Thursday, 02 May 2002

Labor's Love Lost

The environmental movement and the labor movement form two of the strongest currents in progressive politics -- and when they join forces, the results can be impressive. In 1970, the Steelworkers of America and environmental organizations worked together to help gain congressional approval for the federal Clean Air Act. In the 1980s, environmentalists built coalitions with unions to pass legislation giving workers and the public the right to know what chemicals were in their factories and communities; and in the 1990s, many environmental and labor leaders found common ground on trade and energy issues. But in recent months, the glue holding together the blue-green alliance has weakened. Keith Schneider reports on the schism, only on the Grist Magazine website.

The Truck Stops Here

Speaking of the blue-green alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups, plus the trucking industry, filed suit yesterday to prevent the U.S. government from allowing some 30,000 Mexican trucks onto American roads. On Friday, the Bush administration is scheduled to sign regulations that would allow Mexican trucks to cross the border for the first time in 20 years. The coalition contends that doing so would increase air pollution from diesel fumes and violate the Clean Air Act, which prevents the federal government from taking any action that would increase air pollution in regions that do not meet air-quality standards, such as Southern California and other border areas. And truckers have another concern on their minds: Currently, products coming in from Mexico must be unloaded at the border and transferred to U.S. trucks. The Teamsters fear that allowing Mexican truck drivers to enter would cost U.S. jobs and depress wages.

Mr. Green Genes?

When you've skyrocketed into the public eye, become an overnight billionaire, and successfully mapped the human genome, what do you do next? Why, find the solution to global warming, of course. J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist who gave the federal government's Human Genome Project a run for its money and accelerated the pace of DNA sequencing by many years, now plans to figure out a way to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and thereby slow global warming. Venter is in the process of setting up the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives and plans to seek government funding for research on technological and biological (as opposed to, say political or behavioral) solutions to environmental problems. Venter is especially interested in bacteria found in recent years in deep ocean trenches that may be able to convert CO2 back into solid form without needing much energy.

Cells Sell

The internal combustion engine took one small step toward obsolescence yesterday, when General Motors announced the addition of an 80,000-square-foot research facility in upstate New York that will be wholly dedicated to the commercialization of fuel cells. Fuel cells generate electricity by mixing hydrogen and oxygen; the only byproduct of the process is water. The Bush administration has expressed great enthusiasm for fuel-cell development, but to date, only prototype fuel-cell-powered cars exist. With the new facility, GM will explore the feasibility of manufacturing fuel cells on a large scale. The company, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year on fuel-cell research, plans to make mass-produced fuel cells available by the middle of this decade. The first ones, however, will be used for non-transport needs; GM doesn't expect to manufacture fuel-cell cars for the retail market until about 2010.

Abandon Ships

About 15 percent of the world's nitrogen- and sulfur-based pollution is produced by ships -- some 30,000 of them worldwide -- yet the vessels are among the least controlled pollution sources on the planet. That wouldn't change much under rules proposed by the U.S. EPA yesterday. The new regulations, modeled after a five-year-old international accord that has been widely criticized as too lax, would require some ships to reduce their emissions by about 11 percent. But the rules would cover only new ships (although ships sail the seas for four decades) and only U.S. ships (although nine out of every 10 ships entering U.S. ports are foreign). The EPA has admitted that even if the rules were fully in force across the globe, pollution from ships would increase by about 13 percent in the U.S. in the next 30 years. State and local air quality officials say the lack of strict regulations would make it nigh-impossible to meet air-quality standards, and enviros are threatening to go to court over the issue. The Bush administration is expected to finalize the rules by the end of January, after a public-comment period.