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Community health centers rise up from toxic brownfields

by Myrna Posted on December 12, 2012

Community health centers rise up from toxic brownfields

By Susie Cagle

If poor communities aren’t living in the shadow of active industrial pollution, they’re often living in its graveyard. Industrial polluted brownfields are fenced and festering from California to Maine, frequently situated near low-income residents. When developers come to clean up and build on the sites, too often they plan projects that will push out rather than benefit the people who live nearby.

Massachusetts Dept. of Environmental Protection

A brownfield in Worcester, Mass.

But today The New York Times points to a different kind of trend in brownfields development: building health centers for low-income local residents on sites formerly occupied by meatpacking plants, gas stations, and factories. These kinds of projects stand to bolster communities, not just property values, and they’re still serious investment opportunities for health-care companies.

[There’s] a nationwide trend to replace contaminated tracts in distressed neighborhoods with health centers , in essence taking a potential source of health problems for a community and turning it into a place for health care. In recent years, health care facilities have been built on cleaned-up sites in Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Oregon and California.

“These health care providers are getting good at it,” said Elizabeth Schilling, policy manager for Smart Growth America, an advocacy group. “They have internalized the idea that this is an opportunity for them.”

Because these sites are contaminated, many qualify for government tax credits and grants, providing health centers with vital seed money to build. Community health centers, by design, exist to serve populations in poor neighborhoods, where there also tend to be available but contaminated properties like old gas stations, repair shops and industrial sites.

In fact, many of the country’s 450,000 contaminated sites, known as brownfields, are in poor neighborhoods, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. These tracts are disproportionately concentrated in poor communities because contaminated sites are more difficult to redevelop if property values are depressed. Banks are often reluctant to finance construction on a property that might require a costly cleanup.

Brownfields projects can qualify for redevelopment grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development plus tied-in HUD loans and state grants. Florida in particular has promoted the construction of health centers on brownfields with tax credits of up to $500,000.

“The concept in Florida has proven to be not only needed, but viable,” said Michael R. Goldstein, an environmental lawyer in Florida who specializes in brownfield redevelopment. “We are just at the beginning of the journey here. I predict that in the next two years we’ll have close to two dozen across the state.”

How do you improve an impoverished, troubled community for the people who live there now and not the people who would move there if it were less impoverished, less troubled? (Coughgentrificationcough.) This is a question that governments ask almost as infrequently as developers. Grant-qualifying brownfields development projects can be anything from pricey restaurants and mixed-income condominiums to these health centers. If this health-center trend continues, especially in unlikely Florida, it might encourage other communities to redevelop around the needs of their actual residents.

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Oil companies polluting aquifers with EPA’s blessing

by Myrna Posted on December 12, 2012

Oil companies polluting aquifers with EPA’s blessing

By Susie Cagle

Shutterstock

Kind of like this, but underground.

Oil companies: They’re kind of like pet cats, it turns out. They don’t care what you want, they’re only out for themselves, and they love to bury their waste wherever they feel like it. And thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, they’re able to bury it via aquifer injection at hundreds of sites across the country where the EPA says the water is not “reasonably expected” to be used for drinking.

In some of America’s most drought-stricken communities, this practice is polluting what little drinkable water there is left. A new report from ProPublica digs into the EPA’s spotty record on issuing exemption permits for dumping in the nation’s precious aquifers — starting with the fact that the EPA itself hasn’t kept great records on which permits it has issued at all.

Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation’s drinking water. …

Though hundreds of exemptions are for lower-quality water of questionable use, many allow grantees to contaminate water so pure it would barely need filtration, or that is treatable using modern technology.

The EPA is only supposed to issue exemptions if aquifers are too remote, too dirty, or too deep to supply affordable drinking water. Applicants must persuade the government that the water is not being used as drinking water and that it never will be.

Sometimes, however, the agency has issued permits for portions of reservoirs that are in use, assuming contaminants will stay within the finite area exempted.

In Wyoming, people are drawing on the same water source for drinking, irrigation and livestock that, about a mile away, is being fouled with federal permission. In Texas, EPA officials are evaluating an exemption for a uranium mine — already approved by the state — even though numerous homes draw water from just outside the underground boundaries outlined in the mining company’s application.

Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and Colorado have been hit with the most pollution exemptions. Those same states are digging deeper to get at cleaner water, looking into pipelines to pump it in from elsewhere, and/or just still drinking the possibly contaminated stuff. Thirsty Texas communities are considering pricey desalination efforts while the EPA has granted upwards of 50 aquifer exemptions throughout that state.

Most of the exemptions have gone to small, independent companies, but you will not be even a tiny bit surprised to learn that multinational energy giants Chevron, Exxon, and EnCana hold 80 of the permits between them.

To the resource industries, aquifer exemptions are essential. Oil and gas drilling waste has to go somewhere and in certain parts of the country, there are few alternatives to injecting it into porous rock that also contains water, drilling companies say. In many places, the same layers of rock that contain oil or gas also contain water, and that water is likely to already contain pollutants such as benzene from the natural hydrocarbons within it.

Similarly, the uranium mining industry works by prompting chemical reactions that separate out minerals within the aquifers themselves; the mining can’t happen without the pollution …

“The energy policy in the U.S. is keeping this from happening because right now nobody — nobody — wants to interfere with the development of oil and gas or uranium,” said a senior EPA employee who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. “The political pressure is huge not to slow that down.”

But ProPublica also reports the EPA has “quietly” assembled a task force to reconsider the agency’s policies on aquifer exemptions given the rising value of water.

And at least judging by the EPA’s records as provided to ProPublica, there’s no clear trend of aquifer exemptions being handed out with increasing frequency. Permits took a huge dip in the late ’90s and early ’00s, then rose to about 75 annually, then dipped again last year.

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Milk sales have declined sharply, perhaps because we aren’t all babies

by Myrna Posted on December 11, 2012

Milk sales have declined sharply, perhaps because we aren’t all babies

By Philip Bump

No one drinks milk anymore! The Wall Street Journal:

Per-capita U.S. milk consumption, which peaked around World War II, has fallen almost 30% since 1975, even as sales of yogurt, cheese and other dairy products have risen, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics. The reasons include the rise in popularity of bottled waters and the concern of some consumers that milk is high in calories.

Chelsea PhillipsBlech.

Here are other reasons, probably:

Milk is kind of gross. When you hear something described as “milky,” do you think: Hey, yum, that sounds good? No, you think: Gross. That sounds gross.
Milk is what cows feed their babies, in theory. If you’re anything like me, it’s been years since you’ve suckled on your mother’s breast. And even when you used to do that, if you did, I bet you never found yourself faced with the dilemma of whether you would rather drink milk from your mother or from a cow. Even if you grew up on a farm, even if you were breast-feeding in the barn, and even if you were old enough to make rational decisions (which I hope you weren’t), I doubt you thought, maybe that nipple dragging around in that hay is better! When you drink milk, you are basically wrapping your lips around a cow body part that is like two feet from its anus, but with some intermediary sanitation.
I say “in theory” above because the way we get cow milk now is bananas. Seriously. It’s weird. Here’s everything Grist has written about milk. I’m not going to get into it right now, but let’s just say that forced pregnancy and hormones and giant milk vacuums all play a role in industrial milk production. Makes direct suckling seem like a decent option.
People naturally become lactose intolerant. Your body isn’t stupid. It gets what milk is for. When you’re a baby, milk is like 5 Hour Energy and Powerade and probably Axe Body Spray rolled into one: a quality product. Then your body is like, welp, all grown up now, time for beer, and your stomach starts doing that little dance it does when you drink milk and are lactose intolerant. Most of the population becomes lactose intolerant at some point, which is your body’s way of saying, hey, idiot, stop drinking milk. If coffee gave you a stomach ache and diarrhea every time you drank it, would you drink it? I mean decaf coffee, of course; you’d obviously still drink regular coffee.
Those “Got milk?” ads are super played-out. And how gross were they? What the hell was wrong with America in the ’80s and ’90s that we’d see random silver-medal-winning Olympians in full-page ads in George and think, yeah, that guy’s cream-coated lip sure is making me thirsty? How many times did you head down to the local diner, slap your magazine on the counter, point at Bo Jackson’s photo and say, gimme one of those! Zero. No one ever did this.

Rest assured, the milk industry has all sorts of new ideas for how to get you to drink more milk. Well, I have an idea, too, milk industry: Take all of your containers of milk and empty out the milk and put beer in them and sell beer.

You are welcome.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Here’s how you can get conservatives to care about the environment

by Myrna Posted on December 10, 2012

Here’s how you can get conservatives to care about the environment

By Susie Cagle

theworldfortune

Stop appealing to climate-change deniers with science and moral arguments, folks — it ain’t gonna work. Just get them worrying about their own health and the “purity” of their local environment. At least that’s how I’m reading this new study from UC Berkeley published today in the journal Psychological Science.

From the press release:

A UC Berkeley study has found that while people who identified themselves as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than their liberal counterparts, their motivation increased significantly when they read articles that stressed the need to “protect the purity of the environment” and were shown such repellant images as a person drinking dirty water, a forest filled with garbage, and a city under a cloud of smog …

“These findings offer the prospect of pro-environmental persuasion across party lines,” said Robb Willer, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and coauthor of the study. “Reaching out to conservatives in a respectful and persuasive way is critical, because large numbers of Americans will need to support significant environment reforms if we are going to deal effectively with climate change, in particular.”

The researchers found that conservatives weren’t so motivated by the greater good, but rather by concerns about the the purity of their bodies and the Earth, patriotic arguments, and reverence for a higher authority (Father Earth?). Basically we need a lot more stock images of dirty drinking water.

Overall, the study found that the purity-themed message inspired conservatives to feel higher levels of disgust, which in turn increased their support for protecting the environment.

Incidentally, I too am now feeling higher levels of disgust. Hm!

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Rural America: Poorer, less populous, less powerful — but now with fracking!

by Myrna Posted on December 10, 2012

Rural America: Poorer, less populous, less powerful — but now with fracking!

By Susie Cagle

It is the best of times and the worst of times for rural America. On the one hand, they’re the only ones among us who’ve been getting richer lately. Thanks, fracking!

iboh

From USA Today:

The nation’s oil and gas boom is driving up income so fast in a few hundred small towns and rural areas that it’s shifting prosperity to the nation’s heartland, a USA TODAY analysis of government data shows. …

Inflation-adjusted income is up 3.8% per person since 2007 for the 51 million in small cities, towns and rural areas.

The energy boom and strong farm prices have reversed, at least temporarily, a long-term trend of money flowing to cities. Last year, small places saw a 3% growth in income per person vs. 1.8% in urban areas.

Small-town prosperity is most noticeable in North Dakota, now the nation’s No. 2 oil-producing state. Six of the top 10 counties are above the state’s Bakken oil field.

“Give us a little shale, and we’ll show some pretty good income growth, too,” says Bill Connors, president of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce in Idaho.

Connors’ comment leads us to the other hand: Rural areas without energy reserves are suffering. Across the country, poverty rates are higher in rural areas than in urban areas, according to the USDA. About half of rural counties have lost population over the last four years, and that’s led to a loss of political clout as well. According to the Associated Press and TV news exit polls, rural voters accounted for only 14 percent of the Nov. 6 electorate (and more than 60 percent of them went for Mitt Romney).

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, formerly the Democratic governor of Iowa, told a Farm Journal forum last week that rural America is “becoming less and less relevant.” From the Associated Press:

He said rural America’s biggest assets — the food supply, recreational areas and energy, for example — can be overlooked by people elsewhere as the U.S. population shifts more to cities, their suburbs and exurbs.

“Why is it that we don’t have a farm bill?” said Vilsack. “It isn’t just the differences of policy. It’s the fact that rural America with a shrinking population is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we had better recognize that and we better begin to reverse it.”

For the first time in recent memory, farm-state lawmakers were not able to push a farm bill through Congress in an election year, evidence of lost clout in farm states …

“We need a proactive message, not a reactive message,” Vilsack said. “How are you going to encourage young people to want to be involved in rural America or farming if you don’t have a proactive message? Because you are competing against the world now.”

That’s right, farmers: You’re not feeding America, you’re competing against the world!

Vilsack, who has made the revitalization of rural America a priority, encouraged farmers to embrace new kinds of markets, work to promote global exports and replace a “preservation mindset with a growth mindset.”

If you play Vilsack’s speech backwards, it’s actually just a low drone of, “Corn, soy, corn, soy, corn, corn, corn, soyyy.” Great for parties.

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Famed idiot Lord Monckton banned for life from U.N. climate talks

by Myrna Posted on December 7, 2012

Famed idiot Lord Monckton banned for life from U.N. climate talks

By Philip Bump

Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, better known as Lord Monckton, is a buffoon. He created a film called Apocalypse? No!, the name of which is a funny joke playing on the fact that Monckton doesn’t believe in climate change. Climate apocalypse? No! says this guy whose scientific credentials are listed on a grain of salt that can be found at the bottom of the ocean. Monckton has built his name (or, perhaps more accurately, ruined the name he inherited) with his climate antics, prompting Grist to several times mock him.

And now Monckton brings a new ignominious distinction to a family name that has survived lo these many centuries, as a clown who got kicked out of a United Nations climate conference.

From the Telegraph:

The hereditary peer, who is not a member of the House of Lords, took the chair of Myanmar and spoke into the microphone against U.N. climate change protocols.

After a short speech, in which he was booed, he was escorted out of the meeting by UN guards.

He is understood to have claimed there is no global warming in the last sixteen years, and therefore the science needs to be reviewed.

Claiming to represent Asian coastal nations, he is understood to have said: “In the 16 years we have been coming to these events there has been no global warming at all.”

(If you require a rebuttal of that “16 years” bit, voila.)

The irony of this is that the conference that kicked Monckton out is the annually futile Convention on Climate Change, which today is struggling to fulfill its mandate of finalizing deck-chair-rearranging recommendations for fighting global warming. If anything, the science that undergirds the conference needs to be reviewed because it’s too conservative, as noted by Daily Climate.

Across two decades and thousands of pages of reports, the world’s most authoritative voice on climate science has consistently understated the rate and intensity of climate change and the danger those impacts represent, say a growing number of studies on the topic. …

As the latest round of United Nations climate talks in Doha wrap up this week, climate experts warn that the [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]‘s failure to adequately project the threats that rising global carbon emissions represent has serious consequences: The IPCC’s overly conservative reading of the science, they say, means governments and the public could be blindsided by the rapid onset of the flooding, extreme storms, drought, and other impacts associated with catastrophic global warming.

But Monckton won’t be bringing his inadvertently sort-of-correct message to the U.N. again anytime soon. As the Telegraph notes:

He has been banned for life from UN climate talks. …

He has been ‘de-badged’, meaning he no longer has a visa to stay in Qatar and had 24 hours to leave the country.

What Qatar doesn’t realize is that the whole thing is a joke. Monckton isn’t actually an embarrassing British peer with a less-than-firm grasp on the scientific realities of the world. No, he’s something else entirely.

Source

British peer ejected from UN climate talks for denouncing protocol, Telegraph

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Hundreds of new winter farmers markets open for the season

by Myrna Posted on December 7, 2012

Hundreds of new winter farmers markets open for the season

By Susie Cagle

There are 52 percent more winter farmers markets operating in the U.S. this year compared to last, the Department of Agriculture announced this week. Winter markets now make up a larger share of farmers market sales throughout the year, even if they’re not quite as well stocked with delicious goodies. (I miss you, summer tomatoes.)

But winter’s nice too! Roasty chestnuts and hot apple cider? Yes please! Oh, and I guess I’ll take that kale too.

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California pot farms poison animals, cute and less cute alike

by Myrna Posted on December 4, 2012

California pot farms poison animals, cute and less cute alike

By Susie Cagle

Mourad Gabriel is not feeling very mellow, dudes. The Northern California wildlife disease ecologist has been tracking and studying forest-dwelling fishers for the last 10 years, but lately he’s become more of a wildlife coroner.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Fishers deserve your sympathy, but they are not very cute.

A part of the weasel family, cat-sized fishers have hunted turkeys and bobcats, and have few predators besides humans, who used to poach them for fur and now just kill them with pesticides on illegal marijuana farms. From On Earth:

Fishers once roamed our northwestern forests in abundance, but their numbers have dwindled dramatically in the region. Now Gabriel, 38, believes he has unlocked the mystery as to what’s keeping this species from bouncing back. And his discovery, alas, is what has outlaw pot growers reaching for their guns …

“I’m not focused on the pot plants,” Gabriel says. “What makes my blood boil is the environmental damage being done on public land.”

Hit hard by fur trapping and the logging of the forests they favor, fishers had all but vanished from their historic range by the early twentieth century. Gabriel describes them as an “umbrella species,” meaning that they tend to be good indicators of their ecosystem’s overall health. By studying the remaining fishers closely, biologists can get a sense of how other members of their ecosystem are faring.

Fishers live and hunt in mature forests that provide great cover for surreptitious weed grows — grows that are actively poisoning the land and its creatures, adorable and ruthless alike. Gabriel surveyed the scene at one Humboldt County marijuana farm, post-raid.

Pesticide containers were scattered across the landscape, their poison baits marked with countless scratches made by the gnawing teeth of mice and rats. The pot growers, it soon became clear, were spreading large amounts of rodenticide around their plants to protect them from tiny pests. The rodents were living for several days after eating the poison — just long enough to be preyed on by fishers.

Gabriel began to document the stunning quantities of rodenticide that were peppering the 144 square miles of the Hoopa reservation. On one grow site near the reservation, 90 pounds were discovered. He calculates that 10.5 pounds (the amount he found at one of the first sites he studied) is enough to kill 12,542 deer mice or 1,792 wood rats — and anywhere from 5 to 28 fishers.

Outdoor cannabis farming may be more sustainable than the inside kind, but it’s all bad news for the environment. Maybe Humboldt State University’s new marijuana institute could research not just the plant itself, but its effects on the area’s own ecosystem.

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Will twentysomethings head for the suburbs?

by Myrna Posted on December 4, 2012

Will twentysomethings head for the suburbs?

By Susie Cagle

The millennial generation stands to shape our cities for decades to come, largely because it’s so big: 86 million, compared to 77 million baby boomers. Millennials are just starting to turn 30, and middle-aged demographers are wondering how many of them will run to the suburbs like their parents and grandparents before them.

s.yume

From USA Today:

Now, cities face a new demographic reality: The young and single are aging and having children. If the pattern of the past 50 years holds, they might soon set their sights on suburbia.

“We know young people move the most,” says Richard Florida, whose book The Rise of the Creative Class published 10 years ago helped spark the wooing of young professionals to revive declining urban centers. “So capturing people early on in their lives in a metro really matters. It’s important to compete with suburbs for people once they get a little older and have children.”

The older they get, the less likely people are to live in cities, according to recent Census data. The peak age for urban living is 25 to 27, when 20% of that age group are nestled in urban centers. By the age of 41, about a quarter have moved to the suburbs.

Experts say getting cities baby-ready would entail improving schools, building housing near public transit, and expanding and improving parks. That all sounds well and good to me, but here’s the hitch: Demographers say millennials want to bring the suburbs to the city with more low-rise townhouses and single-family homes instead of apartments. So much for that density thing?

Cities are growing, but it’s still unclear just how much they’re growing compared to the ‘burbs.

Will young people move to the ‘burbs because older people before them did, or will cities be able to retain young families?

There are still plenty of young and childless professionals for cities to pursue (the youngest Millennials are in their teens), but as the oldest move to another life stage, cities face a balancing act: Provide adult fun and culture and trendy lofts, but build family-friendly homes and child care centers at the same time.

Even with all the changes cities are making, many Millennials will head to the suburbs when they start a family — but probably not as many as in previous decades, [cities guru Richard] Florida says.

“Before, 90% to 95% would’ve moved, and I would see it more as 60% or 70% now,” he says, based on research and observations. “My hunch is many will move to a close-in suburb that’s walkable, near transit.”

My hunch, as one of these mysterious, potentially ‘burb-bound millennials? There are still lots of factors that would keep us in the cities: urban job growth, rising gas prices, the collapse of the housing market, safety improvements, declining interest in cars, delayed marriage age. These could all be good news for urban areas — even if some of us still secretly want a ranch house with a picket fence.

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Huge, unusual storm slams into Philippines because that is what happens all the time now

by Myrna Posted on December 4, 2012

Huge, unusual storm slams into Philippines because that is what happens all the time now

By Philip Bump

This is Typhoon Bopha, as seen from the International Space Station.

Click to embiggen.

That’s what it looks like from space. It’s hard to get a sense of scale from that image, so here’s another, showing it against the arc of the Earth. It extends for more than 300 miles in diameter.

NASA

More importantly, here’s what it looks like from the ground.

The storm, which Capital Weather Gang refers to as a “beastly super typhoon,” made landfall as the equivalent of a category 5 storm. The site explains why this storm is unusual.

The relatively compact storm is tracking at an unusually far south latitude, not far from the equator. Writes Wunderground’s Jeff Masters:

“Mindanao rarely gets hit by typhoons, since the island is too close to the Equator, and the infrastructure of Mindanao is not prepared to handle heavy typhoon rains as well as the more typhoon-prone northern islands. Bopha is potentially a catastrophic storm for Mindanao.” …

Storms this strong do not usually occur this far south because the coriolis force, which helps storms spin up, is weak at such latitudes. Bopha became a typhoon just 3.8 degrees above the equator, says the UK Met Office.

Yahoo News describes its passage over the island earlier today.

About 40 people were killed or missing in flash floods and landslides near a mining area on Mindanao, ABS-CBN television reported, saying waters and soil had swept through an army post.

A television reporter said she saw numerous bodies lined up near the army base. A military spokesman earlier said about 20 people, including six soldiers, were missing. …

But the relatively low death toll was due in part to an early evacuation. More than 155,000 people were in shelters late on Tuesday.

The storm has moved into the South China Sea, where it is expected to weaken.

This story is part of Grist’s on-going series “Massive, unusual, deadly storms from around the globe.” The odds are good that the series will eventually become a daily feature. Maybe hourly.

CIMSS

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