What's In Store For The Gulf: GE's Battle To Leave PCB's In The Hudson River

How old will you be in 35 years?

If the 80-Years War over cleaning up PCBs in the Hudson is any indication, that's how old you'll be when the entire clean up of the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe is finished. (If you want to use another environmental accident as yardstick, the 250,000 barrel Exxon Valdez spill has still not been completely ameliorated in the almost 21 years since it happened.)

Monsanto began manufacturing carcinogenic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in 1929. General Electric began using them almost immediately in the manufacturing of transformers, capacitors and other electrical equipment at their Hudson Falls plant for more than 40 years as insulating material.

The discovery of PCBs toxicity and subsequent government action began in 1977 when the manufacture and use of PCBs was outlawed. The Hudson is still not cleaned up almost 35 years later.

Because they are long-lived, semi-volatile and don’t dissolve in water, PCBs can travel long distances (the 200-mile stretch of the Hudson River below G.E.’s factories is considered the biggest Superfund site in the United States).

The potential impact doesn’t stop at the tip of Manhattan. Because of their stability and ability to travel long distances, PCBs can migrate around the planet. PCBs are part of a global class of chemicals known to migrate from warmer regions to colder regions. Inuit people living in the Arctic thousands of miles from any industrial source are known to carry some of the highest body burdens of PCBs on the planet.

PCBs are also fat-soluble, which means that they concentrate as they move up the food chain. Animals at the top of the food chain – especially marine mammals like polar bears and dolphins – have dangerously high levels of the chemical, which they lack the ability to detoxify.

Humans, too, are contaminated. PCBs regularly top the list of chemicals found in human tissue surveys.

As early as the 1930s, problems caused by PCB exposures of workers were widely known by G.E. executives who met with colleagues from Monsanto and other companies to share information on the “systemic effects” of PCBs and other chlorinated hydrocarbons, including chloracne, a disfiguring skin condition.

Dredging finally began in earnest in May of 2009, almost 25 years after the first lawsuits against G.E. were brought.

According to The New York Times, "G.E. is supervising and paying for the cleanup, which federal officials have estimated could cost more than $750 million. Industry experts say the ultimate cost could be many times than that, however. (G.E. declines to give an estimate.)"

The Times also says, "...G.E has reserved the right, after a review of the operation in 2010, to reject the project’s much larger second phase. Federal environmental officials have said that if it did that, they would most likely order the cleanup to proceed and levy enormous penalties against the company."

Chances are that a good proportion of us reading this will be long dead before the Gulf is cleaned up and restored. The rest of us will be well into middle age. If they're lucky, our grandchildren will know the Gulf as it stood on April 18, 2010.

If they are very lucky.

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Oil Hearings: Somebody Spoke And I Went Into A Dream

Although reverie is much too pleasant and lighthearted a word for it, I fell into one of those strange drifts of thought where anything can happen, where fantasy and logic meld effortlessly.

In the crazy daydream, in my arms I carried a few quarts of motor oil in garishly-colored plastic bottles when suddenly I was gripped by an uncontrollable, really an unconscious, impulse to twist off the caps and begin pouring it (take your pick):

1. into Bethesda Fountain in Central Park,
2. over the Channel Gardens that lead to the statue of Prometheus where the famous Christmas tree is sited in Rockefeller Center,
3. into the Hudson River,
4. over the floor of Grand Central's main concourse,
5. all over Fashion Avenue's "Walk of Fame,"
6. onto a Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum, or maybe one of the Egyptian sarcophagi, etc., and,
7. for good measure, I found a few frogs sitting in the Lake in Central Park and gave them a good dose of the poisonous goo.

Maybe a quart or two for each prime location. Places that represent the "ecology" of the great city. Not a lot of oil, mind you. Let's say two gallons total would do the trick.

I wondered what would happen to me. Certainly I would be arrested. Most likely, if the authorities didn't have me committed, I would do jail time, be forced to make restitution (in the case of the Rembrandt probably community service unto the seventh generation). Lord knows what the papers would make of my actions.

It's likely I wouldn't be brought up before a Congressional panel wearing a three-thousand-dollar suit while I blamed my subcontractors, associates, friends, neighbors and the little boy who lived down the lane. I certainly wouldn't be flying in and out of Washington on a private jet. I wouldn't get no stinkin' $200 lunch out of my anti-social behavior.

I'd be branded an outlaw. A lunatic. A miscreant. A sociopath. A scarlet O for oil would be blazed into my skin.

I'd be fined, jailed, shamed, and pretty much enjoined to keep my grubby hands off any and all oil products for the rest of my pathetic life.

We increasingly live in a two-tiered society. Everyone knows it. The Tea Parties in their off-kilter way express it. The divisions in American society are palpable and frightening. Which side of the divide will our children and grandchildren end up on?

To get off scot-free when dousing the world with oil, it's wiser to spill 200,000-plus gallons a day than just a gallon or two. Then you're a somebody. Then you'd make a multimillion dollar salary and be among those untouchable by the real law.

You remember that: the law of crime and punishment, not crime and lashes with a wet noodle.

No clean environment, no future. No justice, no peace.

Fire In The Gulf, Wind Off The Cape

Almost at the same time the Coast Guard was setting fire to the oil sludge erupting from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave the preliminary go-ahead to the giant 130-turbine, 420-megawatt Cape Wind project in Horseshoe Shoal, Nantucket Sound.

Forces aspiring to stop the wind farm, claiming that it will spoil views, upset some sort of tenuous Wampanoag tribal traditions, disrupt marine life, and kill seabirds are already indulging in some big-money grumbling and will no doubt fight the project in courts, perhaps for another decade. A word the right wing ceaselessly bandies about comes to mind. Elitists.

This NIMBY stance by the rich - liberal or conservative - is despicable. It is indicative of a larger, cancerous problem in the body politic, namely the inability of the elite to lead rather than simply control and manipulate public circumstances to suit private appetites. (Goldman Sachs anyone?)

The red herrings being tossed into the slumgullion of this argument are easily refuted: 

Seabirds will suffer in the beginning surely and then they will adjust and adapt to the whirling blades capturing the wind. Is there any hope whatsoever that the same birds will ever adapt to rising planet temperatures, depleted or disrupted fish population, or the effects of oil spills as in the Gulf? Furthermore, according to a research paper by National University of Singapore professor Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool, “wind farms killed approximately seven thousand birds in the United States in 2006 but nuclear plants killed about 327,000 and fossil-fueled power plants 14.5 million.” The biggest killers of birds in the United States today? House cats and plate glass windows. Weigh it for yourself.

The disruption of marine life argument should be read clearly as "the disruption of commercial and recreational fishing businesses," rather than being allowed to be draped in the clothing of environmental righteousness. (The Duke’s County/Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen Association plans to file suit against the federal Minerals Management Service for violations under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.) Navigation will be made somewhat more difficult certainly, but the men who pilot fishing boats in and around Cape Cod and its islands surely are no strangers to navigational difficulties. Rocky shoals, hard currents, storms and other heavy weather abound. Additionally, the Nantucket harbor entrance itself is already flanked by man-made jetties extending almost a mile into the sea, and the regular dredging of boating lanes has a significant, yet accepted, impact on sea life. There is no outcry over these intrusions. 

The hypocrisy of the Wampanoags is also detestable. The tribe, which numbered about 6,000 people at the dawn of European settlement says that their traditional ways are going to be interrupted. In no way denigrating Native American claims of historical hardship, every single 21st century human has to embrace and correct what is happening to the larger ecosystem. The entire population of Wampanoags now numbers about 2,300 individuals of varying degree of purity of lineage. In spite of past deprivations, surely they have no claim on stopping what amounts to a clean-energy technological revolution. Ironically, while resting their standard upon fighting the Nantucket wind farm, the Wampanoags are simultaneously fighting to establish a state-sanctioned gambling casino. Clean, renewable energy vs. fleecing the desperate or mentally ill of their money? The Wampanoags should stop talking tradition trash.

The view is the real crux of the conflict. Are the enormous turbines really eyesores? Some with a grander sensibility might say the wind farms make the landscape more beautiful given the underlying assumption they are providing super-clean energy. The turbines are all over Scandinavia, Great Britain, Germany and Brazil, countries scarcely without tender sensibilities. And just because members of the political elite can't see them, it doesn't mean that large, unsightly generating plants with chimneys belching foul-smelling brown smoke into the sky don't exist.

Agitation against such progressive developments tells us just how self-absorbed and small-minded elites of any stripe can be. The liberal elite should be leading this charge, not hamstringing the efforts at establishing a new energy regimen.

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Coal, Death, and Unions

 We know that coal is not an unequivocal good for our country or world, the way it is mined and burned now. Nor are unions an undiluted good for either their workers or the overall economy.

Coal is with us, however, for better or worse, workers are with us, and unions are still the best way yet to be conceived to protect working people's health, safety, security and wages.

The United Mine Workers Union has squandered its patrimony by not standing up more firmly to the mining companies. Is it better to die in a pit 500 feet in the ground like trapped rats burned and gassed to death, or to stand up and organize, resist and if necessary shed blood for what is fair and right? UMW: look to your history for inspiration.

The tragedy that is unfolding in the Massey Energy Company's Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, dramatizes what happens at a non-union facility when the diabolical neglect of a mining company and government indifference intersect.

Upper Big Branch was fined three times in March alone because of dangerous methane and CO2 levels. Workers have to report problems to authorities anonymously because the Massey Energy Company, the largest mining company in central Appalachia, has bitterly resisted unionization and persecutes any worker who speaks out on crucial issues. Federal and state governments are reactive rather than pro-active concerning safety issues and are essentially AWOL when it comes to environmental damage until the evidence is sickeningly overwhelming. Prevention is worth - oh, a few million pounds of cure.

In 2008 Massey paid a $20 million fine to the EPA for violating water pollution permit limits at its mines and plants 4,520 times between January 2000 and December 2006. Massey had polluted and clogged hundreds of streams and rivers in Kentucky and West Virginia by releasing countless thousands of tons of metals, sediments and acid mine drainage into those states' waterways. It took 8 years from the first incident to the moment the fine was leveled.

Massey is a company hell-bent on creating environmental and human disasters. Massey CEO Don Blankenship is unapologetic: “Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process,” he said. (Translation: we know there are laws but we don't care and violate them anyway because our profits are more important than people or the environment.)

Due primarily to Blankenship's efforts, only one-quarter of mine workers in Appalachian states are unionized, down from 95% less than 30 years ago. This has bred more environmental and human catastrophe at a time when, in fact, more and better safety technologies than ever before are available.

In addition, Blankenship has laid out a plot to pollute West Virginia's political process with campaign contributions that dwarf anything honest opponents can muster. When Massey lost a $50 million dollar jury award to another company that Massey had forced out of business, Blankenship set to work to dismantle plaintiff-friendly courts in West Virginia.

In 2004 Blankenship gave $3.5 million to back the successful candidacy of obscure Republican Brent Benjamin for a seat on the West Virginia Supreme Court. That's how important putting morally corrupt judges in place is to Massey. (Blankenship’s gargantuan contribution inspired the U.S. Supreme Court to order Benjamin to step down from an appeal involving Massey.)

All this in a state that consistently ranks 48th or 49th in per capita GDP nationally. (Per capita income for all West Virginians is around $30K. Blankenship's personal income is approximately $34 million per year, 1100 times larger than the average. Is it any wonder he's padding the pockets of friendly, right wing politicians?)

Do you hear that desperate sound coming from underground? It's the extremist right leaning madness that's taken a deat hold on one of our poorest states, which happens also to be our most environmentally damaged state.

The United Mine Workers Union needs to look to its militant roots and stop serving as the facilitator for Blankenship and others like him. The UMW membership needs to stop sitting on their hands and raise their fists in the air.
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Don't Go Near The Water - Pollution and Natural Rights

Watch: Don't Go Near The Water by the Beach Boys (1971)

Think quickly: to whom do public waterways, lakes, wetlands, and ponds truly belong?

Nominally they belong to the famously elusive “We the people.” Federal, state, county and municipal governments own millions of square miles of waterways; that is to say, we own them collectively. Private individuals "own" hundreds of thousands more waterways. Corporations "own" yet others. But, only the people can truly own such a resource.

Some waters are useful for drinking, some for recreation, others for aesthetic reasons. But all fit into an overall ecosystem that provides each of us with a safe, “big picture” environment.

Healthful drinking, bathing, cooking, and swimming; safe fishing and hunting; visual delight, and overall good health are collective, natural rights of all human beings.

Currently, arguments that wended their way through the Supreme Court over 5 or more years ago quibble about the phrase “navigable waters,” and have left gaping holes in the EPA’s jurisdiction over polluters of various states.

For nigh unto 40 years, “navigable waters” was correctly interpreted by regulators and courts so as to include many large wetlands and streams that connected to major rivers, and thence to the oceans. Essentially all waters were covered throughout the country. Polluters, essentially misguided, greedy misers, challenged that idea.

The two Supreme Court decisions suggested that waterways entirely within one state, creeks that sometimes go dry, and lakes “unconnected” to larger water systems may not be “navigable waters” and are therefore not covered by the act — even though pollution from such waterways can make its way into sources of drinking water well beyond artificial state borders. Everything is connected and the Earth is small.

If pollutants make their way into drinking water, you can bet your last dollar they are making their way into fish, animals, and crops, and thence into your and your children’s fatty tissue, creating the perfect medium for cancers and other illnesses.

By what right do polluters act in such irresponsible ways? Simple. They hold to property rights as described by antique thinkers from Locke and Madison to Hegel, and finally to today’s radical libertarians. The writings of these mindless property advocates has to be discarded now and forever, and the stronger notion of the common wealth has to replace their destructive philosophies.

Polluters may be industries that dump everything from radioactive materials to heavy metals like zinc, copper, chromium, cadmium, etc., into our collective waters. The polluters may be cities and towns that do not properly treat sewage and storm runoff from roads. Untreated insecticides, paint, solvents, spilled motor oil and gasoline, bacteria and pathogens wash into our ground water, into streams and rivers and eventually into drinking water supplies.

Farms, even “organic” farms, contribute mightily to the problem. Food factories – pig and chicken farming, in particular – discharge antibiotics and hormones. Manure fouls groundwater supplies and now washes 60 percent more nitrogen into waterways than it did in the '70s, creating 230 dead zones like those in the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

But, because of the absurd theories offered by polluters, namely that ground water or waters contained within one state are not covered by the clean water efforts of the federal government, the EPA finds itself not able to mount costly counter arguments to establish prosecutorial jurisdiction against polluters in the individual states. 

The Supreme Court right wingers, stuck in backwards notions of 18^th and 19^th century property rights, acting fittingly like chickens with their heads cut off, ignore the intent of the clean water legislation of the last four decades and commit instead to polluters. 

Just who has the right to water? 

“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”

Marketing Environmentalism 3 - The Pitfall of Apocalypticism

Even Sir Isaac Newton succumbed to end-of-the-world speculation. Based on biblical  research, he predicted it would come in the year 2060. Who can forget the weirdness of Y2K? Recently we have been exposed to the ruckus over the Mayan calendar's 2012 doomsday scenario. Global warming champions exemplify another, if subtler, form of this syndrome. 

We have met the enemy and he is our apocalyptic self.

Perfectly well-intentioned proponents of the Global Warming Theory have fallen prey to this pseudo-religious fervor that never seems to entirely disappear from human thinking. Whether global warming is real (which it is) is not material to our well being in the here and now. There are more concrete, existential threats on our doorstep at this very moment and apocalyptic thinking is destroying our chances to do something about them today, tomorrow, next week.

This morning the American Heart Association reaffirmed its stand on the correlation between excess deaths from heart and arterial disease and air pollution. Click for the statement. 

It says, among other things, that air pollution: "is a serious public health problem because an enormous number of people are exposed over an entire lifetime," and "epidemiological studies conducted worldwide have shown a consistent, increased risk for cardiovascular events, including heart and stroke deaths, in relation to short- and long-term exposure to present-day concentrations of pollution, especially particulate matter."

In April of 2009, Aruni Bhatnagar of the University of Louisville and Robert Brook of the University of Michigan organized a symposium, Environmental Factors in Heart Disease, at the Experimental Biology conference in New Orleans.

Among the deeply disturbing findings they and other participants in the conference presented:

• A study of six U.S. cities found that people died earlier when they lived in cities with higher pollution levels. A majority of these deaths were due to heart disease.
• A study of 250 metropolitan areas around the world found a spike in air pollution is followed by a spike in heart attacks. 
• A study in Salt Lake City found that when a nearby steel mill shut down for a period of months, there was a 4-6% drop in mortality. The mortality rose to previous levels when the steel mill reopened. 
• The risk of heart attack increases in parallel with time spent in traffic the previous day. 
• Within 15 minutes of inhaling pollutants, there is a very rapid increase in blood pressure.
• Aldehydes increase blood cholesterol levels and activate enzymes that cause plaque in the blood vessels to rupture. (Aldehydes are a toxic class of chemicals found in most forms of smoke, including cigarette smoke and car exhaust.)

Some epidemiologists believe that upwards of 1,000,000 excess deaths per year in the United States are caused by fine particulate matter alone.

We are also certain of the role that air borne pollution plays in the astronomical rise in contemporary asthma rates, especially in inner cities around the world. Direct yearly costs of asthma in the U.S. accounts for nearly $10 billion (hospitalizations the single largest portion of direct cost) and indirect costs of $8 billion (lost earnings due to illness or death).  

We are not certain of air pollution's effect on autism rates, depression due to circulatory and chemical issues, or the effect on those with pneumonia and otherwise relatively benign (in the developed world) pulmonary afflictions. Although the accusing epidemiological finger is pointing more directly at pollution.

So, we may battle over global warming, Left against Right, all we want. Meanwhile millions worldwide are dying prematurely, suffering with chronic conditions, or leading miserable material lives because of pollution. 

Focusing so much activist energy on global warming is a disaster. It allows us to say we MUST solve this enormous problem but "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," while in fact we do nothing. It allows the badly informed to indulge in thinking that leads them to dismiss the basically sound science of global warming. It allows those so inclined to pray to God, shrug their shoulders, and think of the afterlife. After all, life on earth is supposed to be a vail of tears, isn't it?

Marketing Environmentalism 2

See video below.

When it comes to common folks who merely want clean air and less dependence on foreign oil, the right wing usually just can't spit the words out. So we'll have to settle for this excellent short video put together by Senator John Warner (R-Va), even if it is with a divided heart.

Hard as it is we'll have to hold our liberal noses and swallow the clarity and professionalism of the message. It's a brilliant strategy and terrific execution. Warner's 100% correct. His points are dead center bulls eyes. $700 billion a year flows out of our economy mostly to countries with whom at best we share a tense antipathy. Soldiers and civilians alike are dying over the black, murky liquid gumming up the works.

Note the flag waving in the opening seconds, the serious tone, the mentions of security, terrorism, the visuals showing soldiers sandbagging floodwaters, discussion of "our sons and daughters" who may serve in these energy wars, and the handsome captain-spokesmodel saying "it's like taking every hornet's nest we have around the world and shaking it up." Images of warfare, natural disaster, refugees, and a masked Islamic radical firing his gun are intermixed with apple pie images of America. The apocalyptic music lends the perfect creepy touch.

This is the way to sell the huge changes we need in order to get off our oil high. Contrast this video with the stiff, didactic way in which we on the left have framed the argument.


Climate Patriots from Laura Lightbody on Vimeo.

High Speed Trains and One Mule

I am only quasi-pleased that the president is parceling out $8 billion dollars for the development of high speed trains around the country. It is really a paltry amount. It represents .00056 of total U.S. GDP. Let's say you have a two income household that brings in $100,000 per year and you want to replace some important infrastructure element in your house, or improve your transportation choices. Spending a similar percentage would give you a budget of $56.38 out of your hundred grand.

Liberals should be behind an enormous expansion of rail infrastructure - not just passenger, but freight as well, but the latter is another story. According to a number of sources, IF we had a rail system on a par with France's, it would provide 500 million passenger rides per year and require 1,000,000 workers to run, service and maintain the system. Now there's a jobs program for you. By contrast, Amtrak employs about 18,000 people. For a really excellent look at the potential for rail in America, check this out at The Infrastructurist.

Yet the right wing is rabid in its opposition. We can put it down to their usual stale pieties about government spending, waste, jeremiads against "socialism," and their slavish devotion to the oil industry. (As if the Interstate Highway System is not a communal venture!) However, I'd like to go deeper and lay it at the feet of a misguided hyper-individualism that is rooted in the values of the Old South. While the Northeast, Midwest and California were modernizing agriculture in the 1890s, the Old South was still dogging along with small family plots and the remnant of the rotted plantation culture that was dependent on slave labor.

Today's automobile culture is roughly comparable to the one-mule, postage-stamp farm of the post-bellum South. And the people who work on this new automobile version of such a farm, stuck in outrageously uneconomical, environmentally unsound machines, are really simply driving their one mule and hoping it lasts through the spring planting. So, the right wing clings to this outmoded way of thinking. It is deeper than political philosophy. It is a cultural philosophy deeply embedded and fraught with all sorts of common, pre-World War prejudices. Anti-cosmopolitan comes most readily to mind. Fear of the outsider - ewww I might have to sit next to a stranger on a train. Fatalism about the future also pops up when I consider this old, worn out way of thinking.

Listen to Harry Nilsson's "Nobody Cares About The Railroads Anymore"

Broader, almost revolutionary thinking is required if we are to hope that our children and grandchildren have jobs, a clean environment, and quick and easy ways to travel, at least regionally, if not cross continent.

But the future is not looking rosy as we dawdle and dither, held hostage to the old one-mule farm mentality.

The U.S. currently has one high speed corridor, Boston to Washington, of about 500 miles. Even if we were to build ALL the proposed high speed corridors on the national wish list, that would only amount to 4,000 at most. (By the way - in the U.S., "high speed" means an average of 79 mph on a system. In Europe, it's 120 mph.)

China, whose land mass is about the same as the U.S., has embarked on the second largest public works program in all of history, following only the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System in size. China plans to spend more than $1 trillion on expanding its railway network from 48,466 miles today to 68,350 in 2012 and 74,564 in 2020. China’s more pertinent goal is to invest in 8,000 miles of high-speed rail by 2020. They invest $1 trillion, while we argue and backbite over $8 billion.

By the way, the cost of the two wars in south Asia has now reached $955 billion.... hmm... just about what China plans to spend on its rail infrastructure. See this website: The Cost of War. Look for your area.