Let's Talk Fracking

The Delaware River in Autumn

As the Gulf catastrophe plays on, there is - if you can believe it - a slower-moving, much farther-reaching calamity emerging.

It is being caused by something called hydrofracturing, a process that uses a slurry of sand and toxic chemicals propelled at high pressure against layers of shale that hold trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under them. Called "fracking" for short, it is in use and growing in rural West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York.

The 2005 Energy Policy Act, a direct outgrowth of the secret Cheney energy cabal, exempts hydraulic fracturing from federal water laws and relies on states to monitor and restrict water pollution. West Virginia and Pennsylvania have largely failed in efforts to stop the process. New York State has largely succeeded - so far.

The material polluting ground water and nearby streams is called "leakoff."

Aside from the actual toxics used in the process, fracking releases huge amounts of methane that finds its way into the water supply as do unwanted large concentrations of normally harmless elements such as iron and aluminum.

Already wells in central Pennsylvania have been closed and the drilling and gas companies have begun trucking in potable water by tanker truck to the affected areas.

Reports of people passing out during their morning showers and developing lesions on their skin have become too pervasive and persistent to ignore.

Most ominously for those in the Northeast, this Pennsylvania drilling is going on in the Delaware River watershed. The Delaware is one of the most pristine rivers in the United States, despite its proximity to the large population centers of metro New York and Philadelphia.

More drilling has been planned or been proposed much closer to New York City's main water supply.

According to a report in Vanity Fair:

"Volatile organic compounds (carbon-based gaseous substances with a variety of detrimental health effects) and other dangerous chemicals are burned off directly into the air during this on-site compression [liquefaction] process. Meanwhile, the returned fracking fluid, now called waste water, is either trucked off or stored in large, open-air, tarp-lined pits on site, where it is allowed to evaporate. The other portion of the fluid remains deep underground—no one really knows what happens to it."

Each well that is opened requires between 5 and 8 million gallons of water to operate. This is the equivalent of 650,000 5-minute showers. (It has to be trucked in, requiring 800 to 1,200 round trips by heavy trucks to each site. New York has forbidden the use of municipal water for this purpose, so if fracking ever goes ahead in the state it will require even longer-distance trucking tactics.) And what goes into the ground must come out, somewhere, sometime. In the case of fracking 1/3rd of the water used is returned as polluted waste water.

“There has never been any evidence of fracking ever causing direct contamination of fresh groundwater in Pennsylvania or anywhere else,” said Scott Perry, another Oil and Gas Management official, as recently as April 2010.

This is patently untrue, another instance of the lies that the energy industry has told the American public about oil, coal, and gas extraction, all the while dragging their feet on the way to a clean energy future.

In east-central Pennsylvania, whole towns have been affected by fracking, homes have been shuttered, schools have been tested and their air found to be polluted.

What chemicals are used in the process? Hold onto your gas masks:

They include such substances as benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, boric acid, monoethanolamine, xylene, diesel-range organics, methanol, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, ammonium bisulfite, 2-butoxyethanol, and 5-chloro-2-methyl-4-isothiazolin-3-one.

The last chemical is known as a "bad actor" in the field of toxin studies. It is an ingredient in pesticides and is deemed a highly acutely toxin, a cholinesterase inhibitor (endocrine system disrupter), a known/probable carcinogen, and known groundwater pollutant or known reproductive or developmental toxicant.
 

An intensive study conducted by New York City, concerned about the spread of hydro fracturing into the city’s 1,585-square-mile watershed in the Catskill Mountains and upper Delaware River basin concluded that “Intensive natural gas well development in the watershed brings an increased level of risk to the water supply: risk of degrading source water quality, risk to long-term watershed health... risk of damaging critical infrastructure, and the risk of exposing watershed residents and potentially New York City residents to chronic low levels of toxic chemicals.”

The city’s report went on to say that while a single well may be environmentally benign, the risks become unacceptable “when evaluated in the context of hundreds or thousands of other wells.”

Wes Gillingham, program director of Catskill Mountainkeeper, said of the report, “One of the reasons industry could get away with these incidents is that there was a lack of science. New York City used reputable geologists and came up with the science.”

Finally, the ineluctables.
 

As surprising as this may be to those unfamiliar with the Northeast woodlands and meadows, the rural areas of Pennsylvania and New York are relatively unspoiled. (New York State, for instance, has two of the country's roughly two dozen big city unfiltered water supplies: New York City's, the nation's biggest, and Syracuse's. Both would be put at extreme risk should fracking for "natural" gas be implemented wholesale.)

Moreover, the regions under the shadow of this threat have largely avoided industrialization and even extensive residential development. The old mixed farmlands and incidentally preserved lands and waters have been little changed over centuries. Second-growth forests in some areas are now close to 200 years old.

One gas industry spokesman, fighting his dark version of the good fight in Pennsylvania, proclaimed that the drilling and fracking had produced more than 300 jobs already in that state. That's about as many people as attend a large elementary school.

That is worth jeopardizing the water of tens of millions of people?
 

Put up the windmills now, build the solar panels. Use the car less. Drive at 55. Turn off the lights.
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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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So We Can Figure This Out But Not Renewable Energy?

Go For Launch! (Click - It's Spellbinding)

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The Gulf, Obama's Presidency, JFK, The Pilgrims, And "Answerable Courage."

A few weeks ago, the right wing chatter was that the rig explosion, pipe rupture and spill in the Gulf were going to be "Obama's Katrina." It seemed far-fetched, more politically-inspired Democrat-baiting than serious criticism.

I'd like to take up the same cudgel, that this very well could be "Obama's Katrina," but as viewed from the left wing, not the right.

This is the golden moment to launch the complete transformation of our society from one almost completely reliant upon expensive, dirty, dangerous carbon-based fuels to a society that will lead the world toward a high-technology-based energy Utopia.

When the expression "American Exceptionalism" is used, it is that kind of innovation leadership that people around the world grasp. The words of John F. Kennedy's challenged the country, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."

Earlier in the speech, given almost 50 years ago in 1962 in Houston, Texas, Kennedy quoted a Pilgrim father: William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

We yearn for President Obama and other leaders of the Democratic Party - for surely the right wing is completely incapable - to stir us not only with great words, but also to act with "answerable courage."

Each and every reasonably sentient American has seen the gushing wound on the sea-floor, heard the sailors' and fishermen's cries for help, watched the sludge violate the marshes, thought of the beautiful summer days on the water that will be ruined. Who hasn't thought of their children and grandchildren and what the planet we leave behind will be?

Toss aside the paralyzing global-warming arguments. Forget that we suffer untold hundreds of thousands of premature deaths because of our burning of fossil fuels. Even reject the notion of dirty water caused by road run-off.

Now is the real, concrete moment. This is a true crossroad in history for our country, maybe for the Western World as a whole.

That Obama has not stood upon this fulcrum in time worries many of us on the left who have secretly suspected him of being a lightweight. It is worse than disappointing.

It could quite well mean his administration is doomed, that his ringing rhetoric was just that, and that we can count on more business as usual with the energy oligarchs.

What the President says - or fails to say - on Friday in New Orleans will be the bell-weather for the fall 2010 elections and define, and perhaps shorten, the Obama era.

Change we can believe in? Time to deliver, Mr. Obama.

Oil In The Gulf And The Toxic Tort Lawyer As Folk Hero

For decades now, the right wing has been ranting about "trial lawyers." The phrase is a code word for lawyers who sue large corporations on behalf of citizens, groups of citizens in class action suits, states and local governmental entities. 

The rightist radicals draw a portrait of the lawyers as little more than highly paid ambulance chasers. Is there a seamy side, a parasitic side to "trial lawyers?" Of course. Just as there is a seamy side to practically every profession from the clergy to agriculture to unions.

On the whole, however, the "trial lawyer" is the last line of defense - often the ONLY defense - against the many predatory practices of corporations. Big pharma, agribusiness, energy producers, crib makers, transportation providers, the tobacco purveyors and a dozen others truly fear the "trial lawyers," because they know they are in for trouble once a suit is filed.

One of the most capable and relentless of these tort lawyers, the appropriate term for the job, is New Orleans native Stuart Smith, long a champion against big oil, big polluters in the Gulf. Just one day after the fire and explosion on the rig, Smith was on the case.

"On Thursday, I could smell the oil and, being a toxic tort lawyer, I realized that the fact that you're smelling something means that you're inhaling something," said Smith when breezes were carrying the scent of the oil slick toward his beloved city. Smith, who has sued major oil companies before, immediately contacted toxicologists and air monitors to start doing tests that could be used as evidence. (As reported in the Washington Post.)

Smith believes that if the leak lasts another 2 months or so, the fishing beds and coastline could be ruined for generations. The devastation could cost the Gulf fishing and tourism industries tens of billions of dollars, more money than BP or any half dozen big polluters could pony up.

In 1992, Smith was the first plaintiff’s attorney to take an oil company to trial for damages caused by radioactive oilfield waste. Street v. Chevron pitted the owners of a mom-and-pop pipe yard located in rural southeastern Mississippi against a multinational oil conglomerate. Chevron had sent radioactive oilfield pipe to Street, Inc., for cleaning –  without informing the owners that the pipe contained radioactive material.

Investigators from the Mississippi state Division of Radiological Health found radiation on the Street property 500 times the natural-occurring level. The suit charged that 38 people, not only the owners and workers, but also children and other family members, had “suffered physical and psychological harm because of their exposure to low levels of radiation and that Shell and Chevron should have warned them about the ‘inherent dangers.’ ” 

The suit sought $35 million in damages. Shell settled early in the process, but Chevron vigorously defended the case during six months of trial. The oil giant ultimately settled the case for an undisclosed amount of money in what remains one of the longest-running jury trials in Mississippi history. The ruling opened the door to further suits associated with damages from oilfield radiation.

In 2001, Smith and his law partner Michael Stag successfully prosecuted the widely publicized Grefer case. The Grefers sued an Exxon contractor for contaminating their 33-acre parcel of land in Louisiana with TERM (technologically enhanced radioactive materials). After a six-week trial, a Louisiana jury returned a verdict of $1.056 billion against a contractor of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, in favor of Mr. Smith’s client, retired judge Joseph Grefer.

The court ordered Exxon to pay the Grefers $56 million in compensatory damages, to clean up their land, and slapped the oil giant with $1 billion in punitive damages.

The most insidious side of the Grefer case is that it appears Exxon knew about the radioactive material and did nothing to alert either the Grefers or its contractor. The court stated that from June 1986 to March 1987, “Exxon officials intentionally withheld information,” and that the company “knew the [radioactive] scale [inside the pipes] posed a direct danger to the physical health of those workers.”

Has Smith made great money by bringing these suits? No doubt. But really, what he and others like him are doing is to function as an ad hoc branch of government. And mounting further suits is time-consuming and costly.

Polluters, who could easily be monitored and prevented from polluting, experience very little oversight by government agencies. They pollute, are usually caught, and the government slaps them on the wrist with a wet noodle.

It is left to Smith and other tort lawyers to "prosecute" the cases the government should have prevented in the first place. No one else is protecting innocent victims from the polluters' activities. 

Is it any wonder that the right wing boot-lickers want to stringently limit the size of jury awards in cases involving many industries but especially energy? The right would leave us defenseless from the inception of a drilling or digging project through to the inevitable catastrophe created by polluters.

The right would gut current "strong" regulations, see to it there is no funding for policing under remaining flimsy laws often written by industry insiders, and finally do away with the tort lawyers' ability to find recourse for victims and/or the overall commonly held environment.

People like Stuart Smith may be be doing very well financially. Deservedly. Perhaps they are even rich, but they are folk heroes nonetheless.

Smith said: "Oil companies are the meanest, nastiest defendants in the country. They just don't care; they have so much money."

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The Million Trees of New York City, The Billion Our Country Needs Now

In New York City call 311 to have trees planted in your neighborhood FREE.  Elsewhere, you can get 10 FREE trees shipped to you from the Arbor Day Foundation by clicking here.

Happy Arbor Day. In 2007, New York City started a modestly ambitious campaign to plant 1 million trees on streets and in parks. So far, about 350,000 have been planted. 

The goal should have been about 2.5 million, which would have represented one tree for every family in the city. Why up the number? 

If every American family planted just one tree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by one billion pounds annually. This is almost 5% of the amount that human activity pumps into the atmosphere each year.

Trees also reduce the greenhouse effect by shading our homes and office buildings. This cuts down on air conditioning needs up to 30%, thereby reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned to produce electricity. This combination of CO2 removal from the atmosphere, carbon storage in wood, and the cooling effect makes trees a very efficient tool in fighting the greenhouse effect.

A single mature tree can absorb carbon dioxide at a rate of 48 pounds per year and release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support 2 human beings.

Each person in the U.S. generates approximately 2.3 tons of CO2 each year. A healthy tree stores about 13 pounds of carbon annually - or 2.6 tons per acre each year. So in a country of 300,000,000 people we need 150,000,000 acres of forest, although getting those acres in the right place is key.

Over a 50-year lifetime, a tree generates $31,250 worth of oxygen, provides $62,000 worth of air pollution control, recycles $37,500 worth of water, and controls $31,250 worth of soil erosion. (USDA pamphlet R1-92-100)

One sugar maple (12" diameter at waist height) along a roadway removes in one growing season 60mg cadmium, 140 mg chromium, 820 mg nickel, and 5200 mg lead from the environment.

Homeowners that properly place trees in their landscape can realize savings up to 58% on daytime air conditioning and as high as 65% for mobile homes. If applied nationwide to buildings not now benefiting from trees, the shade could reduce our nation’s consumption of oil by 500,000 barrels of oil per day. (American Forests Publication, “The Case For Greener Cities” 1999)

The maximum potential annual savings from energy conserving landscapes around a typical residence ranged from 13% in Madison up to 38% in Miami. Projections suggest that 100 million additional mature trees in US cities (3 trees for every unshaded single family home) could save over $2 billion in energy costs per year. (McAliney, Mike. Arguments for Land Conservation: Documentation and Information Sources for Land Resources Protection, Trust for Public Land, Sacramento, CA, December, 1993)

 

For the sake of discussion, let's say that we can plant 100 million trees for $15 each. That's $1.5 billion in outlay. After 20 years in non-inflated dollars we would have saved about $40 billion in energy costs. We also would have created useful jobs for the underemployed and unskilled, beautified our country, saved the wear and tear on air conditioners, captured run-off water, lowered overall pollution, raised oxygen levels in the atmosphere, cut health care costs and improve our spiritual well-being. 

In 10 years, for a total outlay of $15 billion, we would have one billion more trees and would have saved $400 billion in energy costs. Can you think of a more inexpensive, efficient, non-controversial way to improve the environment?

Our Defense Department budget for 2010? $685.1 billion, which represents a 3% increase over 2009 or $22.5 billion. Just the increase over one year would more than cover the planting of 1 billion life-giving trees. What in God's name is wrong with us? 

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?

Climate Change - The Marketing Problem

Around 1990 my wife became editor of Columbia University's Environmental Law Review and global warming popped up on my personal radar. Almost immediately, she and I came into conflict over this issue, even though we are both fervent environmentalists. 

I insisted that people cannot and do not want to wrap their minds around the Apocalypse, especially if they won't be able to drive to Armageddon.

Being more technocratically inclined than I, she insisted that education on the subject would change that. What sane person would ignore the facts?

That was 20 years ago and in our righteous passion, we liberals have wasted two decades of trying to convince the dim-witted, uneducated, science-resistant and self-absorbed American public that global warming is 1) a reality and 2) a menace to the planet. Too bad. Time is money.

All consumers - in this case consumers of information - need to be sold the benefits of a clean environment. If a consumer is told carefully and repeatedly that the warming of the atmosphere is dangerous, his or her first reaction is "When?" Second reaction is "Where will these changes occur? Near me?" Their third reaction is most likely "Tilt. I can't do anything about it anyway. Problem's too big." 

In a country where half the population believes the earth and all its creatures were created in a 7-day week about 10,000 years ago, global warming and necessary remedies simply won't sell. Moreover, the focus on global warming conveniently tosses all notions about the immediate dangers of air, water and soil pollution to the side of the road.

For instance, a Stanford University study shows that in the U.S., solely because of excess CO2, there are 2,000 excess deaths every year.* Total deaths from pollution in the U.S. number in the hundreds of thousands, hovering close to 1,000,000. And ocean chemistry is being radically altered by CO2 (and other pollutants) to such an extent that the fish and marine life population is beginning to suffer so severely that by the end of this century essentially we will see the end of natural populations of all food fish.** (*Mark Z. Jacobson (Stanford University). On the causal link between carbon dioxide and air pollution mortality.  **James Zachos, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Toby Tyrrell, Southampton University, U.K.)
 

In fact, scientists now overwhelmingly agree that about 40% of ALL deaths in the world can be attributed to pollution,

So, what has marketing got to do with it? Simple. Passionate, convinced environmentalists have to stop selling the Apocalypse and start selling the cost benefits in the here and now. Stop selling the steak and start selling the sizzle.

The sizzle may be the decline in the daily catch and consequent rise of fish prices. It may be the increased cost burden of medical care or life insurance. It may be the decline in productivity and wealth due to lost days of work. It may be the cost of re-painting a house every 6 years instead of every 10. It may be appealing to patriotism by persuading people to get off the junkie's addiction to foreign oil.

The average American thinks in the concrete, not the abstract. There are literally hundreds of reasons why we should have a cleaner environment. Global warming is the overarching one, but it just ain't selling. (Think this way: Toothpaste Brand X has decided brighter teeth is its position. But the company discovers through research that people care more about fewer cavities and fresh breath. Well? Do you keep advertising brighter teeth?)

In marketing there are a number of terms that drive the thinking before the actual message - a TV commercial, for instance - is born. Let's suppose that our company is Clean Environment, Inc. Our products are good healthy air, water, and soil. A strategy is needed.  

Strategy is how a brand or product line will achieve its objectives. The strategy provides decisions and direction regarding variables such as identification of the target market, the segmentation of the market, positioning, marketing mix, and expenditures of time/money/energy. Tactics address the "how." Do we use, aside from the usual media mix, premiums or incentives like tote bags or a free vacation, a club, initiatives in schools and churches; is the campaigning seasonal or year round? Message: We are off message on the environmental issue. Off the top of my head I'd say there are a few catch-words that need to be employed as if they were Holy Writ: Cleaner, Cheaper, Children, Country, God. 

More on this to come.