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Ruling on Clean Air

Not sure who reads unsigned editorials anymore, but there was a good one from the Times on Thursday touting a new EPA ruling on expansions of the Clean Air Act:

The rule, which takes effect in 2012, would cut emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain, and nitrogen oxide, a component of smog, by more than half by 2014 compared with 2005 levels.

As is true of nearly every regulation spawned by the landmark 1970 Clean Air Act, the rule’s benefits will greatly outweigh its costs to industry — a truth routinely ignored by the act’s critics, most recently the Tea Party supporters in Congress. The E.P.A. estimates annual benefits at $120 billion to $240 billion, mostly from fewer premature deaths, hospital visits and lost work days associated with respiratory illnesses.

By contrast, the costs of new pollution controls and plant retirements are estimated at $800 million annually, on top of about $1.6 billion in capital improvements already under way in anticipation of the rule.

These new regulations are part of a package that includes new mileage standards for cars and reductions in other greenhouse gases – a way for WH to do the job of congress through the EPA.When cap and trade went from a foregone conclusion to a dead letter, there was really little other option for the Obama Administration to act on climate change, air and water pollution or any other snapshot of the future of the country than to issue new EPA guidelines. Again, howls of indignation from the Confederates, while the corporations on whose behalf they roam work feverishly to come up with new eco-themed advertising to disguise their craven end-times profiteering. For those who would like to see through the smoke, the crushing hand of government regulation momentarily stuns the intruder by being at home. Now where’s that bat?

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Expense of the Environment

It’s an interesting concept, especially as we’ve all but stopped letting the costs of war preclude us from war-making, but how much should protecting the environment cost us? In money and competitiveness, the issue is contentious, rife with conflicts, false promises and disinformation. But, let no one tell you that Republican officeholders at every level stand for anything but rolling back regulations and agencies charged with protecting the environment. While there was hardly ever any doubt about this, now there is not even a pose.

The budget approved by the legislature, led by Republicans for the first time in a century, eliminates the program as part of roughly $23 million in environmental program cuts that would chop more than 150 positions. All told, the department’s budget would be cut by 12 percent, more than double the cuts proposed by Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat.

The legislative budget also would shift some operations to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is led by a Republican commissioner, a move some fear would change the focus from environmental protection to business enhancement.

That’s in North Carolina, but it is everywhere the same. Democrats get elected promising to enact new regulations and fund alternatives; Republicans get elected promising to rein in regulations and lavish spending on boondoggles. Eye; beholder. I especially like this:

“I don’t want to destroy anything,” said state Sen. Don East, a Surry County Republican and an environmental budget writer. “I just don’t think these very stringent environmental rules that we are living under are going to do what the environmentalists say they do.”

How could they? I believe he doesn’t want to do any harm to anything, including taking any power away from anybody to release anything anywhere. You know, the little guy. Sorry, dude. That’s not a choice anymore. Now you have to actually make choices. Oh: you are.




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State of the Environment

The local environment, in China. You’ve heard about the smog, but just how bad is it?

  • Surface water pollution is “relatively grave,” with 16.7% of rivers failing to meet any sort of grade standard–meaning the water is completely unfit for use (including in agricultural irrigation). And 42.3% of rivers are affected by eutrophication, a process where phytoplankton deplete oxygen from the water.
  • Approximately one in five cities doesn’t meet China’s urban air quality standards, which are lower than those recommended by the World Health Organization. Acid rain was observed in over 50% of the country’s cities.
  • 22% of the country’s 2,588 nature reserves are damaged in some way, mainly because as “economic development and industrialisation have gained momentum, unreasonable activities have weakened the function and value of those reserves.” In other words, the country is just too crowded.
  • Heavy metal pollution is a growing (but still small) problem, with 14 reported cases last year and seven this year.

Something to remember in between all the talk about China being our biggest competitor. Point being: competitor for what?

Another thing, all this is from a report released by the Chinese government. It’s not like they’re being coy about it. Maybe we shouldn’t be, either.

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Photo-voltaic Impasse

Might have been broken.

Photovoltaic (PV) efficiency is a significant problem for today’s commercial solar panels, which can collect only a theoretical maximum of about 30 percent of available light. Now, a team that includes a University of Missouri engineer is developing a flexible solar film that can theoretically capture more than 90 percent of available light. Prototypes could be produced within the next five years.

Patrick Pinhero, an associate professor in the MU Chemical Engineering Department, says energy generated using traditional photovoltaic methods of solar collection is inefficient and neglects much of the available solar electromagnetic (sunlight) spectrum. The device the team is developing — essentially a thin, moldable sheet of small antennas called nantenna — is designed to harvest industrial waste heat and convert it into usable electricity. Their ambition is to extend this concept to direct solar facing nantenna devices capable of collecting energy broadly from the near infrared to the optical regions of the solar spectrum.

90% is much more like it. High-speed electrical circuitry. Inexpensive manufacturing processes. This is not being saved by technology so much as using engineering to break the problem down into manageable fragments until it’s no longer a problem and more of way to do what we want – harvest as much energy as possible for the sun.

Moving on to renewable energy sources can be done – and need not been seen or thought of a desperate last gasp/final hope but the natural of progression of technology and its uses that our subservience to fossil energy sources has for so long stymied. Departments of Energy whose first loyalty is to oil and gas industries will not provide the necessary R & D investments in replacing the same. This kind of research takes a lot of money, time and expertise – but the payoffs will be enormous. I’m looking at you, coal, in the rear view mirror.

Via IC.

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Green Quiz

Which is the more eco enviro? No fair if you recognize your ‘hood.

1. Paris3rd

2. allemagne

3. alpharhetta

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Flooded Threads

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This is a good example of why the green issue is so complex, viz our modern ways and means, and corrections to it so complicated.

An emergency procedure intended to prevent the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from flooding several river towns appears to be working Tuesday, as river levels have fallen more than a foot. However, water levels are rising as far south as Memphis, Tenn., where heavy rainfall could contribute to a river crest of 48 feet next Tuesday.

Late Monday, the US Army Corps of Engineers blasted a two-mile hole in a Mississippi River levee to relieve water pressure that, at its height Monday night, stood at a record-breaking 61.72 feet in Cairo, Ill. The historic river town is located at the bottommost tip of Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet.

But that’s only part of it. Originally, before it was straightened at any many points and levees built to protect settlements, town and cities the alluvial plain of the Mississippi Delta was about 300 miles wide. As much as it was a pain and a danger, its regular flooding by the sediment-rich river produced extraordinarily fertile croplands throughout the Delta region – not to be confused with the Mississippi River Delta at the mouth of the river, which is different.

The delta regularly flooded, so we set about changing its course and building levees to protect people and property from the flooding. In an alluvial plain. I certainly do not wish any of these residents any harm or ill-will at this time of hardship. These are the ramifications of our own attempts to master the largest river system in North America. When we made it impossible for the river to periodically dump sediments onto the land through flooding, we made it possible for the river to carry the same same sediment out into the river delta, where it creates massive biological dead zones, aka hypoxia zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s weird and not much salve to see try to this in context of a longer time continuum. But as Fred said, we need more weird.

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Renewable You

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AFP – Getty Images

The whole idea of renewable energy sources – wind, solar, tidal, pedal – has only been in our viewfinder for a short while. This is because fossil fuels have become increasing problematic – not only in terms of long-term ecological catastrophe, but also human error-plagued bottom line-oriented short cutting and, not to be left out, geopolitical events that compromise our ability to secure said fuels. On top of this and not unrelated to the last point, the physical infrastructure, economy and energy policy of the United States were all developed when the country was a net exporter of fossil fuels.

Needless to say, nothing has changed and we continue to do things the same way, perhaps not even yet expecting different results, as one way of hanging to the last vestiges of any semblance of sanity.

And yet an expectation of different results is very much needed. As the above plus the nuclear meltdowns as a result of the devastating earthquakes in Japan attest, the need to pick up the pace in advancing toward a renewable energy present will not wait. The low-info dead-enders rising political stars waste capital and human resources debating settled issues at our collective peril and should be considered armed clueless and dangerous.

To repeat an unpopular refrain: these things are connected.

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Supreme courting

A friend and I have had several conversations recently about how much of our lives and livelihoods seems to be in the hands of 9 people, one in particular, and how little people seem to know or care about this august body.

Soon comes one of these, in the case of American Electric power vs. Connecticut:

On December 6, 2010, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, a federal nuisance case on appeal from the Second Circuit. Plaintiffs — eight states, the City of New York and three non-profit land trusts — seek abatement and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from defendants, who include some of the United States’ largest electric utility companies. The Second Circuit ruled that: (1) the case did not present a non-justiciable political question, (2) the plaintiffs have standing, (3) the plaintiffs stated claims under the federal common law of nuisance, (4) the plaintiffs’ claims are not displaced by the Clean Air Act (“CAA”), and, finally, (5) the Tennessee Valley Authority (“TVA”), a quasi-governmental defendant, is not immune from the suit.

The states, plus NYC and three land trusts want to be able to sue these companies spewing carbon into the air like it’s a birthright. One lower court said, “sure.” The companies appealed.

And then,

Three leading Republicans in Congress filed a brief with the Supreme Court late Monday asking the justices to overturn a lower court ruling that allowed several states and environmental groups to sue electric utilities over their global warming emissions.

You might guess who these three are. They don’t believe in AGW and routinely put a fork (or a hold on, choose your metaphor) in any legislative efforts to address the problem. Of course their amicus brief makes the claim that the issue is simply not one for the courts, which might do something; they want to preserve this right for the legislative branch, which likely will not do anything for at least a while longer, if these three have anything to do with it.

It’s a very strange meaning for preservation.

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New Dual Suspension, Now with More Disbelief

The Economist, today:

By itself, as we always say, one hot year doesn’t prove anything. The fact that every one of the twelve hottest years on record has come since 1997 is a little harder to wave away. 2010 was also the wettest year ever, corresponding to the expectation that higher heat means more water vapour. More countries set national high-temperature records in 2010 than ever before, including the biggest one, Russia. Arctic sea ice in December was at its lowest level ever, temperatures across a broad swathe of northern Canada have been 20° C higher than normal for the past month, the record temperatures are coming despite the lowest levels of solar activity in a century and a La Nina effect that should be making Canada colder rather than warmer, and so on. It is of course possible that global warming plateaued this year; it’s also possible that it plateaued this morning. One can always hope!

Complete with a nice graph. But is this thing settled? Far from it apparently. Can’t begin to do anything that might be too expensive until every last numb-nut is convinced, every last remote possibility that nothing is happened vanquished. Then what? A study group? They don’t believe in human-caused global warming because of the same reason they don’t believe in making Medicare universal – it’s un-American. Yes, it’s that incoherent. If you think you’re reasoning with people who can be convinced, you haven’t been listening to what they have been saying. And so amateur deniers and professional politicians continue to propose cuts to clean energy, yell about business regulations strangling growth and about how the debt is the evil to end all evils.

I think Republicans believe that we can keep doing things the way we always have (only with way lower taxes) and get much the same wholesome results. It’s this point that is already frustrating them in ways, besides race, that I don’t believe have actually set it in with the folks who carry the water. And until they can openly say they don’t like the results without another of their team calling them America-haters, they just have to keep professing to love the results.

Meanwhile, ticktock… and the incremental, practically unnoticeable damage will continue until it becomes more noticeable and there’s a special Fox News report on the real news that global warming actually hurts liberals and helps Republicans. And so it must be real and irreversible. And then it finally will be.

Yay?

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Redfields to Greenfields

Written by our friend JL, an article on a potential oxygen tank for underwater properties:

Redfields describe a financial condition, not a development type. So brownfields and greyfields are often redfields, as are other distressed, outmoded or undesirable built places: failed office and apartment complexes, vacant retail strips and big-box stores, newly platted subdivisions that died aborning in the crash.

Now comes “Redfields to Greenfields,” a promising initiative aimed at reducing the huge supply of stricken commercial properties while simultaneously revitalizing the areas around them. (It’s a catchy title, if imprecise because it’s about re-establishing greenfields within developed areas, not about doing anything to natural or agricultural acreage at the urban margins.) The plan, in essence, is this: Determine where defunct properties might fit a metropolitan green-space strategy; acquire and clear them; then make them into parks and conservation areas, some permanent and some only land-banked until the market wants them again.

There’s plenty to agitate against when the proposition of more urban park space comes up, even when, hey, who doesn’t love a park? There could always be better uses for land, but we have t0 get urban property back up to a premium first. And this is not a bad way to over-correct, where much correction is due. Like, say, from most places to everywhere.

Thanks, J.