In good environmental news, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions should fall in 2009. The drop, which is attributed to the economy, isn’t expected to last, however. As the economy improves, emissions are expected to rise.
U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, should fall 5.9 percent in 2009 as the recession cuts electricity and transportation fuel demand, the government said in a monthly forecast on Tuesday.
Demand for coal, which emits about twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas per unit of energy generated, should fall more than 9 percent in 2009 on the economic downturn, said the Energy Information Administration, the statistics arm of the Department of Energy, in its short-term forecast.
“Several factors contribute to a projected reduction of nearly 6 percent in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use in 2009, primarily associated with the economic downturn,” EIA Administrator Richard Newell said.
Some important things to know: the ponds, one built in 1957 and the other in 1986, are listed as “high-hazards” because they’re close to a large population, not because the EPA suspects they may collapse.
Currently, Duke Energy is in compliance with current state and federal regulations. While the coal ash ponds were, up until this summer, regulated by an arm of the N.C. Commerce Department, they are now the responsibility of the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
The Riverbend plant, which is located just up Brookshire Boulevard from Uptown, is supposed to be thoroughly inspected by a third-party this fall.
Some other things to know: the ground water near two unlined, high-hazard ponds is so close to the surface that it bubbles out of the wells that were drilled to monitor the ground water. The ponds also sit on the edge of Mountain Island Lake, Charlotte’s main source for drinking water.
How close are Duke Energy’s two unlined, high-hazard coal ash ponds to Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s drinking water intake, at the Catawba River Pumping Station? See for yourself. (Once you click the link, the ponds are visible near the top-right of the image. The pumping station is labeled “A.”)
Duke Energy is expected to respond this week to recommendations the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has made to strengthen two unlined coal ash ponds behind the company’s Riverbend Steam Station in the Mountain Island area.
The ponds sit on the edge of Mountain Island Lake and three miles upstream from the Catawba River Pumping Station, where drinking water for most of Charlotte-Mecklenburg is pulled.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency listed the ponds as having “high-hazard potential” in June. That means, according to the agency, “Failure or mis-operation will probably cause the loss of human life.”
That is in addition to the catastrophic environmental and economic damage a breach would cause.
Since then, the Environmental Protection Agency has released a draft of their assessment of the ponds, stating that the ponds are in “satisfactory” condition. The assessment includes a list of 10 improvement recommendations. It also states that the closest town to the ponds is six miles away and called “Mountain Island.”
“I’m not sure what they meant there,” says Duke Energy representative Andy Thompson.
The closest town to the coal ash ponds is, of course, the city of Charlotte.
The Environmental Protection Agency has not responded to a request from the Mountain Island Weekly for an explanation.
Lisa Jackson, the EPA’s administrator, doesn’t have time to wait on Congress to politic their way around the massive environmental issues our world is facing. She’s using her authority to make change happen NOW.
Unwilling to wait for Congress to act, the Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it was moving forward on new rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from hundreds of power plants and large industrial facilities.
President Obama has said that he prefers a comprehensive legislative approach to regulating emissions and stemming global warming, not a piecemeal application of rules, and that he is deeply committed to passage of a climate bill this year.
But he has authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to begin moving toward regulation, which could goad lawmakers into reaching an agreement. It could also provide evidence of the United States’ seriousness as negotiators prepare for United Nations talks in Copenhagen in December intended to produce an international agreement to combat global warming.
“We are not going to continue with business as usual,” Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. “We have the tools and the technology to move forward today, and we are using them.”
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Ms. Jackson described the proposal as a common-sense rule tailored to apply to only the largest facilities — those that emit at least 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year — which are responsible for nearly 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
The rule would not, as critics contend, cover “every cow and Dunkin’ Donuts,” Ms. Jackson said.
Earlier this month, Jackson spoke to NPR’s Diane Rehms:
Am I the only one who worries when CEOs — any CEO — predict what will happen in Washington?
Climate change legislation is unlikely to pass the U.S. Congress until the first half of 2010, and maybe not until 2011, Duke Energy Corp Chief Executive Jim Rogers said on Friday.
Rogers is one of the biggest supporters of national carbon-cutting rules among power utility executives and is active on Capitol Hill both in relations with lawmakers and as a Congressional witness.
Rogers said he has not ruled out passage of legislation this year, but believes that it is highly unlikely.
If the bill does not pass in the first half of 2010, Rogers said “it won’t be done until 2011 because 2010 is an election year.”
Rogers made his comments at an energy symposium at the University of Michigan.
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About half the power generated in the United States comes from coal-fired plants.
Duke Energy is the third-leading U.S. emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that causes global warming.
Rogers has set himself apart from many power utility executives in supporting carbon-cutting legislation. Electric power generation creates about 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases.
Today’s Charlotte Observer has an eye-opening article about how officials in our local government skirt the Environmental Protection Agency’s pollution guidelines to make it appear that we’re not the dirty, polluted city that we are. Now the American Lung Association lists the Q.C. on warning lists.
City transportation planners changed data that essentially took one in three cars off the road, enabling them to show less pollution. They also have made overly optimistic forecasts about how often people would use mass transit.
And despite evidence that building more highways causes people to drive farther, the city has told the EPA the opposite: Building billions of dollars of new highways will cause Charlotteans to drive less, and create less smog, than if they weren’t built.
Those questionable projections have helped keep highway dollars flowing to Charlotte.
City transportation planners acknowledge that their pollution estimates have turned out to be low. But they say they have complied with all state and federal requirements.
Mecklenburg County’s air-quality director, Don Willard, said the EPA’s rules are good on paper, but in practice are “divorced from reality.”
Carbon dioxide will soon be declared a dangerous pollutant – a move that could help propel slow-moving climate-change legislation on Capitol Hill, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters that a formal “endangerment finding,” which would trigger federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, probably would “happen in the next months.”
Jackson announced her timeline even as top senators said they were delaying plans to introduce legislation that would set new limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Senators had been scheduled to unveil legislation next Tuesday, but the date has now been pushed back to later in September.
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The EPA can formalize the finding anytime, now that it has closed a 60-day public comment period that netted more than 300,000 responses.
A formal endangerment finding would obligate the agency to regulate greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act – even if Congress doesn’t pass a final climate-change bill.
President Obama and Jackson have said they would prefer that Congress – rather than the EPA – take the lead in implementing new greenhouse gas limits. Businesses and energy industry leaders also have largely favored congressional action over EPA-imposed limits, because they believe lawmakers are better positioned to combine economic safeguards with any new carbon cap.
“Legislation is so important, because it will combine the most efficient, most economy-wide, least costly (and) least disruptive way to deal with carbon dioxide pollution,” Jackson said. “We get further faster without top-down regulation.”
But Jackson insisted the EPA would continue on a path that began when the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases qualified as pollutants and could be regulated if the government determined they threatened the public.
“Two years is a long time for this country to wait for us to respond to the Supreme Court’s ruling,” Jackson said.
No surprise here: Big business leaders are abusing the legislative process in their ongoing attempt to stifle progress and sell our future so they can continue to feed their addiction to money.
While Big Business and the EPA are busy measuring their johnsons, you might be interested to know that a recent study on global warming includes our fair city. Charlotte is not only listed as one of the 30 cities at risk, but it’s listed at the top of the at-risk list — right up there with Los Angeles, New York and Dallas.
The nation’s largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.
Chamber officials say it would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.
“It would be evolution versus creationism,” said William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. “It would be the science of climate change on trial.”
The goal of the chamber, which represents 3 million large and small businesses, is to fend off potential emissions regulations by undercutting the scientific consensus over climate change. If the EPA denies the request, as expected, the chamber plans to take the fight to federal court.
The EPA is having none of it, calling a hearing a “waste of time” and saying that a threatened lawsuit by the chamber would be “frivolous.”
EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan said the agency based its proposed finding that global warming is a danger to public health “on the soundest peer-reviewed science available, which overwhelmingly indicates that climate change presents a threat to human health and welfare.”
Environmentalists say the chamber’s strategy is an attempt to sow political discord by challenging settled science — and note that in the famed 1925 Scopes trial, which pitted lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in a courtroom battle over a Tennessee science teacher accused of teaching evolution illegally, the scientists won in the end.
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In the coming weeks, the EPA is set to formally declare that the heat-trapping gases scientists blame for climate change endanger human health, and are thus subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. The so-called endangerment finding will be a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s plan to set strict new emissions standards on cars and trucks.
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Most climate scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, are warming the planet. Using computer models and historical temperature data, those scientists predict the warming will accelerate unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced.
“The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable,” said a recent letter to world leaders by the heads of the top science agencies in 13 of the world’s largest countries, including the head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
China and India have closed ranks on climate change, blaming developed countries for the lack of progress towards a deal.
“They have talked much, but not done much,” said Xie Zhenhua, China’s minister in charge of climate change, adding that the conflict between developed and developing nations was driven by commercial and political interest.
His remarks came during two days of talks with Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, which were aimed at -synchronising the two countries’ positions as negotiations at Copenhagen, Denmark, on climate change draw near.
Mr Ramesh also rejected the notion that the two Asian giants were obstructing a deal. “The way the narrative seems to have evolved is that countries like India and China are holding back an inter-national agreement,” he told foreign journalists before leaving for China. “Far from it.”
The two countries are responding to intensifying criticism from western -governments and climate change activists for refusing to agree to binding -targets for carbon emissions as part of efforts to forge an international deal to combat global warming. But the negotiators’ remarks also reflect their growing disillusionment with the talks.
“Developed countries just keep repeating the demand that China should commit to capping its emissions but they are not engaging in a sincere dialogue about the proposal China has put forward,” said Zou Ji, a leading climate change scholar at Renmin University who has advised Beijing on its climate change policy and is head of the World Resources Institute in China.
Groups from the oil industry, agriculture and manufacturing have lined up to oppose climate change legislation, saying it would add costs for producers, farmers and consumers without guaranteeing environmental gains.
Vilsack and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke met with groups from the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states to press their message that a climate change law would be good for the environment and economy.
A U.S. Agriculture Department study shows farmers could boost their net income by $10 billion to $20 billion in the long term earning money from offsets — contracts to plant trees or change the way they till land to lock more carbon in soils, Vilsack said.
“The report highlights the current vulnerabilities from heat waves growing,” says climate scientist Amanda Staudt of the National Wildlife Federation, a report sponsor. Average temperatures are expected to grow 4 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit nationwide over the next century, according to the federal climate research group.
The severity will vary with industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, but “heat waves will continue to get worse in the coming decades,” the report warns. It lists the 30 major cities most at risk.
In June, the climate research program published a report that found average temperatures in the USA have increased more than 2 degrees in the past five decades, largely as the result of emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which are produced by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, which drives up temperatures in the air and oceans.
Mountains aren’t like trees or corn, we can’t just grow another one. Mountains across Appalachia are being removed so we can have abundant, cheap energy.
Want to make a difference? Stop being an energy hog. Conserve instead.
The Obama administration late last week quietly approved one of six major mountaintop removal permits that were said to be undergoing close scrutiny by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Without announcing the move publicly, EPA gave the nod for the federal Army Corps of Engineers to issue a Clean Water Act permit for CONSOL Energy Inc.’s Peg Fork Surface Mine near Chattaroy in Mingo County.
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“We are disappointed that the administration has approved a new mountaintop removal mine without making any commitment to adopt new regulations or policies that would end this destructive practice,” said Ed Hopkins, director of the Sierra Club’s environmental quality program. “While we appreciate that the Obama administration is taking a harder look at mountaintop removal coal mining, unless that results in decisions that end the irreversible destruction of streams, the harder look isn’t going to do the job.”
Read the rest of this Charleston-Gazette article here.
Witness the devastation mountain top removal causes for yourself. As one commenter says, “Everyone is downstream from this.”
What can be done? The American Lung Association recommends these actions:
Clean up coal-fired power plants.
Clean up dirty diesel engines currently on and off the road.
Clean up dirty ocean-going vessels.
Tighten ozone and particulate exposure standards to reflect current science.
Require all counties with high air pollution levels to crack down on sources.
Drive less by combining trips, walking, biking, carpooling and using public transportation to limit your contribution to air pollution — especially on hot, sunny days.
Don’t burn wood or trash, to avoid releasing particulates in smoke into your neighborhood’s air.
Encourage your school district to retrofit old school buses with modern pollution controls, and to stop idling in school parking lots.
Conserve energy, because every bit of electricity saved means less pollution from the power plant supplying your electricity.
Isn’t lead the stuff that makes you stupid if you ingest too much of it? Uh. Yeah. Side effects include learning disabilities, lower I.Q., developmental delays and behavioral problems. And the good Lord knows we don’t need to lower our collective I.Q.
How in the hell does lead get into the air? Isn’t that stuff heavy?
Well, when you go to the gas station, what kind of gas do you buy? Unleaded, right? But, that’s here in the United States — not every country in the world uses unleaded gasoline. And, since we share one atmosphere, we share pollution problems, too.
It’s also released into the air during the manufacturing of some products, when volcanoes erupt, when older houses with lead-based paint are remodeled, during mining operations and when waste — that’s right, our trash — is incinerated. It’s naturally occurring, so it can also be found in dust and water.
Lead is heavy, though, so it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere long. It floats back down to the ground, thank you gravity, assuming we don’t inhale it first. Since we can’t see lead in the air, it’s not like you can hold your breath when a lead molecule floats by.
Here’s the press release from the EPA:
To ensure the most vulnerable Americans are adequately protected from exposure to lead from the air, EPA will reconsider some of its lead air pollution monitoring requirements, Administrator Lisa P. Jackson announced today. Even at low levels, lead exposures can damage a child’s IQ, learning and memory.
“We have a fundamental responsibility to protect every child from environmental threats, especially contaminants like lead that can cause behavioral and learning disabilities and create a lifetime of challenges,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “We’re putting in place rigorous standards to prevent contamination. To make them fully effective, we need close interaction and monitoring in the communities where harmful levels of airborne lead are most likely to be found.”
Air quality monitoring measures concentrations of a pollutant in the outdoor air. EPA revised its air quality monitoring requirements for lead in 2008, at the same time the agency tightened the national air quality standards for lead for the first time in 30 years. The current rule requires air quality monitoring in areas where any industry emits at least one ton of lead to the air each year, and in the 101 urban areas with populations of 500,000 or more.
As part of today’s action, EPA will consider whether additional monitoring near industrial sources of lead is warranted. The agency also will reconsider the monitoring requirements for urban areas as part of its review. EPA is not reconsidering the lead standards.
Lead that is emitted into the air can be inhaled or can be ingested after it settles out of the air. Ingestion is the main route of human exposure. Children are the most susceptible because they are more likely to ingest lead and their bodies are developing rapidly. Exposures to low levels of lead early in life have been linked to damage to IQ, learning, memory and behavior. There is no known safe level of lead in the body.
The reconsideration will not delay implementation of the 2008 lead standards. EPA will issue a proposal and take public comment before deciding whether to revise the lead monitoring requirements. The agency anticipates issuing a proposal for public review and comment later this summer, and a final rule in early spring 2010.
