Beyond Oil: Corporate Influence and Regulation
Authors:
Steve Cohen
Editor’s note: Any hope that the Deepwater Horizon would mark a turning point in the fight for a climate bill quickly evaporated. But the spill still offers us a “teachable moment” on many critical issues. In a series of essays in our magazine and online, some of the nation’s leading environmental writers and thinkers reflect on our two national disaster areas: the one in the Gulf and the other in Congress. Here, the executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute argues for increased oversight of both the drilling industry and its influence in Washington .
The modern economy is hooked on petroleum, and we are a bunch of addicts increasingly desperate for our next fix. When we drill for oil a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico, we are like junkies in a dangerous alley, willing to go anywhere to score. The latest result of our addiction was arguably the worst environmental catastrophe in American history. One would have to go back to the Dust Bowl of the early 1930s to find human-induced environmental destruction of a similar scale and impact.
The primary cause of this disaster in my view was that advances in resource extraction technology outpaced effective government regulation of resource extraction industries. The notion of government as the enemy and the modern glorification of the private sector, both of which have their origins in the Reagan Administration, were the root causes of both our recent environmental and financial disasters.
The Department of the Interior has an inherent conflict of interest because it both generates revenues and wealth by leasing government lands and waters for mining and drilling and regulates those activities on government property. It’s like the city’s chief food inspector owning a part interest in the town’s biggest restaurant. The Obama administration’s organizational response to the disaster was to direct Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to split up these two functions. He was tasked with dividing the infamous Minerals Management Service into two parts: one to lease resources and the other to regulate the extraction practices of the firms holding the leases.
In practice, however, this simply moves the conflict of interest up one level of hierarchy, into the secretary’s own office. The Department of the Interior, like the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture, is an old-line federal agency that is essentially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the American business community. I am not complaining about this in principle. Economic power tends to be aligned with political power in most nations, and I would prefer to have it out in the relative open in a cabinet-level agency. However, as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and other regulatory agencies has demonstrated, it is possible to set up reasonably effective agencies to police corporate behavior. Regulatory responsibility has to be removed from these old-line cabinet dinosaurs. The EPA and FDA are far from perfect and they are certainly influenced by corporate interests, but they still manage to work reasonably well.
The influence of business in public policy is not limited to food and fuel but extends to finance as well. The “Great Recession” that began in 2008 was also caused by inadequate regulation, and the financial reforms enacted in the summer of 2010 were a direct response to that failure. Now we need a similar reform of mining and drilling regulation.
One lesson learned from the BP disaster is that the inspection, regulation, and enforcement of offshore drilling must be given to the EPA or a new regulatory agency. A second lesson is the need to pay more attention to the role of money and corporate influence in public policy. The Supreme Court has decided that political donations are a form of free speech that cannot be regulated. It is legal for corporations to spend lavishly to subtly steer the media and the political process to define issues in ways that match corporate interests. The fact that confidence in the technology of deep-sea oil drilling was unchallenged until the BP disaster exemplifies how pervasive this corporate influence has become.
The third lesson we have learned relates to the control of this complex technology. The views of experts may have been influenced by the resources and clout deployed by the energy industry, but the President trusted these experts. Our decision makers need to develop a healthy skepticism of the views of experts. They need to engage panels of competing experts to debate these issues and then subject their analyses to external peer review.
We live in a world dominated by technology, and we are all addicted to the convenience and comforts that technology generates. While we could all use a little treatment to reduce our need for a fossil-fuel fix, it’s a little ridiculous to pretend that we can free ourselves completely of our dependency on the natural resources we rip out of this fragile planet. But if we are to manage these resources for the use of our children, we need to be more careful in the way we extract and use them. Companies that refuse to be careful should be treated like reckless drivers running red lights. They should ticketed, penalized, and if necessary, lose their licenses.Tell your senators not to abandon climate legislation
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Disaster in the Gulf
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Beyond Oil: Corporate Influence and Regulation
Rough Burial: Cleaning Up Katrina’s Toxic Mess
Authors:
Elizabeth Royte
This Sunday will mark the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast. With the region now facing a new and challenging cleanup following the BP blowout, we look back at author Elizabeth Royte’s 2006 journey into the trash and debris created by the last disaster — a toxic mess strewn across 90,000 square miles of land.
Winter days in the French Quarter still commence with the hosing of the previous night’s excesses from the sidewalks, but the district’s few lunchtime patrons are dressed for drudgery, not revels. New Orleans remains a somber place. During daylight hours, this is a city unerringly and unceasingly focused on recovery. A jungle camo T-shirt popular among visiting emergency workers reads “Baghdad on the Bayou.”
Beyond the central business district, National Guard troops prowl the city in brown and green jeeps. The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded three $500 million contracts for debris removal, and platoons of subcontractors roll through New Orleans’s low-lying districts, directing thousands of foot soldiers in orange vests, hard hats, and work boots. Entire neighborhoods appear deserted; the only obstacles to parking are the ever-accumulating mounds of household chattel — the contents of a city turned inside out.
Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) estimates that Katrina created 22 million tons of debris in the southeastern part of the state. The wreckage of the World Trade Center, by comparison, was 1.5 million tons, and it lay mostly within a few city blocks. Katrina’s is strewn across 90,000 square miles. By early December, when I visited the city, only 26 percent of the residential and public debris in Orleans Parish had been removed; a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spokeswoman expected the cleanup to continue at least through this summer. Since tens of thousands of residents still hadn’t mucked out their homes, and city officials had already tagged more than 2,500 unsound structures for demolition, new massifs of waste will materialize on curbs for some time.
But where will everything go? And what will become of the hazardous material that’s inevitably mixed in with the benign?
In an ordinary trash-producing year, New Orleans generates about 350,000 tons of waste, 6 percent to 9 percent of which gets recycled. Now, everything flows in a continuous torrent that debris managers struggle to comb into five roaring streams: woody debris; construction and demolition debris; “white goods,” such as refrigerators, air conditioners, water heaters, and trash compactors; household hazardous waste; and electronic waste. The process borders on chaos. Half a dozen government agencies have jurisdiction over different types of waste, the rules change as one crosses parish lines, and information is typically offered with a sense of contingency. “We can burn the mulch,” for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that mulch is being burned.
The mulch comes from nearly 12 million cubic yards of oaks, magnolias, and other vegetation strewn about by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The state has authorized burning to reduce this volume, and also that of some non-recyclable household debris. Erik Olson, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who recently visited New Orleans, worries that some wood used in construction and furniture has been treated with preservatives that can release toxins, like chromium and dioxin, upon combustion. “We’ve heard from citizens that there is burning, but the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] refuses to give us detailed information on how they’re handling debris,” he says. And then there’s an entomological caveat: As many as 80 percent of the city’s trees are infested with Formosan termites. The state Department of Agriculture, which keeps termite maps, decreed that mulch originating in termite zones can be spread only where these insects already occur. Most of the city’s chipped wood is being trucked directly to landfills, where it’s used to cover the trash and assist in erosion control.
But as organic materials — like wood and brush — biodegrade in the anaerobic confines of a landfill, they give off methane, a potent greenhouse gas. While 21 states ban yard waste from landfills — both to preserve space and to decrease the generation of methane and leachate — Louisiana’s landfills, post-Katrina, are moving in the opposite direction. Moreover, when methane and carbon dioxide (from decomposing wood) rise from landfills, they set off a chemical reaction that strips from the other waste such toxic organic compounds as benzene and toluene, which are then transported to the surface. Polyvinyl chloride occurs in roofing and insulation materials, vinyl siding, and window frames — all ubiquitous in the thousands of truckloads of debris dumped daily at six area landfills.
Construction and demolition (C&D) debris is the most heterogeneous of Katrina’s waste streams, containing both the slimed and moldy contents of houses and the houses themselves. Some household materials, meanwhile, are excluded from this rough burial, whether because of their intrinsic worth or their intrinsic toxicity. White goods are coveted for their scrap value. In a staging area set aside for this material at the Old Gentilly landfill, which sits in a cypress swamp east of the city on a road fringed with illegal dump sites, a team of workers drains the appliances’ refrigerants for reuse. Another team, known as the food guys, dumps the putrefying contents of the refrigerators and wraps them, burrito-style, in sheets of plastic. The air here is eye-wateringly bad. Gulls kettle over the decomposed food; workers wear moon suits and respirators. The reeking burritos won’t be buried at Old Gentilly, which is unlined. Instead they’re bound for River Birch, a lined landfill that already entombs 36 million pounds of spoiled meat and seafood collected from processing and export facilities in the port. As for the white goods themselves, by late December more than 230,000 appliances, squashed into six-foot-long rectangles, had been hauled to a scrap yard and sold.
Three thousand trucks enter Old Gentilly each day; a spotter in a two-story tower peers down into each load and orders the removal of any hazardous materials he or she can make out. But the trucks come fast and thick, their contents are jumbled, and spotters aren’t paid to poke through the mess. Moreover, the drivers are paid by the cubic yard, so they have no incentive to separate.
But plenty of household hazardous waste is teased out. Residents or their proxies haul it from ruined houses and set it in discrete piles on the curb: small collections of paint cans, pesticides, and solvents, the kind of stuff relegated to high shelves in garages. Household electronics too are set apart: TV and computer monitors contain between four and eight pounds of lead. Cell phones, handheld video games — anything with a circuit board — often contain chromium, cadmium, mercury, beryllium, nickel, zinc, and copper, all of which can potentially leach from landfills.
EPA crews troll the city for electronic waste, which they transfer to a Georgia-based company that removes batteries, cathode-ray tubes, mercury bulbs, leaded glass, and toner cartridges for recycling. What remains is sorted into metals and plastic, then shredded and sold to commodities processors. By late December, a unified command composed of the EPA, the Coast Guard, and the Louisiana DEQ had collected about 90,000 hurricane-damaged televisions, computers, stereos, and other electronic equipment in seven parishes. There’s plenty more to come.
East of the city, in a weedy lot shadowed by an abandoned incinerator, a different phalanx of EPA workers sorts through more than 12,000 pieces of household hazardous waste each day. Flammables and solvents go to a power plant hungry for their Btu value; pesticides and poisons end up at an incinerator licensed to burn hazardous waste; propane is recovered from tanks and canisters which are then either crushed and scrapped or painted for reuse. Lead from car and boat batteries is recovered for processors; bleach is poured into barrels, chemically neutralized, and discharged (under a federal permit) into waterways. Hunched over a small table, a field chemist runs tests on mystery compounds. “We’ve processed more than a million pounds of household hazardous waste,” says James Augustyn, a site coordinator. Asked whether the folks mucking out houses are segregating all the hazardous stuff, he answers with an air of resignation. “They’re supposed to, but it’s impossible to get every single piece.”
And that is the bottom line. No one is going to root out a mercury-containing thermostat from a 20-foot mound of rubbish. Not every car (Katrina left 360,000 storm-ruined vehicles on the streets) will be drained of its toxic fluids and scrapped for reuse. Not every desktop monitor will be transformed into something shiny and new.
If Katrina’s cleanup seems to be proceeding slowly (and it is, especially for exiled residents eager to come home), officials blame the unprecedented scale of the operation and the complexity of the waste stream. “We want to reuse and recycle as much as we can,” says John Rogers, a DEQ staff scientist. “We’re diverting as much as we can from the landfill because we don’t want to create problems down the line.” Rogers is alluding to the cleanup after 1965’s Hurricane Betsy, when debris was dumped indiscriminately into the Agriculture Street landfill, in the Lower Ninth Ward, and then covered with less than two feet of soil. In time, lead, arsenic, and polyaromatic hydrocarbons — in all, some 50 carcinogenic compounds — leached out, and the EPA in 1994 conferred Superfund status on the site (though not before houses, a community center, and a school were constructed atop it).
Everything has to go somewhere, the laws of nature state. Sluice the brown sediment, laced with oil and heavy metals, from your siding and the contaminated water drains into Lake Pontchartrain. Bury PVC pipes in a landfill and vinyl chlorides rise with the methane. We know, after decades of failing to manage Superfund sites, that poisons shunted elsewhere have a way of working their way back again, into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.
As winter turns to spring, it’s impossible to say whether anyone is doing a good, or even an adequate, job of handling Katrina’s fallout. The hurricane’s toxic legacy has already been written, but it may be decades until we’re able to comprehend it.
Back in New Orleans — Five Years Later
Five Years After Katrina Psychological Wounds Reopen on the Gulf Coast
Overview of NRDC's health work after Katrina
Read more from the original source:
Rough Burial: Cleaning Up Katrina’s Toxic Mess
Low-Cost Cooling Options
Authors:
pmcrandle
A quick look at your summer electric bill will confirm that cooling your home is expensive. In fact, according to the EPA, air conditioning accounts for 21 percent of annual home electricity consumption, at an average cost of $239 year. Per household, that results in 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from AC alone. But by following these steps, you can save at least $494 a year and .95 tons of CO2 — even more if you upgrade your AC or replace it with a ceiling fan.
PLAN
1) Tell your A/C what to do: A programmable thermostat lets you save money by not cooling your house when you’re not around to enjoy it. Set the temperature at 80°F when you know you’ll be away and set it at least 2 degrees higher than you would normally — a shift from 72°F to 74°F in the summer will save 366 pounds of CO2 a year and $28.56 on your annual energy bill.
2) Seal, weatherstrip, and insulate your home to keep hot air out and cold air in. As recommended in the NRDC Simple Steps CO2 Smackdown series , weather stripping and caulking doors, windows, and any cracks or openings and walls will save about 225 pounds of CO2 and $17.71 from AC use in the summer.
It is also important to insulate around window air conditioners, which can lose cool air to the outside, particularly if the unit has extended plastic “wings” to fill in the window frame. Insulating kits for window air conditioners are available at hardware stores for approximately $10.
Remember to clean or check the conditioner filter once a month; any buildup will restrict airflow and make it less efficient.
3) Seal and wrap your ducts: The ductwork that conveys your cool air from the HVAC to the rest of your house may be leaking air and losing efficiency. This can result in a 10 percent “leaky duct fee” on your power bill. Get your ducts professionally sealed and make sure they have been insulated properly. If possible, have your ducts moved inside the air-conditioned space. You may save 305 pounds of CO2 a year and $23.82 on your energy bill annually.
4) Windows: After weatherstripping your windows, consider adding low-emissive film to the panes to reduce solar gain. This will allow you to reduce the heat entering your home for a fraction of the cost of replacing your windows. If you decide to invest in new windows, seek out the lowest available U-factor, which measures how much heat can escape, and the lowest solar heat gain coeffiecient (SHGC), which measures how much heat from sunlight is transmitted through a window. A 30 percent federal tax credit is available for windows with U-factors and SHGCs of 0.30 or less each. SHGC is most important in sunny climates and on the sunny side of your home.
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5) Start cooling from the outside: Awnings, shutters, and overhangs will provide a good defense against the summer sun, but you may also use trees and tall bushes to beautify your view and reduce the sunlight entering your windows.
6) Close the blinds: Shutting curtains, shades, or blinds on the sunny side of the house can make a big difference. Blinder venetian shades with highly reflective light colors in particular can reduce heat build-up in your home.
7) Let in fresh air: When it’s not too hot out, pull in cool air by cracking open lower-story windows just 1 or 2 inches, and place portable and window-mounted fans in upstairs windows facing outward to remove the air that rises due to convection in your home. This will create a stronger draft throughout the house that will keep the air cool without the use of AC.
Install ceiling fans: Fans use 10 percent of the energy consumed by AC and can make a room feel 10 degrees cooler. They are even relatively easy to install yourself, as shown in NRDC Simple Steps’ DIY installation article . Replacing your AC with ceiling fans could save you up to $215 and 1.35 tons of CO2 annually.
9) Install an attic fan: Whole house fans that remove hot air from throughout the house only provide substantial relief at night and in low humidity. A cheaper option is an attic fan that can save up to 10 percent on AC costs — that’s $24 and 300 pounds of CO2 annually.
10) Upgrade your AC: Whether you’re using central air or window-mounted AC, if your cooling system is several years old, you can most likely save on your energy bill by upgrading to new, more efficient models. The most efficient models use inverter technology that also makes them very quiet. Thirty percent tax credits are available for units 16 SEER and better. Depending on the age of your current unit, Energy Star-rated air conditioning could save you 10 percent to 30 percent of your cooling costs, or up to $71.52 and 916 lbs of CO2 annually.
REDUCING COSTS
11) For Federal tax incentives, see the Tax Incentives Assistance Project for information about the limits on energy efficient home improvements. For a listing of state incentives, visit the Alliance to Save Energy . Be sure to check out the Department of Energy’s “ 5 Things You Should Know Before You Claim Your Energy Tax Credit ,” which points out that installation costs for insulation cannot be claimed when determining your tax credit.
Depending on your income, you may qualify for free weatherization services through the Weatherization Assistance Program . This service is also available to renters.
ALTERNATIVES
Consider an evaporative cooler if you live in a dry, hot climate. Evaporative coolers (also known as “swamp coolers”) draw outside the air over wet pads thereby cooling it. Although they only work in dry climates, evaporative coolers consume 75 percent less energy than conventional AC and can reduce indoor temperatures by almost 30°F. This could save you $179 and 1.15 tons of CO2 annually.
CO2 Smackdown: Insulating and Sealing
Efficient Applicances Save Energy — and Money
Naturally Cool
More here: Low-Cost Cooling Options