Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.
Shortly after, the Environmental Protection Agency was created. To help foster support for the newly created agency, Nixon sent out 70 photographers tasked with documenting 'subjects of environmental concern' all throughout the United States.
At the time, environmental laws were only just beginning to be formed and regulate the environment.
Known as 'The Documerica Project,' the photographers captured thousands of images of rural and urban life. Back then, the images demonstrated the toll that unchecked manufacturing and energy industries had on the environment.
Today, they continue to serve as a reminder of what Nixon called the 'price tag' on pollution: 'Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.'"
Now Fracking Activity Is Probably Causing Earthquakes in Texas, but I learned an important detail. "It’s not the fracking itself that’s driving North Texas’s quake spike, but the wastewater injection wells. That’s when oil and gas companies shove brine and other fracking byproducts back into the ground, irritating faults."
I'm seeing a lot of stories covering the link between injection wells and induced earthquakes in Oklahoma, but most of them make the same error: this study had nothing to do with fracking. The injection wells in Oklahoma causing the swarms of small-magnitude earthquakes are used to dispose of wastewater from dewatering operations. These particular wells are still part of oil and gas production, but don't fracture the surrounding rocks. Instead, extraction wells suck up water already in the formation. After yanking out the oil and gas, the leftover wastewater is injected back into the ground. The change in water pressure distribution induces the earthquakes, some quite far away from the actual wells.
This isn't to say that fracking is safe and harmless. Fracking probably does induce earthquakes, maybe even some of the earthquakes in Oklahoma. On top of that, the fluids have a nasty habit of sneaking into the groundwater. But fracking is not dewatering, and the particular story making the rounds in the news circuit isn't about fracking.
ALEC is the conservative organization that drafts legislation for states to adopt like Stand Your Ground laws, weaken labor unions, protecting fossil fuel interests, etc. The Washington Post reports ALEC sees more losses as Facebook and Yelp jump ship, too. That's added to Google and Microsoft who left recently too. Google chairman Eric Schmidt even said "they're just literally lying" about climate change.
It's not really clear Why Did Google Support ALEC in the first place. These four companies were all members of the Communications and Technology Task Force. "Areas of focus for the Task Force include: 1) broadband deployment and adoption; 2) protecting consumer choice in privacy; 3) promoting new forms of e-commerce; and 4) growing the high-tech sector of the economy. Additionally, the Task Force has established five subcommittees to thoroughly investigate topics of interest to the states. These subcommittees are: Broadband; E-Commerce; Information Technology; Innovation; and Consumer Protection, Critical Infrastructure, and Security Technologies." I wonder what parts of the sample legislation they were working on?
This post was inspired by a terrific new and important paper that speaks to the role of Saharan dust, the iron and other mineral micronutrients it carries to the ocean, and how this results in a new explanation of the power and potency of ocean photosynthesis in regulating global CO2. Once again we find that the living ocean is not merely a chemical test tube but rather a complex living ecology. But sometimes the chemistry shines through as well or I should say the bio-chemistry.
In short the authors show that when Sahara dust arrives in the Bahamas cyano-bacteria, what we used to call blue-green algae, bloom. As they bloom their photosynthesis removes CO2 from the water making the pH locally rise, alleviating ocean acidification. That blooming rise of ocean pH to a slightly more alkaline state results in what the Bahamanian’s have long called ‘Ocean Whitings’ where the ocean becomes white like milk.
The whiting of the ocean is the result of white calcium carbonate precipitating out of solution as a solid mineral which sinks to the sea floor and accumulates in massive amounts. On the sea bed it looks like tiny pellets. That’s because it’s been reprocessed by marine worms."
"Protection from storms is just one of many services that ecosystems provide us — services that we’d otherwise have to pay for. In 1997, a team of scientists decided to estimate how much they are actually worth. Worldwide, they concluded, the price tag was $33 trillion — equivalent to $48.7 trillion in today’s dollars. Put another way, the services ecosystems provide us — whether shielding us from storms, preventing soil erosion or soaking up the greenhouse gases that lead to global warming — were twice as valuable as the gross national product of every country on Earth in 1997."
"Seventeen years later, the debate is getting re-energized, just as the nation becomes immersed in an intense fight over the Obama administration’s attempt to tackle the emissions that scientists say could threaten many of these ecosystems. Dr. Costanza and his colleagues have now updated the 1997 estimate in a new study, published in the May issue of the journal Global Environmental Change, and concluded that the original estimate was far too low. The true value of the services of the world’s ecosystems is at least three times as high, they said."
"Most of the 17 services that Dr. Costanza and his colleagues analyzed in 16 different kinds of ecosystems — including tropical forests, mangroves and grasslands — also turned out to be more valuable. When they added up all their new figures, they came up with a global figure of $142.7 trillion a year (in 2014 dollars)."
I guess Apple is going all out for Earth Day. Their site has a section Apple - Environmental Responsibility that describes all their efforts to make products that are better for the environment. It's also very beautifully designed.
Also, Steven Levy has an article in Wired, Apple Aims to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint With New Data Centers. He toured an Apple data center with Apple VP of Environmental Initiatives (and former head of the EPA) Lisa Jackson. It's powered 100% by renewable energy sources.
Ars does a nice job diving into the question of Methane burned vs. methane leaked: Fracking’s impact on climate change. "So what’s the bottom line? Is America’s shale gas revolution helping or harming efforts to reduce climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions? Most estimates put the amount of methane currently leaking into the atmosphere from shale gas in the neighborhood of two percent. Insofar as natural gas is displacing coal-burning power plants, it takes at least four percent leakage—up to nearly eight percent if the oldest, least-efficient coal plants are the ones displaced—for natural gas to fail to yield greenhouse savings over the short-term, 20-year timeframe."
The way Congress funds clean energy is a mess. Max Baucus thinks there’s a better idea. "Baucus, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, put out a plan (pdf) to dump all 42 existing tax incentives for specific energy sources. Instead, he would create two broad tax credits that would boost clean energy without picking specific technologies or explicitly taking sides between, say, nuclear energy and wind power."
Nice overview. I'd still rather have a carbon tax.
"Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples."
Seven thrilling facts about carbon taxes from the CBO "But the details are always thorny: How big should the tax be? Should the revenue be rebated to the public? How do you avoid putting a heavy burden on the most vulnerable? The newest analysis from the CBO delves into all of those questions and more."
Meanwhile China reveals details of first carbon trading scheme. "The world’s biggest carbon emitter, China is planning to experiment with carbon trading schemes during the next three years as it seeks to cut emissions. Beijing is targeting a 40 per cent reduction in emissions relative to economic output by 2020, from 2005 levels, but hasn’t identified what means it will use to reach that goal."
(FT wants me to use their tools to share, but they didn't have a blogging option and I didn't copy the whole article just the summary opening paragraph with a link to their site. That should be fine fair use, as I'm directing people to them.)
Brad Plumer wrote The end of fish, in one chart - The Washington Post "Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted."
"The big thing the WWF paper emphasizes, however, is that human consumption patterns are currently unsustainable. We’re essentially consuming the equivalent of one and a half Earths each year. This is possible because we borrow from the future, as is the case with fish — one day the world’s fish population may collapse, but there’s plenty for us now. WWF doesn’t quite call it a Ponzi scheme, but that’s the first metaphor that comes to mind."
Honeybee problem nearing a ‘critical point’. "Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy."
"In addition to continued reports of CCD — a still somewhat mysterious phenomenon in which entire bee colonies literally disappear, alien-abduction style, leaving not even their dead bodies behind — bee populations are suffering poor health in general, and experiencing shorter life spans and diminished vitality. And while parasites, pathogens, and habitat loss can deal blows to bee health, research increasingly points to pesticides as the primary culprit."
"The Purdue University study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, found high levels of clothianidin in planter exhaust spewed during the spring sowing of treated maize seed. It also found neonics in the soil of unplanted fields nearby those planted with Bt corn, on dandelions growing near those fields, in dead bees found near hive entrances, and in pollen stored in the hives."
"The irony, of course, is that farmers use these chemicals to protect their crops from destructive insects, but in so doing, they harm other insects essential to their crops’ production — a catch-22 that Hackenberg said speaks to the fact that “we have become a nation driven by the chemical industry.” In addition to beekeeping, he owns two farms, and even when crop analysts recommend spraying pesticides on his crops to kill an aphid population, for example, he knows that “if I spray, I’m going to kill all the beneficial insects.” But most farmers, lacking Hackenberg’s awareness of bee populations, follow the advice of the crop adviser — who, these days, is likely to be paid by the chemical industry, rather than by a state university or another independent entity."
"Unfortunately, it was the EPA itself [I think in 2003] that green-lit clothianidin and other neonics for commercial use, despite its own scientists’ clear warnings about the chemicals’ effects on bees and other pollinators. That doesn’t bode well for the chances of getting neonics off the market now, even in light of the Purdue study’s findings."
"Since this is an election year — a time when no one wants to make Big Ag (and its money) mad — beekeepers may have to suffer another season of losses before there’s any hope of action on the EPA’s part. But when one out of every three bites of food on Americans’ plates results directly from honey bee pollination, there’s no question that the fate of these insects will determine our own as eaters."
How an Ink Cartridge Trashed in Seattle Ended Up in Mexico. "In August 2009, a team of researchers from the SENSEable City Lab in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning embarked on a major project to track the journey of 3,000 items of waste as they moved through Seattle’s disposal system. The goal of the project, called Trash Track, was to monitor the patterns and costs of urban disposal and to help create awareness of the impact of trash on the environment."
"In the report released today, the EPA said that pollution from 33 abandoned oil and gas waste pits 2013 which are the subject of a separate cleanup program 2013 are indeed responsible for some degree of shallow groundwater pollution in the area. Those pits may be the source of contamination affecting at least 42 private water wells in Pavillion. But the pits could not be blamed for contamination detected in the water monitoring wells 1,000 feet underground. That contamination, the agency concluded, had to have been caused by fracking."
"The agency's findings could be a turning point in the heated national debate about whether contamination from fracking is happening, and are likely to shape how the country regulates and develops natural gas resources in the Marcellus Shale and across the Eastern Appalachian states.
Some of the findings in the report also directly contradict longstanding arguments by the drilling industry for why the fracking process is safe: that hydrologic pressure would naturally force fluids down, not up; that deep geologic layers provide a watertight barrier preventing the movement of chemicals towards the surface; and that the problems with the cement and steel barriers around gas wells aren't connected to fracking."
On Wednesday Rachel Maddow had this report about nuclear power plants. The interesting stuff starts at the 4:57 mark and I've transcribed it below (which was a pain in the ass but the MSNBC provided transcript is really bad).
"The east coast earthquake hit on August 23rd this year. The damage to roads and homes and offices was not catastrophic except in some very specific locations. However, the epicenter was 12 miles away from the North Anna Nuclear Plant in Louisa County Virginia and because of the earthquake, the plant had to shut down. That is the first time that's ever happened to any nuclear plant in the country. They've never before had to shut one down before a quake. Well ten weeks after that August earthquake, the North Anna Nuclear Plant is still not back up and running.
When that plant shut down we were first told it was shut down because it was knocked off the electrical grid when power went out in the area due to the quake. Turns out that was not true. We've since learned that the North Anna Plant shut down because of all the shaking from the earthquake. It was only after the plant shut down because of all the shaking, that the electrical power went off. And eight seconds after the electrical power went off, the generators kicked in, three diesel generators kicked in. One of the four generators at the North Anna Plant tried to kick in and failed.
Right now the rule for American nuclear power plants is that they have to have backup generator capabilities for four hours before off site power is restored. Here's my question. What if it takes more than four hours to get the power back on? Remember, if can you cannot keep the power on, if your diesel generators aren't running to keep the cooling system going, if you can't keep the cooling system on, Fukushima.
I know there is no sex scandal or partisan advantage here but for the record, today we learned that, okay the headline in the Associated Press calls it a glitch, but check this out. Utility officials say gas from inside the Fukushima plant's No. 2 reactor indicated the presence of radioactive xenon which could be the byproduct of unexpected nuclear fission. This is happening now, today at Fukushima. Unexpected nuclear fission. Nuclear fission as in the very thing emergency crews were trying to prevent in the meltdown of Fukushima because a small burst of fission could trigger a much larger nuclear reaction. That's still going on.
Here in the United States in just the last couple months, in addition to the earthquake damaged North Anna Plant which is still not online, the Palisades Nuclear Plant in southwestern Michigan was shut down for a week because a mechanical fault led to a small release of radioactive tritium into the air. This is the same plant shut down in September because it lost water in its cooling system. At a plant in Georgia, in Baxley Georgia, they found radioactive water, tritium again, leaking out of the plant. The Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire shut down automatically after a faulty water pump caused a low water level in its steam generator. After three weeks of being online [sic], it is just now being turned on again. At a plant in Ohio, more cracks were found this week in the concrete shield building that's supposed to protect the plant from wind and tornadoes. The plant's been shut down since October 1st because of previously discovered cracks. Those cracks were found accidentally when the plant's owners were doing some unrelated renovations. And yesterday, a nonradioactive ammonia leak at the San Onofre Nuclear Plant in California set off alarms and caused a partial evacuation of the plant.
On top of all that, the General Electric Corporation, hi boss, says that the 35 nuclear reactors that it built over the last 40 years from New York all the way down to Washington may not shut down properly during an earthquake. The company is recommending testing now to determine how much of a jolt it would take to stop the nuclear fission process during an earthquake in one of those plants. They're recommendation additional testing, 40 years after making them, because we don't know the answer to that yet.
Some of these plants are 40 years old. These plants are all 40 years old. And we're just now getting around to figuring out how big a quake would turn them from a disaster into a catastrophe. All of our nuclear plants being decades old and constantly subject to poorly understood and unprecedented mechanical failure is not the kind of scandal that involves sexy things like reality show stars getting divorced after 72 days of matrimony or regulators shtooping lobbyists or drugs be snorted on household appliances. But some day this stuff, this nuclear plant stuff, is going to drive me nuts enough that I'm going to send cocaine-laden divorce papers without a prenup up to Indian Point in the hopes of getting somebody outraged."
So I'm not sure how bad some of this is. Nonradioactive ammonia leaks don't sound that bad and a partial evacuation could just be a prudent standard operating procedure. But the issue with earthquakes does sound bad, and after my sister just went 50 hours without power after a snowstorm, a four hour backup battery supply does sound inadequate. But Maddow didn't connect a few other things that I've come across lately.
Reuters reported Natural Gas Firm Says Shale Fracking Caused UK Earthquakes "Shale gas exploration triggered small earthquakes near Blackpool in northwest England earlier this year, UK firm Cuadrilla Resources said, adding to concerns about the safety of a technology that is transforming U.S. energy markets."
The report says ""It is highly probable that the hydraulic fracturing of Cuadrilla's Preese Hall-1 well did trigger a number of minor seismic events." Apparently the events were 2.3 and 1.5 on the Richter scale and the site's geological features are rare which would make it unlikely that at other sites there would be quakes caused. Ars Technica has more details.
Brian Williams' new show Rock Central had a segment about how there are tons of jobs in North Dakota because of the new booming oil industry there because of all the fracking. EarthJustice has a map shading "areas of active and potential natural gas drilling and fracking"
I know there's a lot of controversy over fracking and I've seen the movie Gasland. Usually the complaints about fracking are about the (underregulated) chemicals used and the affect on the water supply. The video of someone lighting their water faucet on fire is certainly compelling. The EPA is studying it with reports due out in several years. But I hadn't heard the earthquake issue before.
The USGS says "Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the United States, Japan, and Canada. The cause was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the use of reservoirs for water supplies. Most of these earthquakes were minor. The largest and most widely known resulted from fluid injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. In 1967, an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 followed a series of smaller earthquakes. Injection had been discontinued at the site in the previous year once the link between the fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established. "
But, we have all these 40 year old nuclear power plants that I'm sure were built in areas of low seismic activity. Well I know the Indian Point plant in NY was built on a fault line and there are some in California. Conveniently, the sunlight foundation has made a map of nuclear plants and fault lines.
Regardless, the idea that lots of fracking could cause even small seismic events in areas that might not otherwise have them is kind of disturbing. If I think that those areas might have been low seismic activity areas and might have been chosen as sites for nuclear plants it's certainly more alarming. I don't mean to be alarmist or generate stupid internet fears, but I'm sure 40 years ago, nuclear plant designers didn't factor in fracking and I want to know what they now think of it.
"Today Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Ranking Member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, unveiled a new, searchable database of anti-environment votes by the 112th Congress. The database details the 125 votes taken to date by the House that undermine the protection of the environment.
"This is the most anti-environment House in history," said Rep. Waxman. "The House has voted to block action to address climate change, to stop actions to prevent air and water pollution, to undermine protections for public lands and coastal areas, and to weaken the protection of the environment in dozens of other ways.""
MIT's Technology Review writes A 100-Year Plan for Nuclear Waste "The United States should plan to store spent nuclear fuel in cooling pools and concrete-and-steel casks for 100 years as it sorts out what should be done with it in the long term, according to a new study from MIT. Storing spent fuel temporarily, the study argues, is in some ways better than immediately transferring it into permanent underground storage at facilities like the proposed one at Yucca Mountain."
"When most nuclear plants were built in the United States, the plan was to reprocess the fuel, retrieving material that could be used to generate more electricity. As a result, plant designers included only enough storage space to deal with about a 10 years' worth of fuel. When, for multiple reasons, the idea of reprocessing was abandoned, the federal government took on the obligation to dispose of the fuel itself—but so far it hasn't done so. The question of what to do with spent fuel before sending it to permanent storage "has frankly been an afterthought," says Ernest Moniz, director of MIT's Energy Initiative and an author of the report. After decades of operation, many power plants have run out of room and are resorting to ad hoc approaches to deal with the spent fuel."
Scientist finds Gulf bottom still oily, dead. "Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor. That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012."
