It’s The Year of Living Dangerously all over again.

Orangutan (Photo: Tom Theodore/Dreamstime)

On Tuesday, two journalists were arrested in Sumatra while covering a politically sensitive topic – palm oil harvesting and the ensuing decimation of Southeast Asia’s old-growth, carbon-capturing rainforests, and the subsequent release of giant CO2 pockets that lie beneath the forests and their peat swamps.

More disturbing than the reporters’ deportation, though, is how little we consumers seem to realize that, not only are we what we eat, but when it comes to palm oil, we are eating our own lifeblood. We’re ‘eating’ our oxygen, we’re ‘eating’ our fellow species. We’re consuming our own future by driving up carbon emissions much faster than we can offset them. We are the snake eating its own tail.

Mass deforestation, due to the rapid establishment of palm oil plantations backed by multinational corporations, has recently made Indonesia the third-largest carbon emitter in the world. Think of it, number three  – after the more industrialized China and the United States.

Indonesia’s neighbors, Malaysia and Papaua, New Guinea, also are top producers of palm oil, making Southeast Asia a veritable carbon drain. Because of rapid rainforest loss in these sensitive areas, experts estimate that between 50 and 60 endangered orangutans perish each week, as their habits are destroyed or they are killed by workers. Roughly two football fields worth of rainforests are felled every minute by palm oil plantations, bellowing out stored carbon.

In addition, recent studies show that global deforestation creates one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions; and conversely, that tropical forests now absorb one-fifth of the world’s carbon emissions that are caused by burning fossil fuels.

“Rainforests are one of the biggest ways that carbon gets absorbed from the atmosphere, so rainforests and trees and peat swamps – the whole ecosystem – takes in a large amount of carbon and stores it,” says Margaret Swink, of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), which in the past year has stepped up its protests against companies like Cargill, which uses palm oil in many manufactured foods.

“It only releases when you destroy it – burning being the worst way. When rainforests are cut and burned, you’ve just released millennia of carbon absorption into the air, which is why rainforest destruction is such a threat. …You’ve just released all this carbon into the atmosphere, but because it’s a cycle (remember studying the carbon cycle in fourth-grade science?), you’ve also taken away the thing that was removing carbon from the atmosphere … and so when you replant a palm-oil plantation, it doesn’t absorb as much carbon that those older trees – as that whole ecosystem did” for many thousands of years.

And we, the current people generation, get a double carbon-whammy.

But until, say, two to five years ago, who knew that some of our favorite foods – holiday season or not – contain palm oil derivatives to preserve, add flavor to or fry foods to a golden crispness? Things like cocoa mix, crackers, potato chips, margarine, instant soups, cakes, chocolate bars, cookies, even certain types of granola are all formulated with palm oil.

Yet, as the holidays hover around us and we try to figure out what we’re really giving thanks for, we can take simple steps to slow rainforest destruction. We can learn about campaigns, such as RAN’s recent Call Cargill campaign and check out our pantry for products that rely on palm oil.

“Palm oil is the leading driver of deforestation in the second-largest standing rainforest, which is in Indonesia,” says Swink, who used to work for the Peace Corps in Cameroon; seeing trucks drive past her house, hauling thousand-year-old trees led her to RAN, headquartered in San Francisco.

“There are three areas of tropical rainforests still left in the world – the Amazon, Indonesia and Malaysia. Then there’s the Congo Basin. … But in Southeast Asia, we’re seeing the fastest rate of deforestation. RAN has been looking at the incredible rate of destruction, intersecting that with climate change. And Indonesia is now the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet, after the U.S. and China. But with the USA it’s fossil fuels and transportation that create the emissions. With Indonesia, it’s mostly deforestation. So when you take it all together, palm oil is a really large threat in terms of deforestation leading to climate change.”

As organizations like RAN, 350.org, Greenpeace, Rising Tide North America , World Wildlife Fund and the Rainforest Alliance amplify the clarion call, some companies are taking note. Gucci Group just declared its commitment to abandon paper products (i.e., those tony shopping bags) from Asian Pulp and Paper – and specifically from Indonesian plantations and rainforests, following Tiffany and a few other luxury brands’ leads.

And Cadbury recently announced that as a direct result of a New Zealand zookeepers’ boycott, it has vowed to dump palm oil and return to cocoa butter (but there’s a catch: that’s only in New Zealand).

Burning forest to make way for plantations in Sumatra (Photo: Mark Edwards, WWF-Canon)

These companies are responding to the dire situation that’s resulted over the past 70 years of deforestation by various industries, mainly logging and agriculture, in these Southeast Asian rainforests.

Aside from the devastating impacts on climate change, the forest destruction is taking a big toll on the biodiversity of the area. World Wildlife Fund estimates that converting natural forest to palm plantations results in the loss of 80 to 100 percent of the mammal, bird and reptile species in these normally rich ecosystems. (For a good graphic depiction of the rainforest losses, see the WWF’s report on Borneo and Sumatra and maps of the region, which show, for instance, that Sumatra has lost 85 percent of its natural forest.)

All this begs the basic question: Why are palm oil derivatives in so many foods and emulsive products, to begin with?

The answer “is easy,” says Brihannala Morgan, an activist with Rising Tide North America who lived in Indonesia for nine years and is now based in the Bay Area, where she is a graduate student in forest and climate policy at UC-Berkeley.

“Palm oil is the cheapest oil in the world, second only to soybean oil,” she says. “It’s about how much oil you can produce per hectare of land, and you can produce more palm oil per hectare than almost any other oil. So the laws of supply and demand apply. …It’s used not only in foods but in industrial lubricants, biofuels. But, in foods, it’s mostly for preserving. I’m not a food chemist, but all these things have to have some kind of oil, and they pick the cheapest, for the highest profit. In most countries besides the United States – and we’re only responsible for five percent of all palm oil consumed – but in other countries, it’s used for a frying oil – particularly in China and India, which have populations that are becoming wealthier and can afford more fried foods.”

We hate to just sit around and wait for technology to work us out of this global warming fix….but hey! Look at this technology from Popular Science’s just released Best of What’s New list:

• 

  GE’s new “hybrid” hot water heater uses up to 62 percent less energy than the same size traditional hot water heater. This 50-gallon water heater, which uses heat pump technology along with traditional electrical components (hence: the hybrid terminology), is featured in the home technology category. The Energy Star-rated appliance could be expected to use around 1850 Kilowatts of electricity per year compared with about 4,800 KWh for a standard hot water heater. Downside: It costs $1,600. Upside: It qualifies for a $480 energy tax credit.

• 

  Sole Power Tiles provide solar power while posing as clay roofing tiles, albeit blue ones. Still, this sounds like a great way to thwart your homeowner’s association while going green with your roof. The curved photovoltaic tiles are thin, but their curved architecture allows them to pick up 10-15 percent more solar action. They were developed by SRS Energy with advice US Tile, the country’s largest clay-tile manufacturer.

• A powder to neutralize mercury by Steward Advanced Materials. This grand prize winner, called Thiol-SAMMS, holds promise for cleaning up lakes, rivers and toxic waste spills, as well as cleansing tap water efficiency and affordably.  “Thiol-SAMMS is made of silica molecules assembled into a spongelike pattern of holes, packing the surface area of a football field into just one teaspoon,” reports Popular Science. Each tiny opening is coated with sulfur atoms, which can bind with poisonous mercury, rendering a material that can be safely stored in landfills. (Let’s hope advances like these don’t stop us from trying to stem the pollution at the source, however.)

• The Eco2 Plastics Environmental system helps save water, millions of gallons of water, by supplying recyclers with a corn-based biodegradable solvent that cleans plastic containers so they can be recycled. This proven technology is already in operation at one recycling plant. Now you don’t have to wonder how they get that ketchup out of your old bottle. The old way: use a ton of water. This solution: Save the water and make recycling more affordable.

The 100 winners of the Best of What’s New “represent the higheset level of achievement in their fields,” said Mark Jannot, editor-in-chief of Popular Science.

There’s lots more fun to be found on the list, which features everything from a  handy home-use air leak detector (by Black & Decker; $50) to an entire hospital, El Camino in the Silicon Valley, that employs state-of-the-art robots.

While the number one award-winner on the list, an amplified, smart stethoscope by 3M and Littman Electronic, isn’t green, per se. It could save millions of needless echocardiograms a year, thereby cutting medical costs and making health care a little more sustainable — a goal we can all take to heart.

As debates about climate change — does it exist and how serious is it? – rage on, many scientists continue to uncover more and more evidence that atmospheric pollution is having negative effects on Earth, right here and now, climate change or not.

Scientists studying the chemistry of lakes reported in a study published this week that atmospheric nitrogen released from the burning of fossil fuels and the widespread use of fertilizers in agriculture is altering the makeup of even remote bodies of water.

Green Lake 5 in Colorado (Photo: James Elser/ASU)

The study,  published in Science, found elevated nitrogen levels in alpine and subalpine lakes in Colorado, Sweden and Norway.

The added nitrogen changes the food composition of the aquatic environment, first by feeding the phytoplankton, and then other organisms as it moves up the food chain. With the lake’s plant life getting a disproportionate amount of nitrogen relative to other necessary minerals, like phosphorus, the “fundamental ecology,” of the lake is changed, according to the researchers.

This result of this new balance of minerals means that the phytoplankton, in essence, are eating differently (rather like when we hominids don’t get all our vitamins). The excess nitrogen restricts how much phosphorus they can absorb, and they become, in scientific lingo, “phosphorus limited.” And that’s not a good thing.

“We know that phosphorus-limited phytoplankton are poor food – basically ‘junk food’ for animal plankton, which in turn are food for fish,” said James Elser, a limnologist (people who study fresh water environments) in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, who lead the study of collaborating US and Scandinavian scientists.

“Such a shift could potentially affect biodiversity,” Elser said. “However, we don’t really know, because, unlike in terrestrial systems, the impacts of nitrogen deposition on aquatic systems have not been widely studied.”

In other words, it’s possible that the lake life will adapt. Or not.

Elser’s collaborators include researchers Tom Andersen and Dag Hessen from the University of Oslo; Jill Baron of the United States Geological Survey and Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University; Ann-Kristin Bergström and Mats Jansson with Umeå University, Sweden; and Koren Nydick of the Mountain Studies Institute in Colorado, in addition to members of his own group in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Marcia Kyle and Laura Steger

Elser and colleagues were supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

California American Water has designated the week of Nov. 9 as “No Drugs Down the Drain” Week in its Los Angeles service area as part of a national campaign to reduce pharmaceutical pollution in water supplies. Items such as aspirin, prescription drugs and other medications should never be thrown down the drain or toilet, where they can seep into the ground and find their way back into the public water supply.

Los Angeles County residents will be encouraged to contact the County of Los Angeles’ Department of Public Works at 888-253-2652 or visit www.888cleanla.com to find out where they can drop off expired or unwanted pharmaceuticals and other household items free of charge.

California American Water also will sponsor the “No Drugs Down the Drain” outreach campaign in San Diego and Ventura.

“Ensuring that our water sources are protected and maintained is as important as ensuring we have enough water to meet our demands,” California American Water’s Los Angeles district manager Garry Hofer said in a statement. “Water utilities like California American Water treat drinking water to ensure that it meets or exceeds USEPA standards, but the best water treatment is to prevent water pollution at the source. Environmental stewardship can begin right at home through how we use and dispose of old medicines as well as other hazardous items such as used motor oil and paint.”

California American Water, a wholly owned subsidiary of American Water, provides water and/or wastewater services to more than 600,000 people. California American Water’s Los Angeles service district includes approximately 28,000 households and businesses, or a population of about 100,000 people, in the cities of Bradbury, Duarte, El Monte, Irwindale, Monrovia, Rosemead, San Gabriel, San Marino and Temple City, as well as unincorporated portions of Los Angeles County and the Baldwin Hills area.

The US Environmental Protection Agency said today it is hitting the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency with a $250,000 civil penalty for federal violations of the Clean Water Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

The Department of Justice, working on behalf of the EPA,  lodged a proposed consent decree with the US District Court for the Northern District of California against the city and county of San Francisco for releasing at least 940 barrels of diesel fuel — some of which entered into Islais Creek, a tributary of the San Francisco Bay.

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The proposed consent decree requires the city and county of San Francisco to pay the $250,000 penalty and requires SF Muni to implement a training program that will improve coordination and communication during future incidents of this nature. The consent decree is subject to a 30-day public comment period.

During late November and December of 2005, red dye diesel fuel was released from the Woods bus servicing facility, located at 1095 Indiana Street in San Francisco. The EPA estimates at least 39,000 gallons of fuel were released. The discharge of oil into Islais Creek and interference with the pump station were violations of the Clean Water Act.

An EPA investigation found that Muni staff failed to comply with federal regulations issued under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act that governs the management of underground storage tanks. The EPA has asserted that SF Muni’s federal RCRA violations include:

• Disabling an audible alarm system intended to alert operators to an ongoing release of diesel
• Failure to respond to flashing yellow alarm lights triggered by tank sensor alarms in full alarm mode
• Failure to maintain a written log noting the status, source, or reason for alarms
• Failure to use fuel inventory controls to monitor and observe that it was losing fuel from, the tanks at a constant conspicuous rate
• Inadequate containment
• A known kink and bulge in a faulty, braided, flexible hose that ultimately failed
• Failure to timely notify authorities of the release

The spill had originated when a faulty hose ruptured and underground storage tanks overflowed. The released diesel fuel landed in a storm drain where heavy flows from a major December rain storm caused the storm drain to overflow to the stormwater line. The fuel then caused an interference with a San Francisco southeast wastewater treatment pump station. From there, some of the fuel spilled into Islais Creek, which drains into Central San Francisco Bay.

“Facility operators must pay rigorous attention to operational practices in order to protect the San Francisco Bay and our coastal resources,” Laura Yoshii, the EPA’s Acting Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest, said in a statement.

The city and county of San Francisco conducted remedial actions to clean up the spill in 2006 and has also taken initiative to evaluate its procedures and upgrade its facilities to prevent further spills. In addition to the work required by the consent decree, SF Muni has taken steps to decrease the likelihood of any future releases, including:

• Completing all spill prevention, control, and countermeasure requirements and including installation of adequate containment, and the preparation of spill prevention plans
• Replacing the piping in underground sumps
• Replacing the containment boxes under all diesel and gasoline dispensers,
• Repairing alarms
• Installing external alarms with light and horn notifications and a remote alarm monitoring system
• Establishing new procedures to monitor fuel inventory and provide MTA staff supervision for fuel deliveries
• Additional controls in order to quickly identify and respond to releases diesel fuel

Related video:

From KGO-San Francisco:

In an effort to protect public health, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District will open the Winter Spare the Air season on Sunday, Nov. 1, and begin enforcing a regulation that restricts wood burning in the Bay Area through Feb. 28, 2010.

A pellet stove

Wood smoke is the largest source of wintertime air pollution in the Bay Area. Certain weather conditions in the wintertime cause the air to remain still. When these conditions occur, the Bay Area Air District calls a Winter Spare the Air Alert.

“This winter, Bay Area residents must check before they burn,” Jack Broadbent, executive officer of the Bay Area Air District, said in a statement. “It is illegal to burn wood or firelogs when a Winter Spare the Air Alert is in effect. Wood smoke pollution is associated with a number of serious health risks and is particularly harmful to children, the elderly and those with respiratory problems.”

This winter is the second winter season the wood burning rule has been in effect. The rule was passed in July 2008.

Between Nov. 1, 2009, and Feb. 28, 2010, the Air District will declare a Winter Spare the Air Alert when air pollution is forecast to reach unhealthy levels. During a Winter Spare the Air Alert, the use of wood-burning devices, including fireplaces, pellet stoves, wood stoves and outdoor fire pits, is forbidden. There are expected to be, on average, approximately 15-20 Winter Spare the Air Alerts during the season.

This season, Winter Spare the Air Alerts will be declared the day prior to the alert going into effect. Each day by 2 p.m., the Air District will issue an air quality forecast. If air quality is forecast to be unhealthy, a Winter Spare the Air Alert will be called for the next day. The Alert will be in place for 24 hours – one calendar day – active from midnight-to-midnight.

Those who burn during a Winter Spare the Air Alert will receive a warning for the first violation and a second violation is subject to a $400 ticket. The ticket amount will increase with any subsequent violations, depending on the severity of the infraction. Residents and businesses that burn wood as their only source of heat are exempt from the regulation.

Bay Area residents can check before they burn by:

• Visiting www.baaqmd.gov or www.sparetheair.org
• Calling 1-877-4-NO-BURN
• Signing up for e-mail Air Alerts at www.sparetheair.org or phone alerts by calling 800-430-1515.

Under the new rule, only EPA-certified wood stoves or fireplace inserts, pellet stoves, or natural gas devices can be sold or installed in new construction or remodels. The new rule also places year-round prohibitions on excessive smoke, and on the burning of garbage and other harmful materials in fireplaces and woodstoves.

Wood smoke is a major source of wintertime air pollution in the Bay Area and contains harmful pollutants such as particulate matter and carbon monoxide, as well as toxins such as dioxin, which is linked to increased cancer rates in adults. In the winter, wood smoke from the 1.4 million fireplaces and wood stoves in the Bay Area contributes about one-third of the harmful particulate pollution in the air.

A version of this story appeared in the Albany Times-Union [1] on Oct. 8, 2009.

A preliminary report [2] from a consultant hired by New York City warns that “nearly every activity” associated with natural gas drilling could potentially harm the city’s drinking water supply and that while the risk can be reduced with strict regulations, “the likelihood of water quality impairment…. cannot be eliminated [2].”

That assessment contrasts sharply with the picture presented by an environmental review released by state officials last week [3]. Aside from clauses that ban some waste pits and promise additional consideration for drilling within 1,000 feet of the city’s reservoirs and water infrastructure in upstate New York, the environmental review does little to respond to New York City’s long-standing concerns [4] that the watershed deserves special environmental consideration and instead paves the way for drilling to proceed throughout the watershed.

The issue appears to be emerging as a point of controversy in New York City’s mayoral election.

City comptroller and mayoral candidate William Thompson criticized the state’s environmental review in a news release and said Mayor Bloomberg should be more outspoken. “I am also concerned that the City and the Water Board have been extremely lax in responding to this threat,” he said.

Marc LaVorgna, a spokesman for Bloomberg’s office, said the mayor will withhold judgment until he sees the final version of the report the city commissioned from Hazen and Sawyer, a New York City-based environmental engineering firm. The full report isn’t expected to be delivered until December, after the public comment period for the state environmental review has ended.

LaVorgna emphasized that the Bloomberg administration has invested heavily in the city’s water system and would not rule out a protracted fight to protect it.

“This is not a fringe issue for this administration,” LaVorgna said. “This is a mayor that adamantly orders tap water every night he dines out.”

In one of his few statements on the subject, Bloomberg, who has generally supported the idea of energy development, told WNYC radio Thursday [5] that “if this has the danger of polluting, we will fight it.”

The clashing reports seem poised to reignite long standing tensions between upstate New York and New York City, which depends almost entirely on water delivered from rural, upstate areas.

“The stakes are very high based on the conclusions of this report,” Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said in an interview with ProPublica. The report, he said, “suggests that city elected officials have a role to play here and a responsibility to step up and say, ‘What does frack drilling mean to New York City residents?’”

Last week Stringer announced he was launching a Kill the Drill campaign.

New York is one of four major cities in the United States with a special permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allowing its drinking water to go unfiltered. That pristine water comes from a network of upstate reservoirs and rivers spread across 1,600 square miles in five upstate counties. Those reservoirs – which all lie west of the Hudson River – supply 90 percent of the drinking water for 9 million downstate residents, nearly half the state’s population. If the EPA were to rescind the city’s special permit, New York City would have to build a treatment facility that could cost between $10 billion and $30 billion, according to various estimates.

Hazen and Sawyer’s early findings [2] were summarized at a city meeting last week and posted on the city’s Department of Environmental Protection’s Web site Tuesday evening, after repeated requests for the document by ProPublica over the past several days.

The report [2], and an accompanying summary Powerpoint presentation, lays out several areas of concern. The consultants found that drilling “introduces hazardous chemicals into the watershed” and that “the well bore, which acts as a conduit between geologic formations, can allow previously isolated contaminants to flow into shallow groundwater or surface water.”

The research also warned of “enormous volumes” of wastewater and said there are no treatment plants in the region designed to treat these wastes. It said the disturbance from hydraulic fracturing could cause seismic shifts or otherwise damage the tunnels or aqueducts that bring the water to the city. Hydraulic fracturing shoots millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals underground with such force that it breaks rock and releases pockets of gas.

So far, New York City’s top officials have preferred a behind-the-scenes approach as the public debate over the state’s natural gas drilling policy unfurls in Albany. City DEP officials have protested to the DEC in private letters, but have said little publicly.

In a letter obtained by ProPublica in July 2008, then New York City DEP commissioner Emily Lloyd asked the DEC commissioner [6] to disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing and to consider a partial ban on drilling near the reservoirs that supply New York City’s water. Shortly afterward, and following an investigation by ProPublica, Gov. David Paterson ordered the environmental review [7] that was released Sept. 30. Called the Draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement, it supplements gas and oil drilling rules established in 1992 [8]. New York City officials have since sent several additional letters to the state DEC voicing their ongoing concerns.

A spokesman for the state DEC did not return repeated calls for comment.

The state supplemental draft report discloses many of the drilling chemicals, as Lloyd had requested, and it also strengthens several other environmental protections. But it did not recommend a full or partial ban on drilling in the watershed.

The supplementary impact statement is now subject to a 60-day public comment period, after which final guidelines will be issued. But Stringer and others are pressing the state for a 30-day extension, which would allow the findings from the Hazen and Sawyer report to be included.

Read the “Rapid Impact Assessment Report [2]” by consulting firm Hazen and Sawyer.

Read our full coverage of natural gas drilling [9].

ProPublica reporters Joaquin Sapien and Saprina Shankman contributed to this story.

Pennsylvania environment officials have charged Cabot Oil and Gas with five violations after nearly 8,000 gallons of hydraulic fracturing solution spilled from a pipe system in two separate incidents near the town of Dimock last week. The department reported that a third, smaller spill, occurred at the site Tuesday morning.

According to the state, Cabot failed to prevent a fracturing fluid discharge, failed to keep that discharge from escaping into the environment and from entering a creek, and inappropriately dammed that creek after the spill, among other violations. The company could face fines topping $130,000.

“I was concerned with two releases,” said Bob Yowell, director of the north central regional office of the DEP. “A third release, although it was relatively small, gives us great concern that something unusual is happening at this particular well. This isn’t a normal situation.”

The spills began on Wednesday, Sept. 16 at 2 p.m. when a pipe coupling failed on the system that mixes the fracturing ingredients, sending as much as 2,100 gallons of fluid into the environment. At 8 p.m. that same day another pipe coupling broke in the same system, and 5,880 additional gallons of fracturing fluid were discharged, according to both state and Cabot accounts. On Tuesday morning, Sept. 22, another hose ruptured under pressure, releasing 420 more gallons of the same mixture, though only 10 gallons of that last spill escaped from the company’s spill catch system.

According to Ken Komoroski, a Cabot Oil and Gas spokesman, the fracturing procedure was being conducted by two contractors: Halliburton, one of biggest oil services companies in the world, and Baker Tanks, a petroleum storage tank company.

“Our policy is zero spills, zero unpermitted releases, and those goals were not met so there needs to be evaluations of what can be done to prevent them in the future,” Komoroski told ProPublica. “The spills were less than .5 percent gel, and at 99.5 percent water, this material is not hazardous or dangerous nor does it present any environmental risk.”

Pennsylvania officials allowed Cabot to continue fracturing the well while they conducted their investigation. According to the DEP’s Yowell, halting the fracturing may have presented additional problems, though he could not specify what those risks were. Cabot voluntarily halted the fracturing on Tuesday, after the third spill occurred.

The investigation into the spill is ongoing. According to a DEP press release and the notice letter sent to Cabot, a nearby wetland has been flushed and further remediation may be required, including excavation of soil surrounding the site.

ProPublica reported the spills Monday, stating that the fluids had seeped into Stevens creek and killed fish there, an assertion repeated in the DEP’s press release on Tuesday. Follow-up interviews with the state’s Department of Fish and Boat Commission, however, show that a small number of minnows were harmed and that the damage to the creek appeared minimal. However, water samples from the creek are still being evaluated, according to the DEP’s Yowell.

According to a Material Safety Data Sheet provided to the state by Halliburton, the substance spilled was a lubricating gel used in hydraulic fracturing that poses a substantial threat to human health and was described in the Halliburton document as a “potential carcinogen” that has caused skin cancer in animals.

Cabot’s Komoroski points out that the document refers to the gel’s concentrated form, and that the mixture spilled in Dimock was mostly water. He also disputes the information on the Halliburton form that warns the product is a “potential carcinogen.” The disclosure, required by law on the MSDS form, was an effort to be extremely conservative and account for the possibility that a derivative from the refining process could be part of the gel mixture, Komoroski said. He could not say what that derivative was, except that it is a hydrocarbon.

Halliburton did not respond to questions about the details of its MSDS disclosure for the product, called LGC-35 CBM.

A drill site entrance near the spill site in Dimock, Pa., taken this past winter. (Photo: Abrahm Lustgarten /ProPublica)

Pennsylvania environment officials are racing to clean up as much as 8,000 gallons of dangerous drilling fluids after a series of spills at a natural gas production site near the town of Dimock last week.

The spills, which occurred at a well site run by Cabot Oil and Gas, involve a compound manufactured by Halliburton that is described as a “potential carcinogen” and is used in the drilling process of hydraulic fracturing, according to state officials. The contaminants have seeped into a nearby creek, where a fish kill was reported by the state Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP also reported fish “swimming erratically.”

The incident is the latest in a series of environmental problems connected to Cabot’s drilling in the Dimock area. Last winter, drinking water in several area homes was found to contain metals and methane gas that state officials determined leaked underground from Cabot wells. And in the spring, the company was fined for several other spills, including an 800-gallon diesel spill from a truck that overturned.

Dimock, Penn.

Neither Cabot Oil and Gas nor Halliburton immediately returned calls for comment on Monday. A Halliburton spokesperson sent an e-mail referring any questions to information on the company’s Web site.

DEP officials were also unavailable for interviews, but said through e-mail that faulty piping is suspected and that they have not confirmed the exact cause of the spill. A press spokesperson said to expect an announcement and actions toward Cabot by Tuesday.

ProPublica interviewed state officials several months ago about drilling problems in Dimock. “Cabot has definitely had their share of problems out there,” Craig Lobins, a regional oil and gas division director, said then. “Some of them is just being a little bit careless … or sloppy, or maybe a little bit of bad luck too.”

The drilling fluid spill Wednesday may be the most serious yet, because it involves chemicals that are known to pose a risk to human health and has spread into the area’s surface water system.

According to a Material Safety Data Sheet provided to the state this week by Halliburton, the spilled drilling fluid contained a liquid gel concentrate consisting of a paraffinic solvent and polysaccharide, chemicals listed as possible carcinogens for people. The MSDS form – for Halliburton’s proprietary product called LGC-35 CBM – does not list the entire makeup of the gel or the quantity of its constituents, but it warns that the substances have led to skin cancer in animals and “may cause headache, dizziness and other central nervous system effects” to anyone who breathes or swallows the fluids.

It is not yet clear exactly what led to or caused the spill. State officials report that at least 1,000 gallons of fluid were spilled Wednesday afternoon, and another 5,900 gallons about 10 that night. The substance was reportedly a clay-like mixture, with the Halliburton gel mixed at about five gallons per 1,000 gallons of water. A DEP spokesperson said in an e-mail that the spills appear to be the result of supply pipe failures. In one case a pressurized line may have broken, and in another a seal may have given way.

People at the scene described a “gray gooey substance” spread across the ground and said barricades of hay bales and plastic had been set up to confine the sludge. According to an e-mailed account from Vincent Fronda, who lives in nearby Johnson City, N.Y., and went to take pictures of the spill, there were “many huge puddles of the stuff in the woods west of the pad.” Fronda described finding a hole with a drill bit and four-foot-deep fluids, and said workers were running a vacuum pump to try to get the bit out. State officials said the fluids had spilled into Stevens Creek.

The contamination incident comes as the state faces increasing scrutiny for its handling of a natural gas drilling boom and dozens of instances of spills and water contamination related to it across the state. Earlier investigations by ProPublica found that methane had leaked into drinking water supplies from gas wells in at least seven Pennsylvania counties. And earlier this month the DEP began investigating a suspected chemical spill in the northwestern part of the state, hundreds of miles from Dimock, which decimated aquatic life along a 30-mile stretch of pristine river. No determination has been made in that case either, but waste fluids from drilling are among the possibilities being investigated.

Lead in toys is scary enough, but that’s only the start. Now, you might need to take a second look at your handbag, your car, your pet’s bed and even your clothes. The non-profit group Healthy Stuff reports that their recent tests of 900 everyday consumer products turned up some toxic results.

Let’s start with man’s best friend or your purring pal.

More than 400 pet products, such as beds, chew toys, stuffed toys, collars, leashes and even tennis balls were tested. The results are unsettling. Healthy Stuff says that 45 percent of all the pet products they examined had at least one and frequently more toxins. A good one-quarter of the items had detectable levels of lead and of those, 7 percent exceeded the current limit the government has said are acceptable in children’s toys.

About half of the pet collars tested had detectable lead, and more than 25 percent of those exceeded the 330 ppm (parts per million) level that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has said is dangerous for children.

And if throwing the ball is fun for Fido, you might want to reconsider. Almost half of the tennis balls made for pets contained lead (interestingly, no lead turned up in tennis balls for the court).

That’s just the tip of the chemical iceberg.

If you’re driving a 2004 or older car, there is a greater chance of heavy metals (such as lead) in it. Also, the groups said, the level of chemicals in cars can be five to 10 times higher than your home or office.

The group tested 700 new and used vehicles, from some ‘80s models to 2010s. The two with the least chemicals – the 2009 Pontiac G5 and the Chevy Cobalt. The worst offenders — at the bottom of the chemical-heavy car list — were Mitsubishis, Audis and VWs.

Just what is HealthyStuff.org, anyway? They say their ratings are based on information from environmental health groups and researchers. The website was created by the Ecology Center, a non-profit environmental group in Michigan born after the first Earth Day in 1970. Its goal, according to its website, is to advocate for safe environments in all walks of life.

Healthy Stuff calls out the government and EPA for what they say are lax, outdated and incomplete research of potentially harmful toxins.  In 2005, the nation’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report criticizing the government agencies for  failing to expand regulation and testing of potentially harmful chemicals in consumer products.

With this latest round of tests, the Healthy Stuff group says it has conducted more than 15,000 tests on more than 5,000 everyday items.

Their most recent research also scrutinized the chemicals found in children’s car seats. Almost 60 percent of car seats had potentially harmful additives, they say, such as PVC, chemical flame retardants and heavy metals.

A substantial list of various kid car seats lets you find the variety you’re using, and a click on the “model” link reveals an overall score, the testing method, manufacturer code and which parts of the seat contain chemicals.

The group repeatedly reminds visitors that their results are not meant to imply that a specific chemical found in a product necessarily means it is dangerous. Their testing is meant to inform the public of the presence of certain chemicals in an item, not to tell consumers what they should and shouldn’t buy.

They test using a portable X-ray fluorescence analyzer, or XRF, to search for lead, cadmium, mercury, bromine, chlorine (PVC) and arsenic.

XRFs are used by manufacturers and government regulators to screen products for potentially harmful chemicals, Healthy Stuff says on their Web site. They also state that their testing has limitations: product choices were based in part on consumer interest. They did not randomly sample the items they tested, and want people to know that the items they test are not representative of all products in the market.

Now that the kids are safely back to school, you might want to peruse Healthy Stuff’s screening of more than 60 school supplies. A look at backpacks, pencil cases, binders and even lunchboxes had plenty of PVC and more than 20 percent had lead.

Of all the kids’ school products, almost 90 percent had one of more of the chemicals on Healthy Stuff’s concern list.

Before you rush out to buy replacements, you’d best check out their new research on women’s purses. Healthy Stuff tested more than 100 handbags, and found detectable lead in more than 75 percent of them. Of those, they said, 64 percent had more lead than the level the government has deemed safe.

The current law that governs chemical content is decades old. The Healthy Stuff site says that impending legislation demanding closer scrutiny of consumer goods chemical makeup is in the works.

Look over these lists for more detailed information:  toys, cars and trucks, clothing and accessories, products for children or pet products.

More questions? Check their list of frequently asked ones.

Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said today that the agency will reconsider the 2008 national smog standards to ensure they are scientifically sound and protective of human health. Smog, which is also known as ground level ozone, has been linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

The reconsideration announced today covers both the primary and secondary ozone standards adjusted under the Bush Administration. EPA sets primary air quality standards to protect public health, including the health of sensitive groups, such as children and people with asthma. The secondary standard is set to protect public welfare and the environment, including protection against visibility impairment, damage to animals, crops, vegetation, and buildings. The agency will propose any revisions to the ozone standards by December 2009 and will issue a final decision by August 2010.

The announcement was immediately hailed by the American Lung Association.

“We at the American Lung Association applaud her decision to remedy a serious misjudgment that the EPA made in 2008. We look forward to working with the EPA to arrive at a new standard in 2010 that provides real protection for millions of people who live where the air they breathe can not only make them sick, it can kill, ” Charles D. Connor, president and Chief Executive Officer of the American Lung Association, said in a statement. “Previously, the EPA ignored the advice of its expert science advisors and the consensus of the health and medical community when it set this official national limit on the amount of ozone pollution that can be in the air.”

The EPA will conduct a thorough review of the science that guided the 2008 decision, including more than 1,700 scientific studies and any public comments from that rule-making process. The agency also will review the findings of EPA’s independent Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which recommended stronger smog standards.

“This is one of the most important protection measures we can take to safeguard our health and our environment. Smog in the air we breathe can cause difficulty breathing and aggravate asthma, especially in children,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a statement. “Reconsidering these standards and ensuring acceptable levels of ground-level ozone could cut health care costs and make our cities healthier, safer places to live, work and play.”

EPA said it will move quickly to implement any new standards that might result from the reconsideration. To reduce the workload for states during the interim period of reconsideration, the agency will propose to stay the 2008 standards for the purpose of attainment and nonattainment area designations. EPA will work with states, local governments and tribes to ensure that air quality is protected during that time.

Ground-level ozone forms when emissions from industrial facilities, power plants, landfills and motor vehicles react in the presence of sunlight. Scientific studies have linked ozone exposure to respiratory health problems ranging from decreased lung function and aggravated asthma to increased emergency department visits, hospital admissions, and even premature death. Seasonal ozone exposure has also been linked to adverse effects on sensitive vegetation, forests and ecosystems.

Here’s a little cautionary tale about how bigger is not always better — and about the inter-connectedness of our energy and food systems, specifically how coal-fired power plants affect your diet.

Say you were camping with friends and caught a really BIG fish. This monster would give you bragging rights for a year. Now say you caught a smaller fish, suitable for pan frying but not Kodak-worthy.

What do you do? If you’re Daniel Boone, you toss the little guy back. It’s a no brainer. But if you’re a post-industrial age sportsperson, you must consider this: That big fish fillet could be disproportionately loaded with mercury; keeping the little fishy could be safer.

According to recent sampling studies by our federal government, ALL of our freshwater fish are contaminated, to some extent, with mercury. And the way mercury works its way through the food chain is that it builds momentum, so that those higher on the food chain are more contaminated — a process called “biomagnification”. And some of those big fish contain a mercury that’s become more toxic, too, after the mercury has been acted on by bacteria found in wetlands and swamps and converted to the more dangerous methylmercury.

The science is complicated, but you don’t need a biology degree to get the gist of things, that our fish are coming to us in less than pristine condition.

Fishy Findings

The US Geological Survey study tested fish from 291 streams across the country and found that all tested positive for traces of mercury, demonstrating how widespread mercury pollution has become. But scientists also reported that only about one-quarter had mercury levels exceeding the EPA’s safe guidelines for people eating “average amounts of fish.”

Still. ALL of the fish tested in the US showed some levels of mercury contamination. (The levels of mercury ranged from .008 to 1.95 parts per million – or micrograms per gram of wet tissue.)

This left us to wonder: Are we supposed to be alarmed? What can we now safely eat? Must we forfeit fresh fish along with all those ocean varieties that are endangered?

The answers: Yes and no. Some fish. No, but sometimes yes – can be confusing.

The government’s FAQs on this topic only left us feeling more uneasy about our future meals and also more than a little helpless about the air pollution at the root of it all. They explain that mercury is a “potent neurotoxin” in fish, wildlife and humans, yet they note that fish are “important part of a healthy diet.” We did know that: Fish are high in protein and healthy oils.

So officials are advising us to continue to eat fish, but with caution. The public should:

• Make “informed decisions” based on EPA and FDA guidelines.
• Check our state advisoriesUSDA guidelines to find out which freshwater fish are most affected and where.
• Kids and women of child-bearing age need to take special care because mercury can be harmful to developing bodies, and especially minds. They should eat no more than two meals a week that contain fish that are “lower in mercury,” according to the

“We don’t want to scare people away from eating fish, because they’re a healthy source of protein, but they should pay attention to state fish consumption advisories and also the EPA and FDA guidance for consumption of commercial fish,” says Mark E. Brigham, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, a leader on the study and an expert in mercury in biological systems.

Isn’t that a lot to ask of consumers who are already busy reading food labels, trying to shop “the outside aisles” of the grocery store, searching for information on how livestock was fed and trying to find the hormone-free milk?

Pause…. “We want informed consumers,” says Brigham.

In case you think freshwater fish present a minor culinary concern, you should know that the federal government estimates about 34 million people fish for sport and food. No doubt many more fancy catfish at the neighborhood fish fry and patronize lakeside restaurants looking for walleye and perch.

To be fair, though, Brigham isn’t on the food side of this issue, but the fact-finding science side. He understands that his team’s discovery -  that every last fish tested had some traces of mercury – is not a comfort to the fish-eating public. But it was not surprising.

Mercury, he points out, “is a pervasive contaminant in the environment.” It is the second leading cause of “impaired” water systems – the first is pathogenic contamination, such as bacterial infections – and has been tracked for many years. Forty-eight of the 50 states issue advisories on mercury in fish.

In addition, “there’s always been a natural component to the mercury cycle. It does get emitted from volcanoes and is “degassed from the earth” and rained back down into waterways.
That’s the good news within the bad news.

A human-made problem

The really bad news, though, is that historical sampling of lake beds shows that mercury contamination from natural sources was slight compared with the rapid accumulation from post-industrial activities.

Knowingly and inadvertently, humans have spewed significant mercury into the earth’s biological systems, waterways and atmosphere as we’ve developed cement plants, mercury and gold mines, metal smelting and coal-burning power plants.

Some of that pollution has been cleaned up as we’ve realized that dumping industrial waste directly into streams and lakes, no matter how giant (think: Lake Erie) is not a good idea.

But the main contributor to the global “mercury cycle’” is coal power plants of which there are 491 in the US and hundreds more around the world, such as in China, which is building coal plants faster than anyone.

Coal-fired power plants account for 40 percent of all mercury emissions in the US, according to the EPA.

The top 50 most-polluting US coal-burning power plants emitted 20 tons of toxic mercury into the air in 2007, according to a study by the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project.

All US coal plants collectively emit some 48 tons of mercury annually, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, preliminarily released in July.

That mercury gets emitted as oxidized, elemental or particulate-bonded forms. The oxidized or particulate-bonded mercury falls to the earth relatively quickly, contaminating the local region and watersheds — but it can also be captured more easily. The elemental mercury, though, can ride in the atmosphere, joining mercury emissions from around the world, Brigham said, which explains why his study group found mercury in fish in areas distant from known sources of mercury.

Furthermore, certain natural conditions, present in wetland environments and forests, enhance a process that converts mercury into methylmercury, which is easily taken up by aquatic life. This leads to the seeming paradox of some fish in relatively undeveloped watersheds and pristine areas having some of the highest elevated levels of mercury (in the rural South and wild wetlands of the Pacific Northwest and Midwest); and complicates the matter of knowing what is safe to eat.

The best way to help save our freshwater fish, and their ocean cousins, from further injury, Brigham, among others, have concluded, would be to reduce those mercury emissions at their source.

(Though remember, some fish is safe to eat all the time, and other fish is safe to eat some of the time, like once a week, if it’s the right type…Check your advisories.)

Dialing back mercury emissions

The EPA first tried to reduce mercury emissions from coal plants with a 2005 regulation called the Clean Air Mercury Rule. But it was thrown out by the courts, which advised the agency to employ the Clean Air Act to set mercury emission guidelines.

The EPA is in the midst of trying to make this change, but a new rule must meet certain tests. The Clean Air Act requires, for instance, that standards for other pollutants in the same category, known as “Hazardous Air Pollutants” (lead, toxic gases and dioxin) be set simultaneously.

Once a rule is written and approved, coal-fired plants will be required to use the latest technological advances to cleanse mercury from their admissions. It can be done: Some coal plants in the US have already added scrubbing technology, required by more stringent state guidelines, proving that removing the mercury is possible.

Furthermore, according to the July GAO report technology to remove mercury is effective and affordable.

Coal plants with the technology already in place are removing 80 to 90 percent of the mercury in air emissions.

Coal’s CO2 emissions, blamed for rising carbon in the atmosphere, will not be affected by this new rule

Resources:

• GAO Testimony to the US Senate committees and subcommittees concerned with food and environmental health.
• EPA list of State Fish Advisories
• Effects of Mercury on People on the EPA

(Photos of: Fish in a Pan by ZKruger/dreamstime.com; brook trout by Eric Engbretson, US FWS; boy fishing by Ronald Laubenstein, US FWS.)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media