pollution

America’s Choice: Leave a Legacy of Hell or Bequeath Clean Air

Leo Gerard — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:13:11 -0400

At the turn of the 20^th Century, smoke meant jobs. When noxious fumes spewed from factory stacks, workers brought home paychecks. Industries hired. The future was bright as molten iron flowing from a blast furnace.

In industrial Pittsburgh’s heyday, the smoke was so dense streetlights remained lit at noon. White collar workers changed soot-covered shirts mid-day. The region’s residents suffered high rates of asthma and emphysema. In 1948, an inversion trapped industrial pollution in a small town south of Pittsburgh, killing 20.

Smoke also meant death and disease.

Now, however, good-paying industrial jobs need not exact untimely death from workers and their families. In fact, it’s the opposite. Development of clean renewable energy generators – the likes of wind turbines, solar cells, biomass – would create family-supporting industrial jobs in America and would reinforce traditional manufacturing jobs in the U.S., including those in steel mills, solar cell fabrication plants and wind turbine factories, such as those built by Gamesa in Pennsylvania.

Labor unions and environmental groups are pressing for passage of policies like a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) and comprehensive climate change legislation that would promote transition to a clean energy economy.

To prod lawmakers to act, the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of those labor unions and enviromentalists, conducted a three-week, 17-state, 30-city barnstorm during August in an energy-efficient, American-made, carbon-neutral bus. At events in each city, BlueGreen activists told attendees, “The Job’s Not Done,” and urged them to tell their U.S. Senators it’s not a choice between clean air and jobs. The choice is leaving a legacy of environmental hell or bequeathing climate unchanged.

In an 1868 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, writer James Parton described with awe the atmosphere created by industrial Pittsburgh’s iron and glass works, its foundries and its coke ovens:

“On the evening of this dark day, we were conducted to the edge of the abyss, and looked over the iron railing upon the most striking spectacle we ever beheld. The entire space lying between the hills was filled with blackest smoke, from out of which the hidden chimneys sent forth tongues of flame, while from the depths of the abyss came up the noise of hundreds of steam-hammers. There would be moments when no flames were visible; but soon the wind would force the smoky curtains aside, and the whole black expanse would be dimly lighted with dull wreaths of fire. It is an unprofitable business, view-hunting; but if any one would enjoy a spectacle as striking as Niagara, he may do so by simply walking up a long hill to Cliff Street in Pittsburg, and looking over into--hell with the lid taken off.”

Beautiful as he found it, Parton added this:

“The first feeling of the stranger is one of compassion for the people who are compelled to live in such an atmosphere. When hard pressed, a son of Pittsburg will not deny that the smoke has its inconveniences.”

Pittsburgh took measures to clean its air. Smoke no longer turns the city’s days to night. But the town, like every other, still suffers the effect of pollution. It is the greenhouse gas pollution causing global climate change, which is associated with extreme weather events like the Katrina hurricane that killed 1,800 five years ago, floods this summer that killed 1,600 in Pakistan and 1,100 in China and unprecedented heat and uncontrolled wildfires that killed thousands this year in Russia.

Even former Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce concede climate change is real. They’re just towing the usual Republican party line of “no” to anything proposed by Democrats or the Environmental Protection Agency to correct it. The Chamber, for example says it supports strong action on climate change, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but it opposed legislation that would cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Chamber, at one point, called for the EPA to hold "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" to debate whether climate change is man-made.

The Chamber’s position prompted high-profile members to quit, including Apple and public-utility companies Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, and Exelon.

Another big name company, Nike, resigned from the Chamber board of directors. It explained the defection:

“Nike believes that climate change is an urgent issue affecting the world today and that businesses and their representative associations need to take an active role to invest in sustainable business practices and innovative solutions to address the issue. It is not a time for debate but instead a time for action and we believe the Chamber's recent petition sets back important work currently being undertaken by EPA on this issue.”

Like Nike, Senators should do what’s right – pass a Renewable Electricity Standard and a comprehensive climate change bill.

They need to stop thinking about their re-election and start thinking about their grandchildren. They need to pass climate legislation that would support American jobs and avert hell.

March madness: How Bush and other bad guys juke the pollution stats

Frank ODonnell — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:40:59 -0400

Perhaps this is a good time to remind one and all of little-told stories that can have a big impact on the air we breathe -- and even see.

We offer three for your consideration – all of them involve what cops on HBO’s “The Wire” call “juking the stats” – that is, playing little accounting tricks to alter the outcome of various analysis. And all of them could lead to more pollution than if things were reckoned honestly.

Cost-benefit baloney: As I noted last week, EPA chief Stephen Johnson has renewed an often-repeated industry pitch to require that national clean air standards be based in part on an assessment of the projected costs and benefits. There are a lot of reasons why this is a pretty dumb idea, but let’s consider just one: that the bean counters at the White House Office of Management and Budget can juke the stats.

And, in fact, they’ve done exactly that. During the past several years behind the scenes they have ordered the EPA to radically revise – and lower – the projected benefits of cleaning up the air. Some of this stuff is really dense, but the bottom line is that OMB ordered EPA to change a whole series of assumptions used to calculate benefits, with the result that projected benefits are relatively much lower than they would have been under the method EPA used in prior years.

Want to see an example? Take the pollution standards for diesel trains and ships announced last week. Two years ago, our friends with the state and local clean-air regulators performed an analysis of the benefits that would be achieved by applying pollution standards comparable to that required for diesel trucks or off-road engines.

They used the exact same methodology that EPA had used in its 2004 off-road rule.
http://www.4cleanair.org/Loco-Marine/Loco-MarineAnalysis.pdf

And they found that setting tougher standards for trains and ships would prevent nearly 4,000 premature deaths a year by 2030.

But the official EPA cost-benefit analysis for this rule now projects that it would prevent only 1,400 premature deaths a year by 2030. Still attention-getting, but much lower benefits from cleanup.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/7ebdf4d0b217978b852573590040443a/2f8d4b77c0bbad3f8525740c0057376e!OpenDocument

Where did all the other bodies go? I guess into the delete file of some OMB computer.

**
Polluted parks: Another story I haven’t seen enough of is the effort by the Bush administration to juke the stats to permit more air pollution in national parks.

Here’s the story in a nutshell: one of the key principles of the Clean Air Act is that relatively pristine areas – such as national parks and wilderness areas – should remain relatively unsullied by air pollution. To achieve this, big new potential sources of pollution (such as a coal-fired power plant) must project the impact of their emissions on any possibly affected national park or wilderness area, and make sure any impact is minimal.

To permit more coal plants to be built, the Bush EPA has proposed accounting changes that would permit more pollution in these pristine areas.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has called EPA on this http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?id=1731 , but I haven’t seen anywhere near the media coverage that this outrage deserves.

Malarkey made in the USA: Finally, let us consider the latest effort by the National Association of Manufacturers to scare policy makers in the name of protecting industry from cleaning up its emissions.

Partially thwarted in its effort to block any changes in EPA’s national smog standards, NAM has turned its attention to Congress – and global warming. Always ready to twist the truth, NAM is touting what it calls an “independent” study (that NAM partly paid for along with the American Council for Capital Formation, or ACCF) by the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). It should not come as a shock that this “analysis” predicts that global warming legislation would cost more than official government assessments predict.

Because NAM juked the stats.

Indeed, in a footnote to the report, the authors concede that

SAIC executed the NEMS model in this project using input assumptions provided by
ACCF and NAM. Analysis provided in this report is based on the output from the NEMS model as a result of the ACCF/NAM input assumptions. The input assumptions, opinions and recommendations in this report are those of ACCF and NAM, and do not necessarily represent the views of SAIC.

In other words, don’t blame us for this fiction. We just took the money and ran their bogus assumptions through our computers.

Approximating Utopia

Gordon Johnson — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:05:52 -0500

We have the technology to lift all boats. We (at least the folks visiting this site) know what we have is better than a lot of the world but is far from the best there can be. There is a solution available that can eliminate poverty and hunger, the national debt (not just the deficit), pollution, and lots more problems. The solution will take a great deal of refocusing of effort.

There are lots of waves out there with conflicting opinions and directions. Business folk say unleash business and prosperity will blossom. What they forget is that with freedom comes responsibility, and the actions of a few bad apples of catastrophically large proportion require we keep business on a short, tight leash. They also forget that their impetus is to make money, and that doesn't always coincide with what is actually best for the economy and society, especially over time as power pools among the successful wealthy.

On the other side, there are people who suggest simply redistributing wealth will fix things. If donations and charity are easily available, it becomes much easier for people to rationalize their poverty and need for handouts.

There are others who rail against outsourcing of jobs. This is a painful, two-edged sword -- the more work is done by impoverished people producing things everyone wants, the more those people become economic voters by the wages they begin to earn. Eventually they will catch up, and until they do, it will draw down the pay for work done in countries where wages orders of magnitude higher.

So the question is how to unleash economic potential outside the fetters of governmental bureaucracy and yet have business making choices that are for the good of society and future generations, how to enrich the poor globally so all share well in the bounty we can create, and at the same time how to cease fouling our environment before we tip the scales irreversibly toward our extinction.

The solution involves enhanced socio-economic evolution by experimentation, but not just by "cult of personality" communes. For us to have more we need to produce more. And more importantly, to have more of what we want, we need to know what we want.

The US and much of the world economy is based on supply side economics. A person starts a company to make something thought to be wanted. Maybe the company succeeds, maybe not. But material, time and effort go into it, no matter what. As successful companies supply more of the good/service they produce, they supply jobs as they ask people to come work for them. The companies that don't succeed go bust, along with the investment. Meanwhile the successful companies are doing their best to hold cost down to keep profit up. And eventually the business cycle overtakes most products and the companies that have not found other front edge products to make (either of their own design or bought of someone else's) go out of business.

But there are lots of currents here driving decisions and methods. If a company makes things people don't think they want, the company can advertise to persuade people to buy. If a company could know that people wouldn't want a potential new product, they would know better than to invest in it. If a company were able to increase the productivity of their workers, there would be more product for money spent on wages. If a company knew what to make next and was supported in doing so it would be less inclined to staunchly cling to current investment.

Here's the kicker. Companies do their market analysis based on what the level of the economy is at the time. What isn't happening is the companies don't think in terms of supposing all companies were to produce at a higher level of quality and volume and pay the workers more accordingly. The workers would be able to turn around with their higher salaries and actually be able to buy the higher economic product.

And to add icing on the cake, we can decide that we want companies to be responsible for pollution anywhere in the world because it does eventually get everywhere. Afghanistan could sue the US for the brown cloud that encircles the earth. Madagascar could sue China for all the polluting they do because the currents eventually carry from China to Africa. We can decide it's time to eradicate cancer or Alzheimer's and include that as part of what we say we want.

The bottom line is to get the horse in front of the cart and have a true demand-side economic system. Let's know where we want to go instead of hoping upon the sum of all guessed actions.

So how do we get there? How do we "know what we want"? We ask ourselves. It is time we develop a system into which we can enter how we would spend, say, $150,000 salary (note, this is not just a one time pot, but an on-going amount). We use data mining and system analysis to distill the overlapping wants, and then CAD-CAM to design the mechanized means of production. And perhaps we decide we can do just fine on $50,000 of value instead. But I don't think there's anything wrong to dream big if we do it well.

Meanwhile, we decide providing energy is not a cow to be milked and its product parsimoniously dispensed. Instead we commit to CLEAN, RENEWABLE, global, bountiful, cheap energy to run all the machinery and free ourselves of the menial tasks. Where do we look? Well if we can get 225,000 miles to the moon and are sure we can cover the multiple millions of miles to Mars, what is stopping us from tapping a nearly limitless source of geothermal energy starting about 20 miles into the crust anywhere on earth? [search on Jeffrey Tester, MIT, jet spallation drilling] Or once we know we can trust that our global economic system on steroids has solved poverty and so, obviated the military and quelled terrorism and the many petty wars in the various backwater pockets of the world, space is a great place to harvest huge quantities of solar energy to beam back to earth with the trust that the energy will not be used as the ray gun to beat all ray guns.

And the Internet is the ideal place to disseminate classes taught by the best teachers we can find to teach us robotics, computer science, medicine, bioengineering, and all the other skills we will need to be able to fill the new level of work that will need to be done.

The time is now to launch an honest-to-goodness new world order that will give our world the peace and prosperity we, as thinking, rational, sentient beings, ought to have achieved.

____________ received personal reply outside OurFuture.org (my reply follows):

Hi Gordon,
I read your article
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/approximating-utopia (2/20/08)
and you seem to be saying:

1) Much inefficiency in developing new products.

2) A planning system that reflects what people would do with $150K would be illustrative (more efficient).

3) Countries should be able to bill other countries for the mess (pollution) that slips in.

4) Geothermal energy is the answer to global warming and our energy needs.

5) Harness the Internet to spread education globally.

I'd say:
1) Scientific method at work. It's not that expensive, vs the advantage of possible unique/accidental discovery, to have multiple firms experimenting similarly with new products.

2) The reality of markets and demographics drives actual market research into possible niches and needs. The granularity of the decisions involved in forecasting the spending of $150K (how many Lotto tickets to buy this weekend when the jackpot is $32M?) would not reflect each market's actual potential.

3) Hard to stop the "You polluted/despoiled to develop and gain your edge so we will too" line of argument. Power/money is resistant to being told what to do.

4) Makes sense. Aren't we seeing commercials from the energy companies about this? If it was easy/cheap, wouldn't it have happened already? i.e. what's the true (not hypothetical) cost/benefit of geothermal?

5) This is happening. Courses are coming online for free from major universities. It's up to people to start taking advantage.

_________________my reply:
my post is an invitation to think outside the box. Sure the way things are right now addresses to some extent what I'm suggesting, but it's pretty myopic to think that the US way of doing things is the best we can hope for. I'm trying to find more hope and joy and lower the fear and greed.

1) I don't rule out experimentation. Indeed the very title, Approximating Utopia, stipulates experimentation.

If developers are behind closed doors working on the same thing and just trying to race each other to be first for a given potential new product, it might be delivered sooner, but at lower quality just to claim the patent and the first production. That kind of development doesn't guarantee the best, most applicable product. (I'm tired of American Cheese level solutions.)

If someone is lucky enough to have demonstrated creative capability extraordinary enough to be on a design/experimentation team, that person is probably already infused with enthusiasm and would most likely benefit from some degree of shared knowledge among developers. Also, the person is probably quite happy just seeing his/her idea(s) adopted. Yes they deserve high compensation, but such people are mostly standing on the shoulders of giants and their contributions are marginal.

The Wright brothers may have been the first to fly, but they didn't invent the steel their engines were made of or fuel they used or the method to make fabric. And they certainly didn't invent the social structure and prior civilization that afforded them all the information they started with. What would you think if you were given the opportunity to gin up the first functional flying machine? That would be pretty exciting in and of itself.

How about a cure for cancer? I would be honored to be helping and not so caught up in expecting billions as a reward.

2) Granularity can be achieved by individuals starting with templates and customizing and individualizing over time, which is to say the ultimate goal would be a moving target, which is OK if production is also dynamic. Part of the way things are is that production is less dynamic than it could be. The point of the $150K figure is a starting point for what level of production to aim for. Current market is based on trying to push noodles and falling far short of potential. Put the horse in front of the cart and we get much further for the same (or less!!) effort.

3) I'm somewhat regretful of including the bit about suing other countries for their pollution, but it is up to developed countries to lead by example how to do huge production without pollution. Instead the US ignores any global efforts to curb greenhouse gases. Maybe the proposed solutions in Kyoto are inadequate, but it's easier to achieve a goal by persuading a friend than chiding an enemy/competitor. When the US finally owns up to its childish behavior and decides to act like a rational adult and take care of our own better, we will find more respect in the world for our ideas. It's not good enough that we have a lot of stuff and poor countries don't so they think it's OK to achieve parity by any means, extraordinary pollution included.

4) The sunk cost of drilling is the big expense. Once invested the resource will produce for centuries. That's why it's worth federal spending to get it done in the first place on a large scale, and then turn maintaining production over to municipalities. The oil companies are no paragon of virtue and I'm not sure they deserve any handouts. What have they done with their obscene windfalls the last couple of years under the wing of Shrub? Trying to do more oil because they already do oil is not the answer.

5) Then pace needs accelerating and publicity to ferret out the best teachers and best providing methods, graphics, testing, teacher aids, etc.

Peace