true. You have to be seriously deluded to believe otherwise. Unless you living at a subsistence level, you’re not really helping (spare me about how green you really are). We really don’t have a clue, and many of the solutions we’re working on, such as biofuels or hybrid cars, provide only little benefit, or actually make matters worse.

2. Tipping points are irreversible. His closing point is educational – people don’t really believe a severe storm or a fire is going to destroy their home, yet they invest in insurance against that possibility. Why can’t we do the same with climate change?

3. Time lag bites. Another thing we don’t get is that the atmosphere doesn’t turn on a dime, even if we summon the will to reduce greenhouse gases. The effects, even if we begin in earnest today, won’t be apparent for over a century.

4. Species matter. This doesn’t involve getting misty-eyed about endangered species. I think that people tend to forget that beyond being beautiful and wondrous, Nature is also FUNCTIONAL.

5. Free markets aren’t free. This should be tattooed mirror-wise on the foreheads of every idiot libertarian, neoconservative economist, nitwit pundit. . . and maybe all Republicans, for that matter. Ecosystem services cost something, even if you don’t want to acknowledge they exist.

6. Inaction can be more expensive than action. There’s money to be made in energy retrofits, carbon sequestration, building mass transit, restoring habitat, rehabilitating soils, etc. etc. Global warming deniers and uncertainty manufacturers are agents of chaos and disinformation in the service of those economic interests who will are fighting a rearguard action to avoid being the big losers in the climate change economy. The fact that a large fraction of us are listening makes us idiots by default.

7. Technology can’t do it alone. We’re going to need a new worldview for how we regard nature in addition to the mother of all Manhattan Projects. I wonder if we’ve got it in us – the current worldview in the US advocates human domination of nature.

Note to self: next time, write the post before cracking open the wine. You’ll sound less cranky that way.

A Placeholder for Interesting Things – Trash Pickers and Sustainability

Keeping my pledge to write more frequently means there will be posts like this one which are placeholders until I have the time to explore a topic in more detail. I ran across this fascinating article about trash pickers, the poor around the world who scrape out a living salvaging recyclables from the street and landfills. Someone has written a book about them, which I will pick up and review. After reading this paper a few years ago, which observed that a significant fraction of the global stock of copper resides in landfills, maybe the idea is possible that the despised (or ignored) trash pickers could become a global economic force.

The Sad State of Environmental Health Policy Today

The other day, Revere was discussing John Edwards’s presidential platform on cancer, and expressing disappointment that Senator Edwards gives virtually no attention to prevention, including regulatory approaches for reducing carcinogenic exposures and incentives for promoting “green chemistry” in manufacturing. I checked over at Hillary Clinton’s web site, which has a bit more meat on this topic: smoking prevention in young people, getting junk food out of schools, and improving biomonitoring of exposure to toxic substances. However, it’s only a slight improvement over what John Edwards would provide for us. To the credit of both of them, they appeared at Lance Armstrong’s cancer forum earlier this week (most of the Republican candidates bailed on it).

It seems so hard for our politicians to inject the environmental health focus into the debate over health care. Perhaps it’s too difficult for them. Too much of our economic system would have to change. For example, in a paper published last month in Environmental Health Perspectives, the cancer risks from organic hazardous air pollutants were ranked for a non-occupational and non-smoking population. The chemicals providing the largest contribution to total estimated cancer risks in the U.S. were benzene, butadiene, formaldehyde, dioxins and chloroform.
Mobile sources (cars and trucks) are a large part of the emissions of benzene, butadiene and formaldehyde into the air. So, by inference, a key strategy for reducing exposure to these substances could be to reduce the amount that we drive, or ship stuff around by truck. The alterations to our daily lives could range from minor, such carpooling, greater proportion of working from home, or buying locally, to fairly life-changing stuff, including redesigning cities for walking and urban biking, substantially increasing the urban mass transit infrastructure, changing patterns of employment, old industries collapsing while new ones flourish. . . more examples are provided here. There would be collateral benefits, too: redesigning our built environment to be more friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists could create a health benefit, and possibly cut into health care costs, by increasing the amount of exercise people get (NIEHS had a conference on this topic in 2004); in addition, reducing vehicle-miles traveled also reduces our consumption of oil, which promotes energy independence and begin reducing greenhouse gas emissions, both of which pose a risk to national security. Oh, and all of the upgrading of our infrastructure that would be needed to accommodate fewer cars and trucks in our lives would create jobs. . . . Stop me if all of this is making too much sense.

Chloroform occurs in drinking water as a disinfection byproduct (most chloroform exposure occurs indoors when we use that water – either from drinking, or inhaling chloroform that volatilizes from hot water during showering or using a washer or dishwasher). While the disinfection of drinking water using chemicals such as chlorine has been a major public health success story by reducing the risk of disease, elevated levels of disinfection byproducts may be associated with an increased risk of bladder, rectal, and/or colon cancers and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Many water utilities use chlorine gas for disinfecting drinking water, and chlorine is transported around the country in rail cars. Derailments have created hazards and caused fatalities to communities in the past (I’ve blogged about one such story in Graniteville, SC in 2005; as discussed here, further work is needed to increase the safety of rail cars transporting hazardous materials). However, alternatives are available for disinfection of drinking water that can reduce the formation of disinfection byproducts and at the same time reduce accidental releases from derailments by limiting the amount of chlorine transported around the country. There would need to be an investment made to fund the retrofitting of water treatment plants – but again, you could look at this as an opportunity for job creation.

The story is bit different for dioxins. People are exposed to dioxins principally through the food supply, particularly by eating animal fat, dairy products and fish. In 2003, the Institute of Medicine published a report discussing strategies for reducing exposure to dioxins in foods. Overall, about 34 percent of the calories in American adults’ daily diet come from fat, and one-quarter to one-third of that is from saturated fat, which is largely animal fat. Recommendations for reducing dioxin exposure in the diet (which, by the way, would also reduce exposure to other lipophilic persistent organic pollutants) include changing agricultural production methods to interrupt the cycle of dioxins through forage, animal feed, and food-producing animals, particularly with regard to the use of animal fats as livestock feed. In addition, they recommend educating people about reducing the amount of fat consumed in their diets. In general, making people more aware of the consequences and benefits associated with what they eat can provide health benefits beyond reducing exposure to dioxins and persistent organic pollutants.

There are pollutants not covered in the EHP article, because they aren’t hazardous air pollutants, but that still are examples of how attention to environmental health can have collateral economic benefits. For example, nearly 2 billion pounds per year of bisphenol-A are used in the production of polycarbonate plastics. Polycarbonates are used to manufacture all types of plastic components, including food and drink containers. There potentially are problems with using polycarbonates in food and drink containers – bisphenol-A can leach from them and be ingested. This makes bisphenol-A a textbook example of an environmental toxicology and health policy problem. It's a commercially important chemical substance. Nearly all of us are constantly exposed to low levels of it. The mechanisms for potentially adverse health effects are subtle and occur at low levels of exposure. The most vulnerable populations for these effects are young children, both during pre-natal development and in infancy. The kinds of biological effects observed in laboratory animals with low levels of exposure include stimulating the growth of prostate (in males) and mammary tissues (in females), potentially increasing susceptibility to carcinogenicity later in life; alterations in hormonol with effects such as early onset of sexual maturation; and neurobehavioral effects. Recently, one study provided indications that BPA might promote insulin resistance, a risk factor for diabetes. These effects can be observed at levels around 10-fold greater than levels of exposure in humans, which is not a comfortable margin of safety. As yet, adverse effects have not been observed in humans, though there hasn't been a concerted effort made to examine human populations.

Bisphenol-A is not the only component in plastics manufacturing with health concerns. Health effects potentially associated with phthalates, used as plasticizers, and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the precursor used to make Teflon, are also under scrutiny. As with bisphenol-A, these substances are in widely used products, and we all carry around a small body burden of them. As can be imagined, there is a strenuous scientific debate about the presence and significance of adverse health effects from exposure to bisphenol-A, phthalates and PFOA, a debate which may never be satisfactorily resolved. However, there is an opportunity to promote the research, development and manufacturing of lower-toxicity materials for use in consumer products, which could help to reduce the uncertainty regarding health risks from plastics. There are many initiatives promoting “green chemistry” (the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production and the Clean Production Action project are resources for learning more about this topic). However, while the chemical manufacturing industry acknowledges the importance of green chemistry, redirecting it onto a more sustainable path will happen faster if political pressure is applied.

Which brings us around to what our presidential candidates have said about cancer prevention, and more importantly, what they haven’t said. Dealing with disease burdens such as cancer is more than just fixing health insurance and giving more money to NIH. It is taking a more holistic view of how physical and socioeconomic factors can affect human health. Environmental health is very much a democratic issue. The Democratic candidates for president should be able to say more about it than they currently are doing.