Measuring the Human Toll in the Gulf
Authors:
Mara Grunbaum
Fewer than 2,000 people live in Lafitte, Louisiana, and most of them make their living catching fish and shrimp. When NRDC public health scientist Miriam Rotkin-Ellman visited the small bayou community at the end of May, crude oil from the blown-out BP well in the Gulf of Mexico had begun to lap at its shores.At a meeting in a local senior center, Rotkin-Ellman met a woman whose family depended entirely on commercial fishing. The woman cried as she talked about her husband and son. They couldn’t fish in the polluted water, so BP was paying them to go out in their boat and clean up oil instead. “She didn’t want them to go, because she was worried about the health implications,” Rotkin-Ellman says. “But they needed to put food on the table.”
In the early weeks of the Gulf oil disaster, Rotkin-Ellman and other NRDC public health staff traveled to Louisiana to connect with the coastal communities — many of the same ones NRDC had worked with five years before, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — to listen to their concerns and to make sure the federal government was adequately monitoring potential health hazards.
One of the first things Rotkin-Ellman found was that some of the authorities’ assertions about health and safety didn’t hold up. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said its air-quality testing had found nothing out of the ordinary, but residents complained their neighborhoods smelled like gas stations. BP said fishermen involved in the cleanup didn’t need protective respirators, but workers reported headaches, irritated throats, nausea, dizziness, and shortness of breath. Some cleanup workers had already been hospitalized.
“Some of them had asked for respirators and hadn’t received them,” says Gina Solomon, an NRDC senior public health scientist and a physician who spent a week in the Gulf in May. BP insisted protective gear wasn’t necessary for the levels of evaporated chemicals that the workers were breathing. But the company had only tested the air around large industrial ships, not near small fishing boats, where workers would be closer to the water’s surface, she says. And there was another problem: many of the exposure standards BP used were set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) more than 20 years ago, when less was known about the chemicals. According to Solomon, OSHA’s limits are not adequate to protect workers’ health.
Yet information on what Gulf residents were being exposed to, and at what levels, was hard to come by. The EPA set up air-monitoring stations in Louisiana and along the coast, but some of the compounds public health experts were concerned about weren’t even being measured. Nor had anyone analyzed wind patterns to determine if the stations were in areas most likely to be affected by air pollution, Rotkin-Ellman says.
The agency also sent out labs on wheels, called Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer buses, to sample and test air along the coast. Rotkin-Ellman rode along in one that was testing for potentially hazardous compounds from the chemical dispersants BP was spraying on the oil. The dispersants’ manufacturer had given the EPA a full list of their ingredients, but because the list was protected by law as a trade secret, the EPA couldn’t say what it was actually testing for. That made it difficult to evaluate the agency’s methods, Rotkin-Ellman says. EPA scientists themselves hadn’t been told where BP was applying the dispersants, so they couldn’t be sure they were testing in the right places.After pressure from NRDC and other environmental and community groups, the names of the dispersant ingredients were released in June — but most of the names came with little or no information on toxicity.
In mid-June, Solomon, Rotkin-Ellman, and NRDC environmental justice attorney Al Huang sent a letter to the EPA urging the agency to reform its monitoring practices and pass its data to affected citizens quickly and comprehensibly. The letter was co-signed by 24 Gulf community and nonprofit groups. The EPA responded by sampling air quality in more locations; testing for more compounds of concern; and presenting data more clearly on its Web site. Rotkin-Ellman and her colleagues will also keep talking with coastal residents and urging public officials to respond to their needs. Even though the oil has stopped gushing, she says, Gulf communities will still need help getting clear information as they figure out what to do next.
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Measuring the Human Toll in the Gulf
The Genius of Efficiency
Authors:
DanRosen
As a physics graduate student at Berkeley in the 1970s, David Goldstein began studying the potential of efficiency measures to reduce the nation’s energy demands. He could not have had better timing. The country was emerging from the 1973 oil crisis, and California’s government was eager to cut the state’s energy use. “Even a young graduate student could influence public policy just by giving the right answers,” Goldstein recalls.
Goldstein, now co-director of NRDC’s energy program, has long seen efficiency as an essential key to controlling this country’s mounting energy consumption. After three decades of groundbreaking work — which earned him a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002 — his efforts seem more crucial than ever. His new book, Invisible Energy: Strategies to Rescue the Economy and Save the Planet, explains how efficiency can help solve two of our most pressing challenges: reducing greenhouse gas emissions and finding a sustainable pathway out of recession.
Since joining NRDC in 1980, Goldstein has proved especially adept at enlisting industry in his cause, persuading business leaders that efficiency is in everyone’s economic interest. In the 1980s, he helped convince appliance manufacturers that national energy standards, fostered by improved technology, would lower costs for both them and their customers. These conversations eventually resulted in the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, which set minimum requirements for 12 types of appliances and established a mechanism for raising those standards over time. In Goldstein’s home state of California, where efficiency has been a focus of energy policy for 35 years, per capita electricity consumption declined 40 percent more than the rest of the nation from 1973 to 2003.
The future could yield even greater benefits. By simply using existing technologies, argues Goldstein, the United States could reduce its energy use by at least 30 percent in 20 years — an amount equivalent to the power generated by any single energy source now in use, even oil or coal. The array of common-sense efficiency strategies includes retrofitting existing commercial and residential buildings; designing urban and suburban neighborhoods that give residents easy access to public transit and in which stores, schools, and workplaces are within walkable or bikeable distances, thus cutting down on driving time and fuel consumption; stronger manufacturing standards for appliances; and regulatory incentives that allow utilities (and their customers) to reap substantial financial benefits by reducing energy consumption.
Goldstein is optimistic that these win-win solutions, once understood, will be found “surprisingly attractive,” as he puts it, by both liberals and conservatives — indeed, by anyone with an open mind.
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The Genius of Efficiency
Cow Woes
Authors:
DanRosen
Concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, produce hundreds of millions of tons of manure in the United States annually. These industrial facilities often dispose of this waste by spraying it on their fields as fertilizer. Rainfall then washes the waste into rivers and streams, carrying with it pathogens hazardous to human health, such as E. coli and salmonella.
Surely the Environmental Protection Agency regulates these practices to protect our waterways? Actually, the EPA doesn’t know the most rudimentary facts about many of these factory farms: how many animals they process, the amount of waste they produce, even where they are located. Although the agency has the authority to regulate CAFOs under the Clean Water Act, these operations have mostly regulated themselves.
NRDC and its partners, the Sierra Club and the Waterkeeper Alliance, sued the EPA to improve its oversight of CAFOs, including how they dispose of manure. In a May 25 settlement, the agency agreed to propose a plan within a year to collect important information from the thousands of industrial farms across the United States.
If its survey is thorough, the EPA will finally have the information it needs to clean up our waterways, says NRDC senior attorney Jon Devine, who, along with colleagues Michael Wall and Jonathan Wiener, helped lead the push for change.
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Cow Woes