Beneath the fold you will find news and notes, community announcements, and our eco-diary roundup.
Peruse the eKos Library to find previously listed diaries. You can also follow eKos on Twitter.
Tonight's editor: patrickz
All views expressed by today's editor do not necessarily represent those of eKos or eKos listed diarists.
You will often here with some justification the need to develop economically outweighs the environmental risk; in the short term. You may have enough revenue to educate the population but you by then may have degraded the environment to such an extent it cannot support them. Indeed you may spark a war with your neighbor if you have diverted resources such as main rivers to suit your own purposes but have starved them of their primary food source.
Such is the case with the proposed dams of the Mekong in Laos
He felt there was no alternative. "We have done studies on micro-energy and renewables, but they are expensive. I don't think the world can subsidise that. If we do it ourselves, only cheap energy from hydropower will do."
I would argue that the world cannot afford not to help developing nations attain their goals through renewables, the only reason the cost is high is that we are not expanding their use ourselves. If we increase the production capacity the price will come down.
Beneath the fold you will find news and notes, community announcements, and our eco-diary roundup.
Peruse the eKos Library to find previously listed diaries. You can also follow eKos on Twitter.
Tonight's editor: patrick
All views expressed by today's editor do not necessarily represent those of eKos or eKos listed diarists.
Beneath the fold you will find news and notes, community announcements, and our eco-diary roundup.
Peruse the eKos Library to find previously listed diaries. You can also follow eKos on Twitter.
Tonight's editor: patrickz
All views expressed by today's editor do not necessarily represent those of eKos or eKos listed diarists.
Beneath the fold you will find news and notes, community announcements, and our eco-diary roundup.
Peruse the eKos Library to find previously listed diaries. You can also follow eKos on Twitter.
Tonight's editor: ellinorianne
Please remember to rec the BP Catastrophe Liveblog Mothership: 104
And don't forget to read tonight's Ecojustice,EcoJustice: Tribal chiefs help rape victims.
All views expressed by today's editor do not necessarily represent those of eKos or eKos listed diarists.
These days, good-paying industrial jobs need not exact untimely deaths from pollution. In fact, development of clean renewable energy generators – the likes of wind turbines, solar cells, biomass – would create and support good industrial jobs in America. Blue collar union workers and green collar environmentalists are pressing lawmakers to pass comprehensive climate change legislation. The BlueGreens told audiences in August the choice for lawmakers is leaving a legacy of environmental hell or bequeathing climate unchanged.
Good science, bad news:
Despite growing awareness of the problem of plastic pollution in the world's oceans, little solid scientific information existed to illustrate the nature and scope of the issue. Now, a team of researchers from Sea Education Association (SEA), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the University of Hawaii (UH) published a study of plastic marine debris based on data collected over 22 years by undergraduate students in the latest issue of the journal Science.
A previously undefined expanse of the western North Atlantic has been found to contain high concentrations of plastic debris, comparable to those observed in the region of the Pacific commonly referred to as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."
The greatest concentration of the more than 64,000 pieces of collected plastic was centered at a latitude roughly corresponding to Atlanta, Georgia.
Said SEA scientist Kara Lavender Law, the Science paper's lead author, "Not only does this important data set provide the first rigorous scientific estimate of the extent and amount of floating plastic at an ocean-basin scale, but the data also confirm that basic ocean physics explains why the plastic accumulates in this region so far from shore."
Surprisingly, despite a great increase in the disposal of plastics over the 22 years of the study, the concentration has not increased.
The whereabouts of the "missing plastic" is unknown.
This is disturbing on many levels, and the report itself offers some seemingly possible explanations, although measurably improved efforts at preventing or recapturing spilled industrial resin pellets is not considered likely, as such residue constitutes but a small fraction of the overall material; and dispersal through anomalous currents and eddies is not considered capable of having offset the fourfold increase in input over the course of the study.
Possible sinks for floating plastic debris include: fragmentation, sedimentation, shore deposition, and ingestion by marine organisms.
It's unlikely that enough plastics could have broken down that much over the study's timeframe, and there's no evidence suggesting much of it sinks.
Because the cohort of pelagic organisms that ingest plastic, their ingestion rates, and the fate of ingested plastics are unknown, it is impossible to estimate the size of this sink.
In other words, we just don't know. The remaining accumulation is massive, but even more is missing, and there are no good explanations. Not that any truly plausible explanations could be defined as "good," anyway.
Further, the model indicates that the minimum time for surface tracer (i.e. drifter or plastic) to reach the collection center from the U.S. eastern seaboard is less than 60 days, at least half the time required to travel from Europe or Africa. The influence of the Gulf Stream is particularly evident in some of the fastest propagation times – 40 days from Washington, DC and Miami, FL, for example – in which tracer traveled along the coast before entering the gyre interior. While not indicative of the size or location of landbased sources, or of the age of debris, these estimates demonstrate how quickly plastic entering the ocean near major U.S. population centers could impact an area more than 1000 km offshore.
Just another contribution of our fossil fuel economy to the world's ecosystems.
Here we are standing on the brink of a crisis greater than any war, and in itself may be the cause of the greatest conflict ever to be seen by man.
We are turning our oceans into a plastic soup and yet some still insist this is only a physical pollution yet they are also wrong.
We flood our oceans with oil every year let alone merely with the outrageous accidents in the Gulf of Mexico and the slow strangulation of the Niger Delta.
We continue to pollute the very water we drink and then spend billions of dollars and create additional pollution in cleaning it sufficiently for human consumption.
We pump green house gases into the air with unabated ferocity as if our own doom was something to look forward too, yet some still insist on burying their heads in the burning sand.
Some thoughts on offshore oil drilling.... crossposted at my blog, http://lurkerspace.blogspot.com/
What the Blogathon has been missing thus far:
I'm still a __ing believer; and why wouldn't I be since the information readily available from the beginning of this incident has been so clear and above board. A free and open flow of accurate information was at our fingertips everyday, shame the information the next day disagreed completely with that of the day before, heh, what could be more open than that?
Color me skeptical if you will. ,
I've suffered with varying degrees of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity for twenty years, so I was one of the early devotees to environmentally friendly cleaning products. Given that most American families regularly use toxic chemical cleaners in their homes, housekeeping creates a huge impact -- our sinks and toilets create a nasty assault on our health and the environment.
Most "freshening" chemicals contain VOC's that cause respiratory problems, and chlorine is a menace to health and environment. The truth is that most companies don't have to disclose the chemicals they use in the cleaning products they sell. And there are a lot of harmful toxins in the products we think make us clean.
Back when Utah had a governor who thought there was such a thing as air pollution and global warming, the state funded a study by Synapse Energy Economics, Inc, with the help of the Harvard School of Public Health. It estimated, predictably, that each year over 2 billion dollars in health and water costs are wasted, and approximately 200 lives lost due to coal plant power production in Utah. Not to mention that other "externality" to coal power, global warming.
Wow! Our state funded study showed us that that nasty air we see every winter is bad for us? It's time for us all to come out for energy efficiency and renewable energy power generation, right? Governor Herbert?
Of course not, this is Utah, and what happened next (below the fold) was also as predictable as it is sad.
Pensacola Bay, in the panhandle of Florida, is about 115 nautical miles from the site of the BP disaster. Nautical miles are slightly larger than statute miles, or the miles you are used to measuring on land.
On land, 115 nautical miles would be the same as 132 statute miles. In a car, it takes more than two hours to cover that distance. That's the distance from Washington, DC to Philadelphia. Toledo is closer than that to Cleveland. Sacramento is closer than that to San Francisco.
If something was burning in Cleveland, the folks in Toledo would be surprised to see it show up in their city. If something was spilled in Philly, you wouldn't expect to smell it in Washington. If something fouled the air in San Francisco, you wouldn't expect it to hurt people in Sacramento.
I make the point because our friends at the EPA have been measuring the levels of benzene, toluene, and xylene in the air along the shore of the Witch's Brew formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico. If you look at their numbers for the area around Pensacola Bay it is clear the concentrations of these compounds in the air have increased substantially over the last few weeks.
This is not an area I'm very familiar with but apparently the complex where I live represents three of the 9,000 NYC buildings that play a large part in New York City air failing federal health standards by burning a very dirty heating oil.
A report from Environmental Defense Fund shows that just one percent of New York City's buildings, those burning the dirtiest grades of heating oil, produce more pollution than all the city's cars and trucks combined. The report "The Bottom of the Barrel: How the Dirtiest Heating Oil Pollutes Our Air and Harms Our Health," advocates phasing out the dirty oil by 2020.
The pollution produced by burning No. 4 or 6 oil—some 1,000 tons of it every year—threatens the health of all New Yorkers, creating a rain of toxic soot that aggravates asthma, increases the risk of cancer, exacerbates respiratory illnesses and can cause premature death.
Below the fold are some of the politics involved and the temporary solution my complex came up with.
It's rare that I disdainfully bury my face into my palm and massage my temples with my thumb and middle finger in quiet frustration so early in the morning. But the sheer lunacy of one woman's brazen suggestion at how I do my job nonetheless prompted me to facepalm around 8:30 yesterday. I have to say, that's the earliest time I've ever been so confused and saddened at the same time, so much so that I had such a reaction.
Read below the fold to find what exactly she said that crushed my spirits and prompted the palming of my face.
Imagine your local Widget Factory, employs dozens of workers,
to put together hundreds of the latest Must-have Widgets, each and every day.
Now imagine this Widget Factory, in the hopes of increasing profits,
took all its industrial by-product Gunk, gathered them up each day,
and quietly dumped them, each night around midnight, when no one was looking,
in the local River waterway. Pollution be gone!
Instant Profit Gain, right? No costly "Gunk Processing" equipment to buy or operate. No extra hidden costs, need be added to that Price of a Widget -- which could keep consumers from flocking to Widget Retail Outlets, right?
Wrong ... ONE Big Problem in this Free Market scheme ...
The Folks living downstream on that local River waterway!
The Folks making a living on the beauty and productivity of that River --
They all might notice that somethings up, in their once pristine Waterway?
They might eventually figure it out too, that "Widget One" has been "cutting corners", in its responsibility to be "good neighbors".
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hosting four public information meetings on the proposed study of the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and its potential impacts on drinking water...The meetings will provide public information about the proposed study scope and design. EPA will solicit public comments on the draft study plan.
The public meetings will be held on:
* July 8 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. CDT at the Hilton Fort Worth in Fort Worth, Texas
* July 13 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. MDT at the Marriot Tech Center’s Rocky Mountain Events Center in Denver, Colo.
* July 22 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT at the Hilton Garden Inn in Canonsburg, Pa.
* August 12 at the Anderson Performing Arts Center at Binghamton University in Binghamton, N.Y. for 3 sessions - 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT
Go below the fold for more essential information.
"We welcome Judge Feldman’s decision to lift the moratorium on deepwater operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
"The administration acted appropriately in its immediate steps to inspect every rig in the Gulf following the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Those inspections were necessary to assure Americans that offshore operations were safe and subject to appropriate oversight."In addition, the oil and natural gas industry took immediate steps to review practices and equipment to ensure safety and environmental protection, through the formation of two industry-wide task forces. The task forces provided important insights to the Department of Interior during its earliest examination of Gulf operations.
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