Pollution from coal is not only unhealthy for the environment -- it also hurts the human body and contributes to four of the five leading causes of death in the U.S.: heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic respiratory disease.

So concludes a new assessment of coal's health effects from Physicians for Social Responsibility. Titled "Coal's Assault on Human Health," the report examines the cumulative harm that coal pollution inflicts on the respiratory, cardiovascular and nervous systems. It also considers coal's contribution to global warming and the health implications of that.

"Detrimental health effects are associated with every aspect of coal's life cycle, including mining, hauling, preparation at the power plant, combustion, and the disposal of post-combustion wastes," the introduction states.

The report examines that entire life cycle, from the high fatal injury rate and chronic health problems suffered by coal miners, to the dust and water pollution that mining inflicts on nearby communities, to how the health-damaging chemicals used in washing coal make their way into water supplies. It also accounts for the enormous amount of pollution emitted by the trucks and trains that haul coal, and the threat presented by the more than 500 coal ash dumps sites across the United States.

It finds that the burning phase of coal's life-cycle takes the greatest toll of all on human health:

Coal combustion releases a combination of toxic chemicals into the environment and contributes significantly to global warming. Coal combustion releases sulfur dioxide, particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides, mercury, and dozens of other substances known to be hazardous to human health. Coal combustion contributes to smog through the release of oxides of nitrogen, which react with volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight to produce ground-level ozone, the primary ingredient in smog.

The report's findings have important implications for the public health future of the United States in general -- and the South in particular. According to the Sierra Club's database on proposed new coal plants, there are a total of 55 active coal plant projects underway in the U.S., and almost half of those -- 27 in all -- are slated for Southern states*:

* 2 in Arkansas (Hempstead and Plum Point II);
* 1 in Florida (Seminole);
* 2 in Georgia (Longleaf and Washington County Power Station);
* 8 in Kentucky (Black Stallion, Cash Creek, Coal Synthetics, Estill County Energy Partners, NewGas Energy Center, Smith, Spurlock, Trimble);
* 2 in Louisiana (Big Cajun I and Big Cajun II Unit 4);
* 1 in Mississippi (Mississippi Power Kemper IGCC);
* 1 in North Carolina (Cliffside);
* 7 in Texas (Coleto Creek, Diamond Alternative Energy, Las Brisas, Limestone III, Sandy Creek, Tenaska and White Stallion);
* 2 in Virginia (Dominion and Old Dominion Electric Cooperative); and
* 1 in West Virginia (TransGas Development's Coal-to-Liquid Plant).

These plants should not be built, according to PSR. In fact, the report's policy recommendations call for no new construction of coal-fired power plants so as to avoid increasing health-endangering emissions of carbon dioxide and toxic air pollutants.

The report also calls for cutting carbon dioxide emissions "as deeply and as swiftly as possible" through legislation establishing hard caps on global warming pollution and through the Clean Air Act. And it urges the U.S. to develop its capacity to generate electricity from clean, safe and renewable sources so existing coal-fired plants can be phased out without a net loss of jobs or compromising the nation's energy supply.

"These steps compromise a medically defensible energy policy: one that takes into account the public health impacts of coal while meeting our need for energy," PSR concludes.

* Facing South counts among the Southern states AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, TX, VA and WV.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Ask Umbra on trash, toxics, and tots

Babies don't like air pollution and neither should you!Early in my pregnancy I developed a bloodhound’s sense of smell: even the faintest of odors overwhelmed me. It’s a common phenomenon during the first trimester of pregnancy, yet my new nasal superpower took me by surprise—and forced me into an unwelcome awareness of the pollution that surrounds all of us. Car and truck exhaust, to my unusually acute nose, was pure poison. It made me recoil, hold my breath, gag, choke. My new super-nose could detect the smell all over the place—waiting at the bus stop in my quiet Seattle neighborhood, wafting through 5th floor downtown office windows, even at the park and in my own backyard. I realized, perhaps for the first time, that the air I breathe really stinks. 

And just as my pregnancy had heightened my sense of smell, it also intensified my concern about what was entering my body with every breath. The well being of a clump of tissue no bigger than a lima bean became my top priority—making me more concerned than ever about the purity of the food, water, and air that was nourishing both of us (or not).

Of course, the professional side of my brain had been thinking about the links between pollution and health for years. (Working at a sustainability think-tank will do that to you.) But pregnancy personalized the issues. It turned a hypothetical threat to the imagined families I held in my mind’s eye, into a very real one that affected my own life and my potential child’s future. My work at Sightline on climate and energy policy started to be more about my body and my family than simply about curbing climate change and stabilizing energy prices over the next decade. It's about the air I'm breathing—and breathing for two—right now!

Two thoughts struck me as particularly scary. First: this is the air we breathe all the time. It just happens that only first-trimester pregnant ladies (and perhaps dogs with their heads out car windows) get the full olfactory impact. Do we really know what air pollution does to our bodies? To embryos?

Second: we’re all incredibly complacent about what we breathe.  Is it because we can’t smell it—at least, not until the first trimester of pregnancy?  Do we wait for our cities to be as polluted as Bangkok or Los Angeles before we start to take action? (And, for that matter, are pregnant women in Bangkok and Los Angeles pounding down their elected officials’ doors, demanding cleaner air? As far as I know, they’re not).

Part of our complacency about air quality may stem from an unspoken belief that the health of a child is solely a mother’s personal responsibility. Mass-market books and magazines, for example, dwell on solely on a mother’s personal choices during pregnancy: alcohol and cigarettes, vitamins and diet.  Pregnant women are advised to avoiding household toxics like harsh cleaners, lead paint, or garden pesticides.

Yet very few books outline concerns that are beyond a mother’s individual control—concerns about toxic chemicals and particulate matter that pervade the air in our cities and suburbs. And fewer still remind us of the political actions we might take to demand safer air quality standards for fetuses, children, and adults alike.

So, the burden is on the mother. Not on the community that sets rules (or doesn't) about air and water quality or holds accountable (or doesn't) polluters that harm babies.

While some popular pregnancy books advise women who work around toxic fumes or spent their days literally in traffic—like tollbooth operators—to seek alternative work during their pregnancy, only a handful of specialized blogs, and a few books specifically oriented around science, biology, or toxics and pregnancy, examine the prenatal health ramifications of poor air quality for the rest of us—people who simply live and breathe (and procreate) in a world with cars and coal plants. And they paint a disturbing picture of the toxic cocktail we imbibe with every breath.

Terry Tamminen lays out the unappetizing recipe in his book Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction:

Tamminen points to a study of thousands of Los Angeles-area expectant mothers conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles. Those exposed for as little as a month to high levels of smog (mostly ozone and carbon monoxide) were three times more likely to have babies with physical deformities, including cleft lips and palates and defective heart valves, when compared with national averages for birth defects. According to a study published in the Journal of Immunology, in the United States, up to 100,000 Americans will die each year from causes attributable to completely preventable smog.

To its credit, the popular pregnancy website BabyCenter did recently post about a study (by researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University) linking prenatal exposure to air pollution (in particular polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAHs) to children with lower IQs:

No wonder city air makes me choke!

There are far bigger questions here than a woman’s personal choices about what to eat and drink. For example: Why is it we’ve let our air become toxic to fetuses? What steps can we take to change the status quo?

And that’s where climate and energy policy comes in. Curbing greenhouse gas emissions means ensuring cleaner air overall. It means we stop taking fossil fuel pollution for granted. It sparks policies to reduce vehicle emissions, and to develop the technologies that would do so—along with policies that focus on energy efficiency and clean energy alternatives. It encourages alternatives to motor vehicle transportation with investments in convenient transit options and better city planning.

I didn’t set out to write a post about why pregnant women should be up in arms. But I do feel that women of child-bearing age—and anyone, for that matter, who cares about healthy babies and kids— should stand up for what I think most of us assume are our basic rights, including clean air to breathe, air that doesn’t hurt us or our families.

But until pregnancy magazines, websites, and books start addressing the health effects of air pollution along with those of alcohol, anyone who cares about healthy children—and for that matter, a healthy, fully-functioning population—won’t be informed enough to be up in arms. It’s a pity because I imagine that if this demographic (isn’t it just about everybody?) did start demanding some policy changes, we’d see some movement. Because, as we’ve seen in other policy arenas, moms—as well as dads, aunts, grandparents, godparents—are political dynamite.

This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog.

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Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash

Here's the damage from a coal ash spill in Tennessee.A civil lawsuit filed last week in state court in Delaware charges Arlington, Va.-based AES Corp. -- one of the world's largest power companies -- with illegally dumping 160 million pounds of toxic coal ash waste onto beaches in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic, leading to serious health problems for nearby residents.

Filed by a team of attorneys from law firms in New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, the suit alleges that between 2003 and 2004, AES Corp. and its subsidiaries dumped 100 million pounds of coal ash on the beach near the small village of Arroyo Barril and another 60 million pounds in the Port of Manzanillo near Montecristi -- and that serious health problems resulted:

Since the dumping, babies have been born with severe birth defects including missing limbs, missing organs, cranial malformations, and gastrointestinal deformities. Some of these children have died as a result of their injuries. A failed Siamese twin with two heads died shortly after birth. Many women have suffered miscarriages at various stages of their pregnancies. Today, in addition to the severe birth defects, men, women, and children of this proud and struggling community continue to suffer with respiratory illnesses and skin rashes.

The attorneys say half of the 42 nearby residents tested had unsafe blood levels of arsenic, a major contaminant of concern in coal ash. There is evidence that inhaled or ingested arsenic can injure the fetus.

A byproduct of burning coal to generate electricity, coal ash contains dangerous levels of known poisons that also include beryllium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel, and vanadium. Workers who handle coal ash at power plants typically wear respirators and other protective equipment.

The coal ash dumped in the Dominican Republic came from AES's coal-fired power plant in Guayama, Puerto Rico. According to the complaint, authorities there allowed AES to build the plant in 2002 only under the condition that most of the ash generated at the plant was deposited somewhere other than Puerto Rico. The company allegedly chose dumping the waste onto beaches in the Dominican Republic -- where some 30 percent of citizens live in poverty -- as the cheapest alternative.

The lawsuit also claims that AES and its partners misrepresented to the Dominican government the toxicity of the coal ash and how it would be handled. In 2004, that government found the AES dumping to be in violation of Dominican law as well as the international Basel Convention on hazardous wastes and pursued criminal and civil actions against AES and other responsible parties.

The Miami Herald reports that it was a contractor from Delray Beach, Fla. -- Roger C. Fina -- who hauled the coal ash to the Dominican Republic and dumped it on the beaches:

"He brings this rock ash into the country without any kind of controls or anything. A good portion of it fell to the sea,'' said Andrés Chalas, the Dominican Republic's top environmental prosecutor. "They got permissions to bring it in and said it was to do renovations of the port, but we investigated and there was no such project, not at Public Works or the Port Authority.''

Fina claims that the ash was supposed to be turned into asphalt and was never meant to sit on the beach for two years. The paper reports that after he and AES were sued by the Dominican government, the company paid $6 million to clean up the site, though contamination still remains. Fina says the case has ruined his life and left him out of work.

The lawsuit filed last week on behalf of the injured Dominicans seeks damages from AES and its companies for the human toll caused by the illegal dumping. It also seeks to compel AES to provide a comprehensive medical monitoring program for the plaintiffs during their lifetimes.

A version of this story originally appeared at Facing South.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

This story was written by Danielle Ivory.

Results from a federal drinking water monitoring program show that many public water companies are ineffective at removing a widely used weed-killer from their water supplies.

As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to notify the public about data showing that the herbicide atrazine has been found at levels above the federal safety limit in drinking water in at least four states.

But that data also reveals that many public water filtration systems are not removing the herbicide. In many places, atrazine levels in untreated water sources such as rivers directly match the levels that come out of the tap.

A carbon filter with granular activated carbon — in other words, a giant Brita-like filter — should absorb all or most of the atrazine. But the EPA’s atrazine monitoring data shows that many water utilities in the Corn Belt do not use carbon filtration. Many use rapid sand filters instead. They are cheaper and last longer, but are unable to remove organic compounds such as PCBs, phthalates, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides such as atrazine.

“Carbon filters might have to be replaced every couple of years whereas sand filters could last 20 to 30 years,” said Alan Roberson, director of security and regulatory affairs at the American Water Works Association, a non-profit organization representing water utilities.

To recover the cost of filtering atrazine, water companies in six states are preparing a lawsuit against the makers of atrazine, the Swiss company Syngenta.

When you compare the raw and finished water of an effective carbon filtration system, you see something like the chart below, which shows weekly levels of atrazine in river water and drinking water as measured last year in Bowling Green, Ohio.

Bowling Green added carbon filters to the water system in 2000. “We installed the filters to take care of taste and odor problems, but it [also] gets the atrazine out of there,” said Chad Johnson, assistant superintendent at the water utility. “These filters are expensive, though. Our new building cost about five million dollars.”

Every year, the utility replaces six of the 12 filter vessels at a cost of $126,000, Johnson said. He said the water plant had received $5 million in stimulus funds, which will be used to partially fund an $11 million project to install new membranes, which will remove nitrates and other chemicals from the water.

Atchison, Kan., is among water systems that do not have adequate filters in place. The chart shows weekly levels of atrazine in river water and drinking water as measured last year.

“I’ll be darned,” said Michael Matthews, the utilities director in Atchison, Kan., upon hearing that atrazine was barely being filtered from his drinking water. “That’s bad.”

Water plant managers said the economic downturn has made it even harder to convert to more effective filters. “Right now, we can’t afford anything,” said Lloyd Littrell of the Beloit, Kansas water plant, where rapid sand filters are used.

“It’s impossible to get atrazine out of the water with these filters. There’s no way to remove it,” he said. “But people need this water. We can’t just shut our doors and tell people to drink from the river.”

Stan Schafer of the Baxter Springs plant, where sand filters are used, said it was difficult to get funding for water cleanup even prior to the recession. “Shoot, I’d like another filter,” he said. “But they’re expensive. We did a $2.5 million update about three years ago and that system is falling apart.”

A civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech University, Marc Edwards, said that the cost of granular activated carbon treatment could double the total cost of drinking water treatment in some rural and poor communities.

“We are used to paying very little for tap water,” Edwards said. “It is hard for some rural communities to justify the higher costs of advanced treatment.”

“Most water systems don’t have the resources to buy a new filter,” said Kirk Leifheit, Assistant Chief of the Drinking Water Program at the Ohio EPA. “They are reporting to us needs in the billions.”

The EPA only monitors the river water and drinking water in about 150 water systems, so it is unknown whether other communities might be experiencing problems filtering atrazine. Washington, D.C., and Maryland, for example, are not part of that program.

However, atrazine is heavily used in the Maryland area, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey. The Washington Aqueduct, which treats water from the Potomac River for about 1 million in the D.C. area, does not filter for atrazine.

Water systems in 57 cities are preparing a lawsuit against the atrazine manufacturer, the Swiss company Syngenta, to recover the cost of filtering the chemical out of drinking water. Utilities in Illinois, Ohio, Kansas, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa are preparing to file suits in state courts. A hearing in Illinois is scheduled for Monday.

“Many of those water providers have incurred an enormous amount of expenses at a time when their tax base is shrinking,”said Stephen Tillery of the Korein Tillery law firm in St. Louis, who represents the water systems. “They’re cash strapped.”

Jere White, executive director of the Kansas City Corn Growers Association and the Kansas Grain Sorghum Producers Association, has been fighting atrazine regulation at both a local and national level since 1995. He has been vocal about opposing the class action lawsuit against Syngenta.

“The difference between them [the lawyers] and an ambulance chaser is the fact that with an ambulance chaser, you at least assume that there’s an ambulance and an injury,” White said in a phone interview.

White is also chairman of the Triazine Network which has been fighting atrazine regulation since 1995. The Network and the Corn Growers, according to White, receive regular funding from Syngenta — for travel, speaking engagements (including EPA hearings), and education, though he pointed out that it has never been earmarked specifically for “advocacy.” The Network, according to its website, “strives to keep the beneficial triazine herbicides available in the United States.”

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Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

While Louisiana struggles to restore coastal wetlands ravaged in large part by decades of oil and gas drilling, its senior senator is leading the effort to lift the ban on drilling off Florida's Panhandle.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is the lone co-sponsor of legislation sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to open up new areas in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas development. Introduced last month, Senate Bill 1517 would allow drilling in federal waters 45 miles off the Panhandle's coast. Current law bans drilling any closer than 125 miles off Panhandle beaches and 235 miles off Gulf Coast beaches from Tampa south.

Opposing the Murkowski-Landrieu plan is U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), a longtime foe of offshore drilling. He joins other Florida leaders worried about drilling's impact on the state's lucrative tourism industry, which in 2008 alone generated more than $65 billion for Florida's economy and $3.9 billion for the state in tax revenue. Nelson has criticized the drilling bill as giveaway to the oil industry, McClatchy reports:

"This isn't even thinly veiled," Nelson said. "It's an oil industry bailout plan. And it's Alaska and Louisiana's senators plan to boost their own revenues in tough economic times. But even in the toughest of times, there are some things states shouldn't sell out, like Florida's economy and environment."

Why is Landrieu pushing the plan? She says it's out of concern for rising oil prices -- though the U.S. Energy Information Administration says drilling in areas that are currently restricted would result in negligible savings to consumers. Meanwhile, Landrieu and and Murkowski are among the top congressional recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org database, the industry is Landrieu's second-biggest contributor besides lawyers, investing more than $711,000 in her campaigns over the past 12 years. In the 2008 election cycle, she ranked first among all congressional recipients of oil and gas PAC contributions, receiving more than $171,600.  The oil and gas industry is Murkowski's third-biggest contributor after leadership PACs and electric utilities, donating more than $286,000 to her campaign over the past seven years; she's also the top recipient of oil and gas PAC contributions in the current election cycle.

Last year the League of Conservation Voters placed Landrieu on their "Dirty Dozen" list of lawmakers, noting that her lifetime score from the environmental advocacy group of 43 percent made her the worst Democratic senator on environmental issues among those running for re-election.

"For a Senator from Louisiana, which faces severe consequences from global warming, to fail to protect Louisiana is disappointing," LCV's Tony Massaro said at the time. "Senator Landrieu joins the [Dirty Dozen] because she acts more to protect Big Oil than the future for the people of Louisiana."

A football field lost every 38 minutes

Sen. Landrieu was among those who suffered personal losses from Hurricane Katrina four years ago, as the storm and the subsequent levee failures and flooding destroyed her lakeside home in New Orleans.

One reason the devastation to inland areas like New Orleans was so severe when the Category 3 storm hit Louisiana is because coastal wetlands that once served as storm breaks have been swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico. Over the past 75 years, Louisiana has lost more than 2,300 square miles of coastal wetlands -- an area equivalent in size to the entire state of Delaware.

Between 1990 and 2000, Louisiana lost about 24 square miles of land each year -- equivalent to about one football field lost to the sea every 38 minutes, according to the state's Department of Natural Resources.

While some of Louisiana's land loss can be blamed on natural processes, coastal experts say most of the destruction is due to human alteration of the landscape. One factor is the extensive levee system constructed along the Lower Mississippi River that prevents sediment from depositing naturally along the coast. Another key factor is the thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines and canals cut through coastal wetlands, opening them up to saltwater intrusion that kills vegetation and leaves the land vulnerable to erosion.

In fact, between 40 and 60 percent of Louisiana's coastal wetlands loss can be traced to oil and gas activities, according to the Gulf Restoration Network. From 1983 to 2008, for example, Houston-based Shell Oil dredged 8.8 million cubic yards of coastal lands in Louisiana while laying its pipelines -- activity that GRN and other environmental advocates calculated as having caused the loss of 22,624 acres of wetlands.

Land loss is not the only environmental damage from oil and gas drilling. Last month alone, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico contaminated several beaches along the Texas coast, while a leak from a Shell pipeline 30 miles off the Louisiana coast created a nine-mile-long slick in the Gulf.

Storms increase the risk oil and gas drilling pose to the environment. Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina and Rita together caused 124 offshore spills that dumped more than 743,000 gallons of pollution into the ocean, according to the federal Minerals Management Service [PDF]. Onshore spills from pipelines, tanks and refineries added another 9 million gallons of pollution to the mess.

Pattern of delay

If no decisive action is taken to address coastal erosion, Louisiana is expected lose another 500 square miles of land by 2050 -- and that will have enormous consequences for communities throughout the state's coastal parishes, where almost 2 million people live. And unfortunately, the current processes for addressing the problem are anything but decisive.

This past June, Steven Peyronnin, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, testified at the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works' hearing on Louisiana's coastal restoration. Noting that scientists and engineers have the expertise to restore sustainability to the landscape and protect vulnerable communities, he said what is lacking is a sense of urgency.

Peyronnin pointed out that it's been more than four years now since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers submitted a final report recognizing the severe wetland loss in coastal Louisiana and recommending five critical restoration projects for the near term. While Congress authorized these projects under the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) section of the Water Resources Development Act of 2007, only one is scheduled to begin construction before 2012. That meant none were eligible for funding under the recent economic stimulus package.

"Not only is the lack of progress a troubling obstacle to restoring a sustainable coast, but it has also negated the ability to leverage federal opportunities that could provide desperately needed funding streams and a strong sense of urgency," Peyronnin told the committee. "Without a single project ready for construction, LCA projects were not considered in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 because they fell far short of the shovel ready requirement intended to urgently move projects forward."

In authorizing the LCA, Congress also directed the Secretary of the Army to come up with a comprehensive long-term restoration plan, but this still has not been done. Instead, the Corps is relying on an older document -- the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Technical Report -- that has shortcomings. For example, it provides no framework for how restoration efforts work with navigation activities, which currently focus on dumping sediment too far offshore to maintain coastal wetlands.

Peyronnin testified that the delay of LCA projects and the Corps' failure to comply with congressional mandates show that the traditional model for carrying out coastal restoration projects is "ill-suited" to respond to the crisis.

"If this pattern of delay continues," he warned, "it will eliminate any chance of success."

Earlier this month, Louisiana officials released recommendations for speeding up Corps projects, which currently take an average of 40 years to complete. But the recommendations remain in the discussion stages.

A starker choice for Florida

Sen. Landrieu has long been an advocate for coastal restoration efforts. For example, the annual energy and water appropriations bill recently passed by the Senate contained hundreds of millions of dollars for Army Corps projects in Louisiana that she championed, including coastal restoration initiatives.

But her push to allow the oil and gas industry to expand its operations in the Gulf of Mexico while federal processes to address land loss remain in disarray would inevitably mean putting other areas of the Gulf Coast at risk of the same drilling-related wetlands destruction experienced by Louisiana.

Unlike Louisiana, Florida has long opposed drilling off its coast, seeing it as a threat to the state's $65 billion annual tourist economy. When Chevron discovered natural gas deposits in Florida waters in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, the state objected to plans to tap them, leading the Bush administration to buy back leases from Chevron, Conoco and Murphy Oil for $115 million.

This past April, amid concern about rising energy prices, the Florida House passed a bill allowing offshore drilling in state waters -- but the measure died in the Senate.

Then along came Murkowski's and Landrieu's bill, which resembles an amendment in a Senate energy bill written by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) that would also permit oil and gas rigs within 45 miles of Florida's Gulf coast, McClatchy reports. But unlike Dorgan's proposal, the Murkowski-Landrieu plan includes a revenue-sharing provision to sweeten the deal.

In 2006, another piece of legislation sponsored by Landrieu gave Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas 37.5 percent of proceeds from fuel production in the Gulf -- returning to the states an estimated total of $6 billion a year that previously went to the federal government. The arrangement aimed to compensate them for the environmental cost of pipelines and other infrastructure.

Florida wanted no part of that earlier deal, but Landrieu hopes the revenue-sharing provision will hold appeal because of the state's fiscal crunch. As she wrote in a June op-ed that ran in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call:

Had revenue sharing been a part of the bargain, Floridians would have faced a choice involving rewards and not just risks. Given Florida’s current $6 billion budget deficit, such a choice would be starker today.

But as Sen. Nelson has pointed out, the proposal is hardly a panacea for Florida's financial woes, since the money states raise from offshore drilling in federal waters can be used only to repair damages caused by drilling, such as coastal restoration and pollution cleanup.

The question facing the Senate is whether that makes drilling worth the environmental damage that Florida will inevitably suffer.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South)

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The tar sands blow

Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!

For the past two years, the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission has been crafting new rules to require water monitoring at factory hog farms, a significant source of pollution in the state.

But last week, even with concerns growing over the environmental impacts of hog farms, the North Carolina Senate unanimously passed a bill that puts the rules process on hold until 2011 -- a display of the mighty political power Boss Hog holds in the state.

The measure now moves to the N.C. House, where its fate is unclear.

The bill's sponsor was state Sen. Charlie Albertson, the Democratic Caucus secretary who represents eastern North Carolina's Duplin, Sampson and Lenoir counties, an agricultural center where many of the state's more than 10 million hogs are raised. In a recent interview with WUNC public radio reporter Laura Leslie, Albertson -- a member and former chair of the state Senate Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources Committee -- accused the EMC of unfairly picking on hog farmers:

Water quality problems, again, are not caused by swine farmers ... It's just not happening.

Unfortunately, that's not true. Agricultural operations, including confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs, are a source of water pollution nationwide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Hogs produce enormous amounts of fecal waste -- three times as much as humans -- that's stored in giant open-air holding ponds known as "lagoons," which are vulnerable to leaking. The waste is eventually sprayed onto fields, where the nitrogen converts to nitrates, chemicals that move readily into nearby streams and groundwater. Nitrates have been linked to a blood disorder called methemoglobinemia, which is especially harmful to babies.

Animals kept in CAFOs are fed a variety of drugs including antibiotics that also present a threat to the environment. Twenty-two states have reported damage to streams and rivers caused by agriculture, with 20% of that attributed specifically to CAFOs, according to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. Health problems have also been documented among people living near hog farms.

In its report released in April, the Pew Commission noted that "one of the most serious unintended consequences of industrial food animal production is the growing public health threat of these types of facilities." 

Overruling the rulemakers

North Carolina, the nation's second-largest hog producer after Iowa, is among the states that have suffered serious environmental problems from industrial livestock operations, one of several significant sources of nutrient pollution along with municipal wastewater and urban runoff. Contamination from the state's factory farms has been linked to outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida, a microbe believed to be responsible for fish-killing algal blooms as well as skin irritation and cognitive problems in exposed humans.

In 2007, with concerns mounting over animal waste pollution, North Carolina's Riverkeepers filed a petition for rulemaking asking the state to consider whether it needed to impose monitoring rules for industrial livestock farms. Current law requires the facilities to undergo two inspections a year, but these are strictly visual checks that involve no environmental sampling.

In May of this year, following a process in which all stakeholders got a chance to be heard through comments and hearings, the EMC proposed rules requiring animal waste management facilities to sample water quality three times a year at three sampling sites to be determined by the state Division of Water Quality.

But that didn't sit well with Albertson, who sought to kill the rules. He turned to an existing piece of legislation that aimed to nix state regulation of toxic air emissions in certain cases. That bill was changed to prohibit the EMC from adopting any permanent rules at all until 2011 except in a few limited cases, such as an unforeseen public health crisis. There were as many as 10 rules under consideration at the EMC that would have been affected by this version of the bill.

It was that broad rule moratorium that Albertson got approved by the Senate Agriculture and Environment committee -- a body that has a history of being sympathetic to agribusiness interests. The committee was once chaired by Wendell Murphy, a hog farmer whose Murphy Family Farms are now part of Smithfield Foods of Virginia, the world's largest pork producer and processor. During his time in the legislature, Murphy sponsored and helped pass bills that exempted hog farms from local zoning laws and lawsuits and that gave the industry subsidies and tax exemptions. When Murphy retired from the Senate in 1992, he was replaced by Albertson, then a state representative.

When Albertson's bill was taken up on the Senate floor, several lawmakers with a record of advocating for the environment spoke against the measure. They included state Sen. Dan Clodfelter of Charlotte, who expressed concerns about the bill's impact on rules the EMC was creating to help his city deal with a serious air quality problem. Clodfelter asked Albertson for a narrowing amendment, which Albertson agreed to provide.

Senate insiders say it's customary that when a colleague does what you ask as Albertson did, you in turn support his legislation. That's why even those lawmakers with strong environmental records voted yes on the bill -- even though not all of them wanted to kill the hog farm rules.

At Boss Hog's trough

But other North Carolina senators spoke in praise of Albertson's bill, with some even accusing the EMC of harboring a "vendetta" against hog farmers.

That lawmakers are so sympathetic to a polluting industry is not altogether surprising considering the enormous clout the corporate agriculture lobby has in North Carolina -- influence that's apparent in Albertson's record of campaign contributions.

Since 2000 alone, Albertson has received $10,200 from the N.C. Farm Bureau, $8,000 from Smithfield Foods, another $7,250 from the N.C. Pork Council, and $5,000 from the N.C. Poultry Federation, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. He's also received tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from individual hog and poultry farmers, include E. Marvin Johnson, owner of the House of Raeford turkey farms, hog farmer William H. Prestage of Prestage Farms and Murphy, his Senate predecessor.

Albertson's hardly alone among North Carolina lawmakers in benefiting from industrial agriculture's largesse: According to a recent report [pdf] from campaign finance group Democracy North Carolina, the N.C. Farm Bureau contributed a total of $222,150 to state candidates and political parties in the last election alone, and the N.C. Pork Council -- which gets funding for its policy advocacy work from a mandatory fee on pork producers -- chipping in another $187,000.

Legislative insiders say there's now an effort underway to keep Albertson's bill from coming up in the House. However, the industry's considerable influence with lawmakers suggests environmental advocates could face a tough battle ahead.

"Hopefully, Albertson's bill will be seen for what it is when it reaches the House, and the EMC will not be bullied by the swine industry and its surrogates," says Rick Dove of the Waterkeeper Alliance.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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My father believes that the one modern invention above all others to contribute to the downfall of the planet, not to mention our civilization, is the drive-through -- or, in the spirit of efficiency on which it's based, the drive-thru.

Your idling could light this sign!Not only does it encourage laziness and obesity by tempting fast-food fans to stay seated in their automobiles during both purchase and consumption, there's the whole car idling issue. By one estimate, every fifteen minutes of idling consumes 0.175 gallons of gas, resulting in as much as 58 million tons of CO2 dispersed into the atmosphere annually. The Sierra Club says that fast-food customers alone burn up some 50 million gallons of gas each year.

But at least one company believes that there is tremendous environmental potential in the drive-thru. New Energy Technologies Inc., which describes itself as "a next-generation alternative and renewable energy developer," has designed a gizmo to green this American institution. It's called MotionPower Kinetic Energy Harvester, and it promises to capture energy currently wasted beneath a car's tires.

The technology, the company says, is the cousin of that used in hybrid cars, but it's installed on the street, soaking up the heat generated by an idling automobile and transforming it into electricity -- possibly enough to power 250,0000 homes daily, if they could trap the heat generated by all 250 million cars on the road. And what better place to grab that heat than the drive-thru?

The company announced recently that it will install a prototype of the technology in a suburban New Jersey Burger King. The start-up is so small and next generation that the one person authorized to speak about MotionPower couldn't be reached to comment for this story -- he was out of the country, apparently convincing other nations that they can transform suburban environmental flaws into potential green gold mines. The Burger King franchise owner, Andrew Paterno, says some 150,000 cars pass through the Hillside, N.J., drive-thru annually, and could simply cruise over an energy-capturing strip as they do so, with nothing getting between them and their Whoppers.

But MotionPower has popped up concurrently with an onslaught of anti-drive-thru sentiment (and not just from my dad), coming in forms as informal as blogs and as formal as legislation. Cities from Madison, Wisc., to Hamilton, Ontario, have considered banning drive-thrus altogether, though powerful restaurant coalitions tend to fight them with force, and with success; San Luis Obispo, Calif., is one of the few cities to successfully ban drive-thrus, which they've done since 1982.

Last year, the Canadian donut company Tim Horton's -- which has been steadily making its mark in America, transforming 12 New York City Dunkin' Donuts just this month -- commissioned an environmental engineering firm to evaluate the emissions generated by drive-thrus. According to the report, the snail's pace of parking lot drivers searching for a spot creates more pollution than the continual line of cars. "Assuming the same volume of traffic, a parking-only store would produce about 20 percent more smog pollutants and as many as 60 percent more greenhouse gases than a location with drive-through service," wrote their director of public affairs in a newspaper editorial based on the report. According to them, drive-thrus are already good for the environment.

If you side with the restaurateurs and believe the drive-thru isn't so bad, MotionPower's premise is still a win. The technology, should it prove to be both profitable and viable, can be used anywhere that slow driving occurs: highway tollbooths, stoplights, residential zones with traffic calming, our nation's borders, and, yes, the lots of parking-only stores. My father might have to find a new scapegoat for climate change and the decline of the modern world.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

A plastic 55-gallon barrell is seen amongst piles of driftwood and mud along the Potomac River in Cropley, MD. The main culprits for the river's deteriorating health are agricultural runoff and suburban sprawl due to a booming local population.  This CAP post looks at some useful responses.

Global warming is on the national and global agenda, but we could very well be on the brink of a global water crisis. Water scarcity has received some attention from the media, but water pollution problems remain. And not just in China: Washington, D.C. residents are currently banned from swimming in the Potomac, the river that cradles the nation's capital and feeds into the Chesapeake Bay.

The main culprit for the river's deteriorating health is suburban sprawl due to a booming local population. More sprawl means less forest and more concrete, asphalt, and turf grass. These "impervious" surfaces, which today cover 25 percent of the Potomac watershed, disrupt the water cycle: rather than being filtered by soil and plant roots, rainwater rushes into storm drains. The runoff, loaded with road grease, trash, and silt, empties out into the Potomac and its tributaries. On the way there, it warms, accelerates, and often mingles with raw sewage spilling over from the area's combined rainwater sewer systems.

What does this hot, fast, dirty runoff do to the river? Impacts range from unsafe quantities of toxins and increased bacterial concentrations to eroded streams, deteriorating ecosystems, and fish kills from dark, oxygen-starved water.

But it's not just the suburbs that are to blame. Agricultural byproducts such as fertilizer and chicken manure are also finding their way into the Potomac. The resulting cocktail of nutrients, hormones, and fecal bacteria feeds algae blooms and dead zones downstream in the Chesapeake Bay. And although nutrient levels have been declining for the past three decades, they remain far above their mandated caps.

If the pollution wasn't bad enough, Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times recently profiled the "intersex" fish that now grace the Potomac. According to a recent survey, over 80 percent of male smallmouth bass in the river now have eggs growing in their testes. The precise cause of this deformity remains unknown, but scientists suspect endocrine disruptors from chicken (remember that manure) or human hormones (which result from birth-control pills and flow right through waste treatment plants). In humans, endocrine disruptors have been linked to early puberty, obesity, diabetes, and both breast and prostate cancer. Keep in mind that these hermaphrodite fish are swimming around in D.C.'s tap water.

What is to be done? As with many environmental problems the solution is smart policy. Local governments should protect existing forests and replant strategic areas along the watershed. They should also mandate the use of low-impact development practices. LID seeks to minimize the suburb's footprint on rivers by preserving a site's natural offset-absorbing features -- such as existing vegetation and drainage courses -- and treating the remaining stormwater onsite using green roofs, porous pavements, and highway medians full of water-absorbing plants.

To incentivize this shift, the EPA should update the federal Clear Water Act by including stormwater permits with numeric limits, which are lacking in the current ineffective regulations that govern new development. These new rules will in turn require local governments to build the capacity necessary to review community stormwater plans and enforce runoff limits.

Research on the intersex fish and on endocrine disruptors is ongoing. The EPA is currently moving to test the compounds. It should accelerate this testing and regulate if necessary.

Remember: Rivers throughout the country are being polluted by agriculture and suburbanization. But change rarely happens without individuals pressuring the political process. Improving our nation's health and environment is not a spectator sport, so call on your representatives to act on this issue and inquire about greening your roof.

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Growing up green: Breathing for two

John SoleyAfter a long struggle with cancer, my friend Mr. John Soley died at his home in Carbon County, Pa. on Saturday, June 20. He was only 62, which is too young to die of natural causes. But then, neither John nor I believe he got sick from natural causes. We believe he and many of his neighbors were poisoned by pollution, and that the perpetrators should be held to account.

Outspoken in the local grassroots struggle against environmental injustice, Mr. Soley was a resident of Quakake Road north of Hometown, the rural Appalachian village where I grew up and where my mom still lives. Located where Carbon, Schuylkill and Luzerne counties converge in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal mining region, Quakake Road is a continuation of Ben Titus Road, where residents have reported an unusual number of cases of the rare blood malignancy polycythemia vera as well as other cancers and chronic illnesses. Last year, researchers with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry confirmed a cluster of polycythemia vera in that area and believe it is caused by something in the environment.

Indeed, the valley where Mr. Soley lived lies below what may be the most toxic mountaintop in America. Broad Mountain is home to McAdoo Associates, a former Reading Co. coal mine that in the 1970s became an illegal chemical waste incinerator and dump used by some of the most prominent corporations in America, including BASF, Johnson & Johnson and a company that today is part of petroleum giant BP. The property is now a Superfund toxic waste site that was once considered one of the country's most dangerous. The first federal investigators on the scene reported finding massive sheets of cancer-causing benzene on the property and dead animals and birds scattered around chemical drums. The smell from the place was so sickening that we used to roll up the car windows and hold our breath when driving past.

Today that Superfund site sits next to the heavily polluting Northeastern Power cogeneration facility, one of seven such power plants in the tri-county area that burn waste coal and waste fuel. Adjacent to the cogeneration plant is what's known as the Big Gorilla -- an old strip mine that since 1997 has served as a dump for the toxic combustion waste created at the power plant. Click here for a photo I took of the cogeneration facility through the gates of the Superfund site.

To give you a sense of how close Mr. Soley lived to this toxic mess, click here for a Google Earth image, where his property is marked with the square in the upper right. The large water body in the center is the Still Creek Reservoir, which provides drinking water for Hometown and the nearby borough of Tamaqua; the black area in the upper left is the old mine site; the lighter-colored area to its right is the Big Gorilla; the white triangle between the black ash pit and the road is the Superfund site; and the industrial facility on the lower edge of the ash pit is the cogeneration plant. The road running along the left edge of the image is Pa. Route 309. The highway roughly follows the Little Schuylkill, the Schuylkill River's northernmost headwaters, which originate on the mountaintop.

The community also lies a a couple of miles northeast -- that is, downwind -- of the Air Products plant, a manufacturer of electronics specialty gases and one of the few domestic producers of toxic fluorine gases. According to the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory, the facility reported emitting to the air in 2007 alone more than 3,400 pounds of toxic hydrogen fluoride as well as more than 2,300 pounds of dichloromethane or methylene chloride.

Methylene chloride is a solvent known to cause cancer in humans, and it has a characteristically sweet odor. Coincidentally, during my last visit with Mr. Soley at his home this past October, he noted a weird smell coming from Air Products that he likened to bubble gum.

Welcome to Cancer Valley

I first met John Soley several years ago at a borough council meeting we attended in Tamaqua. It turned out that he knew my father, Dan Sturgis, as they worked together at the former Atlas Powder Co., where Mr. Soley was an electrician. My dad, a draftsman by training and an explosives expert, was first diagnosed with kidney cancer in the mid-1980s and died from it in 1998. The experience of helping care for him in his final months and seeing how many of our neighbors were also sick inspired me to undertake a research project that eventually led me to start a blog called Hometown Hazards.

When I visited him last fall, Mr. Soley had been on kidney dialysis after years of suffering from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood plasma cells that are formed in bone marrow and that play an important role in immunity. He wanted to walk with me along the Still Creek Reservoir to show me the areas along the shore where the vegetation was dead. Those areas reportedly coincide with springs coming off the mountain, one of several pieces of evidence that suggest the toxic chemicals dumped into the mine on the top of the hill are seeping into the wider ecosystem. But he was too sick to go walking on that day, so instead we sat at his kitchen table and talked.

"We need our story to be told," he said. "Welcome to Cancer Valley."

Mr. Soley told me harrowing stories about his own long battle with cancer as well as the health problems of others in his community. One of his neighbors was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer at age of 18. In another nearby home, two people were both suffering from brain tumors. Another neighbor had stomach cancer. And Mr. Soley knew of at least one child in the area who had leukemia, and whose uncle lived nearby and died of leukemia as a teenager.

Mr. Soley first moved to Quakake Road in 1978 from Tamaqua's Dutch Hill neighborhood. An outdoorsman and hunter with a deep love for Brittany spaniels, he got a good deal on the land, where he soon opened a kennel. It was only a few years after Mr. Soley moved in that his young neighbor was diagnosed with the rare liver tumor. About a year after that, Mr. Soley's own health problems began.

Suffering from chronic fatigue that began soon after the move, Mr. Soley was being treated by his doctor for Epstein-Barr syndrome but wasn't getting any better.

He eventually saw an Epstein-Barr specialist who did additional testing and discovered problems with his T cells, key parts of the immune system. The tests also turned up serious problems with Mr. Soley's blood cells, which he described as looking like "tapeworms ... all stuck together."

It was in 1997 that Mr. Soley was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

After his diagnosis, he went through a four-month round of chemotherapy and later received a bone marrow transplant from his sister, Joan Yacobenas of Hometown. He was in the hospital at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for a couple of months and then lived for a few more months in nearby lodgings for cancer patients so he could be close to his doctors.

Three days after he finally got home, he started bleeding from his bladder -- a reaction from one of his cancer drugs. This required operations to clear up blood clots.

When Mr. Soley returned home from that ordeal, he found he couldn't eat and started losing weight, dropping from 205 pounds to 145.

"I got so skinny when I looked in the mirror I cringed," he recalled. "I wanted to cry. I could only manage to eat one cookie a day."

As if that weren't awful enough, he then started bleeding from his rectum and had to be flown from the Lehigh Valley Medical Center to Johns Hopkins, where doctors diagnosed him with an infected bowel. They wanted to cut out a section but were afraid the operation would kill him. With no other options, they treated him with antibiotics but were not particularly hopeful about his chances.

He recalled how one morning three doctors came into his room and announced -- incredulously -- that somehow his bowel infection had cleared up.

"They told me I must have had a lot of people praying for me," Mr. Soley said. "They called it divine intervention."

After that ordeal, Mr. Soley was able to eat again, and his health gradually improved. But then in June of 1998, tests revealed there was still cancer in his body. He underwent an experimental therapy at Johns Hopkins that involved taking lymphocyte cells from his sister's body and infusing them into his own intravenously. When that treatment ended in January 1999, he finally felt good again for the first time in a long time.

"I was a completely different person," he said. "I felt 150 percent."

His relatively good health lasted until October 2006, when he woke up one morning with a strange feeling in his chest. A neighbor drove him to the hospital in Hazleton, where they found blockages necessitating heart surgery.

While Mr. Soley was undergoing rehab for the surgery, blood tests showed he had abnormally high creatine levels, indicating his kidneys were shutting down. In May 2007, he went on dialysis.

'This isn't normal'

When he first got sick, Mr. Soley told me, he figured it was just bad luck on his part. It was only later that he started noticing the patterns, with many neighbors all around him also sick -- with cancers of the liver, brain, prostate and blood, as well as thyroid disorders and other chronic illnesses. He lived not far from Betty and Lester Kester, a husband and wife who both died of polycythemia vera within the past two years.

"I said to myself, 'What in the hell is going on?' This isn't normal."

He soon began noticing strange things in the environment. The reddish-brown dust from the power plant that gathered on people's cars overnight. The strange chemical odors on the wind. The smell of sulfuric acid emanating from the hill leading up to the Superfund site. The thick white slime that coated the pump on his drinking water well.

A couple of years earlier, on the hillside close to his house, Mr. Soley also discovered what looked like spider webs of some sort of oily substance oozing out of the earth. He called his neighbor and friend, Ricky Johnson, who took photographs. They had a sample of the stuff analyzed at Wilkes University and found they were indeed petroleum products of some sort. The Pa. Department of Environmental Protection eventually sent out someone to take a look at the situation, but the person didn't even bring digging tools. Mr. Soley provided him with a spade to take samples, which according to DEP showed nothing unusual.

During our conversation, Mr. Soley expressed some bitterness toward local elected officials, who he felt failed to take adequate action to help area residents deal with the various environmental threats they're facing. For example, there's never been thorough independent testing of the water and sediment in the Still Creek Reservoir despite the obvious toxic threats. Nor has there been any widespread testing of people living along the reservoir for chemical exposures.

"It's been a joke," he said of official efforts to address the problems. "A farce."

Since Mr. Soley and I met, U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) announced that he secured a $5.5 million federal grant to explore the cause of high rate of polycythemia vera in the area. But like me, Mr. Soley was already growing uneasy about officials' focus on polycythemia vera to the exclusion of all the other health problems suffered by local residents.

What about the people with multiple myeloma? Leukemia? Brain cancer? Prostate cancer? Thyroid disease? Would they be forgotten?

I know I won't forget my friend and what he went through. Perhaps the best way to honor yet another life lost too soon after great suffering would be to keep a question in mind as we continue our work seeking environmental truth and justice for the people of the Hometown area: What difference would our actions have made to John Soley?

(A version of this story originally appeared on the blog Hometown Hazards.)

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First Lady Michelle Obama hosts the Bancroft Elementary School for the garden harvest of the White House in Washington on June 16, 2009Offical White House Photographer Samantha Appleton

[MORE UPDATES:] Obamafoodorama looked into the issue in depth. Now the story is there's no story. Here's an expert commenting on the 93 PPM figure:

that number is “ridiculously low” for any urban garden, according to Dr. Gabriel Filippelli, chair of Geology at Indiana University, and associate chair of the Center for Environmental Health. Dr. Filippelli spent a lot of time chuckling during a recent conversation about the White House Kitchen Garden, because trying to make a case for grave contamination based on a test result of 93 ppm is absurd.

So there you have it. Nothing to see here. Move along.

[UPDATE:] Sounds like this sludge story is getting a bit out of hand. Let's be clear -- the sludge was used over a decade ago. It was NOT used as mulch on the White House Kitchen Garden, as some rumors are asserted. As I say below, the lead levels in the White House soil are not dangerous. I was pointed to some ag extension sites like this one which declare that levels as high as 300ppm are considered safe for vegetable growing. Let's not get carried away people. This story is about the EPA's allowing corporate pressure to trump science regarding sewer sludge -- not that there's anything wrong with the vegetables coming out of the White House garden. A little perspective, please.

Here's a bit of not-so-delicious irony for you. Back when First Lady Michelle Obama planted her garden, the soil tested for slightly elevated lead levels -- not necessarily dangerous, but quite a bit higher than the amount considered the "normal" background soil lead level of 10 parts per million.

Lead contamination is a fact of life that for urban gardeners, as the NYT reported in May -- a hangover from the past, widespread industrial use of the toxic metal in everything from paint to gasoline to pesticides. The White House soil test results were thus shrugged off at the time as an inevitability of urban gardening. Well, Mother Jones' Blue Marble blog speculates that there is a particular guilty party, lead-wise, for the White House lawn's issues. And it's that fertilizer you love to hate -- sewer sludge.

Grist published a series of articles recently on the dangers of using sewer sludge on agricultural lands. Sludge tends to be full of heavy metals like lead, along with an encyclopedia's worth of industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals. But back in the 1980s, the EPA was trying to convince everyone how wonderfully safe and useful all the leftover poo product was. So they spread some "clean" sludge on the White House South Lawn to prove it (and reportedly continued to do so for years).

Only now we discover the sludge wasn't quite so clean. It's entirely possible that the EPA was aware of the lead levels, but since the South Lawn grew only ornamental and not edible plants, it wasn't considered an issue -- that kind of distinction is often made with sewer sludge. Except, as we've learned, garden plans change. Kinda makes you wish the EPA had paid attention to the science on the dangers of sewer sludge and didn't fire the scientist who authored a study indicating the human health risks associated with the use of sewer sludge as fertilzier -- risks which, to this day, the EPA still effectively denies.

I bet the First Lady wishes the same thing.

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Scientists have discovered that exposure to a common pollutant may make people more likely to experience severe symptoms from swine flu -- and it's a pollutant emitted in large quantities by coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities.

The culprit is arsenic, a highly poisonous semi-metal which, according to a new study by researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Dartmouth Medical School, compromises a person's ability to mount an immune response to the H1N1 swine flu virus. 

Most disturbingly, the study -- published last month in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives -- found that arsenic can weaken the immune response to swine flu even in the low-level exposure levels that  are commonly found in contaminated drinking water.

When normal people or mice are infected with the flu, they immediately develop an immune response where immune cells rush to the lungs and produce chemicals to battle the infection, the researchers explain. But in mice who over the course of five weeks had ingested 100 parts per billion (ppb) of arsenic in their drinking water, the immune response to H1N1 infection was initially weak. When the response finally did kick in days later, it often overwhelmed the animal.

"There was a massive infiltration of immune cells to the lungs and a massive inflammatory response, which led to bleeding and damage in the lung," explains MBL senior scientist and report co-author Joshua Hamilton. The animals exposed to the arsenic were more likely to die from the infection than their counterparts who were not exposed.

The currently federal standard for arsenic in drinking water is 10 ppb, but levels in drinking water in some parts of the country routinely exceed that. A 2005 analysis of contaminants in drinking water by the Environmental Working Group found that the average arsenic levels in water supplied by at least 144 systems in Texas and 11 systems in Florida exceeded that standard -- in some cases at levels approaching those given to the experimental mice.

For example, average arsenic levels in water from the Bruni Rural Water Supply Commission in Webb County, Texas were 90.87 ppb. Levels of over 100 ppb were also documented in the drinking water in Jim Hogg County, Texas.  

When Hamilton and his colleagues heard about the recent H1N1 outbreak, they were struck by the fact that there are high arsenic levels in well water in many parts of Mexico. That includes Veracruz, where news reports placed the first case of H1N1 swine flu, though there are now questions about that time line since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta more recently reported that the virus likely started circulating among the Mexican people as early as the fall of 2008.

No link has been established between any specific case of swine flu and arsenic exposure, "but it's an intriguing notion that this may have contributed," Hamilton says.

The coal power-arsenic connection

Arsenic has been linked to cancers of the bladder, lungs, skin, kidney, nasal passages, liver and prostate as well as fetal malformations. Earlier research by Hamilton and colleagues found that arsenic also disrupts the endocrine system that controls the release of hormones.

There are many parts of the United States where groundwater naturally contains high arsenic levels, including large swaths of Texas and Florida; click here for a map from the U.S. Geological Survey. If tests show that your water has high levels of arsenic, the Natural Resources Defense Council recommends purchasing filters certified by NSF International to remove it.

But arsenic is also released into the environment through industrial pollution. Across the United States, there are more than 700 toxic waste sites overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program where arsenic is a contaminant of concern. There are also scores of industrial facilities that routinely release arsenic and arsenic compounds to the air and water or dump it into surface impoundments like the one that collapsed last December at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston plant in Roane County, Tenn., according to the EPA's online Toxics Release Inventory. All of these create potential exposure pathways for people.

Of the top 25 industrial emitters of arsenic and arsenic compounds via point-source air emissions (that is, releases through confined streams like smokestacks) in 2007, 22 were coal-fired electric power plants, according to the most recent TRI data available. The big arsenic air polluters are concentrated in the South, with 10 of the top 25 arsenic-emitting facilities located in the region.

In the Southern states, the biggest emitters of arsenic and arsenic compounds to the air were the Southern Company's Bowen plant in Bartow County, Ga. and Progress Energy's Roxboro plant in Person County, N.C., each of which released 2,200 pounds of arsenic to the air in 2007 alone. Besides coal-fired power plants, the other big arsenic emitters were copper refineries in Texas and Utah and a glass plant in Kentucky. Click here for a chart showing the top 25 point-source air emitters, their location and the amounts released.

Industrial facilities -- and particularly coal-fired power plants -- are also dumping large quantities of arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters such as streams and rivers. Of the top 25 emitters of arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters in 2007, 22 were coal-fired power plants. The facilities dumping arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters are again concentrated in the South, with 16 of the top 25 arsenic water polluters located in the region. Arsenic pollution of waterways is a particular concern since the pollutant concentrates up the food chain, which can render fish unsafe to eat.

In the South, the biggest dumper of arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters in 2007 was Dominion Power's Chesterfield power plant in Chesterfield County, Va. at 4,500 pounds. It was closely followed by the TVA's Johnsonville plant in Humphreys County, Tenn. at 4,200 pounds and TVA's Widows Creek plant in Jackson County, Ala. at 3,900 pounds. In fourth place was TVA's Kingston plant, which dumped 2,700 pounds of arsenic and arsenic compounds into nearby waterways in 2007. Click here for a chart showing the top 25 emitters of arsenic to surface waters.

The failure of the Kingston plant's coal ash impoundment also released significant quantities of arsenic into the environment. An analysis of water samples taken downstream of the spill and released earlier this year showed elevated levels exceeding standards set to protect humans from dangerous concentrations of pollution, with arsenic levels more than double acute toxicity levels. The tests, which were sponsored by the Environmental Integrity Project and United Mountain Defense, also found widely fluctuating arsenic levels in the nearby Emory and Clinch rivers, with some 37 times higher than safe drinking water standards.

Catastrophic failures like the one at the Kingston plant are not the only ways coal ash impoundments are contaminating the environment with arsenic. For example, high levels of the chemical were recently discovered in water and sediment samples collected downstream of Progress Energy's coal-fired power plant near Asheville, N.C., raising concerns that arsenic contamination from unlined coal ash impoundments is seeping into the environment. In addition, a 2007 assessment by the EPA documented coal ash waste dumping sites around the country associated with arsenic contamination.

Enormous quantities of arsenic are currently being dumped into these unlined and poorly regulated surface impoundments at coal-fired power plants across the country. An EPA analysis found people living near these coal ash dump sites have as much as a 1 in 50 chance of getting cancer from drinking water contaminated by arsenic, and evidence has surfaced since then suggesting the risk may be even higher.

Of the 25 surface impoundments where the greatest quantities of arsenic and arsenic compounds were dumped in 2007, 17 were at coal-fired plants; of those 17 plants, 12 are located in the South, as shown in the chart here. Note that TVA's Kingston plant doesn't even make the list of the top 25 facilities; the 44,000 pounds of arsenic and arsenic compounds it dumped into its surface impoundment in 2007 put it at number 27 on the list.

The fight for tougher coal waste regulation

In the U.S. to date, the swine flu virus has sickened more than 13,000 people and caused at least 27 deaths, according to the CDC. This week the World Health Organization said it was getting close to declaring a pandemic as the virus has infected more than 26,500 people in 73 countries, while researchers warn that the current outbreak may be only a "dress rehearsal" for a wider pandemic to come.

Many questions still remain about the virus. For example, last month we reported that scientists working to understand the genetic makeup of the current H1N1 strain linked it to a virus behind a 1998 swine flu outbreak at an industrial hog farm in eastern North Carolina. But Dr. Barrett Slenning, an epidemiologist at N.C. State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, points out that subsequent laboratory research suggests the 1998 virus was not a direct predecessor to the current H1N1, with recent genetic analyses showing greater similarities to flu strains from Asia.

"It all points to the importance of human health, animal health, and environmental health workers needing to come together," says Slenning. "You cannot protect one without protecting the others."

And when it comes to protecting ourselves from the worst effects of swine flu, it might also help to exercise precaution by reducing our exposure to arsenic -- which ultimately means cleaning up dirty coal plants and carefully regulating their toxic waste.

But that won't be easy. While environmental advocates have been pressing hard for enforceable federal standards governing disposal of coal ash waste in the wake of last December's Kingston disaster, some in Washington are working to protect the dirty and dangerous status quo -- despite new research suggesting that regulations to require safer storage of coal ash waste will likely produce far more benefits than costs.

This week, for example, congressional allies of electric utilities have been circulating "Dear Colleague" letters that oppose regulating coal ash as hazardous waste, instead calling only for federal "guidelines" for coal ash disposal rather than enforceable standards. The letters are based on the notion disproved by the Kingston spill that the current patchwork of state regulations is adequate for protecting the environment and public health.

Leading the effort to gather signatories are Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Rep. Tim Holden (D-Pa.). Among the lawmakers from the South who have signed the letter opposing tough federal standards so far are Reps. Marion Berry (D-Ark.), Travis Childers (D-Miss.), John Fleming (R-La.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), Jerry Moran (D-Va.), Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), Mike Ross (D-Ark.) and Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.).

In response, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project -- which has taken a lead role in pressing for better regulation of coal ash -- is urging concerned citizens to call their representatives in Congress and ask them not to sign the letter. Instead, says EIP, lawmakers should support consistent and enforceable regulations of arsenic-contaminated coal ash waste to better protect their constituents' health.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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ProPublica's Abrahm Lustgarten reports:

In a widely expected move that is sure to draw the ire of the oil and gas industry, Democratic members of Congress today introduced twin bills to amend the Safe Drinking Water Act and give the Environmental Protection Agency authority over the controversial drilling process called hydraulic fracturing.

The stand-alone bills in both the House (PDF) and the Senate (PDF) for the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act -- dubbed the FRAC Act (PDF) -- would also require the energy industry to disclose the chemicals it mixes with the water and sand it pumps underground in the fracturing process, information that has largely been protected as trade secrets.

The House bill was introduced by Diana DeGette, D-Colo., Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., and Jared Polis, D-Colo., and will now be debated inside the House Natural Resources Committee. According to DeGette, the bill may proceed alone, or she could attach it to a larger piece of legislation.

"Frankly we are leaving all the options on the table for moving this bill forward," DeGette said after hearings on the issue last week.

A matching Senate version was offered by Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Hydraulic fracturing has attracted scrutiny in the past year after a series of reports by ProPublica found water contamination in areas across the country where drilling takes place. Because the fracturing process was exempted from federal water laws by the 2005 Energy Policy Act, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency have said they can't adequately investigate cases of pollution or determine whether fracturing might be to blame.

"Families, communities, and local governments are upset that the safety of their water has been compromised by a special interest exemption, and we join them in that frustration," Polis said in an e-mail this morning. "The problem is not natural gas or even hydraulic fracturing itself. The problem is that dangerous chemicals are being injected into the earth, polluting our water sources, without any oversight whatsoever."

The energy industry contends that the FRAC Act, which removes the Safe Drinking Water Act exemption, amounts to an additional layer of regulation that is unneeded and cumbersome. States do an adequate job of regulating hydraulic fracturing already, according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and industry research estimates that complying with federal oversight would add approximately $100,000 to the cost of each new natural gas well in the United States.

"Such action runs counter to the nation's energy goals -- increasing the supply of American oil and natural gas -- by making it too costly to produce," said Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America, in an e-mail. "Statements that hydraulic fracturing is unregulated are simply not true. It's been regulated assiduously by the states for more than 50 years."

It is unclear exactly how federal oversight would lead to mounting costs. EPA officials in Washington say the section of the Safe Drinking Water Act that governs the oil and gas industry allows for flexibility and already defers oversight of drilling to the states. According to the industry and a recent industry-affiliated study, most state programs already have regulations in place. In such cases, restoring the EPA's authority could mean that the EPA approves ongoing state oversight and that little else would change.

Read the Bills: House | Senate.

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Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Confronted with the need to dispose of enormous quantities of war-related trash including batteries, pesticide containers, medical waste and even human body parts, but lacking proper incinerators, private contractors working for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan came up with a simple solution.

They burned the trash in big, open pits.

But now soldiers, contractors and civilians have filed a series of class-action lawsuits against the companies behind the burning, saying the smoke from the pits -- which at times was so heavy it reduced visibility to only a few yards and filled soldiers' living quarters -- contained toxic chemicals that have left them with severe respiratory problems, chronic infections and even cancer.

The suits have been filed in 10 states against Houston-based KBR and former parent company Halliburton by Burke O'Neil, a law firm with offices in Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, Va. Attorney Elizabeth Burke says her firm expects to file suit in 34 states where people are suffering problems they believe are linked to the burning.

Among the claims regarding a burn pit at Iraq's Balad Air Force Base from the suit filed in Maryland:

On at least one occasion, Defendants were attempting to improperly dispose of medical waste at the open air burn pit by backing a truck full of medical waste up to the pit and emptying the contents into the fire. The truck caught fire. Defendants' fraudulent actions were thereby discovered by the military.

Defendants burned medical waste that contained human body parts on the open air burn pit. Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains. The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces.

One of the suits was recently moved from Texas state court to federal court in San Antonio. It was filed on behalf of six men including David McMenomy of Lampasas, Texas, who had a football-sized tumor removed from his hip that was suspected of being caused by the toxic fumes from a burn pit at Iraq's Camp Al Taji, the San Antonio Express-News reports:

"They took an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars and did shoddy work," Burke said of the contractors. "The work they did harmed the soldiers and hindered the military mission. In some bases with an Air Force presence, planes could not take off and land because of the smoke."

KBR denies any wrongdoing and says it followed U.S. military rules. Halliburton, which also has headquarters in Houston, questioned why it was named in the suits and denied any legal responsibility. The company, which until 2000 was headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, spun off its KBR subsidiary in April 2007.

Last month a group of U.S. lawmakers asked the Government Accountability Office to review the Defense Department's safety testing of a burn pit at the Balad base, saying the tests may have "significant methodological problems," the Air Force Times reports.

U.S. Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.), Kerry Baker from Disabled American Veterans, and reporter Kelly Kennedy from Army Times have set up the Burn Pits Action Center website that offers information and personal stories from people affected by the burning.

The lawsuits over the burn pits is the latest controversy for war contractor KBR, which has also been in hot water over the electrocution deaths of U.S. soldiers due to faulty wiring, exposing troops to a deadly cancer-causing poison, inflating prices for imported gasoline, poor treatment of migrant workers, rapes of women employees in Iraq, and involvement in human trafficking.

(A version of this story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

Recently, I read about a professor at Columbia who teaches a course about the signs of the apocalypse. With the financial collapse and threats of a swine flu pandemic in mind, he told the New Yorker he decided to create the class because "now seemed like a good time."

I don't know if Professor Taussig's students have looked toward the oceans for signs of the apocalypse, but if they do, the students will find unsettling news coming from the marine world. Whether you believe in end times or not, the oceans are sending clear signals that they are in distress.

In Chile alone, a trio of strange occurrences has unsettled scientists and observers in recent weeks. More than a thousand dead penguins were found on a southern beach, followed by tons of dead sardines so smelly that schools were forced to close. Lastly, thousands of rare flamingos abandoned their nests, leaving 2,000 chicks to die.

Elsewhere on the planet, the ocean throws up another mystery. In California, hundreds of emaciated seabirds, mostly Brandt's cormorants, littered beaches in a dozen locations early in May in perhaps another example of Hungry Oceans.

And as summer approaches, we can expect more curiosities from the sea. Jellyfish swarms thrive in warm water, and vast glowing herds will most likely create a stir again this year, much as they did when a swarm killed 100,000 salmon in pens off Northern Ireland. Arctic ice will probably shrink as far or even further than recent record-breaking years.

A scientist may shrug her shoulders when you ask what is causing these strange phenomena to happen. She also may say it could have something to do with human intervention. After all, less than four percent of the oceans remains untouched by human activity. Overfishing, pollution and global warming have thrown the oceans out of whack, resulting in an increasing number of unsettling sights like the starved seabirds on our beaches.

I like to think positively, though. Fish populations have demonstrated the ability to rebound once fishing pressure backs off, and simple habitat protection can ensure that diverse marine ecosystems thrive. We have the ability to reduce our carbon footprint, if leaders and industry find the will.

So is this the apocalypse? Probably not. A wake-up call is more like it – and it's one we should not ignore.

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This week brought a new piece of journalism from the crack staff of scientists and reporters at Climate Central. It's called "Georgia: Coal and Carbon." Watch:

As always with CC, the piece is accompanied by an annotated transcript that documents virtually every word with links to scientific sources.

Fine work, as usual. I have only two nitpicks.

One: from watching this you'd get the idea that "clean coal" is the only option Georgia has for reducing emissions. Coal utilities certainly think this -- their conclusion is over-determined on that score -- but the rest of us don't have to believe it. See this fact sheet from WRI (PDF) on Georgia's clean options. Not only is "clean coal" not the only option, it's one of the most expensive.

Second, check out this bit from anchor Heidi Cullen on the PR battle over "clean coal":

Opponents of clean coal say that coal is a dirty rock that can’t be wiped clean with an advertising campaign—that mining, ash disposal and combustion are intrinsically problematic.

The other side points to the low cost of coal, and domestic reserves that could last two hundred years or more. That, they say, will help the U.S. remain competitive with fast growing economies like China and India, both major coal users.

This is unintentionally amusing and accurate. The "other side" responds to a argument about pollution by reverting to "you can't do without us! the economy will die!" Which is, you know, BS, but it's also got nothing to do with pollution!

In other words, there is no argument about "clean coal." There's only an argument about whether we can switch to cleaner options.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

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In a bit of good news for the environment, work got underway this week to clean up hazardous PCB pollution that General Electric dumped into New York's Upper Hudson River.

But there's also some bad news -- which is that the toxic waste is being sent to a landfill that sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a key drinking-water source for West Texas.

"This is like a shell game, moving hazardous toxic PCBs from one sensitive location to another," said Dr. Neil Carman, a chemist with Sierra Club's Lone Star chapter. "We are concerned about contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer and other aquifers in this dry region of Texas that needs to protect and conserve water for drinking and agricultural uses."

The company that operates the landfill also recently won approval to dump radioactive waste there, intensifying the controversy surrounding the facility.

The $750 million Hudson River dredging project aims to scrape up almost 250,000 pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, chemicals once used in electrical equipment that are known to build up in the body and cause cancer, damage the immune system and lead to reproductive disorders. The cleanup is being overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"The start of Hudson River dredging is a symbol of victory for the environment and for its river communities," said acting EPA Regional Administrator George Pavlou. "Dredging will help restore the health of the river, and will one day allow people to eat fish that are caught between Fort Edward and Albany. This is an historic day for an historic river."

The sediment scraped up from the bottom of the Hudson will be carried by barge to a facility in Fort Edward, N.Y., where the water will be removed and treated. The contaminated soil will then be loaded onto a train and shipped some 2,000 miles to the Waste Control Specialists (WCS) landfill in Andrews County, along the Texas border with New Mexico.

While WCS officials have insisted that the landfill does not sit atop the Ogallala Aquifer, an investigation by TV news station KCBD confirmed that it actually does. Also known as the High Plains Aquifer, the Ogallala is one of the largest aquifers in the world, underlying about 174,000 square miles of land in eight states. It provides drinking water for many communities in West Texas, including the city of Lubbock.

The placement of the WCS dump on the Andrews County site has proven controversial. In fact, Glen Lewis -- a longtime official with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who was involved in the investigation for the WCS facility -- was one of at least three TCEQ employees who quit their jobs after the agency granted the company permits to dump low-level radioactive waste there earlier this year, KCBD reports:

"All of our time has been wasted. We've all been played for suckers, we've all been pointless impediments to a process that resulted in issuing this license from the first day," Lewis explains.

Low-level radioactive waste is everything radioactive in a nuclear power plant except for the highly radioactive fuel. It includes pipes that carry radioactive water and even the entire reactor itself when it's dismantled, and contains the same radioactive elements present in high-level waste but at lower concentrations. The WCS facility is also licensed to take highly radioactive waste from weapons facilities, according to Sierra's Lone Star chapter.

Lewis found that that runoff from the dump drains into two groundwater sources, including the Ogallala. While WCS claims that hundreds of feet of red clay as well as man-made barriers sit between the dump and the water, Lewis maintains that the groundwater may in fact be as close as 14 feet from the bottom of the proposed dump. And as we reported recently in another story about landfills, the EPA has acknowledged that man-made barriers eventually fail.

Adding to the controversy over the dump, WCS will be using public money for its construction. This month the voters of Andrews County approved a $75 million bond to finance the dump. The bond issue passed by a mere three votes, with 642 people in favor of the project and 639 against it, a margin confirmed last week in a recount. The special election was paid for by WCS.

Among the groups opposing the deal was No Bonds for Billionaires, which points out that WCS is a subsidiary of Valhi Inc., a diversified Dallas-based company owned by billionaire businessman Harold Simmons. The grassroots group's website says:

...Simmons can’t find any investors. So, instead of reaching into his own pocket to finance his project, he wants to reach into yours for the $75 million he needs. This amount averages out to about $16,000 per Andrews County household.

That averages out to about $16,000 per Andrews County household -- slightly more than the county's per capita income of $15,916, according to the most recent census data. More than 46% of Andrews County's population is Latino, and more than 15% of its residents live in poverty.

In a 2006 interview with the Dallas Business Journal, Simmons discussed the hurdles he had to surmount to get the radioactive waste dump deal:

It took us six years to get legislation on this passed in Austin, but now we've got it all passed. We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license (to handle radioactive waste), and we did that. Then we got another law passed that said they can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.

Speaking earlier this year at a press conference in Andrews County organized by environmental groups, Nuclear Information and Resource Service chemist Diane D'Arrigo warned of the dump's long-term risks to the community.

"Texas' waste dump in Andrews County calls for a private company to manage a low-level dump, but the company would only be licensed to operate it for 15 years," she said. "They could then renew their license or decide to close the dump and walk away, leaving a toxic mess to the state of Texas. This could also happen if the company just folds up and vanishes into the night."

And Valhi has been having its share of financial troubles lately. Earlier this year, for example, Standard & Poor's lowered its corporate credit ratings on the company from a B to a B- and placed the ratings on CreditWatch with negative implications.

Valhi recently reported a net loss of $20 million for the first quarter of 2009 along with a drop in sales for its waste management division. But it pointed to the approval of the radioactive waste dump in Andrews County as one way it hopes to cut the division's operating losses.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South, the online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies.)

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Some of the more than 1 billion gallons of toxic coal ash that spilled from an impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston power plant in eastern Tennessee last December is making its way to landfills in poor and black communities in Alabama and Georgia, as we reported last week at Facing South.

It turns out that TVA also looked into sending the waste to Pennsylvania for dumping into abandoned mines -- but that state's Department of Environmental Protection rejected the ash as substandard.

"This ash material was accidentally released from a disposal impoundment and mixed with unknown materials in the river water and bottom sediment," Pennsylvania DEP Secretary John Hanger announced last week. "DEP only certifies coal ash for mine reclamation in Pennsylvania that is not contaminated with other materials and can meet our stringent chemical requirements."

But experts say that Pennsylvania's toxicity standards for coal ash used in such projects are not particularly high -- at least not high enough to keep the ash from damaging water quality in the vicinity of the dump sites.

"PADEP is hurling boulders through their glass house with their public rejection of TVA ash as too contaminated for mine disposal," Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans told Facing South.

Evans is one of the authors of a 2007 report that found widespread contamination of groundwater and surface water across Pennsylvania due to dumping of coal ash waste into abandoned mines as part of its land reclamation program. The report by the Clean Air Task Force found degraded water quality at two-thirds of the sites examined, with levels of arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, zinc and other pollutants found to exceed drinking-water and other water-quality standards.

A Pennsylvania newspaper reports that the material was apparently being considered as fill for an amphitheater construction project underway on abandoned mine lands in Hazleton, a predominantly white community in the northeastern part of the state that gained fame in recent years for its controversial efforts to drive out illegal immigrants.

The Hazleton Standard-Speaker quoted a TVA spokesperson as saying the federal company decided on its own against sending the ash to Pennsylvania because the site where it was to be used lacked a liner to prevent the material from contaminating groundwater. Abandoned mines where coal ash waste is being dumped across Pennsylvania typically lack liners -- one of the reasons why CATF's report found such widespread water contamination.

Instead, TVA is sending the spilled coal ash waste from Tennessee to landfills in in Taylor County, Ga. and Perry County, Ala. The choice of these communities for disposal of the waste raises environmental justice concerns, since almost 41% of Taylor County's population is African-American and more than 24% of its residents live in poverty, while Alabama's Perry County is 69% African-American with more than 32% of its population in poverty, according to the latest census data. Residents had no voice in the decision-making process, given that there was no opportunity for public comment.

The landfill officials have pointed out that their facilities have synthetic liners and systems to collect and treat the liquid runoff known as leachate in order to help prevent groundwater contamination. But even lined landfills with leachate collection systems provide no guarantee that the materials dumped into them won't eventually impact groundwater.

In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency -- which is now overseeing cleanup of the TVA spill -- has acknowledged that all landfills eventually leak. The Environmental Research Foundation points to a Federal Register notice from EPA that states:

There is good theoretical and empircal evidence that the hazardous constituents that areplaced in land disposal facilities very likely will migrate from the facility into the broader environment. This may occur several years, even many decades, after placement of waste in the facility, but data and scientific prediction indicate that, in most cases, even with the applicaiton of best available land disposal technology, it will occur eventually.

Unlike many constituents of ordinary household garbage, the toxic elements in coal ash waste -- arsenic, lead and the like -- do not break down over time. That means that once the landfill liner deteriorates and springs a leak, those chemicals will be present to leach into the groundwater.

In addition, the leachate collection systems used in landfills are far from foolproof, ERF notes. For one thing, the systems have a tendency to clog up and/or corrode after a few decades. And as the fluid builds up and puts pressure on the bottom of the structure, it increases the likelihood of liner failure.

There's no doubt that TVA needs to clean up the spilled ash. The results of independent tests conducted on samples collected downstream from the spill that were released today found dangerous levels of toxic elements present in the water, sediment and fish, with some water samples showing arsenic levels 260 times and lead 16 times drinking water standards. The scientists also found fish with lesions and lost scales, which could be attributed to contaminated water.

But TVA's choice for disposing of the ash is not without its problems, either. Despite assurances by the company and government regulators that their plan is safe, the ash waste presents a very real risk to the communities where it's being sent for long-term storage.

At the very least, the authorities should acknowledge that fact.

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In early April, the excellent investigative journalism show NOW on PBS ran an episode called "Can Coal be Earth-Friendly?"

In conjunction with the episode, NOW hosted an online debate between me and Joe Lucas, spokesflack for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE). We were given a series of five questions. We each answered the questions, and were each given an opportunity to rebut the other's answers.

When I received Lucas's answers, I responded to them. When he received mine, he ... ran off like a pansy. I don't think he likes arguing with people who know what they're talking about and have more than a 30 second soundbite with which to respond.

The debate is reprinted below, with NOW's kind permission.

-----

Joe Lucas: Of course there is. Our opponents like to claim that we invented the term, when in fact clean coal (which is short for clean coal technology) has been an accepted term-of-art for several decades now.

The facts are simple. To date, we have used advanced emissions control technologies (i.e. clean coal technologies) to reduce emissions currently regulated under federal clean air act laws. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and other emissions have been dramatically reduced over the past several decades. This type of reduction didn't just happen—especially given that our use of coal for generating electricity nearly tripled during this same period. It happened because of the use of technologies.

And like other technologies, clean coal technologies are truly evolutionary. Going forward, this same type of technological innovation will lead to reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

David Roberts: No. When coal is mined, it destroys the land and surrounding communities. When coal is washed, it produces millions of tons a year of toxic, water-polluting slurry. When coal is burned, it produces millions of tons a year of toxic ash and periodic disasters like the December spill in Tennessee. Coal combustion produces mercury and particulate pollution that leads to some 24,000 premature deaths a year and billions in healthcare costs, with pregnant mothers and young children particularly at risk.

All these problems would go unaddressed by so-called "clean coal," which would reduce just one pollutant, carbon dioxide. And even that promise is a phantom: Not a single commercial coal power plant in America captures or otherwise prevents CO2 emissions.

"Clean coal" is a PR gimmick.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: Mr. Lucas is right about one thing: reductions in conventional air pollutants from coal plants "didn't just happen." They were forced on the industry by federal law. The industry fought those laws tooth and nail for years and has been fined and sued hundreds of times for breaking them. Hardly something to boast about.

Incidentally, those air pollutants scrubbed out of smoke stacks? They end up in toxic coal ash waste—the kind that flooded Kingston, Tennessee last December. Now the industry's fighting efforts to regulate waste ash. And fighting off efforts to clean up its Appalachia-destroying mining operations.

For a "clean" industry, Big Coal sure does seem averse to getting cleaner.

Joe Lucas: Coal is a fuel that is uniquely positioned to meet the needs for base load (constant, steady, on-demand) power. It is domestically abundant—we have more energy in the form of coal than the Middle East has oil. It is an affordable fuel and is getting cleaner everyday.

We support the use of all domestic fuels to meet America's growing energy needs. However, energy sources are more likely to be compliments to one another than competitors. Take wind and solar for example. They do not displace coal or other base load fuels because wind and solar are intermittent power sources - only producing electricity under certain optimum environmental conditions. To add these intermittent energy resources to the transmission grid, they have to be backed-up with a non-intermittent resource—like coal. What's more, it would take a one-mile band of windmills spanning across the entire equator (around 25,000 miles) just to generate enough power to meet 20% of America's electricity needs.

David Roberts: Yes. Putting aside the health and environmental effects above, coal is increasingly uneconomic. For one thing, a whole array of new studies suggests that U.S. coal reserves could begin declining within 20 years (not quite the "300 year supply" the industry touts).

As this fact and the inevitability of greenhouse-pollution restrictions become more widely understood, new coal plants are being exposed as risky and unsound investments, which is why nearly 100 proposed plants have been canceled in the past two years. States dependent on coal are already seeing their electrical rates skyrocket, and coal utilities are requesting further rate hikes.

Despite coal industry claims, U.S. coal power is neither "abundant" nor "cheap." It's a sinking ship.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: Here's a detailed plan to meet America's energy needs without new coal plants, using a combination of efficiency and clean renewable power. Here's another, another, another, another, and more. Just last week the Department of Interior released a study showing that offshore wind alone could satisfy U.S. electricity needs.

The pressure to build new coal plants is political—a result of the $40 million PR campaign Mr. Lucas is running—not technological.

The message that there's "no alternative" to coal's enormous health and environmental costs is fear mongering. It's a vote against American ingenuity and resourcefulness.

Joe Lucas: We support a mandatory federal carbon management program. In order for such a program to achieve its goals, it must 1) achieve emissions reductions, 2) promote greater energy independence by maintaining fuel diversity, and 3) ensure that businesses and families are not paying higher than necessary energy costs.

In that regard, technology is the key. Recently, more and more policy makers have adopted the notion that a federal climate policy necessitates developing and deploying carbon capture and storage technologies as the foundation for such a policy. President Obama has talked about this as a part of his strategy. Other distinguished academic, governmental, and non-governmental organizations have indicated that CCS (carbon capture and storage) technology is essential to meeting the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale.

David Roberts: Asked whether human greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change, coal pitchman Joe Lucas famously said, "I don't know. I'm not a scientist." Happily, non-scientists can use Google to find out what scientists think, and they overwhelmingly agree: climate change is urgent and potentially catastrophic. In the face of this kind of problem, "containing" coal's emissions—which equal those of the entire transportation sector—is unambitious at best. Those emissions need to be phased out, as quickly as possible.

It's simple: the industry should be forbidden from building new coal plants unless they meet stringent CO2 emissions standards. And over time, all existing coal plants should be required to meet those standards as well, or shut down. If coal can compete in a carbon-constrained world, good. If not, it should move out of the way for solutions that can.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: Big Coal sure has a funny way of "supporting" a plan to reduce climate pollution. It has sponsored, with its allies in Big Oil, a decades-long effort to confuse and deceive the public about global warming. It is still funding groups and politicians that work to block mandatory pollution reductions. Mr. Lucas even linked to such a politician in his response!

With public pressure building, the industry has shifted from battling to co-opting energy/climate legislation, attempting to transform it into a corporate welfare slush fund. An easy tip for spotting subsidy seekers: they repeat the word "technology" a lot! (As Mr. Lucas does several times.)

David Roberts: Put it this way: there is no other way forward for the U.S. coal industry. Coal is effectively made of carbon, so there's no way to use it without producing millions of tons of CO2. The best case scenario for the industry, then, is to be able to capture the stuff and bury it back underground.

But despite the misleading PR from industry, experts agree that CCS is at least 10-15 years out and will be extremely expensive when it finally arrives. Sequestration is arguably important for the developing world, and worth researching for that reason, but it's unlikely to save the U.S. coal industry.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: CCS may well be needed for meeting global carbon reduction targets, though there is considerable debate on that point. (It's a genuine dilemma what to do about the spread of dirty coal in China and India.) But it is crystal clear that America can meet its carbon-reduction goals without CCS.

More to the point: Mr. Lucas's group is fronting an effort to smuggle dirty coal plants into the U.S. under the 10-15-years-off promise of CCS. The industry calls such plants "CCS-ready," much like my driveway is Ferrari-ready.

Watch for the shell game.

Joe Lucas: Recently, the President said that if the cost of a federal carbon management program were too high, people wouldn't do it. Similarly, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that if you make a country choose between growing their economy or reducing emissions—they'll choose their economy every time. So we need to find a solution that allows us to have both—and President Obama and other policy makers realize that.

By deploying CCS technology we can preserve access to affordable energy. This protects and hopefully creates jobs in the manufacturing sector and helps families balance household budgets. Additionally, a study done with several of the nation's leading industrial unions showed that deploying CCS technologies will create over one million job years—and as one of the union representatives said in describing these jobs, these are jobs that pay enough so that you can afford to raise a family.

So investing in clean coal technologies for carbon capture and storage is clearly a part of the President's energy goals. Doing so meets his three primary objectives of 1) creating jobs, 2) promoting greater energy independence, and 3) increasing environmental protection.

David Roberts: Obama supports "clean coal" for a simple reason: coal-state legislators wield a great deal of power in Congress. No national politician can afford to directly confront the network of industry lobby groups and legislators that defends coal's interests.

Obama will direct considerable federal money toward research and deployment for CCS; it's part of the price he has to pay to bring coal-state legislators on board for serious climate change legislation.

The key issue is whether Obama will allow the coal industry to build new dirty coal plants—plants without CCS. He said on the campaign trail that he will not. We'll see if he keeps that promise.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: Mr. Lucas's first paragraph is absolutely correct, but the second is a head-smacking non sequitur. If we want the transition to a clean, green economy to produce jobs and prosperity, why would we focus on the most costly path forward?

International consulting firm McKinsey & Co. has produced the definitive cost curve comparing various emission reduction strategies. CCS is at the far right—among the two or three most expensive out of dozens of alternatives. The smart strategy is to focus on those at the left, the ones that save rather than cost money. (They also generate more jobs.) That's Economics 101!

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