The Films

Day 9, Symphony of Soil and Food Inc.

Probably the most lasting impact that Symphony of the Soil had on me was the very terminology it explicitly laid down to the audience. First and foremost, it’s called soil, not dirt. Soil is the organic intertwined with the inorganic that makes up the bed stretched all across the earth’s land to support all life that grows from it. The film really highlights the hidden magic that goes on beneath our feet that we usually never take more than a moment to acknowledge. Soil is “literally the foundation of life,” yet under appreciated as people take it for granted. It takes 500 years to make an inch or two of soil, and current human processes like over-farming and application of chemicals and fertilizers and pesticides are eroding the earth’s skin. The three important elements that compose soil are life, light, and water/climate. This interface between the organic and the inorganic is like a graveyard from which the three fundamental principles of sustainability all have in one place. The recycling of the dead to form life is the principle of chemical cycling. The necessity for sunlight to aid in the chemical reactions and then further promote the photosynthesis that provides life to most organisms is the principle of solar energy. And the plethora of microscopic organisms that churn about, “like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, all the time,” is the principle of biodiversity.

Soil can start with peat moss growing on rock. The peat moss produces acid that wears down the rock and also keeps other things from breaking down, so it’s layers and layers of living things growing on living things. You can tell when erosion is happening when you dig and find a layer of clay. The particles of clay are so small and condensed that water does not flow through and down, but rather saturates and flows laterally. This can cause landslides and allows for plants to suck out too many nutrients, thereby degrading the soil. Soils can also be transported by water, glaciers, or wind as well as developing over rock in one place over time. Surprisingly, tropical rainforests and deciduous forests are not the most productive because all of the organic matter is stored in the vegetation above the ground. That title goes to prairie soil, because the deep grass roots enable more water filtration and constant recycling of biomass. It’s also interesting to note that 50% of the soil under us is actually empty space. This is because of the various chemical processes involving gases that go on. Once carbon dioxide is fixed into carbohydrates in the plant, the plant actually puts out proteins, carbohydrates, and fats – what one woman from the film called “cakes and cookies” – to promote the growth of bacteria and fungi that symbiotically help protect the plant. Then, protozoan come along and feed on the protective outer layer of microorganisms but put out the minerals that the plant needs, like calcium, magnesium, sulphur, among others on a long list. The mycellium fungi even pull phosphorus toward the roots. Nitrogen fixation in bacterial nodules is a really interesting part of plant root systems. When they’re cut open, once can see a red substance within the nodules, almost as if it were bleeding hemoglobin when reacted with oxygen. It is this vast difference in biology within the soil that can create vast differences within the soils of the earth. But industrial upkeep of soil, the application of nitrogen from heavy machinery to spread excess nitrogen and fertilizers, makes the soil sick. The Roman Empire withered with the soil as they plowed obsessively 8 to 9 times a year. Soil organisms are desperate for carbon. This is why tilling is good, because it invigorates the soil. But overdoing it can waste away resources too quickly. As always, finding a balance is the key.

Composting is great and can easily add 8-10 inches of topsoil in a matter of months. Salinization is the agricultural face of erosion from water evaporation, like washing one’s hands too much. Improving soil quality dramatically reduces water and nutrient runoff and the need to constantly water and add nutrients to the soil. This means a lot. It means we’ve forgotten how to work naturally with the soil under us. We don’t need bioengineered plants to resist erosion, we need better quality farming, more sustainably kept soil. Removing pesticides and becoming organic farmers means cleaner cow manure, which can go into the soil proliferate its biodiversity, which in turn enhance soil quality. Pesticides also kill bee populations which are crucial for pollination. Without bees, there simply are no new plant growths. We’ve taken a liking to our culture of over sanitization. We are sterilizing our soils, only to artificially resuscitate them with the chemicals we apply and pat ourselves on the back for “advances” in farming. Quite the opposite. Industrial nitrogen application does not help plants because they can only absorb small amounts, so it all goes to waste into the ecosystem as runoff. We know this causes algal blooms, which causes eutrophication, which creates dead zones from oxygen depletion. The Dead Sea was the biggest example of this harmful downward spiraling system of industrially applied death.

We are what we eat. So what are we eating? Atrazine and nitrates are linked to cancer and birth defects. What are going to do when the soil runs out and a multitude of people to feed? Aslo the idea of growing ethanol is a sticky situation because corn is one of the most nitrogen-intensive crops, and a large industrial scale agricultural demand is what we are trying to avoid. It also uses a lot of insecto-herbicides, water, and fossil fuels. We are focused too much on production yields and not on what it takes to get there. The answer to the global agriculture problem is locally produced ecological growth. I think about the mess Hurricane Sandy left in an area of the country that is in no way used to cleaning up after a hurricane. What is the effect on our soil after having been inundated with seawater? And the rest of the effluence from our infrastructure that was undoubtedly washed around. Gasoline, oil, paint, chemicals of all sorts washed out of people’s houses, cars, the roads, and buildings – what effect will it have in our food production and water supply? Only time will tell.

Food Inc. is a popular film that exposes the dirty secrets of the food industry and a must-watch for meat lovers. It’s outrageous that from seed to shelf only a couple of companies control the entire food industry. Three to four companies control all of the meat produced here. They treat their employees with little respect and control their farmers with harsh contracts. A typical farmer borrows $500,000 per year but only makes $18,000 a year, leaving them in debt as the industries walk away with having had a cheap supply of labor. McDonald’s is the largest buyer of beef, potatoes, and apples in the world. Tyson is the largest buyer of chickens, but these chickens are  engineered to grow massive breasts so that they can’t even support their own weight. Plus, they’re pumped with antibiotics to make sure they survive the horrid conditions of their keeping pens. Of course, because we are what we eat, this has subtle yet far-reaching effects in the human population. The bacteria that infect us are becoming more resistant to our antibiotics because they’re already used to dealing with the ones in our food. Then there are they multitude of quasi-diseases from which science isn’t entirely sure yet of a cause, like ADD and auto-immune diseases. My brother always been healthy all his life, but became ill one day out of nowhere, and a few days later he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

“So much of our food turns out to be clever arrangements of corn,” says Michael Pollan. Corn is the number one crop because it’s in virtually everything, even farmed animals. Cows have evolved to eat grass, yet industry feeds them corn because it’s cheap. The effect has been a build-up of e. coli. in their stomachs from resistance to the feed, and of course this contaminates our food supply, mostly in breakouts and food recalls. Nevertheless, people have died. When the industry notices a systemic problem, like that of cows being healthier when they eat grass instead of corn, they don’t fix the system with the obvious solution. They make high tech. changes in an attempt to, of course, cut costs and keep up with business as usual. This ends up being worse for everyone involved. “Pink slime” is when all parts of the animal are ground up and mixed with ammonia to kill any bacteria and added as a filler to most meat products. Chicken nuggets, hotdogs, hamburgers, etc. One burger contains bits of thousands of cows. This increases the risks astronomically for contamination in the market. The only reason why not as many contamination stories are heard of is probably because they’re not reported or as a testament to their soaping of their meat, which obviously has other consequences.

This cockamamy system we live and eat in points out other national flaws. Cheeseburgers are cheaper than a head of broccoli. This is because of irresponsible government subsidies put on the wrong things. Our country has the highest rates of obesity. The film projected that after 2000, 1/3 of Americans will have early onset diabetes (like my brother, who had no previous health issues at all). Now, 18.8 million people have diabetes and it’s costing the country $245 billion. Talk about irresponsible subsidy allocation. It is needless to say that the conditions of our slaughterhouses are no different to those of concentration camps of the Holocaust. I will rest my case with saying the most true statement of “if one were to see where our meat comes from, one would not eat it.” Also, the problem (almost entirely supported on the shoulders of Monsanto) of genetically modified organisms is rampant. In 1996, about 2% of soybeans grown were genetically modified. In 2008, that number shot up to 90%. Can our food really be called food anymore? Most of us know about the McDonald’s hamburger that was left out for 14 years and didn’t decay one bit, as normal organic matter should. What we eat can only be called human artifacts, products of industry and a culture based on convenience and haste. Well, haste makes waste. I am continually surprised whenever I see a package of food that says “product,” often like “cheese product.” That’s really what it is, it’s not actual food. Monsanto has the audacity to prove this even further by patenting the very genes of our crops. What we call natural biology is not intellectual property of probably one of the most sinister corporations. Never before has anyone owned biological material in such a finite and decisive way. The effects of this ownership and subsequent genetic tampering is as of now unknown, but it is agreed upon in the scientific community that tampering with the genes of organisms cannot be good. It creates something new – biological pollution – that cannot ever be cleaned up. Salmon that grow twice as fast, when released into the natural environment, will over compete with natural salmon by growing and eating twice as much food, leaving nothing left for natural salmon and slowly killing them off. Of course, the rest of the environment is not acclimated to salmon that grow twice as fast, so they eat themselves out of a food source and die off themselves. Messing with nature has catastrophic consequences, and genetic engineering for the purpose of higher profit is probably one of the most malicious forms of greed there is.

Overall, our relationship with the earth we live on needs to change. This can be done with changes in the hidden systems that propped up negative industrial practices on the large scale, and on the small scale with individual changes in eating habits. Education is first and formost a responsibility to share this kind of information so that more people can be food-literate. The distinction between food and real food must be recognized by all of us.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Day 14

Chapters 20 and 21: Water Pollution & Solid and Hazardous Waste

Water pollution is any change in water quality that can harm living organisms or make the water unfit for human uses such as irrigation and recreation. Water pollution causes illness and death in humans and other species, and disrupts ecosystems. The chief sources of water pollution are agricultural activities, industrial facilities, and mining, but growth in population and resource use makes it increasingly worse. Water pollution comes from point source, which discharge pollutants into bodies of surface water at specific locations through drain pipes, ditches, or sewer lines, and from nonpoint sources, which are broad and diffuse areas from which pollutants enter bodies of surface water or air, such as runoff from farmland, urban streets, parking lots, and golf courses. We haven’t made much progress in controlling nonpoint surface water pollution because of its non-specific causes, but most of the world’s more-developed countries have laws that help control point-source discharges of harmful chemicals into aquatic systems since they’re so easy to identify, monitor, and regulate. The most common water pollutant is the eroded sediment that comes from agricultural lands, along with the runoff of fertilizers, pesticides, bacteria from livestock and food-processing wastes, and excess salts from soils of irrigated cropland. Industrial facilities emit a variety of harmful inorganic and organic chemicals. One of the worst of these is coal ash, which is indestructible waste from coal burned in power plants. This is a significant problem because air pollution laws force coal-burning power plants to remove many of the harmful gases and particulates from their smokestack emissions. Since we can’t destroy matter, this just means that they need to put that waste somewhere, so they end up dumping it into slurry ponds. Fracking is also a huge source of groundwater pollution, since it involves the high-pressure injection of a plethora of toxic chemicals into shale rock deep underground to break it up, which doesn’t go anywhere but further into the underground systems, thus contaminating aquifers. Mining is the third biggest source fo water pollution. It puts tons of toxic chemicals and  heavy metals from mining wastes into runoff streams, polluting streams and lakes. The United Nations reported in 2010 that each year unsafe drinking water kills more more people than way and all other forms of violence combined; and the WHO estimates that almost 1 billion people (1/7 of everyone in the world) do not have access to clean drinking water.

an example of point-source pollution

Streams and rivers are the world are extensively polluted, but they can cleanse themselves of many pollutants if we do not overload them or reduce their flows. The addition of excessive nutrients to lakes resulting from human activities can disrupt their ecosystems, and prevention of such pollution is more effective and less costly than cleaning it up. Some forms of pollution are called oxygen-demanding wastes, such as the biodegradable wastes that bacteria breakdown but end up depleting dissolved oxygen in the process. This is dangerous for organisms that require more oxygen. Laws enacted in the 1970s to control water pollution have greatly increased the number and quality of wastewater treatment plants in the U.S. and in most other more-developed countries, as well as requiring industries to reduce their point-source discharges. Of course, the better way to reduce pollution and cleanup is to eliminate the pollution altogether, using the precautionary principle. According to the Global Water Policy Project, most cities in less-developed countries discharge 80-90% of their untreated sewage directly into rivers, streams, and lakes whose waters are then used for drinking, bathing, and washing clothes. But streams and rivers are more effective at cleansing themselves than lakes and reservoirs. This is because they contain stratified layers underwater, and because they don’t flow, so the flushing and changing in a lake or reservoir can take 1 to 100 years to do what a stream or river can do in several weeks. This also causes dangerous biological magnification of pollutants in ecosystems that travel and accumulate from smaller organisms like algae and fish up to the larger ones like the land animals and birds that feed on them, then ultimately to us who feed on those animals. Eutrophication is also a major problem. It happens when runoff of otherwise good nutrients like phosphates or nitrates flow into a lake or body of water and cause booming algal growth. As water bodies become more eutrophic, human activities can accelerate the input of plant nutrients and cause cultural eutrophication. Then during hot weather or drought, the nutrient overload produces dense growth, or “blooms,” of algae or cyanobacteria and thick growths of water hyacinth, duckweed, or other aquatic plants. These dense colonies reduce lake productivity and fish growth by decreasing the input of solar energy needed for photosynthesis by the phytoplankton that support fish populations. Then when the algae die, they’re decomposed by swelling populations of aerobic bacteria in a process that depletes dissolved oxygen from the body of water. The decaying organic matter is then broken down by anaerobic bacteria once it sinks to the bottom and produces gaseous products like smelly, toxic hydrogen sulfide and methane. As usual, pollution prevention is more effective and often cheaper than cleanup.

Chemicals used in agriculture, industry, transportation, and homes can spill and leak into groundwater and make it undrinkable. There are both simple and complex ways to purify groundwater used as a source of drinking water, but protecting it through pollution prevention is the least expensive and most effective strategy. Common pollutants such as fertilizers, pesticides, gasoline, and organic solvents can seep into groundwater from numerous sources. People who dump or spill gasoline, oil, and paint thinners and other organic solvents onto the ground also containment groundwater. Once a pollutant from leaking underground storage tank or other source contaminates groundwater, it fills the aquifer’s porous layers of sand, gravel, or bedrock like water saturates a sponge, making the removal of the contaminant difficult and costly. The slowly flowing groundwater disperses the pollutant in a widening plume of contaminated water. If the plume reaches a well used to extract groundwater, the toxic pollutants can get into drinking water and into water used to irrigate crops. Groundwater flows so slowly that once it becomes contaminated it cannot cleanse itself as quickly as other sources of water, moving only about a foot per day. The EPA conducted a survey of 26,000 industrial waste ponds and lagoons found that 1/3 of them had no liners to prevent toxic liquid wastes from seeping into aquifers, 1/3 of these sites bring within a mile from a drinking water well. Also, almost 2/3 of America’s liquid wastes are disposed by injection into ground wells, some of which of course leak water into aquifers. By 2008 the EPA had completed the cleanup of about 357,000 of the more than 479,000 underground tanks in the U.S. that were leaking gasoline, diesel fuel, home heating oil, or toxic solvents into groundwater. Scientists expect within the next century for the millions of these tanks to become corroded and more leaky, posing a major global health problem. It can take decades to thousands of years for contaminated groundwater to cleanse itself of slowly degradable wastes, such as DDT. On a human time scale, nondegradable wastes like toxic lead and arsenic remain in the water permanently. In the more-developed countries, the process of turning sewer water into pure drinking water is a very real technology. But reclaiming wastewater is expensive and faces opposition from citizens and officials who are simply grossed out. Among the simpler ways to purify drinking water for topical countries who lack a centralized water treatment system is a technology involving filling contaminated water into clear water bottles and allowing them to absorb the sun’s UV rays for 3 hours, killing any microbes, which has decreased incidence of childhood diarrhea by 30-40%. Several major U.S. cities have avoided building expensive water treatment facilities by investing in protection of the forests and wetlands in the watersheds that provide their water supplies. New York’s drinking water is known for its purity. The city gets 90% of the drinking water for its 9 million residents from reservoirs in NYS’s Catskill Mountains. Forests cover more than 3/4 of this watershed. Underground tunnels transport the water to the city. To continue providing quality drinking water for its citizens, NYC faced spending $6 million to build water purification facilities. Instead, the city decided to negotiate an agreement with the state as well as with towns, farmers, and other parties with interests in the Catskills watershed. The city agreed to pay this diverse group of governments and private citizens $1.5 billion over 10 years in exchange for their promise to protect and, in some cases, to restore the forests, wetlands, and streams in the watershed. The money that New York spent on watershed protection saved the city the $6 billion cost of building water purification facilities plus $300 million a year in filtration costs. This is an excellent example of how people can cooperate and work with nature to provide a more sustainable supply of clean drinking water. The precautionary principle would have it so that the contested project of fracking is sure to never happen, eliminating the increased need to further purify our water supply.

The U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 requires the EPA to establish national drinking water standards, called maximum contaminant levels for any pollutants that may have adverse effects on human health. However, we can enhance the Safe Drinking Water Act by combining many of the drinking water treatment system that serve fewer than 3,300 people with nearby systems to make it cheaper for small systems to meet federal standards, strengthening and enforcing public notification requirements about violations of drinking water standards, and banning the use of any toxic lead in new plumbing pipes, faucets, and fixtures (current law allows for fixtures with up to 10% lead content to be sold as “lead-free.”) Despite much concern and some problems, experts say that the United States has some of the world’s cleanest drinking water. Municipal water systems in the Unites States are requires to test their water regularly for a number of pollutants and to make the results available to citizens. Yet about half of us worry about our tap water and so we buy high-priced bottled water. We’re actually the world’s largest consumers of bottled water, followed by Mexico, China, and Brazil. In 2009, we spent more than $11 billion to buy billions of plastic bottles filled with basically just more than 40% tap water. It is one of the biggest, most successful schemes ever played on the American people. Bottled water uses 100 to 2,000 times more energy to make than just drinking water from the tap. Also, bottled water has very harmful effects on the environment. Every second, about 1,500 plastic water bottles are thrown away. Each year, that’s enough to encircle the globe eight times. In the United States, only about 14% of these bottles get recycled  the rest ending up in landfills, lakes, or the ocean. Manufacturing and transporting the water bottles takes huge amounts of energy. The consumer and environmental group Food & Water Watch estimates that each year more than 17 million barrels of oil are used to produce the plastic water bottled sold in the U.S. Toxic gases and liquids are released during the production of the plastic bottles and greenhouse gases ad other air pollutants are emitted by the fossil fuels burned to make them. The Fiji bottled water company is especially unscrupulous. The corporation that produces Fiji water has a 99-year lease that gives it access to an enormous aquifer on the island. But while Americans and Europeans are drinking this very expensive bottled Fiji water, half of the people on Fiji fo no have access to safe, reliable drinking water. It’s like mercantilism all over again. Health officials suggest that before drinking expensive bottled water or buying costly home water purifiers, consumers have their water tested by local health departments or private labs. Independent experts contend that unless tests show otherwise, for most U.S. urban and suburban residents served by large municipal drinking water systems, home water treatment systems are not worth their cost, and drinking expensive and environmentally harmful bottled water is unnecessary. Buying water bottles is just downright stupid.

The great majority of ocean pollution originates on land and includes oil and other toxic chemicals as well as solid waste, which threaten fish and wildlife and disrupt marine ecosystems. The key to protecting the oceans is to reduce the flow of pollution from land and air and from streams emptying into ocean waters. Coastal areas, especially wetlands, estuaries, coral reefs, and mangrove swamps, bear the brunt of our enormous inputs of pollutants and wastes into the ocean. According to a 2006 State of the Marine Environment study by the UN Environment Programme, an estimated 80% of marine pollution originates on land, and this percentage could rise significantly by 2050 if coastal populations double as projected. The report says that 80-90% of the municipal sewage from most coastlines of less-developed countries is untreated, overwhelming the marine ecosystems’ ability to break down these wastes. It is believed that China’s coastlands are so choked with algal blooms from eutrophication, that they can no longer sustain marine ecosystems. Runoff  of sewage and agricultural wastes into coastal waters introduce large quantities of nitrate and phosphate plant nutrients, which can cause explosive growths of harmful algae. These harmful algal blooms are called red, brown, or green toxic tides, and can release waterborne and airborne toxins that poison seafood, damage fisheries, kill fish-eating birds, and reduce tourism. Each year, harmful algal blooms lead to the poisoning of about 60,000 Americans who eat shellfish contaminated by algae. These plant nutrients also create oxygen-depleted zones of water off the coast. The northern area of the Gulf of Mexico can be seen from aerial views to be oxygen depleted, the third largest oxygen-depleted zone in fact, due in large part from the directly accumulated runoff from the Mississippi River basin. In 1997 ocean researchers discovered a huge swirling mass of plastic wastes in he North Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii containing plastic bags, bottles, jugs, nets, and tiny pieces of plastic the size of the U.S. state of Texas. As a long-lasting monument to the human throwaway mentality, it is now called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In 2010, scientists discovered another huge floating mass of plastic debris in the Atlantic Ocean, called the Great Atlantic Garbage Patch. Ocean pollution from oil is another huge problem. We all remember the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon blowout explosion that sent 210 million gallons (4.9 million barrels) of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for months and months. Although tragedies like this are deeply harmful, studies show that the larges source of ocean pollution from oil is urban and industrial runoff from land, but of it from leaks in pipelines and oil-handling facilities. Volatile organic hydrocarbons in oil kill many aquatic organisms immediately upon contact. Other chemicals in oil form tarlike globs that float on the surface and coat the feathers of seabirds and the fur of marine mammals, destroying their natural heat insulation and buoyancy and causing many of them to drown or die of exposure from loss of body heat. Heavy oil components that sink to the ocean floor or wash into estuaries can smother bottom-dwelling organisms such as crabs, oysters, mussels, and clams, or make them unfit for human consumption, and some spills have killed vital coral reefs. Full recovery for marine ecosystems in the ocean can take decades, and scientists estimate that current cleanup methods can recover no more than 15% of the oil from a major spill. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska, the largest oil spill from a tanker in U.S. waters. Exxon Mobil paid $3.8 billion in damages and clean-up costs, but recovered much of this money in tax credits and insurance payments. In 1994, a jury awarded 11,000 Alaskan fishers, cannery workers, and landowners $5 billion in punitive damages, but Exxon Mobil refused to pay. After 14 years of court appeals, Exxon lawyers persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 to reduce the punitive damages by 90% to 510 million. That same year, Exxon Mobil made $42.5 billion in profits, the largest in history for any U.S. company at the time. Disgusting. In 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act, which banned single-hulled oil tankers in U.S. waters after 2010, but the oil industry got this ban delayed until 2015.

Reducing water pollution requires that we prevent it, work with nature to treat sewage, cut resource use and waste, reduce poverty, and slow population growth. Farmers can reduce nonpoint pollution by reducing soil erosion by keeping cropland covered with vegetation and sing other soil conservation methods. They can also reduce the amount of fertilizer that runs off into surface waters by using slow-release fertilizer, using no fertilizer on steeply sloped land, and planting buffer zones of vegetation between cultivated fields and nearby surface waters. Organic farming helps a lot because it does not use these fertilizers or pesticides. The Clean Water Act of 1977 and the 1987 water Quality Act form the basis of U.S. efforts to control pollution of the country’s surface waters. The Clean Water Act sets standards for allowed levels of 100 key water pollutants and requires polluters to get permits that limit how much of these various pollutants they can discharge into aquatic systems. The EPA has been experimenting with a discharge trading policy, which functions like a carbon cap-and-trade system but with water pollution discharge. However, the EPA has been lax in regulating and enforcing permits. This could also lead to the dangerous buildup of pollutants in accumulated areas. The EPA has found that a certain amount of good has been accomplished since the enactment of the Clean Water Act in 1972. They include: the percentage of Americans served by community water systems that met federal health standards increased from 79% to 94%; the percentage of U.S. stream lengths found to be fishable and swimmable increased from 36% to 60% of those tested; the proportion of the U.S. population served by sewage treatment plants increased from 32% to 74%; and the annual wetland losses decreased by about 80%. Yet there’s more to be done. 45% of the country’s lakes and 40% of its streams are still too polluted for swimming or fishing, and seven out of every ten rivers is polluted from agriculture runoff, particularly from animal wastes. In 2009, the New York Times utilized the Freedom of Information Act to cite water pollution violations of the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act in every U.S. state and found that one in five water treatment systems violated the Safe Drinking Water Act between 2003 and 2008, releasing sewage and chemicals such as arsenic and radioactive uranium, affecting more than 49 million Americans. Now many industries are claiming that the Clean Water Act doesn’t apply to the waterways in which they’re polluting, causing a dangerous step backward and an increase in recent levels of polluting from the uncertainty of which waterways are protected under the law. Toxic coal ash is also very difficult to regulate; and in 2009 the New York Times conducted a study of the EPA and found that 93% of the 313 coal-burning power plants that had violated the Clean Water Act between 2004 and 2009 had also avoided fines or other penalties by federal or state regulators. Some environmental scientists call for strengthening the Clean Water Act by giving it more power in the way of regulating water pollution prevention instead of focusing on end-of-pipe removal of specific pollutants. It should allow for larger and mandatory fines for violators and regulation of irrigation water quality, which is currently not regulated at all. Another suggestion is to rewrite the Clean Water Act to clarify that it covers ALL waterways (the way the Congress originally intended) so that there’s no confusion over which waterways it applies.

sediment and runoff plumes in the gulf of mexico

It is encouraging that since 1970, most of the world’s more-developed countries have enacted laws and regulations that have significantly reduced point-source pollution. These improvements were largely the result of bottom-up political pressure on elected officials by individuals and groups. On the other hand, little has been done to help less-developed countries with their water pollution. By 2020, China plans to provide all its cities with small sewage treatment plants that will make wastewater clean enough to be recycled back into the urban water supply systems, tackling both water pollution and water scarcity. At the end of the day, its a shift toward trying to totally avoiding the production of water pollution in the first place that must be our goal. The shift to pollution prevention will not take place unless citizens put political pressure on elected officials and also take actions to reduce their own daily contributions to water pollution.

My question for this chapter would be the usual how can we enforce stricter water pollution laws and regulations. But as for more recently in the Northeast Unites States, I believe that we should start looking into the problem of chemical contamination left after Hurricane Sandy flooded much of the metropolitan Tri-State area. Entire cars and half houses were underwater for a while, so who knows what kind of chemicals and toxins had leeched out of various parts of our infrastructure during those hours when much of the coastal metropolitan Tri-State area was submerged. How can we make more people become concerned for their own homes and the viability of the soil beneath them to produce food for our future? By education and much more publicity.

In the natural world, there is no waste at all. This is because anything that comes from one organism is utilized by another in some process that works to the benefit of the whole ecosystem, wastes become nutrients. Then we entered the picture. We produce so much waste material that goes unused. Solid waste contributes to pollution and represents the unnecessary consumption of resources. Hazardous waste contributes to pollution as well as to natural capital degradation, health problems, and premature deaths. Studies indicate that we could reduce our waste of potential resources and the resulting environmental harm it cases by as much as 90%. A solid waste is any unwanted or discarded material we produce that is not a liquid or gas, and it can be divided into two types. Industrial waste is produced by mines, farms, and industries that supply people with goods and services. Municipal solid waste (MSW), aka garbage or trash, consists of the combined solid waste produced by homes and workplaces other than factories. More-developed countries witness an alarming amount of MSW, particularly as they grow economically (like with China) and they buy and thrown out more and more stuff, which ends up in landfills or in incinerators. Another category of waste is hazardous or toxic waste, which threatens human health or the environment because it is poisonous, dangerously chemically reactive, corrosive, or flammable. These include industrial solvents, hospital medical waste, car batteries (containing lead and acids), household pesticides products, dry-cell batteries (containing mercury and cadmium), and incinerator ash. The two largest classes of hazardous wastes are organic compounds, like solvents, pesticides, PCBs, and dioxins) and toxic heavy metals, like lead, mercury, and arsenic. Highly radioactive waste leftover from nuclear power plant operation is also a very vexing problem that humanity must now face, as it must be stored for 10,000 to 240,000 years. After 60 years, scientists and governments still have not found a viable scientific and politically acceptable way to safely isolate these dangerous wastes. According to the UN Environment Programme, 80-90% of the world’s hazardous wastes are produced by the more-developed countries – the United States being the top producer, with its military, chemical industry, and mining industry. At least 3/4 of these materials represent unnecessary consumption of the earth’s resources; and studies show that we can reuse and recycle up to 90% of the MSW we produce and thus reduce our resource use dramatically. Although we have only 4.6% of the world’s population, we produce about 1/3 of all the solid waste on the planet. We also need to recognize that the manufacturing process from which most of our products come is laden with hidden background wastes. A desktop computer requires the combination of 700 or more different parts that were obtained from mines, oil wells, and chemical factories all over the world; and, for every 0.5 kilogram (1 pound) of electronics it contains, approximately 3,600 kilograms (8,000 pounds) of solid and liquid waste were created. The manufacturing of a single semi-conductor computer chip generates about 630 times its weight in solid and hazardous wastes. The statistics on what exactly our country produces, and subsequently wastes, are staggering. Enough tires to encircle the planet almost 3 times, enough carpet to cover the entire state of Delaware, and 274 million plastic bags every day/3,200 per second, to name a few. Most of our wastes break down very slowly, if at all. Mercury, lead, glass, plastic foam, and most plastic bottles basically take forever to break down. Aluminum cans take 500 years, plastic bags take 400 to 1,000 years, and plastic six-pack holders take 100 years.

A sustainable approach to solid waste is first to reduce it, then to reuse or recycle it, and finally to safely dispose of what’s left. Waste management is the method in which we attempt to control wastes in ways that reduce their environmental harm without seriously trying to reduce the amount fo waste produced. It basically involved sorting wastes together and putting them somewhere else. Waste reduction, on the other hand, is the method in which we produce much less waste and pollution, and the wastes we do produce are considered to be potential resources that we can reuse, recycle, or compost. It’s more of a prevention approach to tackle the undesirable side effects of waste management. Since there’s no single solution to our waste problem, analysts call for an integrated waste management, with emphasis on reduction rather than on disposal. In 2008, the EPA reported that 54% of the MSW produced in the U.S. was buried in landfills, 13% was incinerated, and 33% was either recycled or composted. Integrated waste management comes in a broad, three-step approach to dealing with how we use our stuff. First, we can change industrial processes to eliminate the use of harmful chemicals, use less of a harmful product, reduce packaging and materials in products, and make products that last longer and that are recyclable, reusable, or easy to repair. Second, we need to reduce, repair, recycle, compost, and buy reusable and recyclable products. And third, our last priority, would be to then treat waste to reduce its toxicity, and incinerate or bury waste. The idea is to make it so that as little waste ends up in the third step as possible. Reducing and reusing are preferred from an environmental standpoint because tackle the problem of waste production before it occurs. When we reduce and reuse, we are saving matter and energy resources, reducing pollution, helping to protect biodiversity, and of course saving money. There are also six strategies that industries and communities can use to reduce resource use, waste, and pollution. First, redesign manufacturing processes and products to use less material and energy. We’ve reduced the weight of a typical car by 1/4 since the 1960s, and we can do better still. Second, develop products that are easy to repair, reuse, remanufacture, compost, of recycle. Third, eliminate or reduce unnecessary packaging – the hierarchy of no packaging, reusable packaging, and recyclable packaging is a good way to start. The 37 European Union countries require the recycling of 55-80% of all packaging waste. Fourth, use fee-per-bag waste collection systems. I really like this one, and I’ve seen it implemented in Spain. If you want to use a plastic bag, you have to pay for it rather than get handed one for free at stores like here in the United States. I like this a lot because it enforces people to realize everything time they buy something the impact of that seemingly simple choice. Needless to say, everyone in Barcelona brings they own bag. Fifth, establish cradle-to-grave responsibility laws that require companies to take back various consumer products such as electronic equipment, appliances, and motor vehicles, as Japan and many European countries do. Sixth, restructure urban transportation systems to rely more on mass transit and bicycles than one cars. An urban bus can replace about 60 cars and greatly reduce amounts of material used and wastes produced.

Reusing items decreases the consumption of matter and energy resources, and reduces pollution and natural capital degradation; recycling does so to a lesser degree. Reuse involves cleaning and using material items over and over, and thus increasing the typical life span of a product. This form of waste reduction decreases the use of matter and energy resources, cuts waste and pollution (including GHG), creates local jobs, and saves money. Everyone should invest in a refillable container so they don’t have to buy drinks in throwaway plastic bottles. Denmark, Finland, and the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island have banned all containers that cannot be reused. According to the founder of reusablebags.com, Vincent Cobb, each year an estimated 500 million to 1 trillion plastic bags are used and usually discarded throughout the world. Producing them requires large amounts of oil since they’re a byproduct of petroleum production, and they take 400 to 1,000 years to break down. Less than 1% of them get recycled in the U.S. In a number of African countries, the landscape is littered with billions of plastic bags. The bags block drains and sewage systems, and can kill wildlife and livestock that eat them. They also kill plants and spread malaria by holding mini-pools of warm water where mosquito can breed. Of course, plastic bags kill the marine life that ingest them as well. Ireland has a tax of 25 cents per plastic bag, and this has reduced plastic bag litter by 90%. Bangladesh, Bhutan, parts of India, Taiwan, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, China, Australia, France, Italy, and the U.S. city of San Francisco have all banned the use of all or most types of plastic shopping bags.

Recycling involves reprocessing discarded solid materials into new, useful products. Households and workplaces produce five major types of materials that we can recycle: paper products, aluminum, steel, and some plastics  There are two ways we can reprocess these materials: primary or closed-loop recycling – materials like aluminum cans into new products of the same type, and secondary recycling – turning old materials into new products, like rubber tires into road surfacing. To make sure recycling works, items separated for recycling have to go to the right place for recycling, and businesses, governments, and individuals must complete the loop by buying products made from recycled materials. Households and businesses should implement source separation, which is separating their trash into glass, paper, metals, and certain types of plastics so that these can all be properly recycled. This is easier and better than materials recovery-facilities because MRFs require an increasing source of trash – the opposite of the intended goal. To promote separation of wastes for recycling, over 4,000 communities in the country use a pay-as-you-throw (PAUT) or pay-per-bag waste collection system in which households that don’t sort their trash properly for recycling are charged when their waste is picked up, and those who do separate their trash properly are not. Composting is another form of recycling that mimics nature’s recycling of nutrients (a principle of sustainability). Composting is using decomposer bacteria to recycle yard trimmings, vegetable food scraps, and other biodegradable organic wastes that yield organic material to be added to soil to supply plant nutrients, slow soil erosion, retain water, and improve crop yields. San Francisco actually mandates it as part of its coal to eliminate dumping any MSW in landfills by 2020. The paper and pulp industry is the world’s fifth largest energy consumer and uses more water to produce a metric ton of its product than any other industry. About 55% of the world’s industrial tree harvest is used to make paper. But, we can make paper using hemp or kenaf, rapidly growing straw-like plants. Recycling paper uses 64% less energy and produces 35% less water pollution and 74% less air pollution than starting from scratch with wood pulp; of course, it also saves trees. The National Resources Defense Council mounted a campaign in 2009 to stop the cutting down of America’s old-growth forests to produce toilet paper, and estimated that nearly 425,000 trees would be saved if every U.S. household used at least one 500 sheet toilet paper roll made from recycled paper a year. Plastics are the devil. There are about 46 different types and many plastic containers and other items are thrown away or end up as litter on roadsides and beaches. Each year they threaten terrestrial animal species and millions of seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles, which can mistake a plastic bag for a jellyfish, or these animals get caught in discarded plastic nets. About 80% of the plastics in the oceans are blown in from land and beaches, rivers, storm drains, and other sources, and the rest get dumped into the ocean from ocean-going garbage barges, ships, and fishing boats. Plastics discarded on beaches or dumped from ships can disintegrate into tiny particles that resemble the prey of many organisms. Since plastic in undigestible to these organisms, it builds up in their stomachs and they die from biological complications like dehydration or starvation. Currently, only about 4% by weight of all plastic wastes in the U.S. is recycled. This is because different plastics are mixed in products and difficult to separate. Scientists are looking into the production of bioplastics, made from corn, soy, sugarcane, chicken feathers, and some components of garbage, that can actually be lighter, stronger, and cheaper, as well as less energy intensive to make. In 2008, the EPA said the recycling and composting of 33% of all MSW in the U.S. reduced carbon dioxide emissions by an amount equivalent to removing the emissions of 33 million cars. Three factors inhibit reuse and recycling. First, the market prices of almost all products do not include the harmful environmental and health costs associated with producing, using, and discarding them. Second, the economic playing field is uneven because, in most countries, resource-extracting industries receive more government tax breaks and subsidies than reuse and recycling industries get. Third, the demand and thus the price paid for recycled materials fluctuates  mostly because buying goods made with recycled materials is not a priority for most governments, businesses, and individuals. We can encourage reuse and recycling by increasing subsidies and tax breaks for reusing and recycling materials and decrease subsidies and tax breaks for making items from virgin sources. The fee-per-bag is a really good way of throwing the issue of the necessity for environmental responsibility into the faces of the citizens and conditioning them to become more aware citizens rather than mindless consumers.

Technologies for burning and burying solid wastes are well developed, but burning contributes to air and water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and buried wastes eventually contribute to the pollution and degradation of land and water resources. There are more than 600 large waste-to-energy incinerators across the globe, 87 of which are in the United States and burn 13% of our MSW. Waste incineration hasn’t caught on here too much because of the excessive air pollution, citizen oppression, and an abundance of cheaper landfills that can only happen due to our largest expanse of area as a nation. About 54% of our MSW by weight is buried in landfills. Of landfills, there are two types – open dumps, which are essentially fields or holes in the ground where garbage is deposited and sometimes burned; and newer, “sanitary” landfills that spread wastes out in thin layers, compacted and covered daily with a fresh layer of clay or plastic foam to reduce leakage and keep it dry. At the end of the day, all landfills eventually leak, passing both the effects of contamination and cleanup costs on to future generations.

A sustainable approach to hazardous waste is first to produce less of it, then to reuse or recycle it, then to convert it to less hazardous materials, and finally to safely store what is left. This is the basic outline of the integrated management approach suggested by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which is fully implemented by Denmark. In Europe, about 1/3 of hazardous wastes is exchanged in clearinghouses where they’re sold as low-cost raw materials, but here in the U.S. only 10% of our hazardous goes through this process and this should be raised. Unfortunately, most e-waste recycling efforts end up creating further hazards, especially for children in developing countries, because of the carcinogenic effects of burning or stripping the raw materials and metals in e-waste. More than 70% of e-wastes end up in China, where workers are forced to inhale toxic fumes from burning plastic and acid. From this, an estimated 82% of children under the age of 6 suffer from lead poisoning. In 2008, only 18% of the e-waste in the U.S. was recycled, and up to 80% was shipped overseas to places like small port towns in China to be dangerously dismantled. The best precaution we can take to make sure no one is harmed as much by our e-waste is to reduce the amount of our e-waste, meaning not to buy as much and properly dispose of what we have. We can also detoxify hazardous wastes, physically, chemically, and biologically. Physical methods would be using charcoal or resin to filter out harmful solids, or distilling liquid wastes to separate out harmful chemicals. Chemical methods are used to convert hazardous chemicals to harmless or less harmful chemicals through chemical reactions. Chemists are testing the use of cyclodextrin, a type of sugar made from cornstarch, to remove toxic materials like solvents and pesticides from contaminated soil and groundwater. Also, the use of nanomagnets, coated in chitosan derived from the chitin in the exoskeletons of shrimp and crabs, to remove pollutants from water is being looked into. What’s really cool is bioremediation, where bacteria and enzymes help to destroy toxic or hazardous substances or convert them to harmless compounds. Here, contaminated sites are inoculated with an army of microorganisms that breakdown specific hazardous chemicals, like organic solvents, PCBs, pesticides, and oil. This method takes a little longer than the others but it costs less. Phytoremediation uses natural or genetically modified plants to absorb, filter, and remove contaminants from polluted soil and water. They’re like “pollution sponges” that can clean up pesticides, organic solvents, and radioactive or toxic metals. Specifically, phytostabilization involves plants such as willow trees and poplars to absorb chemicals and keep them from reaching grounwater or nearby surface water. Rhizofiltration is when roofs of plants like sunflowers with dangling roots on ponds or in greenhouses can absorb radioactive stronium-90 and cesium-137 and various organic chemicals. Phytodegradation is when plants such as poplars can absorb toxic organic chemicals and break them down into less harmful compounds which they store or release slowly into the air. And phytoextraction is when the roots of plants such as Indian mustard and brake ferms can absorb toxic metals such as lead, arsenic, and others and store them in their leaves. Plants can then be recycled or harvested and incinerated.Unfortunately, even with things like the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), only 5% of hazardous wastes produced in the country are regulated. We need to stop using a cradle-t0-grave system and start using cradle-to-cradle. There is about $1.7 trillion worth of cleanup costs in the country’s current Superfund sites, a prime example of the economic and environmental value of emphasizing waste reduction and pollution before it becomes a problem out in the environment and in our backyards. One of the most successful bits of legislation was the 1986 complete phasing out of using leaded gasoline in the United States. However, the Superfund is now broke after pressure from polluters caused Congress to refuse to renew the tax on oil and chemical companies that had financed it after it expired in 1995. Taxpayers, not polluters, are picking up the bill for future cleanups, and yet it’s amazing how people complain that government wants to increase taxes. If people knew the scheming done by those who make the world a worse place for everyone, I should hope they wouldn’t complain so much about the “fault” of government so that they can shift their anger to those who are really responsible for the country’s economic tumult. Although, of course, government should not genuflect so willingly to the dirty commands of these companies.

Shifting to a low-waste society requires individuals and businesses to reduce resource use and to reuse and recycle wastes at local, national, and global levels. Grassroots action has led to better solid and hazardous waste management. Look at Lois Gibbs of Love Canal. Individuals have organized grassroots citizen movements to prevent the construction of hundreds of incinerators, landfills, treatment plants for hazardous and radioactive wastes, and polluting chemical plants in or near their communities. Rather than hold onto the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”), we should think of NIABY, “not in anyone’s backyard,” or even NOPE, “not on planet earth.” The best way to deal with most toxic and hazardous waste is to produce much less of it. Environmental justice is the ideal that every person is entitled to protection from environmental hazards regardless of race, gender, age, national origin, income, social class, or any political factor. Studies have shown that the majority of waste dumps, incinerators, plants, and landfills are near the homes of lower income communities or non-whites, and they’ve also shown that in general toxic sites in white communities have been cleaned up faster and more completely than those  in Latino and African American communities. This applies internationally as well. In 1992, the Basel Convention became an international treaty that banned the more-developed countries from shipping hazardous from industrialized countries to or through other countries without their permission. In1995 the treaty was amended to outlaw all transfers of hazardous wastes from industrialized countries to less-developed countries. By 2009, the treaty had been signed by 175 countries and ratified (formally approved and implemented) by 172 – those countries that were missing were Afghanistan, Haiti, and the United States. In 2000, delegates from 122 countries completed another global treaty called the Stockholm Convention on Persistant Organic Pollutants (POPs), regulating the of 12 widely used chemicals – called the dirty dozen – that can biomagnify in higher trophic levels in ecosystems. The list includes DDT and 8 other chlorine-containing persistent pesticides, PCBs, dioxins, and furans. Medical researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC have found that it is likely that every person on earth has detectable levels of POPs in their bodies. In 2000, the Swedish Parliament enacted a law that, by 2020, will ban all chemicals that are persistent in the environment and that can accumulate in living tissue based on a guilty until proven innocent risk assessment that industries must perform to prove their products’ safety – currently the opposite of of the policy in the U.S. and other countries. Many school cafeterias, restaurants, national parks, and corporations are participating in a rapidly growing “zero waste” movement to reduce, reuse, and recycle in order to lower their waste outputs by up to 80%. The residents of East Hampton out on Long Island cut their solid waste production by 85%.

To prevent pollution and reduce waste, people need to understand some crucial concepts. Everything is connected. There is no “away” when we throw things away. Polluters and producers should pay for the wastes they produce. We can mimic nature by reusing, recycling, composting, or exchanging most of the municipal solid wastes we produce. Biomimicry is the science and art of discovering and using natural principles to help solve human problems. For example, scientists have studied termite mounds to learn how to cool buildings naturally. Biomimicry is at the heart of the three principles of sustainability. Biomimicry also encourages companies to come up with new, environmentally beneficial, and less resource intensive chemicals, processes, and products that they can sell worldwide. In addition,, these companies convey a better image to consumers based on actual results rather than public relations campaigns. Biomimicry involves two major steps. The first is to observe certain changes in nature and to study how natural systems have responded to such changing conditions over many millions of years. The second step is to try to copy or adapt these responses within human systems in order to help us deal with various environmental challenges. With solid and hazardous wastes, the good web serves as a natural model for responding to the growing problem of these wastes, where in nature one thing’s waste, or output, becomes another thing’s input – endlessly recycling on and on in a circle of sustainable life.

My question for this chapter would be – how can we revamp our economy to work starting with the solution rather than the problem? We can grow a green economy based on healing the problems we now face, literally make money off of clean up and restoration. In a side note, there might have been a bacteria discovered that can break down plastics faster than normal rates in the open. What can we do to capitalize on this potentially holy grail of environmental problem solving? More to the point, how can we start making this green, plentitude economy, a reality? I recently attended the NYC Mayoral Forum on Sustainability, where the mayoral candidates expressed their proposed (rough draft) plans for what they would do in the way of sustainability for the city if they were mayor. A breath of fresh air came in the form of Bill de Blasio, who said “We need to make recycling a way of life.” It’s this kind of attitude, of stark and swift change, that we must embrace to really get our act together. (UPDATE: Let’s see if he keeps his promises.)

Civilization’s Most Imminent Threat

Day 13: Chapter 19 – Climate Change and Ozone Depletion

Climate change is one of the hallmark concerns of those who study the environment and what’s to be done about our ruining it. Considerable scientific evidence indicates that the earth’s atmosphere is warming, because of a combination of natural effects and human activities, and that this warming is likely to lead to significant climate disruption during this century. First of all, knowing the difference between weather and climate is central to understanding climate change. Weather is the short-term atmospheric changes in an area’s temperature, precipitation, wind, and barometric pressure over a period of hours or days. Climate is the average weather conditions of the earth or of a particular area over a course of no less than 30 years or even up to thousands of years. Climate change is also neither new nor unusual. The earth’s climate system is very complex and has fluctuated over the last billions of years since it was formed. This is due to changes in the sun’s output of energy, impacts by large meteorites that throw immense amounts of dust into the atmosphere, and slight changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun. The earth’s climate is also affected by global air circulation patterns, global ice cover that reflects incoming solar energy and helps cool the atmosphere, varying concentrations of the different gases that make up the atmosphere, and occasional slight changes in ocean currents. This is how integrated all the natural systems of the earth are, each affecting and being affected by another. Over the past 900,000 years, the atmosphere has experienced prolonged periods fo global cooling and global warming, the alternating cycled of freezing and thawing known as glacial and interglacial periods. We’ve been living in an interglacial period that has allowed the human population to grow over the past 10,000 years due to stable climate temperature that yielded favorable agricultural conditions. Everything we have is a gift from the last Ice Age; the birth of the ancient coastal cities and civilizations that came from our new ability to domesticate plants and animals, reducing our need to live for the sole purpose of gathering food, are now the same cities and civilizations that are the most immediately threatened by climate change. Then came the Industrial Revolution, and the level of clearing forested land and burning carbon-based fuels started to increase beyond what we’ve been able to do before. The effect of this change in human activity on the atmosphere is reflected in data shown in ice core drillings. These ice cores function like little time capsules from which scientists analyze tiny air bubbles, layers of sot, and other materials trapped in different layers of the ice to uncover information about the past composition of the lower atmosphere, temperature trends, greenhouse gas concentrations, solar activity  snowfall, and forest fire frequency. They show a gradual increase in what’s called the greenhouse effect. This is when gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor are increased in the atmosphere and traps incoming solar energy by not allowing the normal amount of excess heat to escape back into space. But the greenhouse effect is not an entirely bad thing. We wouldn’t have the fair weather and climate from which we’re able to cultivate civilizations, and without it the earth would be an uninhabitable and frigid place. Life on the earth and the world’s economies are totally dependent on the natural greenhouse effect.

Now that we know that our activities throughout the past 200 years have led to a global warming of the earth, we’ve come up with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to document past climate changes and project future changes. It includes more than 2,500 climate scientists from more than 130 countries and is helped by the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and the U.S. Environment Protection Agency. They’ve compiled a list of their major findings in the 2007 IPCC report: 1) The earth’s lower atmosphere is warming, especially since 1960, due primarily to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; 2) Most of the increases in the concentrations of these greenhouse gases since 1960 is due to human activities, especially since the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation – which is actually more climactically disruptive than automotive emissions. deforestation in tropical rainforests adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the sum total of cars and trucks on the world’s roads. Scientific American reports that “according to the World Carfree Network (WCN), cars and trucks account for about 14 percent of global carbon emissions, while most analysts attribute upwards of 15 percent to deforestation.” And at the current rate of deforestation about 1/2 of all forests – the lungs of the earth – could be gone by 2100. 3) These human-induced changes in the chemical composition and the temperature of the atmosphere are beginning to change the earth’s climate; 4) If greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, the earth is likely to experience rapid atmospheric warming and climate disruption during this century; 5) Rapid and significant climate disruption will likely cause ecological, economic, and social disruption by degrading food and water supplies and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, flooding low-lying coastal communities and cities, and eliminating many of the earth’s species. This unprecedented effort to evaluate climate data has been on the the longest and most thorough studies in the history of science. The goals of this continuing effort have been to see if these top scientists can reach a general agreement, or consensus, about the usefulness of the data and conclusions that they have evaluated, and to report their findings to the world. After more than two decades of research and debate, there is general agreement among most of the earth’s climate scientists that the earth’s climate has warmed by about 1°F since 1980, that human activities played a major part in this warming, and that human activities are likely to alter the planet’s climate during this century. This high level of general agreement among the world’s top scientific experts on the subject of climate change or on any scientific subject is extremely rare, which makes the Disinformation Campaign’s malicious agenda that much more ominous. This is what we call the filth spewed by climate denialists in the media. They’re completely wrong, and completely paid off by the very powerful multi-billion dollar lobbying industries, who make sure that nothing political harms their money-making. Again, if it were up to me, politicians that create an air of doubt in the media and public eye would be kicked out of politics. As a matter of fact, we KNOW that the entire shroud of doubt that surrounds this most critical argument was completely manufactured. In 1991, the New York Times got hold of a leaked internal memo from the coal industry that mentioning their plan for an advertising campaign intending on “repositioning global warming as theory rather than fact.” It’s actually disgusting. The more we call climate change a “debate,” the further away a cohesive solution becomes.

NOAA’s data shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide rose from 285ppm in 1850 at the start of the Industrial Revolution to 389ppm in 2010. At the current rate, levels are likely to rise to 560ppm by 2050 and could soar to 1,390ppm by 2100. This simply cannot be allowed to happen. Scientific evidence shows that we need to prevent levels from exceeding 450ppm, which would be an irreversible tipping point that could set into motion large-scale climate changes for hundreds to thousands of years. Leading climate scientist James Hansen says we need to bring atmospheric levels down to 350ppm, the level we had in 1990, to maintain a climate similar to that in which our civilizations developed over the last 10,000 years. Right now, we’re at 392ppm. If levels raise to the tipping point, 450ppm, the temperate would equate to a 2.5-3.0°F – this is the tipping point. We can’t let the global climate temperature rise past 3°F. The IPCC report models show that at current rates, the global temperature could increase by 6-8°F, FAR past the tipping point limit, ensuring the destruction of civilization as we know it. Skeptics complain that this is a form of fear mongering, but they surely must not understand the severity or the verity of this research – meaning skeptics are either stupid are blissfully ignorant, or both. The largest emitters of carbon dioxide are China, the U.S., the European Union, Indonesia, Russia, Japan, and India. The U.S.-based Energy Foundation and the World Wildlife Fun warn that if China continued to burn fossil fuels, especially coal, at its present rate, its carbon dioxide emissions could triple and account for 60% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Simple models show prove this. What more information do we need to start caring about our only home?

The projected rapid change in the atmosphere’s temperature could have severe and long-lasting consequences, including increased drought and flooding, rising sea levels, and shifts in the locations of croplands and wildlife habitats. A 2003 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report laid out a nightmarish worst-case scenario in which human activities, alone or in combination with natural factors, trigger new and abrupt climate and ecological changes that could last for thousands of years. The report describes ecosystems collapsing, floods in low-lying coastal cities, forests consumed in vast wildfires, and grasslands dried out from prolonged drought, turning into dust bowls. It warns of rivers drying up – and with them, drinking water and irrigation water supplies – as the mountain glaciers that deed them melt. It also describes premature extinction of up to half of the world’s species, prolonged heat waves and droughts, more destructive storms, and some tropical infections diseases spreading beyond their current ranges. The U.S. Department of Defense concluded in 2003 that climate disruption “must be viewed as a serious threat to global stability and should be elevated to a U.S. national security concern.” Currently, 30% of the world’s land mass (excluding Antartica) is in prolonged drought. This number could reach 45% by 2059. With more drought, the growth of trees and other plants declines, reducing the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Drought also increases wildfires, adding to the carbon dioxide levels in a positive feedback loop of events. Obviously, with climate change comes more ice and snow melt, mostly at the poles. This creates another positive feedback loop, since the light-colored snow and ice at the poles reflect incoming solar radiation and help to keep the atmosphere cool; but as they melt and expose more area of dark ocean water that absorbs more heat, this ends up warming the waters which leads to more ice melt. The glaciers go through yearly periods of melting and freezing in the summer and winter months, but increasingly they’re not freezing as much in the winter months and melting faster in the summer months. At this rate, summer ice coverage at the poles could be gone by 2040, according to a study done by Muyin Wang and James Overland. Mountain glaciers are important because they lock up most of the world’s drinking water, which comes in the form of ice melt in the warmer months and supply billions of people around the world with fresh water. The Ganges in India and the Yellow and Yangtzee Rivers in China are supplied by mountain glaciers. A very dangerous scenario that could happen is the melting of permafrost. The amount of carbon locked up as methane in permafrost soils is 50-60 times the amounts emitted as carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels each year, which would significant’y accelerate climate change once unlocked. Sea levels are currently rising faster than IPCC scientists reported in 2007. In 2008, a U.S. Geological Survey report concluded that the world’s average sea level will most likely rise 3-6.5 feet by the end of this century, 3 to 5 times faster than what the IPCC estimated, and will probably keep rising for centuries. This is due in part by the expansion of seawater when it warms, and the additional water from melting glaciers. As Al Gore points out in his iconic An Inconvenient Truth, melting glaciers could bring an end to the flow of the jet stream, which has kept the climate of the Northern European area temperate. Without the jet stream’s flow of warm water, Europe could go into another Little Ice Age. What’s really concerning is that some unforeseen damage is already done. According to the IPCC, if we severely reduce greenhouse gas emissions now, the world’s average sea level will still rise by at least one meter (3.3 feet) by 2100 based on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels already there. During this century, the projected rise could cause some serious effects: the degradation or destruction of at least 1/3 of the world’s coastal estuaries, wetlands, and coral reefs; the disruption of many of the world’s coastal fisheries; the flooding and erosion of low-lying barrier islands and gently sloping coastlines  especially in U.S. coastal states like Texas, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, and Florida (with storm surges included, the Northeast would be included too, such as New York and New Jersey in Hurricane Sandy); the flooding of agricultural lowlands and deltas in coastal areas where much of the world’s rice is grown (already happening in parts of India and Bangladesh); the saltwater contamination of freshwater coastal aquifers and decreased supplies of groundwater; the submersion of low-lying islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea – home to 1 of every 20 of the world’s people; the flooding of some of the world’s largest coastal cities, including Calcutta Mumbai, Dhaka, Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Bangkok, Rangoon, Haiphong, and the U.S. cities of New York and Miami. This would displace at least 100 million people.

This is an example of the “global weirdening,” or extreme weather that we will see – and have already started to see – in some areas. It’s interesting to see what our textbook says about this effect of climate change compared to what we’ve seen in the present time. It says that there is controversy among scientists over whether projected atmospheric  warming will increase the frequency and intensity of tropical storms and hurricanes. In 2008, climatologists Mark Saunders and Adam Lea analyzed data collected since 1950 and found that for every increase of about 1°F in the water temperature of the Atlantic Ocean, the overall number of hurricanes and tropical storms increased by about a third, and the number of intense hurricanes (with winds over 110 miles per hour) increased by 45%. A 2005 statistical analysis by MIT climatologist Kerry Emmanuel and six other peer reviewed studies published in 2006 also indicated that atmospheric warming, on average, could increase the size and strength of Atlantic storms and hurricanes and their storm surges due to the warming of the ocean’s surface water. In 2010, the a World Meteorological Organization panel of experts on hurricanes and climate change reached a consensus view: projected atmospheric warming is likely to lead to fewer but stronger hurricanes that could cause more damage. This is due to the warming of the oceans. Warm water increases the ferocity of hurricanes. The ability of the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide also decreases as the ocean warms, causing another positive feedback loop. As the water warms up, some of its dissolved carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. In the last century, a 2007 study said that the upper portions of the oceans warmed by an average of 0.6-1.2°F (which is an astounding increase considering the amount of water in all the world’s oceans). Hurricanes swirl counterclockwise and don’t occur in the Southern Hemisphere, rather Southern Hemisphere storms are called cyclones and spin clockwise. In 2004, we recorded the first ever hurricane in the Southern Hemisphere off the coast of Brazil – Hurricane Catarina. Hurricane Sandy is probably one of the first big wake-up calls to remind us that the waters are warming, and this has consequences that recorded history has never witnessed.

With changes and disruptions in climate and geography, so comes disruptions in the ecosystems and subsequent decreases in biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services. According to the 1977 IPCC, approximately 30% of the land-based plant and animal species assessed so far could disappear if the average global temperature change exceeds 2.7-4.5°F and 70% if it exceeds 6.3°F. The hardest hit species would be those living at the poles, those with limited ranges like some amphibians, those that live at higher elevations, and those with limited tolerance for temperature change. A 2007 study concluded that acidic oceans threaten to destroy most of the world’s ecologically important coral reed ecosystems before the end of this century. Other ecosystems that are especially vulnerable to climate change are polar seas, coastal wetlands, high-elevation mountaintops, and alpine and arctic tundra. Forests wouldn’t be able to migrate fast enough to keep up with climate shifts, severely degrading some ecosystems and allowing more carbon dioxide to remain in the air, creating another positive feedback loop.

Modern industrialized agriculture accounts for about 1/3 of the atmospheric warming that has taken place since 1960, according to a 2006 report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Global warming threatens the delicately stable balance the farmer shares with the earth and climate. Farmers who depend on monocultures of plants bred to thrive at certain temperatures and rainfall will be extra vulnerable. For those that rely on glacially fed rivers and freshwater sources, those who produce crops near river deltas, and coastal aquaculture, climate change will force a decline in productivity. The IPCC predicts that by 2050, some 200-600 million people in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people cold face starvation and malnutrition die to the effects of projected climate change. This is especially bad when considered that more frequent prolonged heat waves in some areas will increase numbers of deaths and illnesses. In a warmer world, microbes that spread infectious diseases like dengue fever and yellow fever are likely to expand their ranges and numbers if mosquitoes that carry them spread to warmer temperate and higher elevation areas, as they have already begun to do. Longer and more intense pollen seasons will mean more allergies and asthma attacks. Insect pests that threaten crops would increase. Environmental scientist Norman Myers estimates that projected climate change during this century could produce at least 150 million, and perhaps 250 million, environmental refugees who will be forced to migrate by increasing hunger, flooding, and drought. Right now, 325 million people, a number greater than the U.S. population, are now already seriously affected by accelerating climate change through natural disasters and environmental degradation.

To slow the projected rate of atmospheric warming and climate disruption, we can increase energy efficiency, sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rely more on renewable energy resources, and slow population growth. Most scientists, and those who understand the scope of the problem of climate change, will argue that our most urgent priority is to do all we can to avoid any and all climate tipping points. It is one of the most urgent political, economic, scientific, and ethical issues that humanity faces. The problem is so complex, however, that attacking it will never be simple. The problem is global; in that dealing with this threat will require unprecedented and prolonged international cooperations. The problem is a long-term political issue; in that voters and elected officials will probably not see the end of the problem of climate change once sufficient action is in place. Those who will suffer the most serious harm have not even been born yet. This poses difficulty in getting a solid momentum toward solving climate change because people favor short-term problems, problems that can be identified and fixed within a rememberable time frame. Climate change is not like that. It is a torch that must be passed until thoroughly extinguished. Also, the projected harmful and beneficial impacts of climate disruption are not spread evenly. The source of one particular branch of climate disruption could occur on one part of the globe but affect another part miles away. This muddles with would-be obvious solutions to basic known causes, like acid rain and over fertilization. Of course, many proposed solutions like sharply reducing or phasing out the use of fossil fuels are controversial because they could disrupt some economies and some lifestyles and threaten the profits of economically and politically powerful oil and coal companies. But waiting too long would cause greater harm to more economies, and more lifestyles, and threaten the ways of life of more than just those who are aware. We can either act to slow climate disruption, try to adapt to it, or continue business as usual and suffer. There are four preventive strategies that, by 2050, could reduce human greenhouse gas emissions by 57-83%, and slow the rate and degree of atmospheric warming. One is to improve energy efficiency by reducing fossil fuel use, especially coal. James Hansen says that phasing out coal use is “80% of the solution to the global warming crisis.” We also need to shift from nonrenewable carbon-based fuels to a mix of low-carbon renewable energy resources based on local and regional variability. Wind and solar are pioneering the way and, with the implementation of the smart grid system (which is doable but just needs funding), could power the whole country. Another strategy is to stop cutting down tropical forests and plant trees to help remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And finally, a shift to more sustainable and climate-friendly agriculture, since tradition industrial agriculture is one of the dirtiest and most carbon intensive industries we’ve created. Strategies to remove already present carbon dioxide from the atmosphere come in the forms of massive global tree-planting programs, especially on degraded land and in the tropics, planting large areas of degraded land with fast-growing perennial plants that remove carbon dioxide and store it in the soil (these plants can also be harvested to produce biofuels), and of course by helping the natural uptake of carbon by preserving and restoring natural forests. In 2007, biologist Renton Righelato and climate scientist Dominick Spracklen concluded that the amount of carbon that we could sequester by protecting and restoring forests is greater than the amount of carbon in GHG emissions that we would avoid by using biofuels such as biodiesel and ethanol.

There is another movement by scientists and other who favor what’s called planetary management. An idea from this school of thought would be to seed the oceans with iron filings to promote the growth of more marine algae and other phytoplankton, which absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide. However, when they die, they sink to the sea floor, decay, and release that carbon dioxide back into the environment. The long term effects of adding huge amounts of iron to the oceans are unknown, but some good scientific reasoning can figure out that this is not to be taken seriously. There is also talk of something called carbon sequestration, or carbon capture and storage, where coal-burning smokestacks are filtered to extract the carbon dioxide so it can be liquefied and injected deep underground and out of the atmosphere. This requires a costly and complex additional system to power plants and requires large amounts of energy to perform, making it unsustainable, and the effects of forcing carbon dioxide deep underground (and even the effectiveness of this strategy) are unknown. I suggest we take a hint from how fracking affects the earth, as it also involves the injection of foreign chemicals deep underground, and has been known to cause earthquakes where earthquakes generally do not happen. These are forms of geoengineering, and some might say it is a ploy to make more money by making it look like something is being done to help the environment when really rich people are just becoming richer and messing with complex ecological systems of which they have no idea the consequences. Claiming that our governments should turn to geoengineering projects as a last resort is a cop out and a lame attempt to befuddle the public again. It’s endorsed by Rex Tillerson and Julian Simon, so you know it can’t mean progress. Another idea like this is to inject large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere solely based on the idea that aerosols like this have a cooling effect on the environment as seen in what happens after large volcanic eruptions. Not only would this be extremely expensive, but the effects would be increased levels of chlorine that would further eat away at the ozone layer as well as increasing the acidity of the oceans and thus decreasing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Ideas have even been spread to install giant mirrors into orbit to reflect the sun’s radiation to cool the earth. These are nonsense, and quite frankly, just as annoying for those who take climate and environmental science seriously as those who claim that some day we’ll just have to colonize on the moon. Neither of these science fiction scenarios is likely nor should too much stock be put into them. They are a waste of dialogue that should be spent on getting those who can make a difference to realize what actually can be done with what we have on playing fields that we already occupy. The ideas of geoengineering also completely violate all that the environmental movement has fought to teach in the way of living in harmony with the earth; the planet is not something to be played around with at the whim of the rich and able. Morally, geoengineering methods are just a diversion from the real problem, which is the greed and control of the big oil and coal industries. They can’t be allowed to get away with what they’re doing, on top of further climate destruction. You can’t fight pollution with pollution. In the end, these ridiculous ideas are probably the result of our country’s quick-fix obsession, demonstrate the complete opposite of the prevention principle. 

Governments can help by making it advantageous for people to not support a fossil fuel infrastructure. The existence of government is to protect the people, not just the rich industries that give back door support to those who run it. This is called corruption, and it seems like we’re perfectly alright with it. We need to not be. We can strictly regulate carbon dioxide and methane as air pollutants. A fair amount of education to use as armor against the consistant and hard-fought battles waged by the coal and oil companies is a must. We can also reduce GHG emissions by phasing in a carbon tax or fee on each unit of carbon dioxide or methane emitted by fossil fuel use, effectively putting a price on carbon emissions. People freak out when they hear more taxes, but if we can lower taxes on income, wages, and profits to offset such taxes, then taxing pollution is totally doable (it’s already being done in some European countries). Governments can also create and regulate cap-and-trade programs, either by state or by region, to make it economically advantageous for utility companies to innovate themselves out of emitting such large amounts of carbon dioxide. This comes from issuing permits to emit pollutants and then let polluters trade their permits in the market. Those who need to emit more will need to pay for the ability to do so, and those who don’t (either by cutting back or innovating or both) can make money. The key to cap-and-trade programs is to make sure the initial cap is low enough to make a difference, and to keep lowering that cap regularly to keep companies on their feet in making sure they’re continually decreasing their emissions. It’s also crucial that governments increase subsidies to businesses that encourage the use of energy efficient technologies, low-carbon renewable energy sources, and more sustainable agriculture. Again, the problem of finding the money is the first stop to this idea. But decreasing subsidies to coal, oil, and nuclear would allocate the funds that can boost their rivals in the market. Finally, governments can help poorer countries develop greener technologies so that they don’t pull us down with them as they struggle to grow on dirty energy growth. Increasing the current tax on each international currency transaction by a quarter of a penny could finance this technology transfer, and generate wealth for less-developed countries. This, along with programs to curb overpopulation, could help promote a more environmentally sustainable global economy. Here in the American Northeast, we’ve come up with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Collectively, the Northeast region of the U.S. used to emit 533 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, meaning that if it were a country on its own, it would rank 10th in the world’s highest polluters. Since going into effect in 2009, emissions in the Northeast have fallen 23% lower than the previous three-year period. This shows that the means to reduce pollutant emissions are available and more cost effective than it was initially projected. RGGI has recently revised its cap so that the regional emissions cap in 2014 will be equal to 91 million tons (a huge reduction) and then that cap will start to decline by 2.5% each year starting in 2015 through 2020. This ensures companies stay on their toes to keep innovating to bring their carbon emissions down lower and lower. The states then sell all  emission allowances through auctions and invest proceeds in consumer benefits: energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other clean energy technologies, spurring innovation in the clean energy economy and creating green jobs in each state. Proud of that.

Although 187 out of the world’s 196 countries attended the 2005 Kyoto Protocol to figure out how to lower global emissions of greenhouse gases, the meeting ended with a general, toothless agreement to pollute less. Clinton and Gore signed the agreement, but when Bush took office he withdrew us from it. However, some countries are already making great strides. Costa Rica aims to be the first country to become “carbon neutral” by cutting its net carbon emissions to zero by 2030. They already generate 78% of their electricity from renewable hydroelectric power and another 18% from wind and geothermal. China does whatever it can to become like us, so energy efficiency being the positive economic strategy that it is, has become a major program for them. China actually has the most intensive energy efficiency program in the world. Their car fuel-efficiency standards are way higher than ours and they’re becoming the world-leader in developing solar cells, solar water heaters, wind turbines, advanced batteries, and plug-in hybrid electric cars. Ironically, they also emit more carbon dioxide than any other country in the world. Here in the U.S., California plans to get a third of its electricity from low-carbon renewables, and Portland is our greenest city with GHG emissions having been cut back to 1990 levels. Portland has even had an economic boom from its efficiency and green infrastructure overhaul, and has saved over $2 million a year on energy bills. We can also be efficient in our prevention of more destruction. Climate change is already happening, we’ve seen Hurricane Katrina and Sandy, and we know that super storms like these will happen again. What we can do now before the next one hits is to prepare with what’s already been set in motion by adapting our infrastructure. Global climate models show that the world needs to make a 50-85% cut in GHG emissions by 2050 to stabilize concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere. This would prevent the planet from heating up by more than 3.6°F – past the tipping point.

Our widespread use of certain chemicals has reduced ozone levels in the stratosphere, which has allowed more harmful ultraviolet radiation to reach the earth’s surface. This layer of ozone keeps about 95% of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching us. In 1984, researchers analyzing satellite data unexpectedly discovered that each year about 40-50% of the ozone in the upper stratosphere over Antarctica just disappears during October and November. This is the hole in the ozone layer. Four years later scientists found that similar but less severe ozone thinning by about 11-38% occurs over the Arctic from February to June. This is all largely a result of the booming use of chlorofluorocarbons, also known as Freons, after discovered in 1930 and developed as popular coolants in refrigerators and air conditioners, propellants in aerosol sprays, cleaners, fumigants, and gases used to make insulation and packaging. In 1974 scientists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina discovered that CFCs were persistant chemicals that ate away at protective levels of ozone, and that 75-85% of the ozone depletion was due to the human use of CFCs. CFCs also remain in the stratosphere for 65-385 years, and as they break down they deplete ozone even further. The effect is that less ozone can be replenished before more is disintegrated, and this leaves more biologically damaging UV rays to reach the earth, causing more cataracts, sunburns, and cancers. The increase in UV radiation also harms phytoplankton, which are important for their removal of carbon dioxide and position as the base of ocean food webs. In 1987, 36 countries met in Montreal and came up with the Montreal Protocol, limiting the use of CFCs; then again in 1992 under the Copenhagen Protocol. They were able to get so much done because of the convincing evidence of a serious problem and because the companies that produced CFCs were small international companies with less corporate resistance to finding a solution. They were also able to find a substitute to chemical CFCs. The landmark international agreements on stratospheric ozone, now signed by all 196 of the world’s countries, are important examples of global cooperations in response to a serious global environmental problem.

Personally, I believe the the Disinformation Campaign is probably single-handedly the most infuriating, nauseating, and morally vapid schemes our species has fashioned in the attempt at keeping greedy prospects secure. If you count yourself a climate denialist, or doubtful in any way of the situation that is global climate change, you can congratulate yourself at being completely manipulated, having had the wool pulled over your eyes big time, and being a lasting part of the problem.

My question for this chapter would be: what if a breach in environmental standards/law/regulations resulted in a super high fine demanded to be payed to all the people/countries whom the particular crime (breach) would affect? Not just those immediately, geographically, involved, but payed out to all the world’s countries? We know that the costs of pollution are high and expansive, so why not make the economic costs actually fit the crime? This would cause such high risk and costs to pollute, that companies would have no choice but to switch to renewables once and for all.

The Air We Breathe

Day 12, Chapters 17 and 18: Environmental Hazards and Human Health & Air Pollution

We face health hazards from biological, chemical, physical, and cultural factors in general, however with changing times it’s becoming increasingly evident that our lifestyle choices are Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re facing risks and hazards every day. With sensational news coverage of certain hazards, our awareness of real problems can be seen to be somewhat bottlenecked into what we learn about from the media. There are five major types of hazards: biological hazards, in the form of pathogens that can infect the body, chemical hazards, like harmful chemicals in the air, food, water, soil, and products we come in counter with every day, natural hazards, like fire, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and storms, cultural hazards, like unsafe working conditions, crime, and poverty, and lifestyle choices, such as smoking, eating poorly, and consuming drugs and alcohol.

In the case of biological hazards, the most serious are infectious diseases like flu, AIDS, tuberculosis, diarrheal disease, and malaria. It used to be that infectious diseases were the leading cause of death in the world and in the United States, however, midway through the 20th century with developments of medicine and sanitation these disease and death rates in general have been reduced (leading to overpopulation no doubt). Although we’re experiencing a general increase in living standards and quality, our susceptibility to infectious disease is still threatened with the new problem of genetic resistance. The antibiotics we put in our meats end up in our bodies, causing any other microbes to develop genetic resistances to them since they divide and evolve so quickly. Viruses also evolve quickly but are not affected by antibiotics. The biggest viral killer is the flu virus, the second biggest is HIV, and third biggest is hepatitis B. Exposure to bodily fluids and airborne emissions are how these viruses find hosts. We acquire infectious diseases through a multitude of mediums, such as through pets, livestock, wild animals, insects, food, water, air, other humans, and from mother to fetus. The study of ecological medicine has helped us find out information about the spread of various diseases, such as the suburban development of communities into nearby wooded lands increasing the amount of human cases of Lyme disease. Over the course of human history, malarial protozoa probably have killed more people than all the wars ever fought. During this century, climate change as projected by scientists is likely to spread cases of malaria across a wider area of the globe. As the average atmospheric temperature increases  populations of malaria-carrying mosquitoes will likely spread from tropical areas to warmer temperate areas of the earth. According to the WHO, the global death rate from infectious diseases decreased by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 2006 and is projected to continue dropping. However, the next threatening pandemic-level disease we could be facing is the bird flu, which is already causing problems in the Far East.

There is growing concern about chemicals in the environment that can cause cancers and birth defects, and disrupt the human immune, nervous, and endocrine systems. There are three major types of potentially toxic agents. Carcinogens are chemicals, types of radiation, or certain viruses that can cause or promote cancer. Some examples are arsenic, benzene, formaldehyde, gamma radiation, PCBs, radon, certain chemicals in tobacco smoke, ultraviolet radiation, and vinyl chloride. Mutagens are chemicals or forms of radiation that cause or increase the frequency of mutations in the DNA molecules found in cells. Some of these changes can lead to cancer and other disorders, like how nitrous acid forms from the digestion of nitrite preservatives in foods and can cause mutations linked to increases in stomach cancer in people who consume large amounts of processed foods and wine that contain this preservative. And when these mutations occur in DNA molecules in our reproductive cells, the effect is suffered by the offspring. Teratogens are chemicals that cause harm or birth defects to a fetus or embryo. Examples of these are ethyl alcohol, angel dust, benzene, formaldehyde, lead, mercury, phthalates, thalidomide, and vinyl chloride. PCBs are a class of about 200 chlorine-containing organic compounds that are very stable and nonflammable. Between 1929 and 1977 they were used widely as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, and insulators in electrical transformers and capacitors, as well as part of the ingredients in products like paints, fire retardants in fabrics, preservatives, adhesives, and pesticides. This would go on until Congress banned the domestic production of PCBs after research showed that they could cause liver and other cancers in test animals and, according to the EPA, probably can cause cancers in humans. A 1996 study related fetal exposure to PCBs in the womb to learning disabilities in children. For decades PCBs entered the air, water, and soil during their manufacture, use, and disposal, not to mention accidental leaks and spills. They’re also fat soluble, so they can be biologically magnified in food chains in ecosystems, eventually aggregating in the highest levels to the prime apex predator on the planet – us. They’ve even been found in the bodies of polar bears. PCBs and other persistent toxic chemicals can move through the living and nonliving environment on a number of pathways. This means they basically travel along the water cycle, finding themselves in ground water, air, surface water, crops, people, animals and vegetation. Some natural and synthetic chemicals in the environment are neurotoxins, like PCBs, arsenic, lead, and certain pesticides, that can harm the human nervous system. Effects can include behavioral changes, learning disabilities, retardation, attention deficit disorder, paralysis, and death. Mercury particles, which are elemental and therefore cannot be broken down or degraded, emitted from active volcanoes and coal-burning power plants are transported through the atmosphere to arctic regions where they can get trapped in arctic ice. Scientists are concerned that as more arctic ice melts as a result of climate change, more of these mercury particles will flow into the oceans and into food chains. Evidence shows that in some arctic seals and beluga whales, mercury levels have increased fourfold since the early 1980s. According to the EPA, 75% of all human exposure to mercury comes from eating fish. In 2003, the UN Environment Programme lead a report recommending phasing out coal-burning power plants and waste incinerators throughout the world as rapidly as possible, as well as use a substitute for mercury in the products it’s found in most. There are other molecules called hormonally active agents (HAAs) that attach to the molecules of natural homones and disrupt the endocrine systems in people and some other animals. Bisphenol A (BPA) is a once-widely produced agent of this kind that was used in plastics. Phthalates are another agent used to soften polyvinyl chloride (PVC plastics) and are used in numerous other products like adult and baby shampoos, children’s’ toys, deodorants, hairsprays, baby powders, body lotions, and nail polishes. Now we know that most exposure comes from our diet, which is too heavily dependent for too many people on the effects of the industrial food system. Phthalates have been found to induce a strange feminization effect in some species of animals, and in some that can change gender, it made them turn from male to female. This could be because some of these chemicals are chemically shaped similarly to sex hormone receptors in animal bodies, causing early onset of puberty in humans. The European Union and at least 14 other countries banned the chemical after studies have shown that phthalates cause liver cancer, kidney and liver damage, premature breast development, immune sustem suppression, and abnormal sexual development. However, the U.S. is home of controversial economic and scientific studies, and bans on substances that would cause huge economic loss to the companies that produce these chemicals have successfully stalled policies with their own “scientific” studies. I particularly feel like this is becoming a very threateningly silent problem, because my brother has diabetes and we believe he has ADHD. He acquired diabetes when he was 11, and doctors said it was from an auto-immune disease and they’re still not completely sure what causes this. We also have convincing evidence to suggest that he and my dad have attention deficit (probably hyperactive) disorder, which we as a family have recently sympathized with and do no believe that it is a mere lack of will or sign of laziness. For whatever reason, they act this way and such information from the textbook, and general observation in the people we interact with every day, show that these chemicals that we have penetrated our environment with are unmistakably the cause of these seemingly recent mysterious afflictions.

Many health scientists call for much greater emphasis on pollution prevention to reduce our exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. Toxicity is a measure of the harmfulness of a substance – its ability to cause injury, illness, or death to a living organism. A basic principle of toxicology is that any synthetic or natural chemical can be harmful if ingested in a large enough quantity, but the critical question is at what level of exposure to a particular toxic chemical will the chemical cause harm? “The dose makes the poison.” Toxicity also depends on the thing that is doing the poisoning and the thing that is being poisoned, so all the variations of the organism being acted upon go into determining how toxic the substance will be for that particular organism. All the variables that go into a substances toxicity are air pollutant levels, water pollutant levels, soil/dust levels, food pesticide levels, nutritional health, overall health, lifestyle, personal habits, genetic predisposition, lung, intestine, and skin absorption rates, metabolism, accumulations, and excretion. Solubility and persistance are important too. Fat soluble chemicals and chemicals that aren’t easily broken down do more damage because they remain in the biotic and nonbiotic systems and last longer, doing more damage; whereas water-soluble chemicals and chemicals that break down easily usually do less. In 2005, the Environmental Working Group analyzed umbilical chord blood from 10 randomly selected newborns in U.S. hospitals. Of the 287 chemicals detected, 180 have been shown to cause cancers in humans or animals, and 208 have caused birth defects or abnormal development in test animals. Taken from the link above, Shanna Swan says, “Whenever food is processed through a tube, whether it’s milk in a milking machine, or tomato sauce going into the bottle, it’s going to pick up phthalates. We see that very dramatically in the neonatal intensive care nursery.” Recent scientific findings have caused some experts to suggest that exposure to chemical pollutants in the womb may be related to increasing rates of autism, childhood asthma, and learning disorders. Perhaps even more alarming is the effect that our pharmaceutical companies’ commercial grip has on the environment. Trace amounts of estrogen-containing birth control pills, blood pressure medicines, antibiotics, and a host of other chemicals with largely unknown effects on human health are being released into waterways from sewage treatment plants or are leaching into groundwater from home septic systems. Never before have we created these synthetic chemicals to treat various bodily ailments, but now we’re producing them at rapid rates for consumers but they all end up being excreted. And what happens in the grand ecological scheme of life? It comes back. The U.S. Geological Survey found that 80% of the U.S. streams and almost 1/4 of the groundwater that it sampled was contaminated with trace amounts of a variety of medications. With the gradual buildup of these synthetic and bodily impactful chemicals floating freely in the world’s waterways, what kind of effect can that have on humanity? It can no doubt be messing with our evolution as we expose ourselves to chemicals that our bodies either aren’t meant to interact with, or aren’t meant to interact with until the delicate time-sensitive structures set up by nature (in the case of sex hormones). I’m not a fan of messing with our entire species’ body chemistry on a global scale, and I feel this might become a very grave global problem in our more distant future that will be flying right under the radar. Not to get over dramatic, but anything that literally causes us to grow up faster is the work of the devil.

Because of insufficient data and the high costs of regulation, federal and state governments do not supervise the use of nearly 99.5% of the commercially used chemicals in the United States. The deplorable lack of any precautionary principle is despicable. But we can use two methods to ensure our approach in regulating what chemicals we tamper with. First, we would assume that new chemicals and technologies are harmful until scientific studies show otherwise. Second, we would remove existing chemicals and technologies that appear to have a strong chance of causing significant harm from the market until we could establish their safety. We have already done with with lead-based paints in much of the developed world. A pollution prevention system or approach, one that is beefed up and given teeth to handle the Disinformation campaign, is needed. An example of what was much needed pollution prevention was many of the world’s nations’ phasing out of chlorofluorocarbons, the chemicals known to deplete the ozone layer that protects all life on earth from damaging levels of UV radiation.

Question: How can we better educate the public about all the chemicals they’re unknowingly consuming through the industrial food (and various other manufacturing) systems?

While we need to be cautious about the industrialized world we construct and live in, the threat is also airborne. Air pollution is a problem because, like water pollution, it’s global. The two innermost layers of the atmosphere are the troposphere, which supports life, and the stratosphere, which contains the protective ozone layer – our global sunscreen. Rising and falling air currents, winds, and concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the troposphere play a major role in the planet’s weather (short-term) and climate (long-term). The problem is that pollutants mix in the air to form industrial smog, primarily as a result of burning coal, and photochemical smog, caused by emissions from motor vehicles, industrial facilities, and power plants. Air pollution is the presence of chemicals in the atmosphere in concentrations high enough to harm organisms, ecosystems, or human-made materials, or to alter climate. Any chemical in the atmosphere can become a pollutant in high enough quantities. And of course there can be natural forms of air pollution, like the pollutants from wildfires and volcanoes. However, it’s the rate and amount of pollutants that humans are emitting into the atmosphere that is what’s causing the problems modern humanity is facing today. Most human inputs of outdoor air pollutants occur in industrialized and urban areas with their higher concentrations of people, cars, and factories. Primary pollutants are chemicals or substances emitted directly into the air from natural processes and human activities at concentrations high enough to cause harm, while secondary pollutants are the results of the mixture when primary pollutants react with one another and with other natural components of air to form new harmful chemicals. Global winds then carry these stagnant concentrations of pollution to other areas. However, over the past 30 years the quality of outdoor air in most more-developed countries has improved greatly thanks to pressure from grassroots organizations and citizens that have led governments to pass and enforce air pollution control laws. Yet, there are areas where the outdoor air pollution is still so unhealthy that it endangers 1.1 billion people. Indoor ai pollution is probably a bigger threat, and it’s caused by the burning of wood, charcoal, coal, or fun in open fires or poorly designed stoves to heat their dwellings and cook their food; along with the annoyingly ever-present threat that is cigarette smoking. Indoor air pollution kills an estimates 4,400 people every day. There is no place on the plant that has not been affected by air pollution. Pollutants emitted in China and India have found their way across the Pacific where they affect the west coast of North America. There is even “arctic haze” collecting from the flow of air pollutants over northern Europe, Asia, and North America.

Carbon monoxide is a highly toxic gas that forms from the incomplete combustion of carbon-containing materials. It comes from car exhaust, burning of forests and grasslands, smokestacks of fossil fuel-burning power plants and industries, tobacco smoke, and open fires and inefficient stoves used for cooking. Carbon dioxide is the main culprit of climate change in leading the greenhouse effect. Other gases like volatile organic compounds, such as methane are more potent at this (20x more effective at warming the atmosphere), but the sheer amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere before the carbon cycle can remove it is what makes this the leading GHG. Nitrogen oxides from from various natural and anthropogenically combustive sources and reacts with water vapor in the air to form nitric acid and nitrite salts, components of acid deposition. They also play a role in the formation of photochemical smog. Two-thirds of the sulfur dioxide in the air comes from human sources, mostly the combustion of sulfur-containing coal in power and industrial plants, oil refining, and smelting of sulfide cores. It’s converted into aerosols in the atmosphere, while consist of microscopic droplets of sulfuric acid and sulfate salts that return to earth in acid rain. This creates breathing problems, kills water ecosystems, ruins crops, and corrodes stone and metal statues. They’ve also had a major part in the formation of the South Asia Brown Clouds, and concentrations of sulfur dioxide have increased by more than a third in the past decade. Ozone is good for us when it’s in the stratosphere, but when it’s in the troposphere it can cause severe breathing problems and disfunction in much of our infrastructure, like corroding tires, fabrics, paints, and damage plants. Significant evidence suggests that we’re decreasing the amount of “good” ozone and increasing the amount of “bad” ozone. Lead is another hugely devastating pollutant, and it has lead to many deaths of children, and those who survive lead poisoning are left with blindness, palsy, partial paralysis, and mental retardation. Leaded gasoline was a major factor in this spread of lead poisoning, but since 1970 it was banned in the U.S. and levels of lead poisoning have dropped.

Smog is gross. People in cities exposed to industrial smog are threatened, particularly in the winter months, with an unhealthy mix of sulfur dioxide, sulfuric acid, and particulates. When burned, most of the carbon in coal and oil is converted to carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Unburned carbon in coal also ends up in the atmosphere as suspended particulate matter, or soot. When coal and oil are burned, the sulfur compounds they contain react with oxygen to produce sulfur dioxide gas, some of which is converted to tiny suspended droplets of sulfuric acid. Some of these droplets react with ammonia in the atmosphere to form solid particles of ammonium sulfate. This is what gives suspended particles of such salts and soot their gray color. Because of its heavy reliance on coal, China has 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. The World Bank puts the annual death toll from air pollution in China at 750,000. But our and Europe’s history shows that we can reduce industrial smog fairly quickly by setting standards for coal-burning industries and utilities, and by shifting from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas in urban industries and dwellings (or even better, renewables!). Photochemical smog is another urban problem. It starts forming when morning when exhaust from morning commuter traffic releases large amounts of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds into the air, reacting in a complex way with UV light and heat from the sun to produce ground level ozone, nitric acid, aldehydes, peroxyacyl nitrates, and other secondary pollutants. Collectively they form a brew of reddish-brown photochemical oxidants that react with and damage compounds in the atmosphere and in our lungs. This occurs in urban cities with lots of mobile emitters, heat, and dry air – so Los Angeles, Mexico City, and much of the Southwest. Some natural factors can decrease air pollution, like heavier particles being gravitated toward earth, rain, snow, and salty sea spray partially cleansing the air and washing pollutants out, wind sweeps that bring in new, cleaner air, and other chemical reactions that bring airborne pollutants to the ground. However, some factors can increase air pollution buildup. These are urban building that reduce wind speed through an area, hills and mountains that reduce the flow of air in valleys, high temperatures that promote chemical reactions leading to photochemical smog, and emissions fo volatile organic compounds, like some trees and plants in heavily wooded areas. The grasshopper effect is when air pollutants transported at high altitudes reach the earth’s polar areas.

Acid deposition is caused mainly by coal-burning power plants and motor vehicle emissions, and in come regions it threatens human health, aquatic life and ecosystems, forests, and human-built structures. Coal burning power plants and smelters reduce local pollution by using tall smokestacks that inject the pollution high into the atmosphere, but end up attributing to regional pollution downwind. This trade-off carries pollution up to 600 miles away. The acidic compounds emitted react in the atmosphere to create acid deposition, aka acid rain. Dry deposition occurs within 2-3 days of emission, so it falls closer to the source, and wet deposition occurs 4-14 days after emission, occurring in areas far away from the source. Acid rain can be naturally buffered by soils that contain limestone or calcium bicarbonate, neutralizing the deposition. However, thin and already acidic soils are at the greatest risk and can fall into a downward spiral of becoming more and more acidic. The worst acid deposition occurs in China, which gets 70% of its total energy and 80% of its electricity from burning coal. The air in Beijing has 40 times above the limit of the level of air pollution set by the Chinese government. China is also the top emitter of sulfur dioxide, threatening food security in many areas within and outside of China.  Acid deposition can be very harmful to crops, especially is soil pH is below 5.1. Forests can be affected by either having their soil’s magnesium and calcium depleted or by the release of lead, cadmium, aluminum, and mercury into the soil that damages roots and weakens trees. Mountaintop forests are particularly vulnerable because of the thinner soil and continuous exposure to tainted precipitation. Thankfully, the U.S. Clean Air Act in 1990 established stronger air pollution regulations for key pollutants in the United States, and saved our country’s and Canada’s vegetation and soil from weakening emissions. However, we’ll need an 80% decrease in sulfur dioxide emissions to recover rivers, streams, lakes, and forests to past states before acidification. According to most scientists studying the problem, the best solutions are preventive approaches that reduce or eliminate emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates. The problems are that the people and ecosystems who are affected by air pollution are often downstream or downwind of the source, so immediate results after political actions won’t often be seen by those who make the decision. This is a central problem for getting most environmental policies into action. And countries that have coal are never willing to not use it as a fuel source because it’s so cheap and abundant; they also resist extracting the sulfur from the coal before burning it or using low-sulfur coal and argue that this would increase electricity prices for consumers. However, this is no excuse because there are certainly always other methods of energy production that can and should be implemented that don’t have such negative external costs. Raising gas mileage standards with efficiency mandates can also limit the amount of emissions. Between 1980 and 2008, air pollution laws in this country have reduced sulfur dioxide emissions from all sources by 56% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 40%. Despite these achievements, much of the rainwater in the eastern U.S. is still between 2.5 and 8 times more acidic than it should be.

The most threatening indoor air pollutants are smoke and soot from the burning of wood and coal in cooking fires (mostly in less-developed countries), cigarette smoke, and chemicals used in building materials and cleaning products. According to the World Health Organization and the World Bank, indoor air pollution is the world’s most serious air pollution problem, especially for poor people. This is one of the more prominent examples of environmental injustice. A prolific example is in Sub-Saharan Africa where thousands of people, mostly women and children, die of lung disease from breathing in toxic smoke from carbon-based fuel sources for cooking and lighting.  The EPA reveals that levels of 11 common pollutants are generally 2 to 5 times higher inside U.S. homes and commercial buildings than they are outdoors, in some cases 100 times higher, that pollution levels inside cars n traffic-clogged urban areas can be up to 18 times higher than outside levels. Our modern life that keeps us indoors more than outdoors increases our health risks from exposures to these pollutants by 70-98%. It’s at the top of the EPA’s list of 18 sources of cancer. Airborne spores of fungal growths like molds and mildew can grow inside the walls of buildings and cause allergic reactions and asthma. Danish and U.S. EPA studies have led to the coining of the term “sick building syndrome,” where various air pollutants cause dizziness, headaches, coughing sneezing, shortness of breath, nausea, skin dryness and irritation, respiratory infections, flu-like symptoms, and depression. That’s a long list of ailments caused by a dirty house. The four most dangerous indoor air pollutants are tobacco smoke, formaldehyde, radioactive radon-222 gas, and very small particulates of various substances.  Formaldehyde causes the most difficulty for people in the more-developed countries, being that it’s in a lot of common household materials like plywood, particleboard, paneling, high-gloss wood, furniture, drapes, upholstery, adhesives used in carpeting and wallpaper, and urethane-formaldehyde foam insulation. Radon gas seeps upward from deposits into the soil and disperses quickly in the air. Buildings above these deposits can acquire it through cracks in the foundation and walls, openings in sump pumps and drains, and hollow concrete blocks.

Air pollution can contribute to asthma, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, lung cancer, heart attack, and stroke. According to the WHO, at least 2.4 million people worldwide die prematurely each year from the effects of air pollution. Most of these deaths occur in Asia, and most of those in China. The EPA found that each year 125,000 Americans get cancer from breathing soot-laden diesel fumes emitted by buses and trucks, and 96% of the people are from urban areas. What’s shocking is that the world’s 100,000 or more diesel-powered oceangoing ships emit almost half as much particulate pollution as do the world’s 760 million cars, making the unregulated shipping industry one of the world’s largest polluters of the atmosphere. Legal, economic, and technological tools can help us to clean up air pollution, but the best solution is to prevent it. The U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Acts in 1970, 1977, and 1990, providing a good step in the direction toward limiting what we emit. Congress also directed the EPA to establish air quality standards for six major outdoor air pollutants: carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, suspended particulate matter (SPM), ozone, and lead. Primary standards of a maximum allowable level are set to protect human health, and secondary limits are set to protect environmental and property damage. Many other emissions, like chlorinated hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds, or compounds of toxic metals that cause serious health and ecological damage are also limited with standards set by the EPA. Those six major pollutants have decreased in quantity by about 54% between 1980 and 2008 while other economic factors, like GDP and energy consumption, have gone up. This proves that limiting externalities doesn’t always have to mean a negative side effect for business or the economy. It’s obviously good to practice safety; the good it does for the most part outweighs the “bad.”According to the EPA, in 2008 about 57% of Americans lived in an area where the air was unhealthy to breathe during part of the year due to ground level ozone and particulate matter. But we can make it better. Environmental scientists stress that prevention is key; don’t make a mess and you won’t have to clean it up. We made lead levels drop the most dramatically by banning it outright in gasoline. We need to update the 20,000 older coal-burning power plants and refineries that are not included in current Clean Air and Water Acts. Improving fuel efficiency lessens mobile sources of pollution. Those who think that reducing air pollution is too costly for commerce and would hinder economic growth clearly don’t care about their or their children’s respiratory health. Also, there’s money to be made by cleaning the air.

We can use the marketplace to reduce outdoor air pollution. Allowing producers of air pollution to buy and sell government air pollution allotments in the marketplace enables companies to make money while simultaneously being forced to innovate by agreeing to operate under capped emission levels. This is called a cap-and-trade system. This approach can be faster and more effective than government regulation, however it requires good government oversight to make sure companies don’t cheat. The ultimate success of any emissions trading approach depends on how low the initial cap is set and how often it is lowered in order to promote innovation in air pollution prevention and control, gotta keep them on their heels. Between 1990 and 2006, this method helped reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 53% across the country. This can lead to a problem, however, where multiple sources in one area buy more pollution credits and end up creating hot spots of pollution. Following the California model, the Northeastern states entered into a coalition to reduce their regional carbon dioxide emissions in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and so far has met good reductions in carbon dioxide levels while also using the money raised from carbon trading toward implementing better energy efficiency. But government oversight is very important in the functionality of carbon credit allocation and proper use.

In short, to reduce outdoor air pollution we need to burn low-sulfur coal or remove sulfur from coal, convert coal to a liquid or gaseous fuel before burning it, obviously phase out coal use altogether, disperse emissions with tall smokestacks (reducing local pollution), remove pollutants from smokestack gases, and tax each unit of pollution produced. We can reduce motor vehicle emissions by using healthier forms of travel, like walking, biking, or using mass transit, improve fuel efficiency, remove older cars from the roads, require emission control devices in vehicles, inspect car exhaust systems twice a year, and set strict emission standards. Because of the Clean Air Acts, a new car today in the U.S. emits 75% less pollution than cars did before 1970. Better technology such as with hybrid vehicles and looking more into the hydrogen cell can make even more improvements. Most of the world;s more-developed counties have enacted laws and regulations that have significantly reduced outdoor air pollution, emphasizing output approaches. The next step is emphasizing preventing air pollution, and will not work unless individual citizens and groups put political pressure on elected officials to enact appropriate regulations. Preventing indoor air pollution can be achieved by banning smoking indoors, set stricter formaldehyde emissions standards for carpet, furniture, and building materials, prevent radon infiltration, use less polluting cleaning agents, paints, and other products, use adjustable fresh air vents for work spaces, circulate air more frequently, circulate a building’s air through rooftop greenhouses, and use efficient ventilation systems for wood-burning stoves. We can also put economic pressure on companies through our purchases to get them to manufacture and sell products and services that do not add to pollution problems. They’re going to be making and selling stuff anyway, it might as well be good for every body. Margaret Mead once said, “The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence. If we can’t solve some of our problems in the face of threats to this global commons, then I can’t be very optimistic about the future of the world.”

I guess my question for this chapter could be how can we make it more transparent how imminent the effects of air pollution are to our every day life and health? What is the best way to show people that the reason why they have repeating seasonal allergies and various respiratory afflictions is due to the air they breathe, and how they can be part of the change to stop this slowing down of caring since the first EArth Day movements?

Energizing the Future

Day 11, Chapters 15: Nonrenewable Energy & Chapter 16: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

In today’s world, energy is the common goal and problem of practically every nation. Everyone uses energy. Everyone needs energy. Citizens of advanced industrial nations consume as much energy in 6 months as citizens in less developed countries consume in their entire life. It’s a fundamental aspect of modern life. Net energy is the useable amount of high-quality energy available from an energy resource minus the amount of energy needed to make it available. The laws of thermodynamics state that it requires high energy to obtain high energy, and that high energy automatically becomes degraded and unnecessarily wasted due to finding, extracting, processing, and transporting that energy to the consumer. We can’t get around this, and so all we worry about is the net energy. An example of how this works is if you put in 9 units of energy to produce the corn to make 10 units of ethanol, then you’ve really yielded only 1 unit of net energy. We can’t get around the laws of thermodynamics, but we can try to tighten our energy ratio by reducing waste and becoming more efficient. In the U.S. about 84% of all commercial energy is wasted through inefficiency like gas-guzzling cars that require more gas for mileage, and 41% of all commercial energy is automatically wasted because of the second law of thermodynamics. But my cutting back on dirty forms of energy like gas and oil, we can save money, use less energy for the same activities (become more efficient), and function on a healthier level for the environment.

We use conventional oil because it is (or rather was) abundant, has high net energy yield, and is relatively inexpensive. However, using it causes air and water pollution and releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Oil supplies about 1/3 of the world’s commercial energy and 40% of that used in the U.S.; it’s the lifeblood of most of the world’s modern lifestyles. You could say we live in an above ground world that is drenched in oil, from the energy we use to our plastics and roads. Petrochemicals produce raw materials in industrial organic chemicals like cleaning fluids, pesticides, plastics, synthetic fibers, paints, medicines, and many other products. Geologists project that proven and unproven oil reserves of conventional crude oil will be 80% depleted sometimes between 2050 and 2100, depending on consumption rates. If the earth were a living body, China’s metabolism would be running the fastest. So China’s rapid growth and consumption would be something to watch out for in that deadline. When evaluating future oil supplies, we need to keep in mind that potential reserves are not proven reserves, that just because oil is in the ground does not mean that it is economically and environmentally feasible to extract it. The U.S. gets about 85% of its commercial energy from fossil fuels, produces 9% of the world’s crude oil, and uses 23% of the world’s production. If all public land and coastal regions in the U.S. were open to oil extraction, we would only find enough crude oil to meet no more than about 1% of the country’s current annual need. This oil would be developed at a very high production costs and produce low net energy yields, with high environmental impacts. The United States cannot even come close to meeting its huge and growing demand for crude oil and gasoline by increasing domestic supplies. This leads to a more current problem that has since emerged after this textbook was written – the Keystone XL pipeline. Heavy oils from tar sand and oil shale exist in potentially large supplies but have low net energy yields and higher environmental impacts than conventional oil has. It’s even worse than oil. Most of these reserves lay under Canada’s Alberta region close enough to the surface to be strip mined. But before it can be mined, the boreal forest must be clear-cut, wetlands are drained, and some rivers are diverted. The tar sands are then dredged up with heavy machinery, transported to plants where they require lots of water to boil the oil out to be refined. The process is more laborious than traditional crude extraction, making it a dirtier process, producing more air pollution, and reducing the net energy of the end oil product. It’s actually really interesting to hear about how bad this process of oil extraction is years before the Keystone XL pipeline project became a viable concern. However, it also makes the prospect of such a project all the more threatening with a public that seems totally unaware of the huge external (environmental and economic) costs and rather blinded by the mantra of domestic oil production – even though it’s not really domestic and won’t really help our efficiency at all!

Another type of oil is shale oil. This oil is especially not worth the trouble of processing because it’s literally like trying to squeeze water from a stone. The oil is locked in the shale rock and requires lots of high grade energy and water to extract, reducing the overall net energy to pitiful levels, even lower than tar sands. It takes 5 barrels of water to produce one barrel of shale oil and it releases 27-52% more carbon dioxide per energy unit produced. But, nevertheless, it’s “domestic energy,” which somehow translates to the American people’s minds as a holy resource. What is really going on when we use low net energy forms of oil is that we’re actually paying more as taxpayers to support government subsidies to these business that prop up the markets for their extraction and use, because otherwise on their own these oils would never survive in the open market. We’re literally making up an artificial market, paying through the roof, and not getting the bang for our buck.

Conventional natural gas is more plentiful than oil, it has a high net energy yield and a fairly low cost, and it has the lowest environmental impact (when burned) of all fossil fuels. That being said, it contains more methane (50-90% more), which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Still, its dramatically lower carbon dioxide output makes some see it as the important transition fuel that we can sustain ourselves on (for probably 82-118 years) during our much needed conversion to solar and wind. The U.S. plans to become the largest importer of liquefied natural gas by 2025. Fracking was probably not around or as prominent when the textbook was written, but now that it’s a popular source of controversy we can now see the scarier side to natural gas extraction through shale rock fracturing. It destroys the communities around it by making the ground water utterly toxic and has been known to kill livestock on farms around extraction sites in short amounts of time. Popular footage of resident’s water faucets igniting on fire have made this clear. I know that Governor Cuomo is due to decide whether or not to allow fracking in some areas upstate, frighteningly close to the water supplies that provide NYC with its famously fresh and clean water. Fracking in New York State would be a local and far-reaching tragedy, so I can only assume that fracking anywhere else would be a bad for populations of anything living things that value their health as well. So far the public fight against fracking has staved it off, but Cuomo’s decision is to be made soon.

Coal is just bad. Conventional coal is plentiful and has a high net energy yield and low cost, however it has a very high environmental impact. In order, China, us, and India are the largest consumers of coal, and the National Academy of Sciences estimates that we have only 100 years left of coal consumption left. Coal is the dirtiest of them all. It produces the largest amount of carbon dioxide when burned, and is extremely taxing on the environment even before it’s burned because extracting it requires so much fuel consumption. Burning coal also releases black carbon particles, or soot, into the air, along with sulfur dioxide and even trace amounts of radioactive materials and toxic mercury into the atmosphere. In fact, coal plants release 100x more radioactivity into the atmosphere than does a nuclear plant with the same energy output. They also produce highly toxic coal ash that must be stored, essentially forever. In China’s rise, they’d been building one coal plant each week, and most of them without modern air pollution control equipment, so they’ve become the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, which contribute to acid rain and serious health problems. If the harmful effects of coal were included in the price of using it, coal would be the second most expensive way to produce electricity after solar cells (which are currently deceasing in price). With the addition of the costs of regulating the coal ash, it might be fairly the most expensive. Some energy analysts say that we should never commit to using an energy resource that requires us to store any resulting harmful wastes essentially forever (and who would disagree with that). The ash leftover from burning coal is highly toxic and contains indestructible chemicals such as cadmium, arsenic, chromium, lead, mercury, and radioactive radium. They’re in the ash because (in the U.S.) smokestacks have equipment that remove these chemicals from the smoke, but the laws of matter just shove them somewhere else. Sometimes it’s sold to make drywall or even fertilizer – and there aren’t any federal regulations on toxic metals in fertilizer. in the U.S. 57% of the ash is either buried or made into a wet slurry that both eventually leach into the ground water and severely pollute nearby waterways. Regulating these byproducts of the coal has met fearsome opposition from the industries. In 2008 the coal industry, along with many coal-burning electric utility companies and Union Pacific Railroad, funded a highly effective $40 million publicity campaign to promote the misleading idea of clean coal. There is no such thing as clean coal. Leading climate scientist James Hansen of NASA says that “coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on the planet.”

Nuclear energy is a very controversial method of energy acquisition. It has low environmental impact (if all goes well) and a very low accident risk, but its use has been limited by a low net energy yield, high costs, fear of accidents, long-lived radioactive wastes, and the potential for spreading nuclear weapons technology. Nuclear power plants are highly complex and costly systems designed basically to just boil water and produce steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. The net usable energy output is so relatively low in nuclear reactors because 75% of the energy from the fuel source is lost to heating the water. Some scientists think that using nuclear energy over the long-run will eventually use up more energy than it will ever produce. Like other low net energy systems, nuclear is heavily subsidizes by the government to compete in the open market against energy alternatives with higher net energy yields. After the uranium is mined and enriched, the uranium dioxide pellets are about the size of a pencil eraser, but each pellet contains the energy equivalent to about a ton of coal. A typical nuclear plant costs about 14$ billion to construct, with all the safety measures and components. Nuclear is currently the world’s slowest -growing form of energy. Probably the most concerning aspect of nuclear energy is that it produces waste that remains radioactive for thousands of years, and we don’t really know what to do with it. After three years of use, fuel rods are spent and then take another five years of cooling in a pool of water until they can be put into solid storage containers, until we know what to do with them. France uses the most nuclear energy for electricity of any country. Most countries that use nuclear energy also recycle the waste to be used again, so that the overall waste volume decreases greatly. However, we in the U.S. like to be difficult and say that it’s too expensive to develop the machinery that can recycle fuel rod waste, and since uranium is so cheap, we don’t bother to recycle. With the low net energy produced by nuclear energy, we would need tons of nuclear reactors built all the time to offset fossil fuel use that causes climate change, and potentially more devastating effects, anyway.

Overall, fossil fuels and nuclear energy are too risky to continue using to supply modern civilization with energy for daily life. If we value our future, we should cease from using these nonrenewable forms of energy production. My question for this chapter would be simply how can we take down oil companies quickly and/or use their influence to promote more renewable forms of energy like solar and wind? If they’re so wealthy already, why can’t they just change the nature of their business to dealing with cleaner, safer, better forms of energy?

With the human civilization’s dependance on secure energy, energy efficiency is key to our society’s fortitude. Improving energy efficiency can save the world at least a third of the energy it uses, and it can save the United States up to 43% of the energy it uses. Although 41% of commercial energy is unavoidably lost due to the degradation fo energy quality imposed by the second law of thermodynamics, roughly 43% of all commercial energy is wasted because of unnecessary inefficiency. It’s up to us to keep our homes and workplaces up to date and kept with minimum energy leakage and thoroughly insulated. Unnecessary energy waste costs   the United States an average of $570,000 per minute. For as much as we need to stop depending so much on our cars in our suburbs  in the first place, we’ve GOT to stop buying gas-guzzling deplorable excuses for automobiles. It just makes sense to want to save energy because it also saves money. In terms of infrastructure, our society needs to stop using these big wasters: the incandescent lightbulb (which inefficiently loses most of the energy output in heat rather than light), the internal combustion engine (and turn to more sustainable hybrid engines), the nuclear power plant (whose net energy just barely covers the energy used to construct and operate one), and the coal-fired power plant (which is just dirty and inefficient on all levels).

So how do we cut energy waste? We have a variety of technologies for sharply increasing the energy efficiency of industrial operations, motor vehicles, appliances, and buildings. Some industries save energy and money by using cogeneration, which involves using a combined heat and power system that uses two forms of energy (for example, electricity and steam) produced from the same fuel source. So in this case you’d be harnessing the steam that was used to generate electricity by using it to also heat the plant, thereby trying to keep the system like a somewhat closed loop. Another obvious way to reduce inefficiency is to recycle materials. It takes 70% less energy to produce steel from recycled scrap metal than from virgin iron ore and it emits 45% less carbon dioxide. A simple way to cut back on electricity use is to use fluorescents, which use 1/4 the electricity of incandescent bulbs, and LEDs, which use about seven times less electricity and last 100 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Also, state utilities should start being rewarded for cutting our bills by helping us to save energy instead of getting rewarded for selling us more electricity as it has traditionally been. We also need to prioritize our conversion and expansion of the outdated U.S. electrical grid system to the “smart grid;” a more energy-efficient, ultra-high-voltage grid with superefficient transmission lines that would be responsive to local and regional changes in demand and supply. It would also involve a two-way flow of energy and information between producers and users of electricity, and also use smart meters to monitor the amount of electricity used and the patterns of use for each customer, making electricity delivery as efficient and need-based as possible. What’s really cool about smart meters is that they would also show consumers how much energy they’re using by the minute and for each appliance, helping they to make more informed decisions about managing their electrical use in a feedback system. Smart grids are essential for also getting the most out of wind turbines and solar cells. The Department of Energy says that building a smart grid would cost the U.S. about $200-800 billion, but it would pay for itself in just a few years by saving the U.S. economy more than $100 billion a year. I think this might be one of the coolest investments we can make, and it would really help each and every individual to become more environmentally literate by integrating the mechanisms of energy efficiency into their daily life.

Transportation also needs an overhaul, which accounts for 28% of energy waste and 2/3 of our oil consumption. The average fuel efficiency standards in the U.S. have been generally very low, and why Hummers are even still allowed on the roads I don’t know (oh wait because people are dim enough to buy them). Average fuel efficiency standards have increased by 3 mpg since the times of the Ford Model T. Fuel efficiency standards in Europe and Japan are almost double the mpg (40-45) of that in our country (20-25), and even China has higher standards. It’s very frustrating because American’s are nothing without their cars, yet buying a car is one of the most transparent areas of modern life where the individual has some sort of control over their carbon output. Buy a more efficient car, be that much more responsible toward the environment and your wallet. It’s a win-win situation that seems to fly over most of our heads in exchange for a flashier, seemingly “cooler” car. Of course the true cost of gasoline is hidden from consumers because the price of gas is heavily subsidized; it should be around $12 or more per gallon, and we whine over $4 per gallon. It should be taxed to incorporate it’s true cost like it is in Europe, but to do that would be political suicide because Americans like having things as free as possible. Well we can play fire with fire and encourage higher efficiency by giving tax breaks to consumers who buy hybrids and fuel efficient vehicles. Energy expert Amory Lovins proposes the “free-bate” idea in which those who buy and drive inefficient vehicles pay a high fee, incentivizing them to go with the all-around smarter choice. That money would then comprise the rebate to the consumer who bought the gas-sipping vehicle, changing market demand to prioritize fuel efficiency, and in the end costing taxpayers nothing. A perfect plan for the polluter-pays method.

Mass transportation like electrified and high-speed rails should also be implemented and used more than truck or diesel forms. And if all Americans biked to work just one day a week, we’d cut our oil imports by half, but due to the insipid infrastructure of the country and its urban landscapes, this would be an impossibility for probably most of the workforce. Still, individuals matter and the best possible approaches should be tried and implemented where they can. Electric cars are better and more affordable than they’ve ever been, and run on 1/5 the cost of a gas powered car, and they’re less vulnerable to gas price hikes. Better yet, The Department of Energy conducted a study that found if all 220 million U.S. vehicles were replaced by highly efficient plug-in hybrid vehicles over 2 decades, it would cut the U.S. oil consumption by 70-90%, eliminate the need for oil imports, save consumers money, and reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 27%. If the batteries in these cars were charged by renewable sources like wind and solar, U.S. emissions would drop by 80-90%!

We can also design buildings that save energy and money. A UN study in 2007 found that better architecture and energy savings in buildings could save 30-40% of the energy used globally. Passive solar heating can save up to 20% of heating costs and as much as 75% of those costs when better insulated. Green buildings have been widely used in Europe and are just catching on in the U.S. Green architecture makes use of natural lighting, passive solar heating, solar cells, solar hot water heaters, recycled wastewater, and energy efficient appliances and lighting in energy- and money-saving designs. The World Green Building Council has implemented the LEED Certification program (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), and had saved $1.6 billion in electrical costs between 1999 and 2009 alone. Surveys can be done to inspect energy leakage in its various forms, and can help to enforce implementation of: insulating the building and plugging leaks (which lead to about 1/3 of the heated air escape in typical U.S. homes and buildings), using energy-efficient windows (which can cut heat losses by about 2/3), heating houses and water more efficiently, and using energy-efficient appliances and lighting. The EPA estimates that if all households used the most efficient refrigerators available, 18 large coal or nuclear plants could close. The only reasons why we have given so little thought to energy efficiency is because electricity has been seen as another form of the “commons” by typical consumers, another resource to be used up without any thought given to its availability; and because the federal government has done so little subsidize the right kind of investments.

Renewable energy is a must. Studies show that with increased and consistent government subsidies, tax breaks, and funding for research and development, renewable energy could provide 20% of the world’s energy by 2025 and 50% by 2050. Making a major shift toward a variety of locally available renewable energy resources over the next few decades would result in more decentralized and energy efficient national economies that are less vulnerable to supply cutoffs and natural disasters, while also improving economic security by reducing dependence on oil and gas, reducing air and water pollution, slow projected climate disruption, create large numbers of jobs in the process, and of course save consumers, or citizens, money. A green economy is desirable for everybody except those who’s business depend on it not to be – fossil fuel companies. But it’s time for them to phase out, there’s just no way around it. But for a government that’s so intertwined with Big Oil, national betterment has proved very stagnant. Subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuels and nuclear power have essentially been guaranteed for many decades, but those for renewable energy in our country have to renewed by Congress every year! So while nonrenewable fossil fuels are shielded from the free-market with government subsidies and even some laws, getting anything renewable approved is basically an uphill battle, every, single, year. If these economic handicaps for fossil fuels were eliminated, many forms of renewable energy would be naturally cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

Solar energy is just amazing. It’s one of the three principles of sustainability and is the foundation for life on earth and all that we have. Passive and active solar heating systems can heat water and buildings effectively, and the costs of using direct sunlight to produce high temperature heat and electricity are coming down. We’ve been employing the sun in passive heating for thousands of years. Active solar heating systems capture energy from the sun by pumping heat-absorbing liquid, or water, through special collectors usually mounted on a roof, which is then used directly as hot water or can be stored in a large insulated container and released when needed. There’s a low initial cost, and then you have free hot water. The only problem is that the buildings must be oriented to capture the most of the sun’s light. Indirect solar energy in the form of wind can keep us cool, we simply need only open our windows, or make green roofs or white roofs to deflect the sun’s energy from getting absorbed by the building. Location is key to renewable methods of energy. In desert areas with amble sunlight, we can use solar thermal systems to concentrate solar energy to boil water and produce steam for generating electricity. It is estimated that 25% of the world’s projected electricity needs could be supplied by solar thermal power plants by 2050. They emit not carbon dioxide and building and maintaining them would create thousands of jobs. Their only drawbacks are that they require lots of water for cooling and require the arid, sunny desert landscape for full capacity, so getting the energy from these systems to wide-scale distribution would be difficult. We can also use sunlight to produce electricity with photovoltaic cells, that turn sunlight directly into electricity. Most are made of thin wafers of purified silicon or polycrystalline silicon with trace amounts of metals that allow them to produce electricity with direct solar radiation hits them. The cells can be connected to existing electrical grid systems or to batteries that store the electrical energy until it is needed. Using PV cells on any surface and most sunny climates can turn any building into its own power plant. These kinds of systems have become really advanced and can even track the sun to acquire a maximum amount of energy throughout the entirety of a day. New nanotechnology will drastically lower the price for these systems and this helps everyone, especially those in less-developed or rural areas who are not connected to an electrical grid system. Solar cell systems can also store energy for when the sun goes down by sing the excess electricity to run pumps that compress air into underground caverns, and whose stored pressure can be released as needed to drive turbines and produce electricity; as well as using that stored energy to decompose water to produce hydrogen gas, another fuel source. The world’s largest solar cell power plant is in Arizona, and it has payed back the energy needed to build it in less than 3 years. Some drawbacks are that the solar cells require carbon emissions in their production and they need to be replaced every 20-25 years, but science is always looking for new innovations to elongate the lives of the cells. The main problem in solar technology was the start-up cost, but recently their production has soared and they’ve become the world’s fastest growing way to produce electricity (due to increased government subsidies and tax breaks for solar cell producers and users). With more innovation and help from governments, solar cells could provide 16% of the world’s energy by 2040, and possibly even the world’s top source of electricity by the end of the century, according to Jim Lyons of General Electric.

Hydropower uses water flowing over dams, tidal flows, and ocean waves to generate electricity, but environmental concerns and limited availability of suitable sites may limit our use of these energy resources. It involves damming water to control its release over turbines that spin to produce electricity, and it’s the world’s leading renewable energy source used to produce electricity. In 2007 hydropower supplied about 20% of the world’s electricity, including 99% of Norway’s and 75% of New Zealand’s, and 59% of Canada’s and 21% of China’s, who plans to double its hydropower output by 2020. But some analysts expect that hydropower plants will close gradually over time as existing reservoirs fill with silt and become useless faster than new systems are built. Also, growing emissions of methane from decomposing submerged vegetation in these reservoirs poses an ironic threat to climate change. Interestingly, the use of microhydropower generators may become increasingly important; they’re floating turbines the size of a suitcase that use the power of flowing water to turn rotor blades to produce electric current and can be placed in any stream or river without altering its course to provide electricity at a low cost with low environmental impact.The problem with developing tidal or wave energy is that suitable sites are limited and production costs are high, but some underwater turbines have been installed in NYC’s East River and wave power sites are being developed along coasts in California, Ireland, and Great Britain. They’re also vulnerable to saltwater corrosion and storm damage.

Wind energy is great! When we include the environmental costs of using energy resources in the market prices of energy, wind power is the least expensive and least polluting way to produce electricity. Wind comes from differences in the angles of the sun’s rays hitting the earth coupled with the earth’s continuous rotation; it’s practically as limitless as the sun. We capture this kinetic energy with wind turbines and in large groups of them called wind farms. In recent years, wind power has been the second fastest growing source of energy after solar cells. China, the U.S., Germany, Spain, and India, in that order, dominate the known wind energy production. The world’s most energy-efficient country, Denmark, gets 20% of its electricity from wind power and is aiming for 50%. We can place wind farms over land or offshore, where there is generally more wind and they can harness more power. In 2008 the Department of Energy found that the U.S. could feasibly use wind power to generate 20% of its electrical supply by 2030, but the main obstacle would be a necessary revamping of the nation’s transmission lines to accommodate more electricity. This would also support about 500,000 new jobs, not only in maintaining the wind farms but in production and manufacturing. We can work on reducing our wind turbine component imports from Europe and China, further bolstering our economy. This is what the “green economy” idea is all about. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated in 2009 that the world’s top carbon dioxide emitting countries have more than enough land-based and offshore wind potential to more than meet their current electricity needs. We have enough to supply 16 to 22 times our need; the four Great Plains states of North Dakota, Kansas, Texas, and South Dakota are called the “Saudi Arabia of wind power.” A study by the Department of the Interior estimated that with expanded subsidies (taken from those given to Big Oil hopefully) wind farms off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts could generate enough electricity to more than replace all the country’s coal-fired power plants. The main problem is upgrading those outdated grids. This would be expensive, but in the long-run it would be totally worth it. Also, the ecological impact of offshore wind farms would obviously have to be looked into. New technologies are also being looked into and designed to harness an equal amount or more energy from less wind velocity and less land space use. Land-based wind farms can be installed on land where they wouldn’t disrupt daily life (not that they really do anyway), such as farms that already large spances of land, and farmers aren’t impacted by the turbines. Some people say the noise and appearance bother them, but they’re not really noisy and I personally think they look really cool. However, more studies need to be done in terms of their strength against increasingly powerful and repetitive storms, like Hurricane Sandy. There is a proposal to install an offshore wind farm in the NY Bight that would power many homes in NYC and on Long Island. The project would cost around $415 million and currently the only major problems are ecological studies and transmission line upgrades, but here’s a picture given out by the NYC-Long Island Offshore Wind Project Collaboration that shows what the wind farm would look like from the Long Beach boardwalk

notice how you can’t see them at all

Solid biomass is a renewable resource for much of the world’s population, but burning it faster than it is replenished produces a net gain in atmospheric greenhouse gases , and creating biomass plantations can degrade soil and biodiversity. We can use liquid biofuels derives from biomass in place of gasoline and diesel fuels, but creating biofuel plantations can degrade soil and biodiversity, and increase food prices and greenhouse gas emissions. Biomass consists of plant materials like wood and agricultural waste and animal wastes that we can burn directly as a solid fuel or convert into a gaseous or liquid form. It contains combustible compounds because it is organic matter containing carbon produced by photosynthesis, which means that it does give off carbon dioxide when burned. It is 95% of the fuel used for burning in the poorest countries. Wood is renewable as a fuel only if it is harvested no faster than it is regrown. But poverty-stricken countries are depleting their wood resources, and planting some species of faster growing trees can lead to invasive species takeovers and over-harvesting that leads to soil nutrient depletion. Liquid biofuels like biodiesel and ethanol are being used in place of petroleum-based diesel and gasoline. They advantageous over fossil liquid fuels in that they can be produced anywhere and not just in the limited places where they’re pumped from the ground, they don’t have a net carbon dioxide increase if they’re used sustainably, and they can be used right now in our current infrastructure in our pipelines and cars. Of course, heavy reliance on biofuel could mean clearing large areas of natural diverse lands to harvest biofuel plants, striping away soil nutrients and biodiversity and causing erosion. It would also have the weird effect of causing the price of food stock to increase as farmers sell more crops for the biofuel industry and it becomes less profitable to produce and sell more food crops for a different market. Producing soybeans for biodiesel and corn for biofuel are also the two most highly water-intensive activities, so there’s that problem. France, Germany, and Italy produce about 95% of the world’s biodiesel, as more than half of their cars run on diesel because it is more efficient, and although the market for biodiesel is booming here (aided by subsidies), it takes a lot of land and water to grow the necessary crops, and with little yield. Plus traditional industrial agriculture with high fossil fuel-based input makes the system very low in net energy yields. Ethanol is produced from sugarcane, corn, and switchgrass, and from agricultural, forestry, and municipal wastes, and contains 8 times the amount of energy used to produce it. About 45% of Brazil’s (the second largest grower of sugarcane) vehicles run on ethanol or ethanol-gasoline mixtures. It takes about 174 bathtubs of water to produce 1 liter of ethanol, and water runoff often contains high levels of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers to help boost production levels. It would also take 75% of the world’s arable land to produce enough ethanol to replace conventional gasoline. However, there is something called cellulosic ethanol that can be produced with the cellulose from plant material like leaves, stalks, husks, and wood chips when isolated and mixed with enzymes to convert the cellulose sugars into ethanol. We can used highly abundant and disease and drought resistant switchgrass to make this. This plant doesn’t even need nitrogen fertilizers. The net energy yield is 5.4 times higher than what it took to produce it, making it very sustainable. The only drawback is that clearing enough land to produce ethanol from switchgrass would lead to 50% more carbon dioxide emissions, despite ethanol-driven car emissions to be reduced 90%. Perhaps the weirdest but most efficient form of biofuel would come from algae. They remove carbon dioxide from air as they grow and convert it to oil, proteins, and other useful products, while also requiring less water, land, and other resources. One wild way would could be very sustainable is to implement theoretical carbon sequestration techniques to transfer carbon dioxide into pools of algae that they would consume. But this idea remains just that, an idea, and would be very expensive to realize. There is an approach that suggests using genetically modified bacteria that convert sugarcane juice to fatty acids that can be used as biodiesel, but personally I tend to be very wary of any sort of genetic modification. This would also require massive harvesting of sugarcane. Algae-based biofuels probably wouldn’t be enough to wane us off of fossil fuels anyway because we use so much of them, but we should start taking help and cutting back whenever and wherever we can. The major advantage algae has is that it can be produced in large quantities anywhere.

Geothermal energy has great potential for supplying many areas with heat and electricity, and it has a generally low environmental impact, but he sites where it can be used economically are limited. This is tapping into the naturally occurring heat under the earth’s surface for heat in cooler months and cooling in warmer months. Scientists estimate that using just 1% of the heat stored in the uppermost 5 kilometers of the earth’s crust would provide 250 times more energy than that stored in all the earth’s crude oil and natural gas reserves. The geothermal heat pump system can heat and cool a house by exploiting the temperature diference almost anywhere in the world between the earth’s surface and underground at a depth of 10-20 feet where the temperature is always 50-60°F. In winter, a closed loop  of buried pipes circulates a fluid, which extracts heat from the ground and carries it to a heat pump, which transfers the heat to a home’s heat distribution system. In the summer, the system works in reverse, removing heat from a homes interior and storing it in the ground. The EPA boasts that a well-designed geothermal heat pump system is the most energy-efficient, reliable, environmentally clean, and cost-effective way to heat or cool a space, second only to superinsulation. It produces no pollutants and emits no carbon dioxide. Of course installation costs are high, but pay themselves off after about 4 years. Geothermal energy generates just 0.4$ of the electricity used in the United States, but Iceland gets almost all of its electricity from hydroelectric and geothermal energy power plants. However, digging so far into the earth for major scale energy production is costly and can trigger small earthquakes.

Hydrogen fuel holds great promise for powering cars and generating electricity, but for it to be environmentally beneficial we would have to produce it without using fossil fuels. Energy is produced by combining hydrogen and oxygen gas, emitting only water vapor, which is how widespread use of hydrogen fuel would eliminate most outdoor air pollution problems that we face today. It would be ideal for lightweight fuel in aviation because it provides the most energy per gram. However, hydrogen gas does not really naturally occur in the atmosphere, it must be produced. And since it takes energy to create the chemical reactions to produce hydrogen gas, the result is negative net energy yield, which is not efficient at all. Fuel cells to store energy are also expensive. The only way hydrogen fuel would be feasible is if it were produced using renewable forms of energy in the first place, like from wind or solar. These difficulties mean that hydrogen fuel would have to be heavily subsidized, but due to its very clean burning properties there’s always a chance it could be implemented further. Many scientific studies and approaches are being taken to make this potential fuel source more sustainable, economically feasible, and practical. In 2008, MIT scientists Daniel Nocera and Matthew Kanana developed a catalyst made from inexpensive cobalt and phosphate salts that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen using a fairly small amount of electricity, and in 2007 engineering professor Jerry Woodall invented a new way to produce hydrogen by exposing pellets of aluminum-gallium alloy to water, meaning that if the process is perfected, hydrogen fuel can be generated anywhere simply using a tank the size of an average car’s gasoline tank. I think there is just too much potential in hydrogen as a very efficient replacement to our already ready and waiting gas-fueled infrastructure to not look hard into making it a definite investment and producing it efficiently.

So how can we make the transition to a more sustainable energy future? By greatly improving energy efficiency  using a mix of renewable energy resources, and including the environmental costs of energy resources in their market prices. There are many factors that go into what kind of energy sources we use, but our energy future depends primarily on what energy resources governments and private companies decide to promote, which will be influenced partly by political and economic pressure from citizens and consumers. Individuals matter. Scientists and energy experts who have evaluated energy alternatives have come up with three general conclusions about the future of our energy: 1) There will likely be a gradual shift from large, centralized macropower systems to smaller decentralized micropower systems, like wind turbines, solar-cell panels, rooftop solar water heaters, and eventually fuel cells for cars. Renewable energy functions best on a local scale, but this doesn’t make it weak. If anything it allows for these systems to be strengthened by the local communities’ understanding of their environment – to live where they live – and will undoubtedly enhance environmental literacy in the nation as we look to our environs as a means of producing local, sustainable energy. Decentralization would improve national security, removing our reliance on large systems that, once threatened or damaged, harm not a few but a lot. 2) A combination of greatly improved energy efficiency and the temporary use of natural gas will be the best way to make the transition to a diverse mix of locally available renewable energy resources over the next several decades. The idea of allocating a transition fuel is probably very wise, however I personally don’t agree with allowing any more natural gas extraction in the form of hydraulic fracturing. Fracking has caused enough local damage to prove its worth as not being worth enough. Heavy front-loading on known technologies like wind and solar should be forced and enforced wherever and as much as possible. 3) The third conclusion is that because of their still-abundant supplies and artificially low prices, fossil fuels will unfortunately continue to be used in large quantities. This thrusts upon us the added challenges of finding a way to reduce the environmental impacts of wide spread fossil fuel use, and to find ways to include more of the harmful environmental costs into their market prices. However the turnover from centralized macropower systems to decentralized micropower, small-scale, localized power generating systems is definitely doable. Solar cells can produce power for the building or house on-site, and then these buildings can also be hooked up to a grid with wind power connected, strengthening their power stability. These buildings can also be hooked up to a smart electrical system which also is getting power from wind and solar, so that together the overall efficient sum is greater than its parts.

National Resources Defense Council graph showing all current and planned solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biodigesters, and biofuel plants

Governments can use three strategies to help stimulate or reduce the short-term and long-term use of a particular energy resource. First they can keep the prices of selected energy resources artificially low to encourage use of those resources. They do this by providing research and development subsidies, tax breaks, and loan guarantees to encourage the development of those resources, and by enacting regulations that favor them. This is the same process that brought fossil fuels and nuclear to their dominance today, and it can do the same for renewable sources of energy while simultaneously discouraging fossil fuels and nuclear, bringing an end to their reign. However, the way these industries are manhandling our governments, some might say we need more of a revolution than a simple policy shift. The second strategy is to keep the prices of fossil fuels and nuclear artificially high to discourage their use. Again, we face the same problem with continuing subsidies and tax breaks given to these companies, plus their lobbying and choke-hold on our governments. To get the public on board, we could off set energy taxes by reducing income and payroll taxes and provide an energy safety net for low-income users. Germany became the most solar-powered nation in the world without raising any taxes at all. Instead, they implemented a “feed-in tariff,” in which they allowed utilities to raise electricity rates slightly on all users to subsidize those who installed solar systems, and they then get a guaranteed payment for 20 years for each kilowatt of excess energy that they feed back into the grid. Homeowners and business who installed solar systems got an 8% return on their investments for 20 years. Seventeen other European countries and 20 other nations worldwide, including China, adopted feed0in tariffs. The third strategy is that governments can emphasize consumer education. I’m a strong proponent of this, because it can be much easier than tricky policy agreements. The government can do all it wants in terms of financial incentives for efficiency and renewable energy use, but people won’t hop on board if they don’t believe what’s going on or are misinformed about the availability of renewable resources and the environmental cost of traditional fuel sources – which is the travesty that’s going on today (just turn on Fox News). The Disinformation campaign has got to stop. If it were up to me I wouldn’t allow naysayers to have a voice on tv. The level of environmental literacy is just too poor in this country to trust people to make the smart decisions for themselves. This is why environmental education is crucial to our future. It should be required in all schools and part of the core curriculums of colleges. The younger kids are exposed to an issue, followed up with continual lessons and reminders, the deeper the message sinks in, and the more prominent their reactions are when encountered in the real world.

Chapter question: With all the power and prominence that the fossil fuel and nuclear industries have in our country, would it be plausible for governments to convert them into the very renewable industries we seek to establish? With their wealth, why not dismantle their business and instead allow them to rebuild themselves as renewable energy providers rather than nonrenewable energy providers? Recycle their business to something much better.