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Dairy accidents spilled a million gallons of crap in Wisconsin this year

by FeliciaEDU Posted on December 10, 2013

Dairy accidents spilled a million gallons of crap in Wisconsin this year

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Shutterstock

More than a million gallons of crap were let loose following agricultural accidents in Wisconsin this year.

No, we aren’t talking bullshit. We’re talking about cow shit, the E. coli– and nutrient-laden fruits of the state’s dairy industry. This is the kind of pollution that causes green slime to grow over the Great Lakes and that leads to dead zones at the other end of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that already this year farming accidents have spilled 1 million gallons of livestock manure in the state. That’s more than five times the amount that was leaked during similar accidents last year. The figure only includes the most spectacular explosions of poo, not the cow pats that are washed off grazing lands into creeks and rivers during rains.

Wisconsin farms this year generated the largest volume of manure spills since 2007, including an accident by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s flagship research farm in Columbia County that produced a mile-long trail of animal waste. …

Manure contains an array of contaminants, including E. coli, phosphorus and nitrogen, that can harm public waterways and drinking water. …

[M]anure handling is a volatile issue in Wisconsin as dairy farms grow larger.

Factory farms, aka concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs, have been responsible for about a third of manure spills in Wisconsin since 2007.

State officials say they’ve become more proactive in addressing spills in recent years, but apparently not proactive enough. The EPA hasn’t been proactive enough either; it was recently ordered by a federal judge to decide what to do about fertilizer contaminating waterways and worsening the Gulf of Mexico dead zone.


Source
Manure spills in 2013 the highest in seven years statewide, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Dairy accidents spilled a million gallons of crap in Wisconsin this year

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How We’re Destroying Our Kids’ Brains

by gcvhlwm8 Posted on December 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on the OnEarth website.

Carlos Jusino grew up a typical kid in Harlem, rollerblading near the Hudson River, eating at the McDonald’s on 145th Street and Broadway, hanging out with friends in his building. Also typical was the fact that many of Jusino’s neighbors and family members, including his mother, had asthma. “When I was growing up, she went to the hospital about once a month for asthma,” he says. Although he didn’t know it at the time, more than 30 percent of the kids in Harlem have asthma, one of the highest rates in the country.

Jusino’s family was worried about the air quality around Harlem, but most of its attention was directed to a sewage treatment facility built in 1985 along the West Side Highway next to the Hudson, where a foul-smelling settling tank lay exposed. The plant galvanized the community, including a group of environmental justice activists known as the Sewage Seven. They sued the city and won a settlement in 1994 that helped establish air-monitoring stations around the plant.

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How We’re Destroying Our Kids’ Brains

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Piles of tar-sands waste in Chicago are pissing people off

by gerdi Posted on November 19, 2013

Piles of tar-sands waste in Chicago are pissing people off

By

Southeast Environmental Task Force

Clouds of coal dust and petroleum coke, a waste product from the refining of tar-sands oil, have been enveloping neighborhoods on Chicago’s southeast side. Federal, state, and city officials are finally moving to temper the dangerous air pollution.

The villains: KCBX Terminals (a division of Koch Industries) and Beemsterboer Slag Co.

The villainous acts: The companies own three terminals along the Calamut River that are storing huge piles of coal and petroleum coke, aka petcoke, which is coming from a nearby BP refinery. But they aren’t bothering to cover all that gunk to make sure it stays on site, so it’s being picked up by winds and blown over neighboring homes, forcing residents to stay indoors.

Anthony Martinez

via Southeast Environmental Task Force

A pollution cloud in southeast Chicago.

The plot: The piles of petcoke are expected to grow in Chicago and elsewhere around the country as refineries switch to processing tar-sands oil from Canada. Detroit suffered a similar problem (also courtesy of the Kochs) until city, state, and federal officials banded together to chase it away with lawsuits and legislation.

The victims: Residents of Chicago’s East Side and South Deering neighborhoods.

What the victims want: “Move the piles!” That was the chant that went up Thursday evening at a community meeting to discuss the problem. Another obvious solution: Cover the damned things. That’s what California law requires.

The latest twists: The U.S. EPA on Friday ordered the terminal owners to install pollution monitors, part of an effort to determine whether they are violating the Clean Air Act. That followed lawsuits filed last month by Illinois. On Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) joined the fray, as the Chicago Tribune reports:

The mayor’s office announced in an email that Emanuel is ordering the Department of Public Health to adopt “strict regulations on the maintenance and storage” of petroleum coke stored in massive uncovered piles along the Calumet River just south of the Chicago Skyway bridge.

The email was short on specifics but promised that three storage terminals will be required to take more aggressive action to tamp down thick black dust that blows into surrounding neighborhoods and washes into the river.

Here’s hoping that Chicago, the state of Illinois, and the EPA can step up the pressure and close out this story as heroes.

(Memo to Obama: Approving Keystone XL would help flood the country with more tar-sands oil, leading to more petcoke piles and more air pollution.)


Source
Emanuel vows crackdown on air pollution from refinery waste, Chicago Tribune
Feds order pollution monitors near S. Side refinery waste, Chicago Tribune

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Piles of tar-sands waste in Chicago are pissing people off

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How the US Militarized the Haiti-Dominican Republic Border

by al36olu Posted on November 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It isn’t exactly the towering 20-foot wall that runs like a scar through significant parts of the US-Mexican borderlands. Imagine instead the sort of metal police barricades you see at protests. These are unevenly lined up like so many crooked teeth on the Dominican Republic’s side of the river that acts as its border with Haiti. Like dazed versions of US Border Patrol agents, the armed Dominican border guards sit at their assigned posts, staring at the opposite shore. There, on Haitian territory, children splash in the water and women wash clothes on rocks.

One of those CESFRONT (Specialized Border Security Corps) guards, carrying an assault rifle, is walking six young Haitian men back to the main base in Dajabon, which is painted desert camouflage as if it were in a Middle Eastern war zone.

If the scene looks like a five-and-dime version of what happens on the US southern border, that’s because it is. The enforcement model the Dominican Republic uses to police its boundary with Haiti is an import from the United States.

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How the US Militarized the Haiti-Dominican Republic Border

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Obama Dares Insurance Companies to Put Up or Shut Up

by Jatiancecab Posted on November 14, 2013

Mother Jones

Here’s the latest on Obamacare:

The White House on Thursday will announce a plan for allowing insurance companies to continue offering existing individual insurance policies even if they fall short of the coverage standards set by the 2010 health-care law, a Democratic official briefed on the plan said.

….The plan, which the official said could be implemented without passing legislation, would allow insurance companies to extend “substandard” plans in 2014 only if they are already in existence. Unlike the House bill, the administration plan wouldn’t allow insurance companies to offer such plans to new customers.

Here’s my guess: this is primarily a put-up-or-shut-up move from Obama, not a plan designed to really fix the problem of canceled policies. I base this on two things.

First, I think insurance companies are mostly allowed to do this already. Second, I think that most of the canceled policies have been canceled because insurance companies wanted to cancel them. They were designed in the first place to entice buyers away from their old grandfathered policies, and insurance companies did this explicitly so that they would be free to cancel them when 2014 rolled around. This allowed insurers to replace them with more expensive policies without taking any heat for it. They could just blame it on Obamacare.

This is just speculation on my part, so don’t take it to the bank. But I think Obama’s main goal here is to remove this handy excuse. He’s basically daring insurers to go ahead and reissue the old policies. If they don’t do it, it means that Obamacare was never really responsible for the cancellations in the first place. And if the insurers see that their bluff is being called and decide they don’t want to take the PR hit, then the old policies get reissued and everyone is happy. It’s a win-win for Obama.

There are more details to this, including its intersection with state laws and the size of the price increase insurers would attach to re-issued policies. But I suspect this is basically the shape of the river here.

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Obama Dares Insurance Companies to Put Up or Shut Up

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Marcellus Shale fracking wells use 5 million gallons of water apiece

by Bikor11 Posted on October 31, 2013

Marcellus Shale fracking wells use 5 million gallons of water apiece

By

cotterpin

Frackers are slurping this right up.

Forget about residents. Forget about fish. The streams and rivers of Pennsylvania and West Virginia are being heavily tapped to quench the growing thirst of the fracking industry.

According to a new report, each of the thousands of fracking wells drilled to draw gas and oil out of the Marcellus Shale formation in those two states uses an average of 4.1 to 5.6 million gallons of fresh water. That’s more than the amount of water used by fracking wells in three other big shale formations around the country:

EarthworksClick to embiggen.

And with approximately 6,000 wells in Pennsylvania alone, the industry is taking a heavy toll on the region’s waterways. The map below shows drilling permits in Pennsylvania and West Virginia; note the heavy concentration within the Susquehanna River basin.

EarthworksClick to embiggen.

Much of the water is being skimmed off the tops of rivers and streams. In West Virginia, the researchers concluded that 80 percent comes from these surface waterways.

From the report [PDF], which was produced by researchers at San Jose State University and consulting firm Downstream Strategies for the environmental nonprofit Earthworks:

[T]he entire flow of the Susquehanna River contributes 26 billion gallons of water per day to the Chesapeake Bay. The cumulative volume of water used by all wells in Pennsylvania is roughly equal to the daily flow from the entire river basin. These cumulative impacts are especially important because such a large percentage of the water injected does not return to the surface and is lost to the hydrologic cycle. The volume of water injected to date in Pennsylvania is also roughly 1% of the 2.5 trillion gallons of total surface water in Pennsylvania alone. While overall, 1% might be seen as only a marginal impact, these volumes could be critical in times of drought. Also, as drilling expands, the cumulative impacts are likely to grow proportional to water use. The development of the deeper and thicker Utica Shale that underlies the Marcellus with similar techniques will require substantially more water.

The report notes that much of the data its researchers had sought was unavailable. Lax water-reporting rules mean the region is swimming in uncertainty over how much water is actually being used by Marcellus Shale frackers, and how much wastewater they’re dumping or injecting into disposal wells.

“Our analysis of available data and identification of missing data indicates that, even with new reporting requirements, we still don’t know the full scale of impacts on water resources,” researcher Dustin Mulvaney of San Jose University said. “States should require operators to track and report water and waste at every step, from well pad construction to fracturing to disposal.”


Source
Water Resource Reporting and Water Footprint from Marcellus Shale Development in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, Downstream Strategies

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Marcellus Shale fracking wells use 5 million gallons of water apiece

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Tar-sands waste going to fuel dirty power plants in China

by Benny Roye Posted on October 16, 2013

Tar-sands waste going to fuel dirty power plants in China

By

Josh Mogerman

Petcoke piled up along the Calumut River in Chicago.

As cheap tar-sands oil flows through America’s refineries, the dusty byproduct — known as petroleum coke, or “petcoke” —  is piling up throughout the country. The stuff is too nasty to burn in U.S. power plants, so oil companies are doing the next best thing — shipping it to China, where somebody else can burn it.

Petcoke has been heaping up along the Calumet River in Chicago — and the problem will likely get worse once BP turns its Whiting Refinery into one of the world’s biggest tar-sands processors. Over in Michigan, Detroit’s mayor and other lawmakers recently fought for months before ridding their riverfront of mounds of petcoke that a Koch Industries subsidiary had stockpiled there.

So where does the petcoke go from there? The U.S. EPA will not issue new petcoke burning licenses. It’s just too dirty. Some has been sent back to Canada to be burned in power plants there. And now the Wall Street Journal reports that China’s hunger for the dirty fuel is surging:

While countries across Latin America, Europe and even the Middle East are buying a lot of U.S.-produced gasoline and low-sulfur diesel that meets their stringent air-quality control, China is in the market for something dirtier.

The country, which has pledged not to sacrifice the environment for short-term economic gain, is buying an increasing amount of a byproduct called petroleum coke from U.S. refiners. …

Sales of petcoke inside the U.S. have waned since 2006, according to data from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. But China’s appetite is growing. It took more than 24 million barrels of the stuff in the first half of this year, up nearly 55% over last year. The country now accounts for 20% of all the U.S. petcoke shipments overseas. …

China has been pushing to clean up its air lately. But Max Auffhammer, agricultural and resource economist at the University of California-Berkeley, points out that petcoke is even dirtier than the coal that has so badly sullied China’s environment. “It is strange to think that for some parts of the Chinese economy, we would prefer that they use coal instead of petcoke,” he told the newspaper.


Source
China Is in the Market for Dirty U.S. Fuel, Wall Street Journal
First it was Detroit, now ‘PetKoch’ piling up in Chicago, Midwest Energy News

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Tar-sands waste going to fuel dirty power plants in China

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Court to EPA on Gulf dead-zone rules: Make up your freakin’ mind

by BerndHugg Posted on September 24, 2013

Court to EPA on Gulf dead-zone rules: Make up your freakin’ mind

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Is it time for the federal government to drop the hammer on the farmers whose fertilizer gushes into the Mississippi River, fueling sweeping dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico? The Environmental Protection Agency now has six months to decide.

The deadline comes via a federal judge in New Orleans in response to a lawsuit from the Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups. The enviros argue that states aren’t doing enough to tackle the problem, and have petitioned the feds to use the Clean Water Act to take charge. But the EPA has been wishy-washy, neither agreeing nor disagreeing that regulating the nutrient runoff should be its responsibility.

Travis S.

The Mississippi River is loaded with nutrients that fertilize algae outbreaks.

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

[The environmentalists’] petition asked EPA to establish numerical water quality standards for nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Mississippi River and the northern Gulf of Mexico. They also asked EPA to establish “total daily maximum loads,” specific numerical amounts of the two pollutants that would be allowed in individual segments of the river and its tributaries.

The daily loads would impact any existing and future permits for pollution sources along those stretches, likely polluters to reduce the release of nitrogen and phosphorus when permit renewals or new permits were requested.

Thanks to the new ruling, the EPA’s indecisiveness should evaporate before next summer’s oxygen-starved dead zone takes root. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey announced that the EPA must rule within 180 days on whether federal regulations are necessary.

Here’s one of NRDC’s Midwestern attorneys, Ann Alexander, doing a touchdown dance in a blog post:

EPA has repeatedly gone on record saying that states have not done enough to solve the problem, and that federal action is hence necessary to set numeric limits on nitrogen and phosphorus to aid the process of setting discharge limits in permits. Yet when NRDC and some of our partners in the Mississippi River Collaborative filed a petition in 2008 asking that EPA render a formal decision that federal action is necessary, the agency balked…

But EPA’s days of waffling are now over. The court has ordered it to tell us, point blank, whether federal intervention is or is not necessary to address the problem.

Here’s hoping the EPA steps up and does what the states have been unwilling or unable to do: Protect the Gulf from farms that overload their land with fertilizer, laying waste to some of the nation’s most productive fishing grounds.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food

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Court to EPA on Gulf dead-zone rules: Make up your freakin’ mind

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Court to EPA on Gulf dead-zone rules: Make up your freakin’ mind

New Orleans has a radical new plan for managing floods

by Olesiacei Posted on September 10, 2013

New Orleans has a radical new plan for managing floods

By

Derek Bridges

New Orleans won’t let a little rain kill its buzz.

The Big Easy has a multibillion-dollar new philosophy for dealing with flooding: Let it happen. (At least in some spots.)

New Orleans is a low-lying city built on swampland, and its leaders are finally coming to terms with that hydrological reality. No longer will officials try to drain and pump out every drop of water that falls or flows their way.

Instead, under the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, floodwaters would be corralled into areas that serve as parks during drier times. Rain gardens and bioswales would help the earth suck up more of the rain that falls on it. And water would be funneled into year-round canals and ponds that support wildlife, improve soil quality, and generally pretty up the place.

The plan, which was developed in consultation with Dutch engineers, wouldn’t shelter the city from catastrophic floods if its levees fail — as happened after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But it would help turn the region’s heavy rainfall from a hazard into an asset. That’s becoming especially important, with Louisiana enduring America’s fastest rates of sea-level rise and experiencing increasingly intense downpours as the globe warms up.

“We know how to do this. We just forgot,” Deputy Mayor Cedric Grant said at a ceremony as the plan was unveiled on Friday. “We had to be reminded by our friends from the Netherlands.”

The $6.2 billion plan aims to solve two pressing problems. It would help reduce flood damage in a naturally soggy city during a period of climate upheaval. And it would help recharge desiccated soils with moisture, preventing the ground from sinking ever further beneath sea level. From the vision outlined in the plan:

Greater New Orleans has always contended with flooding from rainfall, and now faces new challenges, including changing climate, rising seas, and human-induced sinking of the land.

Last century’s infrastructure enabled widespread urbanization in a wet delta environment, but the principles underlying that infrastructure are no longer adequate to sustain the region.

A new approach to water — the region’s most abundant asset — is the foundation for building a safe, prosperous and beautiful future on the Mississippi River Delta.

Of course, overhauling century-old city infrastructure won’t be easy, and it’s not clear how the needed billions of dollars would be raised. From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

The sheer ambition of the plan lays bare the difficulty of any swift implementation. For that reason, its chief architect, architect and planner David Waggonner, said it looks long-term, to 2050, for a completion date.

While the numbers are hard to prove, … supporters said they believed the new plan could provide an $11.3 billion economic benefit to the region in terms of rising property values and reduced risk of flooding.

Regardless of how long this takes, it’s sure nice to see N’awlins becoming friends again with the bountiful water that once defined it.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Cities

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New Orleans has a radical new plan for managing floods

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Coal shoulder: BLM sells controversial coal mining lease, but no one’s buying

by fji5enf2 Posted on August 22, 2013

Coal shoulder: BLM sells controversial coal mining lease, but no one’s buying

By Claire Thompson

Kimon Berlin

Wyoming has enough coal trains for now.

Today the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming held a sale for the lease of 148 million tons of coal on public land in the Powder River Basin — and received not  a single bid, a first in the state BLM’s history.

The sale was the first of two that the BLM had planned in the area over the next month, which combined would pave the way for the extraction of 316 million tons of Powder River Basin coal. Cloud Peak Energy had asked the BLM back in 2006 to open the site of today’s lease to mining, presumably to expand on its adjacent Cloud Peak mine. But today, the energy company decided it wouldn’t bid, and no one else stepped up (federal coal leases frequently see only one bidder). Here’s Cloud Peak CEO Colin Marshall in the company’s press release:

We carefully evaluated the estimated economics of this LBA [lease by application] in light of current market conditions and the uncertainty caused by the current political and regulatory environment towards coal and coal-powered generation and ultimately decided it was prudent not to bid at this time. … [W]e believe a significant portion of the BLM’s estimated mineable tons would not be recoverable by us if we were to be the winning bidder in the BLM’s competitive process. In combination with prevailing 8400 Btu market prices and projected costs of mining the remaining coal, we were unable to construct an economic bid for this tract at this time.

In other words, coal in this country is getting more difficult and costly to mine, domestic demand is falling, and Obama has directed EPA to crack down on emissions from coal-fired power plants. Even the coal industry’s hail-mary plan to stay profitable by pushing exports to Asia faces setbacks. We agree with Cloud Peak that starting up a whole new coal-mining operation is probably not prudent at this point.

The BLM’s coal-leasing process is already rife with problems: In June, an Interior Department inspector general’s report found that the BLM routinely underestimates the value of federal coal leases, failing to take into account the more lucrative Asian market. Taxpayers lose out on tens of millions as a result. But this time, even that hefty discount wasn’t enough to get Cloud Peak to bid.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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