Archive for May 2014
Sierra Club Sues EPA Over Delayed “Bump Up” for DFW Smog Status
DALLAS, TX – The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) missed a key deadline in 2013 to classify smog air pollution in Dallas-Fort Worth as ‘severe,’ prompting the Sierra Club to file suit against the agency yesterday afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for failing to properly act to protect the health of the people of North Texas.
The levels of smog in Dallas-Fort Worth are among the highest in the country, and only smoggy California, Houston and Baltimore have levels higher than North Texas. Ozone is the main ingredient in the smog in Dallas-Fort Worth. It triggers asthma attacks in children and is responsible for the red and orange bad air alert days the region sees every year.
“While we recognize that the Environmental Protection Agency has many priorities, nothing is more important than protecting our children from the dangers of smog and the asthma attacks that it can trigger,” said Dr. Neil Carman of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. “The Clean Air Act has mechanisms in place to reduce pollution for areas with long-standing smog problems like Dallas-Fort Worth, but those mechanisms don’t get triggered unless EPA acts.”
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) had a federal deadline to meet the public health standard by 2009, and when the state’s clean air plan failed to reduce pollution levels to meet the protective standards of the Clean Air Act, regulators received an extension to meet the standard by the end of the 2012.
State regulators again failed to develop a plan that would lower smog levels to protect people living in the region. After both failures, the law required EPA to classify Dallas-Fort Worth as having a “severe” ozone problem and publish the notice in the Federal Register in 2013. This action would have required polluters to take additional steps to clean our air. Unfortunately, U.S. EPA missed the deadline, prompting the Sierra Club to file suit late Tuesday, May 20, 2014.
"The Clean Air Act requires polluters to take extra steps in places like Dallas-Fort Worth that have been chronic violators of smog standards," said Jim Schermbeck with Downwinders at Risk, a clean air group based in Dallas-Fort Worth. "But asking Rick Perry to enforce the Clean Air Act in 2014 is like asking Wall Street tycoons to care about low-income families. That's why six million residents need the EPA to do its job and guarantee North Texas safe and legal air."
Because the EPA missed the 2013 deadline to properly classify the Dallas-Fort Worth area as a “severe” ozone smog area, industries are being allowed pollute more than they would otherwise, delaying the protections children, the elderly and people with respiratory illnesses in the region need.
"Today's action is the first step in requiring the EPA to finally solve the ozone problem in D-FW. Too many Texas children end up in the emergency room or miss school because of asthma and other breathing difficulties. We have to hold EPA to its legal requirements to give these families a chance to breathe easier," said Nia Martin-Robinson, Beyond Coal organizer with the Sierra Club in Texas.
Coal-fired power plants across Texas, cement plants in Midlothian and fracking in the Barnett Shale are significant contributors to smog-forming pollution to the region. State regulators have failed to require the most up to date pollution controls on these sources, contributing to the repeated failure of state clean air plans.
Air Pollution is “an overlooked risk factor” for Heart Disease
Over the last decade we've seen plenty of studies linking air pollution, and specifically Particulate Matter, or soot pollution, to heart disease and attacks. Now Dr. François Reeves,a Canandian cardiologist has a new book "Planet Heart: How an Unhealthy Environment Leads to Heart Disease," that puts those studies in context.
“You can sum it up like this: more pollution, more major adverse cardiac events. Pollution of the city is as toxic as cigarette smoke. It has different stuff in it, but the difference is that with pollution, you get it all through your life, from your birth to your death. If you live in a polluted milieu, as soon as you’re a baby you’ll take it in through every breath.”
Reeves' interest as a cardiologist in air pollution issues was triggered by a 2008 World Health Organization report that tracked mortality rates for cardiovascular disease in European countries. In nations with relatively clean air like Norway or even France, the levels were approximately 25 to 70 per 100,000 men. In Russia and the Ukraine it was 600-750 per 100,000. “I was blown away by those numbers,” Reeves says. “We know the classical and well-demonstrated risk factors for heart disease, like smoking and obesity and inactivity. But that’s when I realized the environment has a huge impact."
Just like lead, and benzene, and dioxin, and so many other kinds of pollution, there appears to be no "safe level" of exposure to PM pollution. Any amount is capable of doing some harm, and the more you're exposed, the more harm is likely to happen. That's why fence-line communities are particularly vulnerable to higher rates of illness. In DFW, where PM levels are considered under control, there are still lots of hot spots for the pollutant. If you live downwind of the Midlothian cement plants, you're inhaling a lot of soot. the closer you live – Cedar Hill, South Grand Prairie, South Arlington, Mansfield – the more soot you're inhaling.
In his new book Reeves gives a list of heart-healthy things an individual can do to reduce their risk of heart disease, including increased bike riding, more public transit, or walking and weaning yourself off of internal combustion engines with electric cars and hybrids. “Look at everything you’re doing to minimize your footprint and do whatever you can to have an impact on global footprint,” Reeves says,
But he recognizes the limits of this kind of advice if a person is living in a smoggy city or region and offers overarching policy advice for officials. Cities and governments must continue their efforts to be green, if only out of their own self-interest.
If those governments need any convincing, Brauer points to a financial argument: fewer health problems mean less strain on the public system. “If you improve air quality, everybody benefits,” he says. “It’s really, really cost-effective.
Have You Seen This Bucket of Hazardous Waste ?
It's 2014. Distant parts of the globe are connected within micro seconds. Some of us are driving electric cars. Our phones are more powerful than all the computers it ever took to put a human being on the Moon, combined.
And we use five gallon buckets from Academy to collect and store industrial hazardous waste.
Or at least the Exide contractors that are in charge of "cleaning-up" Frisco's Stewart Creek do. And they not only use them, they lose them.
On May 8th, workers for Apex-Titan Inc. were collecting battery casing chips and bits of lead slag from fields near the Creek a the intersection of Legacy and Stonebrook and putting them into the bucket. For decades before it closed in 2012, the Exide lead smelter dumped waste into and around the Creek, leaving a still-contaminated trail from the plant site all the way to Lake Lewisiville, approximately five miles away.
After collecting a full load of Exide waste, the contractors placed the bucket in the back of a pick-up truck and drove off – apparently without securing the tailgate first. Despite two staff from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on the scene to "document field activities" and the City of Frisco's own contractor present – nine people in all – no one noticed when or how the bucket fell off the truck on he way back to the plant site.
When they discovered the loss, the workers retraced their route. They searched the parking lot of a city park located across the street from a school – one of two in the immediate vicinity. No bucket. More than two weeks later the bucket of hazardous waste is still missing. But we're only now finding out about it.
This would be funny if it weren't for the possibility of this bucket ending up with kids or in a garden or as a water container. As a memo from the City of Frisco puts it:
"We believe it is a reasonable assumption that the bucket was found in the street by a person who picked it up for their own use; without realizing the contents might be hazardous waste."
With that in mind, did the City of Frisco inform the Frisco School District? Did any warnings get issued to students and parents at the two near-by schools? Not as far as we know. Did the City put out an All Points Bulletin for the bucket? No it did not. Embarrassment often keeps officials from doing the right thing about public health. So there's hazardous lead waste out there in a Frisco neighborhood that could be diminishing kids' IQs even as you're reading this, even as officials are too embarrassed to ring the alarm.
Now maybe you're thinking this whole Frisco lead cleanup fiasco now has a new mascot. And you' be right. This bucket pretty much sums up the FUBAR'd state of things. A bankrupt company entrusted to clean-up its own mess. A city council seemingly intent on making sure it ends up with a Superfund Site in the middle of the "second-fastest growing city in America." A state and federal government asleep at the wheel. It's all nicely summed up by that lost five gallon Academy bucket. That's the image. Here's the caption, however, thanks to Jack Fink at Channel 11:
"Mack Borchardt of the city of Frisco said he’s surprised, since they were assured going into this process by Exide that there wouldn’t be any problems with the system in place. “Obviously, that didn’t turn out to be the case,” said Borchardt."
City officials were shocked! Shocked they tell you, that Exide screwed up.
Frisco City officials handed the job over to Exide and expected the same company that ran an outlaw smelter operation to provide an excellent clean-up of their own mess. They had faith! The City is handing over the toxicology and assessment to the state and EPA. They have faith! They're handing the decision about what to do with the waste in Frisco to their lawyers, who are recommending the city host a toxic waste landfill by Stewart Creek in front of the new Grand Park. They have faith! What they don't have is any faith in their own citizenry. After 2 years there's still no transparent, civic dialog on the fate of the thousands of tons of lead waste that remains in the heart of the central business district.
There's no question that given a choice, most Frisco residents would vote to haul the waste completely out of town to a hazardous waste disposal site and develop the property as any other prime piece of real estate. And yet the Frisco City Council is still on course to approve a permanent toxic landfill of its own…… that would be monitored by the same state agency that didn't see that five gallon bucket falling out of the contractor's truck.
What's needed now more than anything else is homegrown vision and leadership. The city needs to take its fate into its own hands instead of entrusting others to look out for its self-interests. There's millions of dollars in state-collected battery fees that are supposed to be going to communities impacted by lead smelting. Frisco certainly qualifies. Instead of arguing with its own residents over a permanent landfill, the Council should be proposing legislation for the next session in Austin to finance a full clean-up.
This incident is a five-gallon splash in the face. Following instead of leading can only result in many future "problems with the system."
Downwinders at Risk Joins Groups in Filing EPA Petition Demanding Federal Limits on Toxic Oil & Gas Air Pollution from Well Sites
Downwinders at Risk and over 60 other local, state and national groups filed a petition Tuesday urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect public health by setting pollution limits on oil and gas wells and associated equipment in population centers around the U.S.
Led by the public interest law organization Earthjustice, the nationwide alliance also includes The Clean Air Council, Clean Air Taskforce, Environmental Defense Fund, Global Community Monitor, Natural Resources Defense Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, Sierra Club, and WildEarth Guardians.
Making the case to require oil and gas companies to limit toxic air pollution from oil and gas wells in urban, suburban and other populated areas as the Clean Air Act expressly provides, the petition urges the EPA to act quickly to protect public health.
In recent years, the pace of oil and gas drilling has increased drastically. As of 2011, oil and gas wells in the U.S. numbered more than 1.04 million. Current estimates project that as many as 45,000 new wells could be drilled each year through 2035.
Available data suggest that at least 100,000 tons per year of hazardous air pollution from oil and gas well sites—such as benzene, formaldehyde, and naphthalene—are currently going freely into the air. These pollutants have been linked to respiratory and neurological problems, birth defects, and cancer.
“More than 150 million Americans now live near oil and gas wells or above shale areas where companies are looking to drill or engage in hydraulic fracturing, and EPA needs to set standards that restrict the hazardous air pollutants they put into the air,” said Earthjustice attorney Emma Cheuse, who filed the petition on behalf of the groups.
A significant number of those millions are Texans, who are hosting at least four large gas and oil plays in the state, including the Barnett Shale that overlaps large sections of the DFW metropolitan area.
"Almost a decade of un-and-under-regulated fracking has transformed North Texas into a sacrifice zone for the gas industry, with conservative estimates of over 1,000 tons of hazardous air pollution being released annually from industry sources. Breathing this toxic air pollution has left a well-documented trail of illness and disease throughout the Barnett Shale. EPA needs to do its job and protect frontline victims of fracking by reducing the toxic fallout from the practice," said Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck.
Besides the DFW Metropolitan area, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Beaumont-Port Arthur, Waxo, Lubbock, Amarillo, Laredo, College Station-Bryan, Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood, McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Longview, Tyler, Abilene, Wichita Falls, Odessa, Midland, Sherman-Denison, Victoria, San Angelo, and Texarkana would also be protected by the new regulations.
Facilities presently not regulated for their toxic air pollution that would be covered under the petition include new and existing oil and gas wells, existing hydraulically fractured gas wells (unless modified), new hydraulically fractured gas wells that are exempted, most equipment associated with wells, including: many storage vessels, pneumatic controllers, compressors, and equipment leaks.
The petition filed today, as well as a list of the groups filing, can be found at: http://earthjustice.org/documents/legal-document/2014-petition-for-federal-limits-on-toxic-air-pollution-from-oil-gas-wells
To see the population centers that would receive protection under new EPA rules, look at Table 5 of the petition, or the maps listed below.
Human-Induced Earthquakes and Cooking the Planet: We’re Living the Next Hollywood Sci-Fi Blockbuster
"Environmentalism" as a cause in America has its roots in the wilderness, the "otherness" a person can discover when he or she is separated from their own kind and put among crowds of the planet's non-human inhabitants. Walden Pond. National Parks. These were all meant to be meditative retreats from "civilization," from which you could escape. Environmentalism was a revelatory and individualistic experience.
Then came the understanding of environmentalism as a way to affect collective public health. Air pollution we breathe into our bodies causes lung cancer and asthma. Swallowing water with toxins in it when you're pregnant can cause birth defects. Eating foods with pesticides in them can affect a child's hormones. Still, the impacts were mostly seen person by person, and they depended on lots of variables – genetics, location, exposure. Not in my backyard.
Now however we're in a whole new age of cause and effect. The scale is planetary. The sky we live under as well as the ground we walk on.
Imagine Hollywood makes a movie about alien invaders who want to reshape the Earth for their own purpose, say like "Battleship." They begin pumping in massive quantities of CO2 and methane, driving up the temperature way beyond anything in recent history and setting-off all kinds of chain reactions among species and weather conditions. They begin extracting minerals by poking deep holes in the earth and then setting off large explosions, the waste of which causes not-insignificant earthquake activity when they pump it back into the ground under tremendous pressure. Their huge spaceships sometimes leak radioactivity, and if they just happen to be sitting beside oceans that can be used as industrial-size septic tanks, all the better.
That's what it feels like now, in 2014.
In case you missed it, the United States Geologic Service issued its very first "Earthquake warning" for Oklahoma:
"A new study found that earthquakes in Oklahoma rose by 50 per cent over the last seven months, leading researchers to warn that the risk of a damaging earthquake measuring a magnitude of more than 5.5 has increased significantly in the state. Agencies reported 183 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or higher from October until April 14th, compared with an average of only two per year from 1978 to 2008."
Usually reserved for places like California or Alaska to warn residents of the risk of damaging aftershocks, this is the first time the USGS has issued an earthquake warning for a state east of the Rockies. In the Sooner State, the aftershocks are thought to be caused by fracking waste injection wells. A Cornell University study released this week showed a link between waste wells and earthquakes up to 50 kilometers away.
"A new study of the Jones earthquake swarm, occurring near Oklahoma City since 2008, demonstrates that a small cluster of high-volume injection wells triggered earthquakes tens of kilometers away. Both increasing pore pressure and the number of earthquakes were observed migrating away from the injection wells.
"The existing criteria for an induced earthquake do not allow earthquakes associated with the well activity to occur this far away from the wellbore," said Katie Keranen, assistant professor of geophysics at Cornell University, who led the study of the Jones earthquake swarm. "Our results, using seismology and hydrogeology, show a strong link between a small number of wells and earthquakes migrating up to 50 kilometers away" said Keranen. "
Moreover, we're just beginning to understand the threat to infrastructure from human-induced earthquakes…
"Last week scientists attending the Seismological Society of America annual meeting in Anchorage, Alaska called for more research into the relationship between fracking wastewater disposal and earthquake activity.
Gail Atkinson, an earth sciences professor at the University of Western Ontario, presented research at the conference highlighting the “significant and as-yet-unquantified risk” to the integrity of critical infrastructure, such as major dams and nuclear power plants posed by induced seismicity.
Part of the problem is that fault lines in the areas most affected by fracking operations are often poorly and incompletely mapped. Texas, Ohio, Colorado and Oklahoma, which have in recent years experienced unprecedented seismic activity, have never been made a priority like California and other states where quakes have long been a threat."
SMU and USGS scientists looking into the Azle earthquake swarm were also at this same Alaska conference presenting their paper showing the vast majority of recent earthquakes near that city were centered between two injection wells, including a large XTO one. Expect to see some follow-up as reporters and citizens take their first look. And while we really do expect an alien invasion to occur before the State of Texas voluntarily does anything to stop the problem in Azle, there's a House Energy Committee, Seismic Activity Sub-Committee hearing next Monday May 12th, where only invited testimony will be heard. Sharon has the details for folks that want to make another trip to Austin.
Meanwhile, April saw new highs in atmospheric poisoning.…
The end of April has arrived, and with it, the record for the first month in human history with an average carbon dioxide level in Earth’s atmosphere above 400 parts per million has been set.
With a little more than 24 hours left in the month, the average for April can't slip below 400 ppm. “Every day in April has been over 400 ppm,” said Pieter Tans, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are monitored from a site atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, where they have been measured continuously since 1958. The long record has charted the steep rise of the greenhouse gas — the most prevalent in Earth’s atmosphere — as a result of human emissions.
The first measurement in excess of 400 ppm was made on May 9, 2013. This year, the level rose above that mark a full two months earlier, and has remained above 400 ppm steadily since the beginning of April.
And lest you think you'll be long gone before the effects of this change affect you and yours, yesterday's new National Climate Assessment report wants you to know that,
"The effects of human-induced climate change are being felt in every corner of the United States, scientists reported Tuesday, with water growing scarcer in dry regions, torrential rains increasing in wet regions, heat waves becoming more common and more severe, wildfires growing worse, and forests dying under assault from heat-loving insects.
Such sweeping changes have been caused by an average warming of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over most land areas of the country in the past century, the scientists found. If greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to escalate at a rapid pace, they said, the warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century.
“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States."
Conscience-ridden scientists making dire warnings about the threat. A government too slow or self-interested to act to thwart the threat. We know this movie. From the POV of the moving camera, we see the same forces of darkness making things go boom underneath us are also filling up our thin layer of atmosphere with gunk. This is no longer something we can escape from, nor is it a matter of local public health. After years of hearing that the sky is falling, now it really is. Only instead of aliens causing it, it's us treating the planet as if we were.
In such a Hollywood Blockbuster, the heroes would be the scrappy, common-sense fueled citizenry who had managed to outrun and outsmart the aliens in various small and large ways while governments fumbled and greedy privateers made deals with the newcomers. With some imagination, a rag tag group of locals fighting a single alien ship out in the boondocks would finally find an out-of-the-box way to disrupt, confuse, and eventually defeat the enemy. As the credits begin to roll, you can see word of this grassroots strategy spread across the globe and its effectiveness showing up in Paris, Moscow, Nairobi, Mexico City, and Hong Kong.
This is that movie. We're in it. Are you a member of the scrappy resistance or an anonymous uncredited crowd extra? Quick, the tide's coming in.….