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As Sandy aid finally arrives, FEMA unveils new flood maps

by vserko45 Posted on January 29, 2013

As Sandy aid finally arrives, FEMA unveils new flood maps

By Philip Bump

The flooded Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

Midnight tonight marks the three-month anniversary of Hurricane Sandy making landfall in New Jersey. To celebrate, Congress finally cleared the aid package for victims of the storm. You’ll forgive the East Coast if it doesn’t send a thank-you note.

From The New York Times:

By a 62-to-36 vote, the Senate approved the measure, with 9 Republicans joining 53 Democrats to support it. The House recently passed the bill, 241 to 180, after initially refusing to act on it amid objections from fiscal conservatives over its size and its impact on the federal deficit.

The newly adopted aid package comes on top of nearly $10 billion that Congress approved this month to support the recovery efforts in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and other states that were battered by the hurricane in late October.

The money will provide aid to people whose homes were damaged or destroyed, as well as to business owners who had heavy losses. It will also pay for replenishing shorelines, repairing subway and commuter rail systems, fixing bridges and tunnels, and reimbursing local governments for emergency spending.

Obama pledged to sign the bill as soon as it gets to him.

Yesterday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency presented its own gift to the community: new flood maps for the New York City area. The reassessment of risk to neighborhoods updates the existing, 30-year-old maps, adding some 35,000 new homes and businesses to at-risk areas.

New York Times

Revamped flood zones. Click to embiggen.

In a separate story, the Times reports:

The maps will not formally go into effect for about two years, but the mayor’s office was already preparing an executive order to help owners of damaged homes rebuild to higher standards. That means that a badly damaged home that was not in the old flood zone, but is in the new one, would be allowed to rebuild to prepare for dangers predicted in the new maps. For instance, a home could be hoisted onto posts or pilings, which might have previously been disallowed because of zoning. …

To help offset the costs, [Michael] Byrne, of FEMA, said homeowners with federally backed insurance policies could get up to an additional $30,000 for rebuilding their homes to comply with new codes. Mr. Holloway said it was hoped that federal aid in the wake of the storm would include money to help homeowners better protect their homes.

According to the agency, owners of a $250,000 home with a ground floor built four feet below sea level could pay up to $9,500 a year for flood insurance, compared with $427 for homes built three feet above the flood line.

You may remember that the first, $10 billion package approved by Congress went to bolster FEMA’s ability to pay out claims. For years, the agency has been charging flood-insurance premiums that don’t reflect the actual risk of flooding across the country, meaning that it has been operating at a loss. Homeowners in areas that have been added to the newly mapped flood zones will have to pay higher insurance rates, but not for another few years. Which means FEMA will continue to bring in less money than it needs and will be constrained in paying out claims.

Worse still, FEMA’s new maps reflect only the present conditions: current sea levels, current storm estimates.

Mr. Byrne said the maps were based on current conditions. “We’re not taking into consideration any future climate change,” he said.

Within a decade, then, even FEMA’s new maps will be out-of-date. Sea-level rise is happening faster than anticipated, and New York Harbor is witnessing that directly. If FEMA waits another 30 years to update the maps, the harbor could be almost four inches higher than it is today.

The constraint is financial. Elements of the government are loathe to spend on preventative measures and are reluctant to provide additional funding to programs like FEMA. It took them three months to OK even minimal aid to the largest city in the country. How many years will it be before Congress approves resources to combat climate change preemptively?

Source

Congress Approves $51 Billion in Aid for Hurricane Victims, New York Times
Twice as Many Structures in FEMA’s Redrawn Flood Zone, New York Times

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

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Leaked, useless report suggests fracking is fine for New Yorkers

by biglermyrta910 Posted on January 3, 2013

Leaked, useless report suggests fracking is fine for New Yorkers

By Philip Bump

The New York Times got its ink-stained hands on a report from the New York Health Department assessing the risks associated with fracking, the primary issue at play as the state considers whether or not to lift a ban on the practice. While the report suggests that fracking doesn’t pose risks, there are at least two gigantic caveats. From the Times:

The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times from an expert who did not believe it should be kept secret. …

The eight-page analysis is a summary of previous research by the state and others, and concludes that fracking can be done safely. It delves into the potential impact of fracking on water resources, on naturally occurring radiological material found in the ground, on air emissions and on “potential socioeconomic and quality-of-life impacts.” …

Emily DeSantis, a spokeswoman for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, said the analysis obtained by The Times was out of date. “The document you have is merely a summary, is nearly a year old, and there will be substantial changes to that version,” she said.

Can you spot the caveats? Yes, the report is an aggregation of existing research, not new reporting on any health effects. And, yes, it’s outdated.

Lazzarello

Last November, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed out a deadline for making a final decision so that the state could do more research on fracking’s health effects. The release of this report makes clear why that was a natural next step: With only a cobbled-together set of data on how the practice could affect New Yorkers, it would be hard for Cuomo to make a strong case for lifting a ban. An upstate political blog spoke with a Sierra Club representative following release of the report.

“The position that the impacts of fracking can be regulated to ‘below levels of significant health concern’ is pure fantasy and it is understandable why (Gov. Andrew Cuomo) did not press forward with these baseless conclusions last year,” said Roger Downs, conservation director of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter.

The Times didn’t include the report in its coverage, but the site Journalist’s Resource has a good overview of existing research and reporting on the topic. Among the reports included there is one from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which looks specifically at shale fracking in New York and Pennsylvania.

In aquifers overlying the Marcellus and Utica shale formations of northeastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York, we document systematic evidence for methane contamination of drinking water associated with shalegas extraction. In active gas-extraction areas (one or more gas wells within 1 km), average and maximum methane concentrations in drinking-water wells increased with proximity to the nearest gas well and were 19.2 and 64 mg CH4 L −1 (n ¼ 26), a potential explosion hazard; in contrast, dissolved methane samples in neighboring nonextraction sites (no gas wells within 1 km) within similar geologic formations and hydrogeologic regimes averaged only 1.1 mg L −1 (P < 0.05; n ¼ 34).

Emphasis added, to highlight the health risk. The area in New York considered in that research lies on the state’s southern border — the area most likely to see approval of the fracking process.

New York isn’t alone in its skepticism. Large cities across the country are beginning to ban the practice within city limits.

Some cities, even those in the heart of oil and gas country have moved to ban fracking within their limits. Tulsa, Oklahoma, (once the self-proclaimed oil capital of the world) has completely banned fracking within the city limits. Planning for the first ever natural gas well in the city of Dallas was blocked last week, and the town of Longmont, near Denver, is currently battling attempts to overturn its own fracking ban.

Meaning that even if Cuomo feels comfortable in lifting the state’s ban once a more thorough health assessment has been completed, the odds that we see fracking wells in Central Park remain pretty slim.

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

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Leaked, useless report suggests fracking is fine for New Yorkers

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New York’s energy-efficiency survey suggests that older is often better

by olikellopas Posted on December 26, 2012

New York’s energy-efficiency survey suggests that older is often better

By Philip Bump

dbasulto

The new LEED-certified 7 World Trade Center is much less energy efficient than older buildings.

Here’s a tip for Manhattan building owners looking to build as energy-efficiently as possible: Build your structure 100 years ago.

New York City’s recently-implemented law mandating that buildings report energy use has revealed that the city’s best performers are often not its newest additions. From the Times:

Older buildings tend to have higher Energy Star scores because they have thicker walls, fewer windows and less ventilation — superior “thermal envelopes,” as a report on the early results puts it. They are also less suited to energy-gobbling activities like computer data crunching, the downfall of some youthful but middling performers. …

Unlike cities that depend heavily on automobiles, New York racks up most of its carbon dioxide emissions — nearly 80 percent — in heating and cooling buildings. Tracking this energy use is deemed crucial to meeting the city goal of cutting overall emissions by about a third by 2030, to slash costs and fight climate change.

New York’s largest buildings — just 2 percent of the roughly one million buildings in the city — account for 45 percent of the energy expended by the entire building stock.

We took the data — which is available online — and mapped it by address. (We chose to use greenhouse gas emissions, since the metric used by the Times, its Energy Star rating, had far fewer data points. Clicking an address will reveal both its GHG emissions and efficiency rating.)

If you zoom in on Manhattan (the densest cluster of buildings) you can see that locations in Midtown, just south of Central Park, have higher GHG emissions (indicated by more red in the pie charts).

One of the factors in the energy scores is who’s using the building’s energy.

The disclosure law exempts buildings in which more than 10 percent of the space is devoted to trading floors, data centers and other energy-intensive activities.

Yet work spaces that hum 24/7 seem nonetheless to have played into the results, including [LEED-certified] 7 World Trade Center’s score.

“Seventy-four is good, but I was initially surprised that three of our older buildings scored higher than 7 World Trade Center, and it had to do principally with tenancy,” said John Lieber, who oversees buildings at ground zero for Silverstein Properties. He noted that 7 World Trade Center’s tenants included firms like Moody’s, the financial rating agency.

The higher-efficiency-scoring properties he alluded to — 120 Wall Street, the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway and 570 Seventh Avenue — house nonprofit groups, modeling agencies and other tenants whose needs are of the basic light-switch variety, he said.

(It is our understanding that some nonprofit groups also use the internet; we will update this article once we can confirm that.)

These data may become more useful over time, as indicators of how buildings have improved their efficiency scores or as a means of tracking how neighborhoods have gotten better or declined. For now, we must be content with what we’ve already learned: the greenest building in New York is a windowless one built in 1920 that is home to a modeling agency that never turns on its lights.

Source

City’s Law Tracking Energy Use Yields Some Surprises, New York Times

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

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Lead-bullet ad targets NRA, misses the point

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 21, 2012

Lead-bullet ad targets NRA, misses the point

By Susie Cagle

Gun violence is America’s lurking health crisis. But not exactly the way the Center for Biological Diversity means in its full-page New York Times ad today.

Click to embiggen.

None of this is untrue! A drop in environmental lead has even been correlated with a (moderate) drop in violent crime — but that is cold comfort for the people who live in poor urban areas that are afflicted by both gun violence and environmental pollution that isn’t born from hunted meat or shooting ranges.

On a day when the National Rifle Association called for armed guards at every school in America, maybe getting rid of the lead in those would-be guards’ bullets shouldn’t necessarily be our first priority?

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

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California releases draft rules for regulating fracking

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 19, 2012

California releases draft rules for regulating fracking

By Philip Bump

Jerry Brown, the once-and-current king (governor) of California, yesterday announced a draft proposal for regulating fracking. Because if there’s one thing California needs, it’s more fissures beneath it. And/or more earthquakes.

Though that’s not the tack Brown took. From the L.A. Times:

The proposed rules, released Tuesday, would require energy companies to disclose for the first time the chemicals they inject deep into the ground to break apart rock and release oil. They also would have to reveal the location of the wells where they use the procedure.

Though fracking has unlocked vast amounts of previously unreachable fossil fuels elsewhere, environmentalists and public health advocates in California have raised safety questions about the hundreds of chemicals used — many of them known carcinogens — and the potential for drinking water contamination.

I mean, nothing about the earthquakes? Well, you’re the governor.

Wikipedia

Oil pumps near I-5.

The region that has oil companies salivating is the Monterey Shale, a stretch of rock running from Modesto through the Central Valley of the state, which some think could contain 300 billion barrels of oil. At today’s per-barrel price, that’s $26.4 trillion dollars sitting under a bunch of walnut groves and cattle ranches.

But California has a … complicated relationship with fossil fuel extractors, dating back to Daniel Plainview’s New Boston strike. It’s been the first (and only) state to enact a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions, and voters defended that plan, overcoming millions in oil company funding. Also, California votes Democrat about 90-to-10 (except Southern California).

So you can see the friction. It’s like the San Andreas fault of politics: Big Oil versus the State of California. Even with this draft proposal, there are concerns that the state isn’t creating friction enough.

Environmental and industry groups said the draft regulations were a good first step in what is expected to be a lengthy rule-making process. But environmentalists signaled a coming fight over the level of disclosure, noting a provision that would allow oil companies to withhold disclosure of chemicals they claim to be proprietary. …

A recent analysis by Bloomberg News found that companies nationwide withheld from their disclosure reports one out of every five chemicals they used in fracking.

The “lengthy rule-making process” can’t happen fast enough. As the Times notes, a federal auction last week in Sacramento leased nearly 18,000 acres of shale land in 10 minutes.

And, not to beat a dead horse here, but the state really might want to consider that it is riddled with geological faults — not in the Central Valley, to be sure, but even there earthquakes occur. Especially if you start breaking apart rock and injecting fluids to make it slip around more. And what about already-leak-prone wastewater disposal wells lined with cement? The U.S. Geological Survey suggests that there is a 62 percent chance the Bay Area will see a 6.7-or-stronger quake by 2032. The odds that a major earthquake won’t have ripples 100 miles away near Modesto are slim.

Just something to think about. Good luck with the rule-making process. Try and beef it up. And, if you can, try to get it done before 2032.

Source

California issues proposed rules for ‘fracking’, Los Angeles Times

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

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Fossil fuels beat renewables in race for state and local incentives

by Myrna Posted on December 3, 2012

Fossil fuels beat renewables in race for state and local incentives

By Philip Bump

Over the weekend, The New York Times launched a series considering how state and local incentives to private business benefit the localities that bestow them. The bottom line seems to be: not much. Incentives frequently fail to prevent companies from relocating or going out of business, and often cost huge amounts of money while returning very little value to the public.

Reading the report, we couldn’t help but wonder how those incentives — a combination of tax breaks, zoning changes, and contributions — broke down by industry. (Full disclosure: We have a bit of a chip on our shoulders about fossil fuels.) The report offers a teaser hint:

Far and away the most incentive money is spent on manufacturing, about $25.5 billion a year, followed by agriculture. The oil, gas and mining industries come in third, and the film business fourth. Technology is not far behind, as companies like Twitter and Facebook increasingly seek tax breaks and many localities bet on the industry’s long-term viability.

Third place is instructive, but not nearly enough. Happily, the Times also included a searchable database of incentives by company name. So we searched it.

First, a note on methodology. Here’s what the database contains:

The New York Times spent 10 months investigating business incentives awarded by hundreds of cities, counties and states. Since there is no nationwide accounting of these incentives, The Times put together a database and found that local governments give up $80.3 billion in incentives each year [stemming from] 1,874 [different] programs.

We searched the database for company names we associated with either the fossil fuel or renewable energy sectors, and threw in the following words for good measure: coal, oil, gas, ethanol, wind, solar. Some expected names didn’t appear (Solyndra; remember, this isn’t federal money); some appeared often but were too broad in scope to be included in our analysis of energy subsidies (Halliburton).

Now, the findings:

Of the 103 incentives we identified, fossil fuel companies received $2.5 billion compared to renewables’ $382 million — or more than six times as much.
Of the total for renewables, $118 million went from the state of Iowa to ethanol companies. Iowa also gave $1.2 million to Plymouth Oil.
The most generous state was Pennsylvania, but only due to the $1.6 billion it offered to Shell (something we covered here).
Excluding Pennsylvania’s largesse, the most generous state was Louisiana, which offered $426 million — all to fossil fuel companies.
If we’d included Halliburton, it would have added only about $15 million to the total.

A chart and some maps. In each map, the darker the color, the more money went to incentives. (Note: We excluded the Pennsylvania/Shell incentive from these because it dwarfed the other data.)

Click to embiggen.

Fossil fuel incentives, by state

Renewable incentives, by state

All energy incentives, by state

Here’s the spreadsheet we used to make these calculations. See something we missed? Leave it in the comments.

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

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Renewable energy consumption is expected to keep rising in the U.S. — sort of

by Myrna Posted on December 3, 2012

Renewable energy consumption is expected to keep rising in the U.S. — sort of

By Philip Bump

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has what seems, at first blush, like bad news. Renewable energy consumption in the U.S. is expected to drop 2.6 percent this year. Here’s a graph of the dip. (Note: Both the 2012 and 2013 values are estimates.)

Click to embiggen.

But buried in the data is the explanation: The drop is only due to hydropower “[beginning] to return to its long-term average.” Take out hydropower, and you have a 4.2 percent increase.

Click to embiggen.

But there’s another caveat. The estimates are based on two assumptions.

The first is that the wind production tax credit (PTC) is renewed. This is a pretty big “if.” The tax credit, you may remember, is a bolster that allows the wind industry to compete in the rigged production game with fossil fuels. Fossil fuel companies are eager to see the PTC expire as it’s slated to at the end of the month, with one Koch-allied group pushing hard on the issue. If the PTC isn’t renewed, it’s safe to assume that the projections above will prove to be far too optimistic.

That said, there is some good wind news today. The New York Times notes that the government is holding another offshore auction next year — but this time, for wind energy. How much is generated by that auction — in terms of money and electricity — depends on what happens on Capitol Hill by the 31st.

The other caveat in those EIA projections is that solar continues to grow at about 30 percent a year. The solar industry (whose own PTC is expiring at the end of 2013) isn’t sitting on its hands. Over the weekend, the Times reported on how the industry is taking a page from Tupperware in selling its panels.

Environmentalists, government officials and sales representatives have been trying to get Americans to go solar for decades, with limited success. Despite the long push, solar power still represents less than 1 percent of electricity generated in the United States. Home solar panel setups, which typically run $25,000 or more, are considered by many consumers to be the province of the rich or idealistic.

So now solar companies are adhering to a path blazed by Tupperware decades ago, figuring that the best sales people are often enthusiastic customers willing to share their experiences with friends and neighbors — and perhaps earn a referral fee on any sales that result.

It’s a smart strategy: As we’ve noted before, peer pressure shows a demonstrable effect on solar panel adoption.

And, finally, some context. Here’s the breakdown of energy consumption between renewables, nuclear, and fossil fuels.

A 4 percent increase in renewable consumption is better than a decrease. But it will take a whole lot of solar-ware parties before we’re actually making a real dent in our greenhouse gas emissions.

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

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Paris to ban older cars, ruining all of your chase scenes

by Myrna Posted on November 26, 2012

Paris to ban older cars, ruining all of your chase scenes

By Philip Bump

If you know Paris, you know that it is primarily populated by men with pencil-thin mustaches who wear berets and carry around baguettes in paper bags. A lot of them wear shirts with thick horizontal stripes. These men don’t talk much, they mostly loiter around in the background speaking a language comprised mostly of sniffs and grumbles. (There are also women in Paris; they are uniformly stunning.)

roger4336

This is exactly what Paris looks like today.

The protagonists of the city are the superspies, the well-coiffed American and British men who use Paris as a rendezvous point with clumsy, heavyset agents from Russia or Bulgaria. Invariably, these meetings end poorly, and the superspies — though heavily outnumbered — manage to effect an escape by driving vintage cars along the banks of the Seine. Depending on the day, the Bulgarians either end up in the river, emerging with a spluttering curse, a fish draped across their heads, or they vanish from the scene in some sort of horrific explosion.

But all of that is likely to change, ruining the Paris that we know so well. The mayor of the city is going to ban vintage cars.

From the Times:

[T]he ban would include many of the most recognizably French cars, including the Citroën 2CV, known as the Deux Chevaux; the Citroën DS, celebrated for its clean, distinctive design; the Renault 4L, a practical Everyman’s car of the 1960s and ’70s; and many classic Peugeots. …

The ban would apply to private and commercial vehicles that would be older than 17 years in 2014 and therefore do not comply with existing European standards for the tailpipe emissions that cause smog.

A spokesman for the city estimated that 367,000 cars would be affected. Also targeted are heavy trucks older than 18 years and motorcycles older than 10.

Oh la la, etc.!

The primary motivation for Mayor Delanoë’s decision (an umlaut! How European!) is a set of regulations issued by the E.U. aimed at cutting pollution from automobiles. But Delanoë has been on an anti-car jeremiad for some time. Over the past decade, one expert notes, car traffic in the city dropped by 25 percent.

The plan would extend the mayor’s efforts to make the city more pedestrian-friendly by reducing the number of cars. These efforts include introducing the Vélib’ bicycle rental program, establishing the Autolib’ electric-car rental system and cutting vehicle traffic along the banks of the Seine.

We share this story primarily because it will have a ripple effect. Not in the sense that other cities will soon ban their signature vehicles, but because the next time you travel to Paris for a bit of skulduggery, your adrenaline-drenched chase will be an exhausting one, taking place on a bike. Or, worse, you’ll be zipping along the Champs Élysées in a silent electric car, suddenly able to hear all of the various tut-tuts of those striped-shirt gentleman and the guttural curses of the fruit stand vendors who shake their fists as you unnecessarily plough through their wares.

Source

Premature Retirement? Old-Car Owners Bristle at Proposed Ban, New York Times

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

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