Tag Archives: pollution

Climate Campaigners Try Flooding the (Comment) Zone

by Myrna Posted on April 8, 2013

In a new tactic, climate campaigners aim to flood the comment zone when global warming is news. Source:   Climate Campaigners Try Flooding the (Comment) Zone Related ArticlesThe Fire Hose: Mink Exports, Planetary Limits, Nuclear BenefitsKnowosphere at Work: Farmer-to-Farmer Video Advice Boosting YieldsScientists See Cruelty in Killing Method Used in Japan’s Dolphin Roundup

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Climate Campaigners Try Flooding the (Comment) Zone

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The Count of Dead Pigs Pulled Out of Chinese Rivers Is Up to 16,000

by DonnieaBlevins Posted on March 25, 2013

Image: Jack Zalium

Earlier this month, locals spotted what would prove to be the first of a plague of dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River in Shanghai, which supplies drinking water to the metropolis. The pig death toll has steadily risin since then—16,000 confirmed at last counting.

But just as officials said they were finishing up with recovering the last of the carcasses, dead ducks joined the swine in polluting China’s rivers. Locals in Sichuan Province spotted around 1,000 of the birds floating down the Nanhe River, the BBC reports.

As for the dead pigs, officials still have not produced an explanation for the animals’ presence. The Huffington Post writes:

Hog farmers have told state media that the dumping of swine carcasses is rising because police have started cracking down on the illicit sale of pork products made from dead, diseased pigs.

Local officials also told Southern Weekly that the city lacks enough facilities to properly dispose of dead pigs.

Though many hog farms are situated upstream of Shanghai, the authorities still haven’t nailed down any culprits. The New York Times explains that authorities do have their eye on the upstream farmers, though: 

Those suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Shanghai officials said that more than a dozen of the pigs carried ear tags indicating that they were from Jiaxing. The authorities then announced that they had detained a farmer who confessed to throwing his animals into the river.

But in Jiaxing, farmers denied dumping pigs into the river, calling it preposterous and saying that the animals could not possibly have floated all the way to Shanghai.

It’s also possible, the Times writes, that the animals died on their way to Shanghai and that truck drivers decided to dump the bodies in the river. The paper argues, though, that this may actually be a bit of positive environmental news from China:

In May, for example, the police in this hog-producing city arrested four people who had sold dead pigs to slaughterhouses. And in December, a Zhejiang Province court sentenced 17 people to prison sentences, one for life, for processing and selling meat from pigs that had died of various diseases. In less than two years, the group had collected about 77,000 animals.

So, as the authorities have cracked down on people selling diseased or dead pigs, agriculture experts say, it is possible that someone may have decided it was better to dump dead pigs into the river.

Officials insist to locals that the water is still safe to drink and that the city’s pork is fine to eat.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Is It Safe to Eat Pork? 
Horse Meat Turned Up in Irish and British Burger Meat 

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The Count of Dead Pigs Pulled Out of Chinese Rivers Is Up to 16,000

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Jamaica and plastic ocean trash

by johnsmithwindows Posted on March 4, 2013

green4us

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Jamaica and plastic ocean trash

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ExxonMobil wins and regular folks lose in $1 billion pollution ruling

by h0rt67bx11 Posted on February 28, 2013

ExxonMobil wins and regular folks lose in $1 billion pollution ruling

By John Upton

Thomas Hawk

Guess who wins.

Susan and Robert Lazzaro buy bottled water for cooking and drinking. Their jacuzzi sits empty and baths are out of the question. They limit their showers to two minutes or less.

And like many other homeowners in Jacksonville, Md., the Lazarros fear that the savings they invested in their home were wiped out when a local ExxonMobil gas station leaked for more than a month in 2006, poisoning the groundwater upon which they depended.

All was not lost: In 2011, a jury awarded victims of the gasoline leak $1.5 billion in compensation and punitive damages. Of that sum, $5.6 million was to go to the Lazarros.

But we’re talking about an oil giant here. Inevitability ran its course and all suddenly seems lost again.

That’s according to The Baltimore Sun, which reports that Maryland’s highest court on Tuesday rejected $1 billion in punitive damages from the $1.5 billion verdict and also rejected some claims from an earlier case in which $150 million was awarded to a smaller number of plaintiffs. The court ruled that victims of the pollution should not be compensated for emotional distress, nor should ExxonMobil have to pay for monitoring their health. From the article:

Charlie Engelmann, a spokesman for ExxonMobil, said in an email that the company was pleased with the decision.

“The evidence showed that we acted appropriately after the accident and the court has agreed,” Engelmann wrote. “We have apologized to the Jacksonville community and we remain ready to compensate those who were truly damaged by this unfortunate accident. We will continue the cleanup.”

The court rejected all six claims of fraud the jury affirmed in 2011, including ExxonMobil’s alleged willful deceptions of public officials and residents before and after the accident.

While ExxonMobil officials were pleased by the ruling, the Lazarros and their neighbors are left wondering how they will pick up the remnants of their polluted lives. ”We’re all still in a state of shock,” Susan Lazzaro told the newspaper. “It leaves us with such a sense of defeat because we are still living with this nightmare.”

The Associated Press reported that 150 families were affected by Tuesday’s ruling and that new trials have been ordered.

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Don’t worry about BP; it’s going to be fine

by f45 Posted on February 6, 2013

Don’t worry about BP; it’s going to be fine

By Philip Bump

BP’s logo is of an offshore rig exploding with money.

“BP” used to stand for “British Petroleum,” presumably until Britain got embarrassed. Well, not really — although British people weren’t very happy about people calling the company British Petroleum after its Gulf rig exploded and leaked and killed mammals of various types.

Anyway, here’s News About BP and Money and the Government, our new feature about BP and money and the government, part one in a series of one.

BP made a lot of money last year.

Big surprise. Annual profits for the company were $11.6 billion, only six or seven times what the average U.S. household makes (over the course of 33,000 years).

And of course we’ll bring back our favorite tool to make this figure hit home:

But not as much as states think it should pay for the Gulf spill.

BP doesn’t want to be rude or disrespectful, of course, but it thinks that the amount of money sought by state and local governments over the Deepwater Horizon disaster is a tad steep. From Reuters:

BP Plc has tallied up claims made by states and local governments on the U.S. Gulf Coast for economic and property damages from the Macondo oil spill, and come up with a figure of $34 billion, which it deems “substantially” overstated. …

The $34 billion total, provided for disclosure reasons with the company’s financial results on Tuesday, is based on claims made last month by Alabama, Mississippi and Florida as well as claims made by Louisiana and others from local governments, BP said.

Citing the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) underpinning the claims, the company said it considers the methods used to calculate them to be “seriously flawed, not supported by the legislation and to substantially overstate the claims.”

I am shocked and you are shocked and everyone is shocked that BP thinks this. But, really, how ungrateful can those states be? Have they already forgotten that the company ran this ad promoting Gulf Coast tourism over and over and over again? That’s like $30 billion worth of effort right there!

The government is doing its best to help BP pay its bills.

You may remember that the feds recently finalized a $4 billion penalty for BP for its role in the Gulf spill. But what the government taketh away, it also giveth, in spades.

From Bloomberg:

BP Plc’s Pentagon contracts have more than doubled since the year of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the biggest in U.S. history.

The company’s awards surged to $2.51 billion in the year ended Sept. 30 from $1.04 billion in fiscal 2010, the year of the oil rig explosion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. BP’s share of the military’s petroleum market jumped to 12 percent from 8.5 percent during the period. …

The Pentagon “greatly rewarded the company for the oil spill,” said Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor and former member of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting. “This is alarming since the billions of dollars of environmental harm by BP make it the worst federal government contractor in history.”

Not sure “alarming” is the best word, but we’ll stick with it for now.

This past November, the EPA suspended BP’s ability to win new government contracts, but didn’t cancel the existing ones.  In fiscal years 2010 and 2011, BP got more than $3.5 billion from the Defense Department alone. It’s safe to assume that over the past year and up to now, the company’s existing government contracts brought in at least $500 million. So the company’s $4 billion fine from the feds will probably be completely covered by money the company got from the feds. The system works.

In summary.

BP should stand for “Bafflingly Profitable,” but only because “Bullshit Professionals” is rated R.

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

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Want to fight climate change? Don’t work so hard

by Larissaiyb Posted on February 5, 2013

Want to fight climate change? Don’t work so hard

By Susie Cagle

Shutterstock

Here’s one way to stop global warming: SMASH CAPITALISM!

That is how I choose to read a study released this week by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which found that switching to a “more European” work schedule, i.e. working fewer hours and taking more vacation, could prevent as much as half of “global warming that is not already locked in.” From U.S. News:

“The relationship between [shorter work hours and lower emissions] is complex and not clearly understood, but it is understandable that lowering levels of consumption, holding everything else constant, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” writes economist David Rosnick, author of the study. Rosnick says some of that reduction can be attributed to fewer operating hours in factories and other workplaces that consume high levels of energy. …

Rosnick says a move toward the European system would result in a trade-off of up to one quarter of income gains in exchange for increased leisure time and vacation. His best-case scenario, which predicts prevention of up to a 1.3 degree Celsius temperature increase, assumes that Americans would begin working about 0.5 percent less each year, starting with a 10-hour reduction in 2013. “We can get a similar amount of work done as productivity and technology improves,” he says. “It’s something we have to decide as a country—there are economic models in which individuals get to decide their hours and are still similarly productive as they are now.”

Rosnick didn’t consider the impact of telecommuting, so it’s not clear how emissions might be affected by fewer people driving to their workplaces, or by companies expecting telecommuters to put in longer hours.

But if everyone did work less, that could mean reductions in all kinds of pollution and pillaging. I don’t see “Smash Capitalism!” catching on at Chevron, though. Maybe “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Capitalism”?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Good news for Kabul’s Tourism Bureau: The city’s air is unhealthy, but not full of feces

by f45 Posted on January 22, 2013

Good news for Kabul’s Tourism Bureau: The city’s air is unhealthy, but not full of feces

By Philip Bump

Particulate matter is a particularly (pun intended and embraced) dangerous form of air pollution. Particulates are usually in the air as soot, small bits of burned fossil fuels which may cause millions of premature deaths annually. It was largely soot pollution that caused Beijing’s Bladerunner-esque pollution last week.

jdennesDust over KabulAs I said, particulate pollution is usually soot. It doesn’t have to be. Sometimes, the polluting particles are something … much less pleasant. Take Kabul. From the Times:

It has long been a given that the air pollution in this city gets horrific: on average even worse than Beijing’s infamous haze, by one measure.

For nearly as long, there has been the widespread belief by foreign troops and officials here that — let’s be blunt here — feces are a part of the problem.

Canadian soldiers were even warned about it in predeployment briefings, which cited reports that one test had found that as many as 30 percent of air samples contained fecal particles. The Canadians were worried enough that the government ordered a formal investigation, officials say.

There’s reason to think that this apocryphal pollution assessment could be accurate. Kabul is bursting at the seams. The Times indicates that only five percent of homes are connected to sewage systems, in a city that now holds ten times what it was designed for. And a common heating source is dried dung.

But not to worry. Science, history’s greatest killjoy, suggests that Kabul’s air is nearly feces-free. Not that this means it’s great to breathe.

When the United Nations Environment Program did a study that included air sampling, in 2008, it found plenty to worry about, but mostly what would be expected of a traffic-congested city: a lot of sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides. Plus a very high concentration of particulates, known in the trade as PM 10 — which means particles smaller than 10 microns, small enough to penetrate deeply into the lungs, and an important indicator of air pollution — but no specific fecal bits. …

In fact, when the Canadians investigated the matter in response to their worried soldiers, the investigators said that some fecal matter in the air was normal — even in Canada. Some of it could just be bird and flying-insect droppings.

Kabul’s bigger problems are dust and geography — it lies on a plateau surrounded by mountains, limiting airflow. Breathing the air in the city is a health hazard regardless of what it is you’re inhaling, making this little consolation to residents or visitors.

But on the long list of reasons tourists might choose not to visit Kabul, at least the city can cross off “you will be inhaling feces.” Small victories.

Source

Despite a Whiff of Unpleasant Exaggeration, a City’s Pollution Is Real, New York Times

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

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Good news for Kabul’s Tourism Bureau: The city’s air is unhealthy, but not full of feces

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The $400 million plan to unsink a giant cruise ship

by olikellopas Posted on December 27, 2012

The $400 million plan to unsink a giant cruise ship

By Susie Cagle

Nearly a year after it crashed into a very picturesque rock on the coast of Giglio Island in the Mediterranean, the Costa Concordia cruise ship is still lying on its side in the middle of a marine wildlife preserve. The island’s mayor called the ship “an ecological timebomb,” but while it’s not (currently!) leaking oil into the sea, the Concordia is basically a massive amount of pollution still waiting to happen.

Roberto Vongher

There are only two things to do: Chop it up, sink it, and say sorry, or spend $400 million towing the failed monstrosity away from nature.

The latter it is!

Business Insider calls the plan, “the riskiest, most complicated, and most expensive salvage plan ever undertaken,” and no one is entirely sure it will actually work.

The process consists of stabilizing the ship with massive cables (almost complete); drilling an underwater platform into the sea floor; attaching massive floaties to each side of the ship, tipping it upright, and (hopefully!) towing it away from the protected coastline still mostly intact.

Workers had to take a four-day rock climbing course before beginning the work, which will take months.

The (many) companies undertaking this plan say, “it best fulfills the main objectives of the operation: removal of the wreck in one piece, minimal risk, minimal environmental impact, protection of Giglio’s economy and tourism industry, and maximum safety of the work.”

When the only other option is to sink the ship and walk away, it doesn’t really matter if the salvage plan is serious about preserving the Mediterranean ecosystem or just desperate to salvage the tourist dollars on which Giglio’s economy relies. But just think of all the wonderful things we could do with that $400 million if we weren’t building these big dumb toys and crashing them into islands.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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How Toxic Are Our Schools?

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 21, 2012

Karen H.

on

Two Glasses of Milk Per Day, Like it or Not

7 minutes ago

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Soot pollution may cause as many as 3.2 million premature deaths a year

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 17, 2012

Soot pollution may cause as many as 3.2 million premature deaths a year

By Philip Bump

Morgan Burke

There are several factors that probably contribute to what the Atlantic Cities refers to as St. Louis’ “asthma epidemic.” High rates of smoking, for example. And: air pollution.

The number of children suffering from asthma in the St. Louis metropolitan area is nearly three times the national average, according to Asthma Friendly St. Louis, a community program designed to help school-age kids and teens manage respiratory illness. Despite the efforts of several community initiatives, the disease is often poorly managed because of a lack of access to care and educational resources. …

In East St. Louis, which sits across the Mississippi River from St. Louis in Illinois, asthma rates are among the highest in the nation, and experts suspect that this is linked to the high rates of pollution and poverty in the city. 44 percent of East St. Louis residents live on incomes below the federal poverty line.

CDC

Missouri asthma hospitalization rates.

The link between pollution and asthma — a terrifying, occasionally deadly inflammation in the lungs — is well-established. But the effects of pollution, particulate soot pollution, may be much broader than previously understood. From the NRDC’s Switchboard blog:

A new study in The Lancet, developed by an international group of experts, finds that outdoor air pollution, especially fine particulate matter (soot) contributes to more than 3.2 million premature deaths around the world each year. …

This new, more refined study also finds that:

Air pollution ranks among the top ten global health risks associated with mortality and disease.
Most of the premature deaths due to air pollution are in China and other countries in Asia. In fact, air pollution is the 4th highest risk factor right behind smoking in East Asia.

But outside of Asia, the risks are still high. Globally, outdoor air pollution ranks as the 8th highest risk factor for premature death, posing a greater danger than high cholesterol.

The study was timed, coincidentally or not, to go public as the EPA announced new restrictions on soot pollution, dropping the allowable standard of small particles by 20 percent — a step that could save 15,000 lives a year.

The group Abt Associates also unveiled Air Counts, an online map that allows visitors to assess the effects of soot reductions in various cities around the country. Dropping the amount of particulate matter in New York City by 250 metric tons a year could save 67 lives — and more than half a billion dollars in costs. (In heavily polluted Beijing, a similar drop would have less of an effect, saving only 29 lives.)

St. Louis is not included on Abt’s map, so it’s hard to say the extent to which lives might be saved by the EPA’s new standard. But in a state that sees a higher rate-of-death from asthma than the rest of the country, particularly among African-Americans …

CDC

… even one life saved makes the calculus worth it.

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

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