Climate of Our Future

EarthJustice.org

First public hearing on EPA coal ash rule draws nationwide participation

August 30, 2010
Washington, D.C. — Hundreds of concerned citizens are traveling to the Hyatt Regency in Arlington, Virginia on August 30 to urge the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to pass strong, federally enforceable safeguards for coal ash, the hazardous remains left over from coal-fired power plant operations. The public hearing is the first of seven public hearings the EPA is holding on its much delayed plan to finally regulate toxic coal ash.

Coal ash is the leftover byproduct from burning huge amounts of coal at power plants. It is America’s second largest industrial waste stream, and enough coal ash is generated each year—approximately 150 million tons—that it could fill over 340,000 jumbo 747 jets.

Because of the pollutants in coal ash, leachate from ponds, landfills and fill projects can severely damage health and the environment. The EPA’s 2010 risk assessment found the cancer risk from drinking water contaminated with arsenic from coal ash disposed in unlined ponds is as high as 1 in 50 adults, which is 2,000 times EPA’s deems “acceptable.” Dry landfills can also pose dangers to drinking water and aquatic life, according to the EPA.

While one option the EPA proposed will finally regulate this toxic substance with strong safeguards that protect public health, including water quality monitoring, record keeping and protections against runoff , the other—supported by power companies and other big polluters—would retain the failed status quo and do nothing to monitor the coal ash threat to our drinking water and health.

The lack of federally enforceable safeguards is exactly what led to the disaster in Tennessee in 2008 that destroyed 300 acres and dozens of homes, killed fish and other wildlife and poisoned the Emory and Clinch Rivers. The chemicals in coal ash such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, selenium and others have been linked to cancer, organ disease, respiratory illness, neurological damage and reproductive and developmental problems.

Despite the clear dangers from exposure to coal ash there has been much resistance from industry to regulating the substance as a toxic agent, with power companies lobbying government officials and spreading misinformation. Today, residents from Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Indiana, Puerto Rico and Alabama will counter industry pressure by testifying at the public hearing about their experiences with coal ash. Local and state elected officials are also scheduled to testify at the hearing, and scientists and legal experts will also be on hand to offer insights into the EPA’s proposed coal ash rule.

“Coal ash is contaminating our drinking water supplies and it is more dangerous than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. We have scientists, scholars and concerned citizens all saying the same thing: coal ash is toxic,” said Lisa Evans, senior administrative counsel for Earthjustice.

“Today it’s the people burdened by living near toxic coal ash dumps—rather than just the coal companies—who finally get to have the ear of EPA,” said Eric Schaeffer, Executive Director of the Environmental Integrity Project. “When it comes to regulating coal ash, the attitude of state agencies is, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ At too many sites, there is no groundwater monitoring at all. When the states do have data showing that toxic pollutants from these dumpsites have leaked into drinking water, their response is frequently too little and too late.”

“The number of people who attended the hearing today, and the distance they travelled to do so shows just how far the problem of toxic coal ash stretches. The current patchwork of failed state regulations is not enough to keep our communities safe. We need EPA to enact federally enforceable protections and to do so before more people are exposed to this toxic mess,” said Lyndsay Moseley, federal policy representative for the Sierra Club.

The EPA will hold additional hearings in:
Denver, Colorado: Sept. 2
Dallas, Texas: Sept. 8
Charlotte, North Carolina: Sept. 14
Chicago, Illinois: Sept. 16
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Sept. 21
Louisville, Kentucky: Sept. 28

EarthJustice.org

The names of toxic chemicals will no longer be kept secret from the public
August 25, 2010
Washington, D.C. — Twenty-six health, labor and environmental organizations today filed detailed comments voicing resounding support for a long-overdue change in a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policy that denied public access to information EPA receives from the chemical industry. That policy and the resulting Agency practice had allowed chemical companies routinely to mask the identity of chemicals when submitting information to the agency about known health and safety impacts. [Click here to see a sample redacted chemical industry report to EPA.]

“EPA’s move brings us toward an age of greater transparency and helps give people the power to make safer choices about what products to bring into their home,” said Earthjustice attorney Marianne Engelman Lado. “If a chemical is known or suspected to be causing cancer or other serious diseases, at the very minimum, the public should be able to find out the name of that chemical. Although it’s the law, in the past it wasn’t the practice.”

The groups’ filing comes as Congress considers legislation that would overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the 1976 law that EPA, health, labor and environmental groups, and even the chemical industry agree has not adequately protected the public from toxic chemicals. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has declared enhancing chemical safety to be one of her priorities, and announced the agency’s new right-to-know policy in late May. At that time EPA signaled its intent to deny industry claims seeking to withhold the names of chemicals when submitting health and safety data to the Agency. EPA announced that it will not only deny future claims, but will review and challenge such claims made in the past.

“One of the few positive provisions of TSCA is that it clearly puts chemical health and safety data off-limits for protection as confidential business information,” said Dr. Richard A. Denison, senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. “Despite this, chemical companies have as a matter of course claimed the identity of the chemical in question to be confidential even when providing EPA data indicating a chemical presents a substantial risk—yielding the perverse outcome that the public learns only that some unnamed chemical may be dangerous.”

One provision of current law requires chemical companies to submit to EPA any studies or data they obtain that indicate a chemical presents a substantial risk to the public or the environment. According to EPA, the identities of more than 40 percent of the hundreds of chemicals covered by reports submitted in fiscal years 2006 through 2009 have been claimed secret.

On the rare occasions in the past when EPA has reviewed such claims, it has uniformly found they do not actually qualify for protection after all. Yet EPA’s only recourse is to challenge those claims one by one—a highly resource-intensive activity that has hamstrung EPA officials. EPA officials have noted that they review an average of only 14 of the thousands of secrecy claims made under TSCA annually. EPA’s new policy puts companies on notice that they should not make those claims, and that they will be denied except in very rare cases.

“Communities of color and low-income communities are particularly at risk from toxic chemicals,” said Dr. Mark Mitchell, President of the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice. “Public access to all available health information on chemicals is critical to our communities’ ability to inform and protect ourselves from the disproportionately high exposures to such chemicals that we experience.”

In their comments, the groups urged EPA to take several additional steps in implementing the new policy, including that
EPA should implement a system for tracking and publicly reporting the status of all reviewed and challenged claims and should provide that information on EPA’s website in a timely manner.
In reviewing past claims, EPA should prioritize review of claims for chemicals for which available information indicate cause for concern as to hazard or exposure potential.
Where EPA determines that a chemical’s identity is not entitled to protection in the context of a health and safety study, it should also remove any such protection for that chemical in the context of its listing on the TSCA Inventory.
EPA should require the recertification of CBI claims after no more than five years and not allow information to be withheld from the public indefinitely without substantiation.

It’s All About the Costs
By Tom Rooney

Conservatives, let’s talk about energy. And why so many conservatives are so
wrong — so liberal, even — on wind and solar energy.

Let’s start with a recent editorial from the home of ‘free markets and free people,”
the Wall Street Journal. Photovoltaic solar energy, quoth the mavens, is a “speculative
and immature technology that costs far more than ordinary power.”

So few words, so many misconceptions. It pains me to say that because, like many
business leaders, I grew up on the Wall Street Journal and still depend on it.

But I cannot figure out why people who call themselves “conservatives” would
say solar or wind power is “speculative.” Conservatives know that word is usually
reserved to criticize free-market activity that is not approved by well, you
know who.

Today, around the world, more than a million people work in the wind and solar
business. Many more receive their power from solar.

Solar is not a cause, it is a business with real benefits for its customers.

Just ask anyone who installed their solar systems five years ago. Today, many
of their systems are paid off and they are getting free energy. Better still,
ask the owners of one of the oldest and most respected companies in America who
recently announced plans to build one of the largest solar facilities in the
country.

That would be Dow Jones, owners of the Wall Street Journal.

Now we come to “immature.” Again, the meaning is fuzzy. But in Germany, a country
1/3 our size in area and population, they have more solar than the United States.
This year, Germans will build enough solar to equal the output of three nuclear
power plants.

What they call immaturity our clients call profit-making leadership.

But let’s get to the real boogie man: The one that “costs far more than ordinary
power.”

I’ve been working in energy infrastructure for 25 years and I have no idea what
the WSJ means by the words “ordinary power.” But, after spending some time with
Milton Friedman whom I met on many occasions while studying for an MBA at the
University of Chicago, I did learn about costs.

And here is what every freshman at the University of Chicago knows: There is
a difference between cost and price.

Solar relies on price supports from the government. Fair enough — though its
price is falling even faster than fossil fuels are rising.

But if Friedman were going to compare the costs of competing forms of energy,
he also would have wanted to know the cost of “ordinary energy.” Figured on the
same basis. This is something the self-proclaimed conservative opponents of solar
refuse to do.

But huge companies including Wall Mart, IBM, Target and Los Gatos Tomatoes figured
it out. And last year so did the National Academy of Sciences. It produced a
report on the Hidden Costs of Energy that documented how coal was making people
sick to the tune of $63 billion a year.

And that oil and natural gas had so many tax breaks and subsidies that were so
interwoven for so long, it was hard to say exactly how many tens of billions
these energy producers received courtesy of the U.S. Taxpayer.

Just a few weeks ago, the International Energy Agency said worldwide, fossil
fuels receive $550 billion in subsidies a year — 12 times what alternatives
such as wind and solar get.

Neither report factored in Global Warming or the cost of sending our best and
bravest into harm’s way to protect our energy supply lines.

Whatever that costs, you know it starts with a T.

All this without hockey stick graphs, purloined emails or junk science.

When you compare the real costs of solar with the fully loaded real costs of
coal and oil and natural gas and nuclear power, apples to apples, solar is cheaper.

That’s not conservative. Or liberal. That comes from an ideology older and more
reliable than both of those put together: Arithmetic.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100818154730.htm

ScienceDaily (Aug. 19, 2010) — Scientists can now study climate change in far more detail with powerful new computer software released by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) will be one of the primary climate models used for the next assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The CESM is the latest in a series of NCAR-based global models developed over the last 30 years. The models are jointly supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR’s sponsor.

Scientists and engineers at NCAR, DOE laboratories, and several universities developed the CESM.

The new model’s advanced capabilities will help scientists shed light on some of the critical mysteries of global warming, including:
What impact will warming temperatures have on the massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica?
How will patterns in the ocean and atmosphere affect regional climate in coming decades?
How will climate change influence the severity and frequency of tropical cyclones, including hurricanes?
What are the effects of tiny airborne particles, known as aerosols, on clouds and temperatures?

The CESM is one of about a dozen climate models worldwide that can be used to simulate the many components of Earth’s climate system, including the oceans, atmosphere, sea ice, and land cover. The CESM and its predecessors are unique among these models in that they were developed by a broad community of scientists. The model is freely available to researchers worldwide.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100817211052.htm

ScienceDaily (Aug. 18, 2010) — A massive reduction in grasslands and the spread of forests may have been the primary cause of the decline of mammals such as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhino and cave lion, according to Durham University scientists.

The findings of the new study challenge the theory that human beings were the primary cause of the extinction of mammals through hunting, competition for land and increased pressure on habitats.

The research is part of the most comprehensive study to date of Northern Hemisphere climate and vegetation during and after the height of the last Ice Age, 21,000 years ago. It shows that, over a huge part of the Earth’s surface, there was a massive decline in the productivity and extent of grasslands due to climatic warming and the spread of forests.

These habitat changes made grazing much more difficult for large mammals and dramatically reduced the amount of food available for them. The changes in grassland quality and availability coincided with increases in the distribution and abundance of modern man, Homo sapiens, ensuring a time of wide-scale upheaval for herbivorous mammals and other mammals that preyed on them.

The decrease in productivity and extent of grassland is likely to have been the major contributor to the extinction of many large mammals across most of northern Eurasia and north-western North America by about 11,400 years ago, the onset of the present warm interglacial period. Although some species held on for several thousand years longer in very limited localities, their fate had effectively been sealed.

Professor Brian Huntley, from the School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Durham University, said: “Woolly mammoths retreated to northern Siberia 14,000 years ago whereas they had roamed and munched their way across many parts of Europe, including the UK, for most of the previous 100,000 years or more.

“The change from productive grasslands across large areas of northern Eurasia, Alaska and Yukon to less productive tundra-like habitats had a huge effect on many species, particularly on the large herbivores like the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth. Mammoths and other mega-mammals found it increasingly difficult to find food.
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