Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Bonnie Azab Powell.

Summer fruits from the farmers market are the supermodels of
the produce world. Just like Heidi Klum doesn’t need makeup to be beautiful, a
super-fresh White Lady peach or Seascape strawberry doesn’t need extra
sweetening or seasoning to shine. But given the right recipe—one designed
expressly for fruit and vegetables at their peak ripeness and flavor, not for their
wooden supermarket facsimiles—they can really wow your tastebuds.

 

Just in time for June’s bounty of stone fruits and berries
comes Farmers’ Market Desserts. Author
Jennie Schacht and photographer Leo Gong visited dozens of farmers markets as
well as farms in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Schacht lives; New York City
and the Hudson Valley; Wisconsin; Maui; and elsewhere to compile this visually
appetizing collection. Grouped according to the season, the recipes hit all the
right dessert notes, from familiar ones like sorbets and tarts to more exotic
granitas and parfaits. And it’s not all strawberry fields forever—there’s a
section for in-between seasons, using dried fruits and nuts and even winter
vegetables like squash. Suggestions for substitutions abound, and “Farm Journal”
boxes share tidbits from farms Schacht visited, such as Weston’s Antique Apple
Orchard, where a Wisconsin family grows some of the last remaining examples of
certain apple varieties.

Grist quizzed Schacht by phone this week about how she got
into food writing, why she prefers shopping at farmers markets to Safeway, and why
the buzzword “organic” rates hardly a mention in her book. And in case you feel inspired to bake over this holiday weekend, she’s also shared her recipes for Strawberries
& Cream Cake Roll and Chilled Plum Soup with Sour Cream after the jump.

How do you pronounce
your name?

“Shacked,” like shacked up. Or “Shaq attack,” with a “t” at the end and without the
“attack” part.

In addition to
writing about food, you also consult for food and hunger nonprofits and
government agencies. Which came first? Cookbooks or grant proposals?

My background is actually in social welfare—I am a
licensed clinical social worker, though currently on inactive status. I worked
in community-based health care, for example running a prenatal care program at
a Native American health center. In January 1991, I started Schacht &
Associates, which helps nonprofit and public organizations to
develop health care programs and get them funded.

At some point I realized I had raised around $20 million in
grants, and that obviously my third-grade teacher was wrong—I could write! I grew up being told I was
a terrible writer. Even my parents, who were extraordinarily supportive, said
it wasn’t my strong suit.

When I realized I was able to persuade funders to give these
groups large amounts of money, I decided to try and do some food writing, which
I had always wanted to do. I’ve always loved to cook. At a young age I’d tackle
stuff from Mastering the Art of French
Cooking or from the Julia Child TV show. Looking back now, I had a
predisposition toward math and science. One of the things I love about baking
and pastry are the marriage of art and science. It’s creative and artistic, so
many scientific principles involved.

So I went to Cornell for a summer and got a certificate in
food and beverage management, because I thought it was good to have some
academia behind me. I wrote a few food articles, and then one day I went to a chocolate
tasting with chef Mary Cech, who developed the pastry program at Greystone [the
Culinary Institute of America]. I handed her my business card and said, “If you
ever want to do a book, call me.” And she did! And that book was The Wine Lover’s Dessert Cookbook.

Farmers’ Market Desserts is your first solo cookbook, right? Was
that hard?

Yes, it’s the first I’ve done entirely myself. It’s very
touching that Chronicle Books had faith in me, since I don’t have a culinary
background, no restaurant or catering company as a portfolio of work. I just
went to farmers markets and bought stuff and brought it home and thought,
“OK, what would be fun to make with this?”

I’ve always wondered
how people create recipes. Do you start with someone else’s and then modify it,
or make it up “from scratch”?

I have files and files and notebooks of things I’ve cooked,
notes on what I’ve done so I can make it again if I like it, or a variation to
try next time. The recipes I’ve developed are things that have worked with my
own kitchen experiments over the years. Also, I have a very strong mental taste
capacity—a flavor imagination. Sometimes I can actually write a recipe on my
computer, print it out, and take it into the kitchen and more often than not it
works exactly as I imagined it.

Most Americans seem
to view cooking as a chore, something to be outsourced. With cookbooks on their
way to becoming anachronisms, how can we entice people to make their own ice
cream?

Well, I know even people who cook are intimidated by
desserts. I had someone tell me that making granita sounded too complicated
because you had to open the freezer and scratch it with a fork every 30
minutes or so. And granita is one of the easiest desserts to make, I think. So I
tried to have plenty of things in this book that are really simple, like
avocado pudding, that would work even for people who are easily intimidated.

A lot of people are just busy and overtaxed, and they do
rely on packaged foods. But there seems to be a new and increasing interest in
home cooking, as evidenced by the growth in farmers markets, the Edible publications, the Slow Food
movement, and backyard gardening. So I am hopeful. I’ve noticed that
when people make something themselves and have the satisfaction of it coming
out edible—or better yet, fantastically delicious, better than something in
a restaurant—it’s sort of self-igniting.

Why the “Farmers’ Market” Dessert Cookbook? Why
not the “Supermarket” Fruit Dessert
Cookbook?

First of all, I just love the farmers market. I love that
you can talk to and ask questions of the people who grow the food you’re
eating. I love that you can see it, touch it, and taste it before you make it.
You can try three different kinds of strawberries, and one week one vendor will
have the ones you like best and the next week it might be a different one. I love that
it’s shopping and community.

With cooking, your outcome to a large degree is only as good
as your inputs. It depends where you live. If you want to make dessert and the
farmers market isn’t open, if you have a produce stand with good fresh local
produce, use it. But if you buy products that have been flown from somewhere
far away, they’ve likely been picked before they are ripe, or selected for their durability in shipping, and they’re just not going
to taste as good. If you aren’t lucky enough to have a farmers market or a
produce stand, then just try to find a reliable source. Even our neighborhood
Trader Joe’s has organic produce, and it’s often local. Ask the produce person
in your supermarket if you can taste the fruit. They’ll usually let you.

You don’t talk much
at all about the organic label in your book.

I prefer organic. But when I go up
to someone’s booth and they say they haven’t gotten their certification
because they haven’t been doing it long enough, or it’s too expensive, but they
don’t spray or use pesticides, then why shouldn’t I buy it? Why should they
be penalized? I’m more interested in a combination of food that’s been grown
healthfully, with respect to the environment, that’s good tasting, and local. I
am not an organic über-alles person.

OK, so what’s your
secret junk-food weakness?

I don’t think I have one! I can honestly say I really don’t
like processed food. Even when I was growing up, we ate home-cooked food
always. We baked our own bread or got it from the local bakery. We used very
few packaged products. I don’t think I have ever eaten a McDonald’s hamburger
in my life—I stopped eating meat in college. I eat dark chocolate. And I do
like a pretzel. Maybe even the two together.

Strawberries
& Cream Cake Roll

From Farmers’ Market Desserts by Jennie Schacht (Chronicle Books, May 2010)

This takeoff on
strawberry shortcake is elegant enough for a dinner party and, despite a few
construction steps, not at all difficult to make. It can be made several hours
or even a day ahead, making it perfect for entertaining.

Makes 8 servings

Filling

2 pints (about 4
cups) strawberries, hulled
3 tablespoons
granulated sugar
2 teaspoons orange
liqueur, such as Grand Marnier (optional)
1 cup heavy cream
1/3 cup crème
fraîche or sour cream
1/2 teaspoon pure
vanilla extract

Cake

5 large eggs,
separated cold, then left at room temperature for at least 30 minutes
2/3 cup granulated
sugar
1 teaspoon pure
vanilla extract
1 cup cake flour,
sifted before measuring
1/2 teaspoon kosher
salt
Confectioners’
sugar, for rolling and finishing

1. To begin the
filling, set aside 1 cup of the berries for garnish. Cut the remainder into
1/2-inch-thick slices and toss with 2 tablespoons of the sugar and the liqueur
(if using). Set aside at room temperature to get acquainted while you prepare
the cake batter.

2. Preheat the oven
to 400ºF, with a rack near the center. Oil a 17-by-12-inch rimmed baking sheet and
line with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper. Oil the mat or parchment.

3. To make the cake,
in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the whisk attachment (or with a
handheld mixer), beat the egg whites on medium speed until they hold soft
peaks. Add 1/3 cup of the granulated sugar in a slow, steady stream, then
increase the speed to medium-high and continue to beat until the whites hold
medium-firm peaks. Set aside.

4. In a large bowl,
using the mixer with the whisk attachment, beat together the egg yolks,
vanilla, and the remaining 1/3 cup sugar on high speed until thick and pale,
about 5 minutes with a standing mixer and a little longer with a handheld
mixer. Stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. On low speed, mix
in the flour and salt just until combined.

5. Whisk the whites
briefly to bring them back to medium-firm peaks. Using a large spatula or whisk,
gently fold one-third of the whites into the yolk mixture to lighten it, then
fold in the remaining whites just until combined.

6. Immediately pour
the batter into the prepared pan and spread evenly. Bake until the top feels
dry and springs back when you press it lightly with your finger near the
center, about 8 minutes. It should remain pale. Transfer the pan to a wire
rack, cover with a tea towel, and let cool for 10 minutes.

7. Run a thin knife
around the inside edge of the pan to loosen the cake sides. Using a fine-mesh
strainer, dust the top of the cake lightly with confectioners’ sugar, re-cover
the cake with the towel, and invert a rimless baking sheet on top. Invert the
pans together, releasing the cake onto the towel and rimless sheet. Lift off
the top pan and peel off the mat or parchment. Let the cake cool completely, 20
to 30 minutes longer.

8. To complete the
filling, using a chilled bowl and beaters, whip the cream, crème fraîche,
vanilla, and the remaining 1 tablespoon sugar until the mixture holds firm
peaks. Strain the berries, capturing their juices in a bowl, and fold the
drained berries into the cream.

9. Cut the berries
reserved for garnish in half, from top to tip. Mix them with the reserved berry
juices.

10. Position the
cake with a long side parallel to the edge of the work surface, and place a
serving platter at the opposite long side. Spread the cream filling evenly over
the cake, leaving a narrow border on the short sides and a 1-inch border along
both long sides.

11. Starting at the
long side closest to you, fold the 1-inch border tightly over the filling, then
begin to roll, using the towel to help form a compact roll and pulling it out
of the way as you go. Then, use the towel to help you transfer the cake, seam-side
down, onto the serving platter. Use a thin or serrated sharp knife to trim just
a bit from the ends of the cake to create a slight angle (baker’s snack!).
Refrigerate the cake, tightly covered, until very cold, about 2 hours or up to
1 day.

12. Sift confectioners’
sugar over the top, and spoon the reserved berries around the base. Cut the
cake with a thin or serrated sharp knife at a slight angle, using a gentle
sawing motion.

Season to Taste: In place of the sliced strawberries, use
raspberries, olallieberries, or blackberries, coarsely chopped if very large.
In the filling, substitute crème de cassis for the Grand Marnier with
blackberries, or raspberry liqueur with raspberries.

Farm Journal: If you are accustomed to shopping in a supermarket,
you may not know that many strawberry varieties are cultivated, each with its
own constellation of size, color, texture, and flavor. Don’t discriminate
against strawberries because of their size, shape, or color. Instead, follow
your nose: fragrant berries are likely to be ripe and flavorful.

Chandler, Diamante,
Douglas, Ogallala, Seascape, Sequoia, and Sweet Charlie varieties are
particularly flavorful, with the Ogallala combining the floral aroma and flavor
of wild strawberries with the larger size of domesticated (or farmed)
varieties. Which are available at your market will depend on where you shop,
but the farmers’ market gives you the perfect chance to taste and discover the
sweetest for yourself.

Chilled Plum Soup with Sour Cream

From Farmers’ Market Desserts by Jennie Schacht (Chronicle Books, May 2010)

One
childhood role I had was to re-create my grandmother’s best hits for my dad.
Plum soup with sour cream, which he called by its Yiddish name, pomella, was one of his favorites. This
grown-up version is every bit as satisfying, served in shot glasses as a sort
of dessert amuse-bouche, or in bowls
accompanied by crisp Hazelnut-Almond Biscotti, Lavender-Walnut Sandies, or
Market Jam Gems, made with plum jam if you can find it. The soup is perfect for
making in advance because it needs time to chill. If you have leftover soup,
take a tip from recipe tester Emily Lichtenstein: freeze it in Popsicle molds
for a refreshing plum pop!

Use
flavorful, dark flesh plum varieties, such as Santa Rosa or Yummy Rosa, for the
soup. The fruit should be quite ripe and soft but not bruised. This recipe is a
great way to use up plums about to go over the hill.

Makes
6 to 8 servings

4
cups water
2/3
cup granulated sugar
1/4
teaspoon kosher salt
Few
twists of black pepper
2
pounds firm-ripe plums, pitted and coarsely chopped
1
sprig lemon verbena, about 4 inches long (optional)
2
tablespoons crème de cassis or other berry liqueur
1/2
teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
2
teaspoons fresh lemon juice
About
1/2 cup sour cream or crème fraîche, for serving
6 to 8 small sprigs
mint or lemon verbena, for garnish

1. Combine the
water, sugar, salt, and pepper in a large, heavy, nonreactive saucepan over
medium-high heat and bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved.
Add the plums, bring back to a boil, and then reduce the heat to a gentle
simmer. Skim off any foam that rises to the top, stirring occasionally, until
the fruit is very soft and falling apart, about 20 minutes.

2. Remove from the
heat and stir in the lemon verbena sprig (if using). Let cool for about 20
minutes, tasting occasionally and removing the lemon verbena when its flavor
has perfumed the soup to your liking. It should be a delicate background note,
not a predominant flavor.

3. Puree the soup
until smooth using an immersion blender, standard blender, or food processor.
Stir in the crème de cassis and lemon zest and juice. Cover and refrigerate
until very cold, about 4 hours or up to 4 days.

4. Ladle the chilled
soup into shallow bowls. Top each serving with a dollop of sour cream and a
mint sprig.

Season to Taste: Try other stone
fruits, such as peaches, nectarines, or cherries. Strawberries or blackberries
also make a delicious soup, though you may want to strain out the seeds. Omit
the cassis or substitute a complementary light-colored liqueur for
light-colored fruits.

 

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Support Southern seafood with this Vietnamese-style caramelized catfish dish

by Eric de Place.

Following up on last week’s preliminary analysis of the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill, here’s a closer look at how allowances are distributed under the cap-and-trade program.

High level: the allowances allocated over the life of the program, from 2013 to 2050, heavily favor consumer benefits. Smaller chunks are dedicated to deficit reduction, industry, and other objectives.

[See full size image here.]

What you see is that 68 percent of the allowances are specifically targeted at consumer benefits—things like ratepayer insulation, protection for low-income households, and universal rebates. Additionally, 10 percent of the allowances are set aside to reduce the deficit, shown in gray. Shown in yellow, 9 percent of the allowances are directed to a variety of industry transition measures such as industrial energy efficiency and protection to trade-exposed industries, as well as some giveaways to oil refiners. The remaining allowances—totaling around 13 percent—go to transportation spending, carbon capture and sequestration, clean energy subsidies, research & development, and a variety of smaller purposes. (I provide more definition for each of these terms in the notes, below.)

High level, through time: a summary view of the major categories, tracked in each year of the program from 2013 to 2050.

[See full size image here.]

You can seen the number of allowances under the cap decline for a couple of years; then increase sharply in 2016 (when industrial emitters and natural gas distributors are added); and then decline over time in a linear path until 2050.

Detailed view: all of the major categories for which allowances are awarded.

[See full size image here.]

For those interested in more detail, I’ve prepared a spreadsheet of the raw data.

Notes and methods

The following are explanations of the terms I’ve used in this post, as well as some clarification about the assumptions I’ve made. As a general matter, all of the figures are calculated by Sightline Institute based on the American Power Act.

My analysis is, in many ways, indebted to Ted Gayer at the Brookings Institution, who has produced a high-quality analysis of the bill’s approach to allowance value distribution. (Another good resource, via Joe Romm, is Robert Stavins’ detailed review of the bill’s allocations, in which he finds that 82 percent goes to “consumers and public purposes.” And Pete Ericksen at Stockholm Environment Institue just sent me a good graphic depiction by Judi Greenwald at Pew; I can’t find it online, however, so no link.)

“Deficit reduction” refers to allowances distributed to the Deficit Reduction Fund as well as to the one-quarter of allowances in the Universal Trust Fund that are set aside for deficit reduction.
“Transportation” refers to allowances distributed to “transportation Infrastructure and efficiency” that are in turn allocated in equal thirds to the national Highway Trust Fund, the National Surface Transport System, and transportation greenhouse gas reduction.
“Miscellaneous” refers to allowances that are distributed to “adaptation” and “early action.” (“Adaptation” allowances are actually directed to two separate purposes: half of these are for “community protection” and half are for “international adaptation and global security.”)
“Tech & clean energy” refers to allowances that are distributed to “energy efficiency and renewable energy,” “clean vehicle technology,” “low-carbon industrial technologies research and development,” and “clean energy technologies research and development.”
“CCS” refers to allowances that are distributed to “commercial deployment of carbon capture and sequestration.” The bill’s table setting forth the allowances for commercial deployment to CCS omits the year 2019, apparently by accident. Following Ted Gayer at Brookings, I guessed that the correct figure is 0.8 percent, as it is in 2017 and 2018.
“Industry” refers to allowances that are distributed to “trade-exposed industries,” “industrial energy efficiency,” and “refiners.”
“Consumer benefit” refers to allowances that are distributed to “electricity consumers,” “natural gas consumers,” “home heating oil and propane consumers,” “consumer relief” (for low-income households), and the three-quarters of the allowances in the Universal Trust Fund set aside for universal rebates.

My analysis does not include any treatment of allowances set aside for the cost containment reserve.

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How utilities plan to continue evading toxic air pollution controls

Deforestation reductions could save U.S. farmers, ranchers, and foresters $220 Billion

by Sue Sturgis.

This is the final installment in Facing South’s week-long investigation into the growing national problem of coal ash waste and the looming battle over regulation. To read earlier installments in the series, visit here.

A series of coal ash disasters—both catastrophic, like the spill of a billion gallons of toxic ash at a Tennessee Valley Authority plant in 2008, and ongoing, such as the contamination of North Carolina’s drinking water from ash used in building fill—have exposed gaping holes in how the United States regulates coal ash, the second-biggest stream of industrial waste.

As Facing South documented earlier this week, an array of powerful interests—led by the electric utilities whose coal-fired plants generate 150 million tons of coal ash each year—have successfully lobbied to ensure coal ash has escaped regulation by federal officials. That has left regulation to the states, whose uneven patchwork of standards has allowed these disasters to happen.

But that may soon change: Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency released its long-awaited proposed rule on coal ash. But in reality, the EPA released two proposals with very different visions of how to confront the national coal ash threat.

One option—the stricter version favored by public health and environmental advocates—would regulate coal ash under Subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which governs hazardous waste. The other option handles coal ash as an ordinary solid waste under RCRA Subtitle D.

That distinction will become a flashpoint in the coming months for energy interests, environmental groups and state officials. And it will have an enormous impact on how much—or how little—officials and regulators can do to protect communities from coal ash hazards.
 
What’s in the EPA’s new rules?

According to an analysis of the proposed regulations by environmental groups, both approaches would impose dam safety requirements on coal ash impoundments in an effort to prevent another disastrous collapse like the one at TVA’s Kingston plant in eastern Tennessee.

Both proposals would also require the installation of composite liners—multilayered liners like those now required at municipal waste landfills—at new and existing surface impoundments as well as at new dry coal ash landfills in order to prevent groundwater contamination.

The stricter Subtitle C version of the rule would effectively phase out the construction of new coal ash impoundments. However, the less strict alternative under Subtitle D would also likely lead to their phase-out because of the requirement that they be retrofitted with liners—a costly prospect that many utilities would likely seek to avoid.

Both proposals leave some of the status quo intact: For example, they would continue to allow coal ash to be recycled into concrete and other products. However, the proposed rules draw a distinction between such generally beneficial reuses and other reuses like large-scale structural fills that essentially constitute disposal operations.

Neither proposal addresses the use of coal ash for filling mines; the EPA is leaving regulation of that up to the Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining. Nor do they address the use of coal ash on agricultural crops, which is currently under study by EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with those findings set for release in 2012. And neither proposal regulates the 3 million to 6 million tons of coal ash generated each year by non-utilities like factories with coal-fired boilers.

But the differences between the two alternatives are significant. For environmentalists, the stricter proposal’s acknowledgment that coal ash should be treated like other hazardous waste is a breakthrough.

“Their inclusion of an option to regulate coal ash as hazardous waste is an important first step,” said Earthjustice Executive Director Trip Van Noppen. “The next important step will be to maintain this position in the face of inevitably misguided claims by polluters that the sky will fall under this new regulatory environment.”

One of the most fundamental differences between the two approaches is enforcement. While the stricter RCRA Subtitle C would give EPA clear authority to enforce the law, under Subtitle D EPA would have the power only to set guidelines, leaving oversight to the states and enforcement to citizen lawsuits.

In addition, Subtitle C would require states to issue solid waste permits for coal ash disposal sites while Subtitle D does not. Permits are not only critical enforcement tools—they’re also the only avenues for meaningful public involvement when it comes to where these facilities are located and how they’re operated.

Electric utilities and other interests opposed to the stricter rules say their biggest reservation is cost. The EPA estimates that the stricter regulations would cost the entire industry $1.5 billion a year, while the less strict ones would cost about $600 million. To put that cost in perspective, though, consider that the profits earned last year alone just by North Carolina-based Duke Energy were $1.1 billion.

The reason for the cost difference is that EPA assumes less compliance under the latter approach—which environmentalists say is precisely why the tougher rules are needed.

“Polluters will claim EPA’s plan to designate coal ash as hazardous waste will come with a cost to industry as they conveniently ignore the costs to public health of dumping unregulated coal ash into ponds and landfills,” said an alliance of environmental groups calling for the tougher rule.

‘I’d like to hear from citizens’

Right now, the public can find the unofficial, pre-publication version of the EPA’s proposed rules on the agency’s website. Once the rules are published officially in the Federal Register, the clock begins ticking on the 90-day comment period.*

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said her agency would also hold public hearings on the proposed rule, though none have been announced yet.

At the close of the 90-day comment period, EPA will evaluate what it expects to be an extensive set of comments and then make a decision. The agency has not said how long that might take.

Because the EPA is not asking for comment on just one proposal but on two competing visions of how to oversee coal ash, some regulatory watchdogs like Rena Steinzor of the Center for Progressive Reform have raised concerns that because of the release of what are essentially two proposals, the agency will have to extend the process.

“The EPA will almost certainly have to go back and get another round of public comment before making a final decision,” Steinzor said.

But after months of navigating the rules behind closed doors, Jackson seems eager to send a message that Washington is ready to tackle the problem of coal ash.

“I want communities to know that EPA thinks it’s important to get on with this regulatory process,” she said. “We’ve heard from government officials and private industry. Now I’d like to hear from citizens about what they think is a protective rule.”

* The supporting materials for the rule and the public comments that EPA receives on the proposal are available for public review online at Regulations.gov. To use that site, type in the docket number EPA-HQ-RCRA-2009-0640 in the Keyword or ID Search box and press “Enter” on your keyboard.

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Coal: Good News, and An Opportunity for More

When recycling goes bad

by Umbra Fisk.

Dearest readers,

Ah, Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial kickoff of summer—even
though we’re still rocking scarves and raincoats here at Grist HQ. To prep you for this glorious three-day weekend,
I’ve sifted through the archives and found these handy holiday-appropriate tidbits,
from flying the flag to drinking beer (both arguably patriotic acts). What’s
going on your grill this weekend? Can I come over?

Oh say, can you see?
So you want to fly the American flag 24 hours a day but are a stickler for
following the Flag Code, which requires the flag to be lit up when it’s dark out?
Easy peasy: Save the electricity and take it down at sunset. Too much effort?
Try a solar-powered, LED flag light! These are readily available on the interwebs; they make models that clamp directly onto the flagpole, as
well as ground-nesting lights. Get the
full Ask Umbra answer.

Boy meets grill.
Grilled veggie kabobs on the brain? Go with a gas grill to cook ‘em up (that
is, unless you feel adventurous and want to make
your own solar oven!). It’s far easier to control the temperature of a gas
grill (no more burgers burnt to a crisp), and gas grills produce about half as
much CO2 as charcoal grills. And you’ll save yourself the pain (literally) from
all those headache-inducing volatile
organic compounds (VOCs) that charcoal gives off. Get
the full Ask Umbra answer.

Take the sting out.
Wasps are actually quite beneficial to the
ecosystem as predators to other insects like caterpillars, which can wreak
havoc on a garden. But wasps can be a nasty addition to your holiday barbecue.
I found this handy video
on making your own wasp trap from a used plastic bottle and a coat hanger,
as well as some readymade
glass wasp catchers. Both lure wasps into a vessel with fruit juice as
bait. Once the wasps have succumbed to the fruit juice’s siren call, they are
unable to scramble out of the bottle. You just empty the container out when you
feel like you’ve got a full house in there. Get
the full Ask Umbra answer.

Give yourself a wedgie.
So you’re worried that the lime wedge in your beer bottle’s going to make the
thing unrecycable? Never fear! When you recycle your beer, the bottle is picked
up curbside by a hauling company, which brings it to a glass-cleaning plant,
which then ships it to a glass-manufacturing plant, where it begins a new life.
A “contaminant,” as your lime would be called, is either picked out
at pickup or removed during the cleaning. Get the full Ask Umbra
answer.

Get baked—or not.
Conventional chemical sunscreen can be
toxic to your body and the planet—from hormone disruption to coral bleaching.
Look for mineral sunscreens that contain titanium oxide and/or zinc oxide. And
if you’re going to be taking a dip in the ocean, choose a screen with
plant-based ingredients—we ooze 4,000–6,000 tons of sunscreen into our oceans
every year; scientists say we’re probably putting 10 percent of reefs at risk,
so choose wisely. Get
the full Ask Umbra answer.

Day-offly,
Umbra

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Win some free ‘Dirt!’

Ask Umbra on eco-fiction and hair donations for the oil spill

by Ashley Braun.

Now, we at Grist don’t like to encourage contests of “who art the greenest of them all,” but we think this tote bag (made of recycled cotton and soda bottles, natch) for the hardcore bike lover really makes a(n uncensored) statement about the iconic Prius and its pious following.

On the other handlebar, it could just be that all that spandex makes you more likely to attend a bike-to-jerk day rally.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Like what you see? Sign up to receive The Grist List, our email roundup of pun-usual green news just like this, sent out every Friday. And help keep puns in environmental news by donating a Lincoln to
Grist (or a Benjamin, we don’t discriminate against non-presidents)!

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Public service announcement: Don’t spit on the people transporting you

by Eric Roston.

First things first: Oil-spill updates
continue to gush out of the Gulf and Washington at volumes difficult to
estimate. BP initiated its risky “top kill” maneuver Wednesday and the
Coast Guard reported cautiously this morning that the oil stream has
abated. If the effort works, BP will begin to plug the well with concrete in the next day or so. President Barack Obama
held his first press conference in 308 days this afternoon. He placed a
moratorium on new deepwater drilling permits for six months and ordered
the Interior Department to expedite its reforms of the key oil-industry
regulatory office.

Blame has lapped up on the shores of the Potomac as crude sullies the
Gulf coast, destroying livelihoods and wildlife. Obama spoke today
after a week when scrutiny of the disaster led directly to the
Department of Interior’s Minerals Management. A report from Interior’s
inspector general accuses officials there of gross conflicts of interest
and misconduct prior to 2007 (The report was commissioned before the
accident but accelerated after).

Acting IG Mary Kendall writes to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar [PDF], “Of greatest
concern to me is the environment in which these inspectors
operate-particularly the ease with which they move between industry and
government. While not included in our report, we discovered that the
individuals involved in the fraternizing and gift exchange-both
government and industry-have often known one another since childhood.
Their relationships were formed well before they took their jobs with
industry or government.” The report catalogs gifts, drug use,
pornography, and fraternizing between the regulators and the regulated,
including an incident when an MMS official interviewed for a job while
on an inspection. The official found no violations and later got the
job. Earlier today MMS chief Elizabeth Birnbaum was fired or quit—the president wasn’t sure-knocking one question off this list.

U.S. Geological Survey scientists have concluded that the
disaster has unleashed between 17 and 39 million gallons of oil into the
Gulf, making it far larger than the Exxon Valdez, previously the worst
spill in U.S. history.

Nicholas Institute colleagues, led by Director Tim Profeta, held a
wide-ranging panel on the oil spill, the state of energy legislation,
and other issues in climate policy. View the second Nicholas Institute
EnLIST webinar here.

Let the investigations begin: A BP official
argued with oil rig engineers 11 hours before the April 20 explosion, about
whether or not to drain drilling mud that protected the riser where the
well meets the rig.  The BP official, Donald Vidrine, was supposed to
appear today at hearings conducted by MMS and the Coast Guard but called
in sick. Earlier hearings revealed that BP was a month and a half
behind operations on the rig it was paying $533,000 a day to use. Check
out MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in a report on how little safety questions and technology have changed in a
generation.

Some journalists in the Gulf report heavy-handed treatment from BP
staff and the local and federal officials who are working with them. BP
and civic employees have restricted or prevented access to contaminated beaches and interfered with
flyovers. A Mother Jones reporter, Mac McClelland, explains how tightly BP reins in local law enforcement personnel, and a CBS News
crew was threatened with arrest.

Renewable renewable forecasting: A month
before the 2008 election, the New York Observer depicted presidential candidates McCain and Obama respectively as the original Star
Trek‘s impetuous hot-head Captain James T. Kirk and cool
deliberator Mr. Spock. That caricature of the now-president is probably a
good starting point to Christopher Beam’s questions to Slate readers this week: Why aren’t Democrats exploiting the spill
emotionally? Shouldn’t the oil spill “make comprehensive energy
legislation more likely, if not inevitable” rather than less
likely? He writes, “There would come a point, you’d think, when the oil
spill was such an unmitigated disaster, environmentally and politically,
that Republicans would set aside their ultimatums about drilling,
Democrats would set aside their paranoia about it, and members of both
parties would support alternative energy legislation. Not all of them.
Just a handful would be enough.” As for Obama, the New York Times’ Jeff Zeleny describes his demeanor this way:

‘Every day I see this
leak continue I am angry and frustrated as well,’ Mr. Obama said, his
words not rising with volume or intensity.

The narrative in the legacy
media appears to suggest that the downside to having a president that
doesn’t lose is cool is that he doesn’t lose his cool.

Before tempers elevated to the point where Obama called his first
press conference, public management of the crisis took the president to
Silicon Valley, where he visited thin-film solar panel maker Solyndra.
In requisite remarks about clean energy, he also mentioned Tesla Motors’
$465 million loan from the Department of Energy and its work with
Toyota to build electric cars. The San Jose Mercury News dangles this line into its piece about Obama’s Solyndra visit without
elaboration: “The visit, Obama’s second to the Bay Area since becoming
president, shone a spotlight on Solyndra, a Silicon Valley company that
has tried to avoid publicity as it prepares for its initial public
offering of stock.” Now, if you wanted to avoid publicity, would you
invite the president over?

What will the future of renewable energy look like? Michael Levi of
the Council of Foreign Relations picks up a World Bank paper that analyzes 116 projections for renewable energy growth conducted over 36 years.
The trend: No discernible trend?

Meanwhile, back in low gear…: The
international climate conversation remains in a holding pattern. China reduced expectations, such as they are, for some kind of formal agreement in
Cancun later this year, striving instead for a “positive result.”
(Cleaning up before the guests come? Cancun mayor arrested for drug trafficking and money laundering.) Outgoing U.N. climate chief
Yvo de Boer said that international talks in Bonn next week will try to graft parts of the December Copenhagen Accord into the formal U.N. process.
Europe, left out of the key meeting between the U.S. and developing
powers in Copenhagen, unilaterally upped its greenhouse gas emissions goals from 20 percent to 30 percent below
1990 levels by 2020. The E.U.‘s chief climate official is under fire for failing to crack down on fraud in the continent’s carbon market.

Developed nations have chipped in $4 billion to slow deforestation, a half billion dollars more than
they agreed to at the Copenhagen climate negotiations in December. By
2030, U.S. farmers could see more than $200 billion in gains as avoided
deforestation removes unfair competition from the global market.

Greenland moving up in the world: Scientists continue to study ice loss in Greenland, a much-watched field
of research. A new paper in Nature Geoscience reports that
territory’s land itself (call it Greenlandland) is rising an inch per year as the ice above it recedes.

The 2010 hurricane season begins June 1. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration predicts a very active hurricane season: “If the 2010 activity reaches the upper
end of our predicted ranges, it will be one of the most active seasons
on record.”

The oil spill lays bare the difficulty at the heart of communicating
climate change risk: There’s no single company or administration to
denounce and no poisonous gunk killing fisheries and suffocating
ecosystems. Nations of the world would have addressed the problem long
ago if greenhouse gas pollution rained back down as tar balls. One mile
of highway driving spews a pound of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Imagine if all drivers threw a pound of trash out their windows every
mile they drove. The trash would pile up. (Climate Post Trivial
Pursuit!: Whose analogy is this? Can’t remember or find it.)

So … with the spill looking like it might be capped, we expect to
return you soon to your regular invisible, odorless, slow-acting, and
globally dispersed pollution concerns.

Related Links:

Michigan: Where U.S. clean energy, emissions, efficiency policy really counts

Obama preaches green tech gospel to California choir

The Climate Post: BP Oil Spill Washes up Potomac

by Keith Schneider.

On Friday, May 21, President Obama gathered in the Rose Garden the
chiefs of his transportation and environmental departments to take the
next big step to leverage federal climate policy and clean energy
investment to spur new job growth.

The president directed Transportation Secretary Ray La Hood and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to draw up new rules that make heavy trucks much more fuel-efficient and produce less global warming gases.

“This standard will spur growth in the clean energy sector,” Obama
said. “We know how important that is. We know that our dependence on
foreign oil endangers our security and our economy. We know that
climate change poses a threat to our way of life. We know that our
economic future depends on our leadership in the industries of the
future.”

Response in Michigan

Three days later, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm was in Ypsilanti, midway between Detroit and Ann Arbor,
to praise executives of the Ford Motor Company. Ford is spending $10
million to retool one plant in Rawsonville to assemble battery packs
for next generation clean vehicles, and $125 million more in another
plant in Sterling Heights to build electric drive transaxles. The $135
million investment, made possible by $62.7 million in federal clean
vehicle grants from Obama’s 2009 stimulus act, will lead to 170 new
jobs, said Ford, and bring work currently occurring in Mexico and Japan
back to the United States.

“In a global economy we are fighting for every single job,” said
Gov. Granholm.  “We are not going to turn our back on the manufacturing
sector. We are not just going to be a nation that teaches each other to
dance or cuts hair. We are going to rebuild this country by having a
strong manufacturing sector. And it starts right here. “

The two ceremonies, occurring 500 miles apart, are the latest public
manifestations of a little recognized but exceptionally productive
political partnership between the president and Michigan’s governor
that is reshaping the American vehicle manufacturing sector, and
starting to produce big consequences for energy use, climate action,
and job production.

$6 Billion For batteries

Since Obama has taken office, Michigan has attracted roughly $6
billion in manufacturing investment focused on building batteries for
electric vehicles. Last August, after the president announced that the
Energy Department was awarding $2.4 billion in grants for battery
development and manufacturing, Vice President Joe Biden personally
travelled to the Detroit region to confirm that more than half, $1.3 billion,
would be spent in Michigan and contribute to developing 19,000 new jobs.

LG
Chem, the Korean battery maker, received $151.4 million from the
Department of Energy for the $303 million battery plant it is building
in Holland, near the Lake Michigan shoreline. The plant will
manufacture the power packs for the Chevy Volt, the plug-in hybrid that
General Motors says it will introduce later this year.  The LG Chem
plant opens in 2012 and is expected to employ 400 people.

Johnson Controls received a $299.2 million federal grant to make nickel-cobalt-metal
battery cells and packs, as well as produce battery separators in a
plant it also is building in Holland, Michigan in a joint venture with
Saft, the French battery maker. The project is expected to employ 550
people by 2014.

In all 17 new battery plants are either under construction or
nearing groundbreaking in Michigan, according to the Michigan Economic
Development Corporation, a state agency. Toda America,
a Japanese manufacturer of battery components, broke ground in Battle
Creek in April for a $70 million plant, half of it financed by federal stimulus funds, that will initially employ 60
people. A123 Systems,
an innovator of battery technology incubated at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, is building two plants just outside Detroit.

Efficiency, emissions rules supported

It’s understandable that Granholm and auto industry executives are
enthusiastic about the state’s embrace of clean car technology. They
also support, after decades of resistance, the new efficiency and
emissions reduction rules. The regulatory standards have the effect of
producing new markets and force vehicle manufacturers to modernize
their thinking to compete. The convergence of new technology, new
regulation, and big federal and state investments has produced several
thousand new jobs announced to date. Each is viewed as precious in a
state overwhelmed by the downsizing of the auto industry and a riptide
of manufacturing job losses over the last decade.

In Washtenaw County, where Ford’s Rawsonville plant is located,
14,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared since 2001, according to county
figures. The state has lost a total of 800,000 jobs since 2000, half of
them in manufacturing according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Michigan has led the nation since the middle part of the last decade in
the rate of joblessness, which currently measures 14 percent, but also
is improving since it’s high of more than 15 percent late last year.

“These have been a really tough eight years for everybody. We’ve all
gone through it,” said Granholm on Monday. Then, brightening, she
added, “but today we are sending a message to the world. You can be
competitive manufacturing in the U.S. and in Michigan.”

Indeed, at times in her public appearances, Granholm appears almost
giddy about the germination stages of what could be a new era of
vehicle design and production in Michigan.

Big markets For clean vehicles

First are the market analyses that consistently predict big domestic and global markets for clean vehicles. In 2009, Deutsche Bank estimated that global sales of electric, hybrid, and other alternative fuel and advance technology vehicles stood at 1
million and could rise to 1.3 million this year, a 30 percent increase.
J.D. Power and Associates recently estimated that sales of
hybrid-electric vehicles could reach about 1.3 percent of an estimated
67 million light vehicle sales worldwide this year.

DTT Global Manufacturing Industry group estimates that by 2020,
electric vehicles and other “green” cars will represent up to a third
of total global sales in developed markets and up to 20 percent in
urban areas of emerging markets. “The drive for e-mobility is on the
rise and not only affects the automotive industry, but also other
related industries such as energy and resources,” Martin Hoelz,
Deloitte Germany partner and Global Automotive Affinity Group Leader
for DTT Global Manufacturing Industry group, said in a news release.

Ford alone plans to launch five new all-electric or hybrid
gasoline-electric vehicles in the U.S. by 2012 and in Europe by 2013.
One is an electric commercial van, the Transit Connect. Two others are
plug-in hybid electric sedans.

The second reason for Granholm’s fervor about clean vehicles is the
daring new clean energy and climate policies that the Obama
administration is steadily delivering to support them. She has
personally played a big role in that delivery system.

Following her 2006 re-election on a promise to produce new jobs, the
two-term Democrat seized on clean energy to leverage Michigan’s heavy
manufacturing prowess. Michigan approved a renewable energy standard
that required utilities to generate 10 percent of their power with
clean sources by 2015. It established a 21st century jobs
fund that provided millions for job growth, a good share focused on
attracting clean energy development. And it set aside $1 billion for
tax incentives to lure battery makers.

In 2008, candidate Obama campaigned on a message that envisioned a transition to the low-carbon economy that would wake up American industrial innovation, generate jobs, make the nation more secure, and
reduce the threat from climate change. He introduced his New Energy For America strategy in August 2008 in East Lansing, Michigan, a state that embraced the same ideas and had a governor who could deliver the votes to help send him to Washington.

A political partnership

Their relationship, at least in public, seems genuinely warm.
Granholm is routinely on the White House list of candidates for the
Supreme Court. Obama is a regular visitor to Michigan, appearing with
Granholm most recently on May 1 to deliver the commencement in front of 90,000 people at the University of Michigan, the largest crowd
the president has addressed since the Inauguration.

The partnership, in policy terms, has been substantive in ways
little noted in Washington or the nation. The Obama administration has
passed legislation and administrative rules to support the development
of a clean vehicle manufacturing sector that Granholm is determined to
base in Michigan.

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained over $3 billion for clean vehicle development including $2
billion for battery development, and $1.3 billion for electric and
alternative fueled vehicles. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has sent
Michigan substantial funds from a $25 billion clean vehicle
manufacturing account approved late in the Bush administration. The
Obama administration also has supervised the $50 billion investment
that taxpayers made to keep GM and Chrysler in business, making it much
easier to direct the companies to pursue new product lines since the
U.S. essentially owns both.

The president and his advisors, lastly, are ordering up the
administrative rules to ensure that the next generation of vehicles do
more with less. A year ago, Obama directed Secretary LaHood and
Administrator Jackson to develop rules for improving fuel mileage and
reducing greenhouse gas emissions in light cars and trucks beginning
with the 2012 model year. The government issued the rules on April 1
and the EPA estimated the new standards would save 1.8 billion barrels
of oil from 2012 to 2016, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 900
million metric tons.

Big savings

Both are significant. The annual fuel savings, nearly 400 million
barrels, represent roughly 7 percent of all the oil used in America in
2006, according to the World Bank. The emissions reductions, roughly
180 million tons annually, represent over 3 percent of all carbon
emissions the U.S. produced in 2006. Last year in Copenhagen and
elsewhere, the administration said it wanted to cut greenhouse gas
emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. The clean vehicle rules
will help the U.S. reach that goal.

The new heavy truck rules that Obama ordered last week should also
produce substantial fuel and emissions savings. Heavy trucks, according
to industry analysts, consume more than two million barrels a day, or
about 12 percent of current daily use in the United States, and produce
a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation.

“America has the opportunity to lead the world in the development of
a new generation of clean cars and trucks through innovative
technologies and manufacturing that will spur economic growth and
create high-quality domestic jobs, enhance our energy security, and
improve our environment,” the president said in a memorandum
accompanying the May 21 Rose Garden ceremony.

He added in his public remarks: “I believe that it’s possible, in
the next 20 years, for vehicles to use half the fuel and produce half
the pollution that they do today. But that’s only going to happen if we
are willing to do what’s necessary for the sake of our economy, our
security, and our environment.”

That message has reached deep into Michigan’s reviving vehicle
manufacturing sector. Lenawee Stamping, a producer of metal stamping
and welded fabrications is expanding a plant in Tecumseh to accommodate
more production of GM’s clean electric vehicles and produce almost 140
jobs. Magna Holdings of America, a designer and manufacturer of
automotive components and systems plans to invest $49.2 million to
expand its operations in four Michigan cities to produce electric car
systems and 500 more jobs, according to the Michigan Economic
Development Corporation.  Tenneco Automotive, which makes emission and
ride control products, is spending $15.6 million in Michigan to
manufacture next generation emissions systems that help manufacturers
comply with the new federal rules and generate 185 new jobs.

During a conference call with reporters on Friday after the White
House announcement, Gov. Granholm praised the new standards and said
Michigan was starting down the low-carbon path with promising results.
“We are particularly pleased that it will be one national standard and
not a patchwork of state by state regulations. That sends the right
market signals,” Granholm said, adding that her state is on its way to
becoming the “world capital of electric vehicles.”

Related Links:

The Climate Post: BP oil spill washes up on Potomac shores

A chat with energy analyst Trevor Houser about how to assess climate legislation

Obama preaches green tech gospel to California choir

by Ashley Braun.

Sure, most people living in the Western world could probably definitely do with consuming much, much less stuff. But this Chicago couple demonstrates the extreme: what can happen when a throwaway society like ours throws you away. Turns out you actually can be consumed by your own consumption. (Lucky for them, this pair survived.)

If this isn’t enough to prompt a spring cleaning of your house and your values, then there’s an HGTV show out there for you.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Like what you see? Sign up to receive The Grist List, our email roundup of pun-usual green news just like this, sent out every Friday. And help keep puns in environmental news by donating a Lincoln to
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Related Links:

When cyclists go uncensored

Global warming vs. biblical armageddon: How will we all die? [VIDEO]

Public service announcement: Don’t spit on the people transporting you

by Todd Woody.

Silicon Valley in the Internet age has not made for great
presidential photo ops. The Valley’s computer-chip factories were off-shored
decades ago and (Google accepted) the software giants that supplanted hardware companies just
didn’t have the same pizzazz—T-shirted geeks writing code can’t compete with guys and gals in bunny
suits tending big futuristic machines.

The rise of green tech has changed all that. The Valley
is back in the business of building stuff—solar panels, electric cars, fuel cells, and various energy efficient
widgets and gadgets.

And so when President Obama’s helicopter landed Wednesday
morning at Solyndra, a solar module maker, a television-ready tableau awaited—a huge American flag hung in an unfinished factory, shiny high-tech thin-film
solar panels were on display and workers in hard hats mingled with an audience
of some 200 engineers, scientists, venture capitalists, and California’s patron
saint of green tech PR events, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“We’ve got to go back to making things. We’ve got to go back
to exports. We’ve got to go back to innovation,” said Obama on Wednesday
in Fremont as Solyndra employees snapped photos with their iPhones. 

“The true engine of economic growth will always be companies
like Solyndra, will always be America’s businesses,” he continued. “But that
doesn’t mean the government can just sit on the sidelines.  Government
still has the responsibility to help create the conditions in which students
can gain an education so they can work at Solyndra, and entrepreneurs can get
financing so they can start a company, and new industries can take hold.”

It’s an apt choice of words, for the fortunes of green tech
startups like Solyndra have become entwined with the government as the Obama
administration attempts to jumpstart a transition to a clean energy economy.
The sprawling solar module plant we’re standing in—its construction is
employing 3,000 workers—is being financed thanks in large part to a $535
million loan guarantee the Department of Energy granted to Solyndra last year.

A few months later, the startup filed for an initial public
offering. The extensive vetting of Solyndra that the federal government performed
before issuing the loan guarantee bolstered the company’s IPO (though Solyndra’s cash
burn rate led auditors to question its viability).

“This facility would not have been possible in the current
financial climate without that loan,” Kelly Truman, a Solyndra senior vice
president, told me as the presidential podium was dismantled and construction
workers returned to their jobs. “In terms of our business, having the Department of Energy
give us this loan has certainly given us some credibility because of the
scrutiny. We went through a year of due diligence.
Imagine the most conservative bank in the world looking you over.”

The federal stimulus package’s 30 percent cash tax incentive
for buyers of rooftop photovoltaic systems like those made by Solyndra has also
helped keep the solar industry growing at a rapid clip through the Great
Recession.

“But we’ve still got more work to do, and that’s why I’m
going to keep fighting to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation in
Washington,” said the president, who called climate change “a threat to our way
of life.”

Maybe it was the luxury of being 3,000 miles away from Washington, D.C.
surrounded by apostles of an alternative energy future while the grim reality
of the fossil fuel present hung over his head, but Obama spoke more bluntly
than usual.

“We all know the price we pay as a country as a result of
how we produce and use—and, yes, waste—energy today,” he said. “And the
spill in the Gulf, which is just heartbreaking, only underscores the necessity
of seeking alternative fuel sources … With the increased risks, the increased
costs, it gives you a sense of where we’re going. We’re not going to be
able to sustain this kind of fossil fuel use.”

A few miles up the road from Solyndra sits the empty hulk of
the New United Motors Manufacturing Inc. plant. The now-defunct joint venture
between General Motors and Toyota was California’s only auto manufacturing
plant when the last Corolla rolled off the line in April. Its closing idled some 5,000
workers.

Last week, Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric
carmaker, announced it was buying the NUMMI factory, tapping a $465 million
federal loan guarantee to close the deal. Tesla will build its Model S
battery-powered sedan at the plant and produce electric cars with Toyota,
putting about a thousand autoworkers back on the line.

“This is only the beginning,” Obama said, referring to the
Tesla deal. “We’re investing in advanced battery technologies to power plug-in
hybrid cars. In fact, today in Tennessee there’s a groundbreaking for an
advanced battery manufacturing facility that will generate hundreds of
jobs. And it was made possible by loans through the Department of Energy,
as well as tax credits and grants to increase demand for these vehicles.”

No surprise that Obama focused on the green jobs created by
the federal largesse. But in the long run, that investment will help cutting
edge technologies to scale. 

Solyndra emerged
from stealth mode less than two years ago, having raised an initial $600
million and secured $1.2 billion in orders for its copper-indium-gallium-selenide solar cells. CIGS cells can essentially be printed on flexible
materials or glass without using expensive silicon. While such solar cells are
less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, production costs are
expected to be significantly lower than making traditional silicon-based
modules.

Co-founded by chief executive Chris Gronet, a veteran of
chip equipment maker Applied Materials, Solyndra’s innovation is to coat long
glass tubes with CIGS solar cells. Conventional rooftop solar panels must be
tilted to absorb direct sunlight because they aren’t as efficient at producing
electricity from diffuse light. But the round Solyndra module collects sunlight
from all angles, including rays reflected from rooftops. That allows the
modules, 40 to a panel, to sit flat and packed tightly together on
commercial rooftops, maximizing the amount of space for power production.

While some commentators have questioned whether the DOE loan to Solyndra should have been directed at competitors with
lower costs, there’s no doubt that the company is a contender in an ever
competitive global market.

“There are factories like this being built in China,
factories like this being built in Germany,” said Obama. “Nobody is
playing for second place. These countries recognize that the nation that
leads the clean energy economy is likely to lead the global economy. And
if we fail to recognize that same imperative, we risk falling behind. We
risk falling behind.”

Related Links:

The Climate Post: BP oil spill washes up on Potomac shores

Michigan: Where U.S. clean energy, emissions, efficiency policy really counts

The Climate Post: BP Oil Spill Washes up Potomac

by Jonathan Hiskes.

Now we’re getting somewhere
on the offshore drilling problem. Some progress from the top:

Mr. Obama ordered a further six-month moratorium on new
permits for new deepwater oil and gas wells; suspended the planned exploration
in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the coast of Alaska; canceled a planned
August lease sale in the western Gulf of Mexico; and canceled a proposed lease
sale off the coast of Virginia. Environmentalists who had opposed the Alaska
and Virginia projects hailed the decisions.

Mr. Obama said further moves will be made to strengthen
oversight of the drilling industry and enhance safety as a commission he is
appointing opens its own six-month inquiry.

(Side note to New York Times: Self-identified “environmentalists”
aren’t the only people opposed to putting major marine ecosystems, fisheries, coastal
economies, beaches, and rig workers at risk. More Americans now oppose increased
offshore drilling than support it.)

Better still, Obama
used a White House press conference today to personally stump for clean-energy
legislation as a response to the Gulf spill—something we’ve been begging and pleading for.

“This disaster should
serve as a wake-up call that it is time to move forward on this legislation,” he
said. “I call on Democrats and Republicans in Congress, working with my
administration, to answer this challenge once and for all.”

He also spoke about
pushing for an energy-climate bill in a closed-door meeting with Senate
Republicans yesterday. Notably, he didn’t say whether they expressed
willingness to cooperate. They’re still the crucial barrier to progress on the
issue.

Obama’s comments echo
his message yesterday at a solar-panel plant in California, where he said,
“I’m going to keep fighting to pass comprehensive energy and climate
legislation in Washington.” But today’s D.C. presser should give the message
more media attention.

He also stressed that
his administration is trying really hard
to find a way to stop the Gulf leak and cope with the mess it’s created.

“Those who think we
were either slow in our response or lacked urgency don’t know the facts. This
has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred,” he said.

“We are relying on
every resource and every idea, every expert and every bit of technology to work
to stop it. We will take ideas from anywhere but we are going to stop it. I
know that doesn’t lessen the enormous sense of anger and frustration felt by
people on the Gulf and so many Americans.”

Now—with encouraging
signs that the “top
kill” might finally be plugging up the Gulf gusher—Obama needs to make
the larger energy crisis his
administration’s highest priority, tapping every resource and every expert and
every bit of technology to move the nation to a clean energy economy. There’s
still time to make use of this crisis.

Related Links:

The Climate Post: BP oil spill washes up on Potomac shores

Michigan: Where U.S. clean energy, emissions, efficiency policy really counts

Obama preaches green tech gospel to California choir

by David Roberts.

Trevor Houser is a green energy wonk’s green energy wonk. In the last few years, he has produced, among other things, congressional testimony on greening the stimulus bill, an astute take on the market failures around energy efficiency in buildings (PDF), and a comprehensive assessment (PDF) of the Copenhagen Accord and the state of international climate negotiations. He also has a post on Grist taking on the CBO over jobs numbers.

Houser is the head of the Energy and Climate Practice at the Rhodium Group research consultancy and a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where last week he and his colleagues produced the first comprehensive assessment of “The Economic, Employment, Energy Security and Environmental Impact of Senator Kerry and Senator Lieberman’s Discussion Draft [of the American Power Act]” (PDF). It got some good press coverage (including a post from me), thanks in part to its rigor and in part to some intriguing conclusions.

I chatted with Houser about some of those conclusions, and about the features and flaws of the economic modeling that so dominates climate policy discussions. (Yes, it’s wonky.)

Q. How does your analysis differ from the ones we’ve seen from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and the Energy Information Administration (EIA)?

A. Our analysis is similar to the EIA’s, since we use their model, with one important exception. We treat the change in investment that comes from pricing carbon differently than they do.

EIA’s model, as well as EPA’s and others, assumes that over the lifetime of the program, changes in investment between clean energy power generation and fossil fuels will net out, so they don’t focus a lot of attention on quantifying the changes in investment that you see in a high-carbon vs. low-carbon future. In the U.S., those changes are pretty significant.

In an emerging economy like China or India, the choice is between, Do I build a new coal-fired power plant or do I build a windmill? In the U.S., the question is, Do I continue with a coal-powered energy plant (95 percent of which were built before 1987) or do I replace that coal fleet with low-carbon generation? This is slightly a U.S.-specific case, but when we model something like the American Power Act, we see a $20 billion average annual increase in power-sector investment, from a baseline of $18.5 billion to $41.1 billion. So we capture the employment impacts of that change in investment.

Q. Is that the main reason your analysis shows a net employment increase, which is different from what most models show?

A. Right. If an economy is operating at full employment—if we had 5 percent unemployment instead of 10—economic theory suggests the increase in investment would be inflationary. It would result in higher prices of goods, because you’d have competition for capital and labor, trying to draw them away from other industries. But that’s not the case; we’re at 10 percent unemployment.

So what’s most different about our study is we analyze the impact of energy and climate legislation on the U.S. given that we’re in recession. The conventional wisdom has been that we can’t afford to do this now because the economy is emerging from recession and unemployment’s still high. Our finding suggests the opposite: Energy and climate policy can have a stimulative impact on the U.S. economy in the first decade, albeit a modest one.

Q. How long is the U.S. expected to stay in recession? Are there official projections?

A. We use the projections from EIA, which come from the consulting firm Global Insight. They see a slow recovery in the U.S. economy and an even slower recovery in employment. We’re not staying at 10 percent for the next decade, but we don’t get back to 5.5 percent unemployment, which is what they see as full employment, until 2020.

Q. Over the years, environmentalists have charged that EIA’s model radically overestimates how much petroleum will be available (among other complaints). Do you share any of these familiar criticisms of models like EIA’s?

A. Long term, there are a bunch of problems with all models. They all fall short in their presentation of reality for different reasons. Their robustness in capturing long-term global petroleum supplies we felt was less of an issue for this analysis because we’re looking at the relation between the policy and the baseline, particularly in the next decade or so.

Long-term oil supply and oil prices that EIA projects currently are not terribly different from what the International Energy Agency forecasts—fairly tight global oil markets. There doesn’t seem to be a ready alternative in terms of a modeling framework if you have a different point of view about long-term crude oil supplies.

Q. Another familiar criticism of typical macroeconomic models is that they don’t do a very good job of capturing the benefits of energy efficiency. Did you do anything in your analysis to try and compensate for that?

A. CGE [computable general equilibrium] models—the equilibrium models that EPA uses, for example—do the poorest job of capturing the potential of energy efficiency. They assume that investment is naturally flowing to its most productive use. NEMS [National Energy Modeling System], the EIA’s model, is a little bit different. It’s an engineering model, so you can actually change the efficiency of different types of technologies through codes and you can see the resulting change in energy prices and how that mitigates the impact for consumers.

What it still doesn’t capture is if investment in energy efficiency is providing a higher rate of return than an investment in other sectors of the economy, what that does to long-term growth in the capital stock—you have investors making more money, which they can then reinvest in other parts of the economy. So that part we weren’t able to capture.

We did model transportation efficiency provisions in the bill, the building codes that Sens. Kerry and Lieberman have indicated will be brought over from the ACELA bill out of the Senate Energy Committee, and the use of allowance revenue for investments in commercial and residential building efficiency. That does important work in terms of mitigating the price impact on consumers. But the broader fact you’re talking about—the kind of change in the productivity of investment—we don’t capture.

Q. One of the most surprising outcomes of your analysis—Michael Levi commented on this—is the large percentage of new employment in the next 10 years that comes in the nuclear sector. What explains that?

A. There two things, primarily. The first is that we see more deployment of renewables than anything else between 2011 and 2030. There’s 106 GW of renewable capacity, driven entirely by the cap.

Only 24 GW of that is additional above business as usual because our business as usual includes the [American Recovery and Investment Act]. In the EIA analysis of the stimulus bill, you get pretty healthy increases in renewable energy out to 2020. So between now and 2020, which is the window in which we asses the jobs impact in detail, you don’t have much renewable energy growth above the baseline (although you have very aggressive renewable energy growth). The baseline assumes that stimulus provisions are successful in deploying fairly large amounts of wind power and solar power.

Q. So there are renewables jobs, they are just already incorporated into the baseline.

A. Correct.

The second thing is that our modeling shows pretty big nuclear capacity deployment—78 GW of nuclear over the next two decades, and 68 is additional to business as usual. That’s for a couple reasons. First, there’s the capital cost assumptions around nuclear power that EIA uses. There’s a lot of debate about what the right capital cost of nuclear power is. We don’t have a lot of good reference points.

We used the 2009 version of the Annual Energy Outlook. Two weeks ago, EIA released the 2010 version. We didn’t have time to run the model on that full version, but the one thing we ported in was its capital costs, because they had made a significant revision in nuclear power costs—16 percent revision in the capital costs of nuclear, upwards relative to 2009. Even with that, you still see a lot of nuclear power, in part because of an increase in loan guarantees of $36 billion and a 10 percent investment tax credit for nuclear power out to 2025. There’s a lot of nuclear incentives in the legislation.

Now, things the model doesn’t capture could very well slow the deployment of nuclear power—for instance, supply-chain restraints for labor or equipment. That’s not something the model’s equipped to capture. We’re going to do some alternative scenarios in the next couple weeks where we put exogenous constraints on nuclear deployment.

There are a lot of assumptions in the EIA model that we don’t think are correct. EIA’s model is very public and frequently reviewed; the assumptions are hotly debated. We decided on our first cut to just use the EIA’s assumptions, with the exception of the treatment of employment because we thought that was a pretty glaring shortfall given current underemployment. But we didn’t want to make selective changes to cost assumptions in the code.

In subsequent analysis we’re going to do that. There are big capacity additions in our analysis from nuclear and CCS. But there are uncertainties about both of those, in many ways greater than the uncertainties surrounding efficiency and renewables. They will have a big impact on carbon prices, electricity prices, rates of deployment, and overall employment.

Q. If it turns out nuclear and CCS are more expensive and deployment is more limited than reflected in the current analysis, what’s the effect?

A. You see more renewables, a higher carbon price, and an increase in international offsets.

Q. You said you’re going to do another round of modeling, suggesting ways the bill could be improved. Can you give us any kind of preview of that?

A. We’re still in the midst of all of that, so I don’t want to speak out of school too much. The one thing I’d give a nod to is: If employment creation is a policy priority, there are a number of things the drafters of legislation can do that will significantly improve the jobs outcomes relative to what we see with the current draft. Most important is how allowance revenue is used to offset the impact to affected consumers and affected businesses.

In the early years, the primary mechanism for offsetting the impact to affected consumers is free allocation to LDCs [local distribution companies], which is supposed to be used for the benefit of ratepayers. Assuming that it is in fact used for the benefit of ratepayers, that prevents some improvement in energy efficiency that you would otherwise see. Consumers aren’t seeing higher prices, which increases the overall economic cost of the program.

If your focus is on employment, remember, a significant amount of allowance revenue is going for commercial and industrial sales from LDCs. If you use that allowance revenue for a rebate of the payroll tax, you create a significant incentive for employment that would offset the impact of higher energy prices—through wages, not through a check to consumers.

Those are some of the tradeoffs that we’re going to explore. We’re going to look at ways the bill could be more successful in addressing energy-security concerns and discuss some of the issues surrounding the long-term environmental integrity of the legislation given where the price collar is.

Q. I hope you make the point that there’s much more efficiency to be had.

A. Right. What is really shocking to me, if you look at our results, is how little overall energy demand is reduced. It’s reduced 5 percent below business as usual by 2030. That’s because the barriers to energy efficiency are non-economic barriers, so adding another 5 percent to electricity prices is not going to make the average household run out and buy a more efficient air conditioner. What that means is, there’s economic loss there—you’re forcing the power sector to make investments that have 10-year payoffs instead of households making investments that have three-year payoffs, because of those market barriers. So yeah, we will certainly focus quite a bit on that in the forthcoming work.

Q. Thanks to the influence of the Cantwell-Collins cap-and-dividend system, more allowance revenue is being directly rebated in the Senate bill than in the House bill. For the most part that money got taken from the weakest lobbies, generally renewable energy and energy efficiency. What’s the macroeconomic effect of that?

A. I don’t have the answer for you now, but that’s something we’re looking at. I think the core point is probably right. As a good economist, I should be ecstatic about something like the CLEAR Act. It puts a simple price on carbon and rebates it to consumers.

The problem is, the energy space if rife with market failures, so an economically optimal policy needs to do two things in addition to pricing carbon. It needs to take care of efficiency-market failures, which are at the left hand of the cost curve—the stuff we’re not taking advantage of even though it’s profitable today. And it needs to deal with R&D for the stuff at the right hand of the cost curve, so that when carbon prices get up to $80, $100 a ton, we have mitigation options like CCS or advanced vehicles that the private sector is not necessarily going to be able to deliver.

Whether or not the American Power Act gets the balance right is a separate question, but I think it’s important that any piece of [climate] legislation have those complementary measures in them.

Q. But that increases the page length!

A. Our litmus test for legislation that will fundamentally alter the behavior of the U.S. energy sector—a $2.2 trillion part of the U.S. economy—for the next 40 years is whether or not it can be kept under 100 pages?

Q. It gets lost in the debate that in the House bill, ACES, the bottom 20 percent of the income scale came out ahead.

A. The problem is that our frame is, how low can we get household expenditures? If households—- the middle 50 percent of U.S. households, not the lowest deciles—are not willing to pay an extra $100 to $200 a year in higher energy prices on top of the already $5,000 to $7,000 a year they pay, then we just can’t get this thing done. Trying to minimize that number to zero is a losing strategy. Paying $100 to $200 extra a year now is going to allow us to make investments that prevent us from paying $600 to $1,200 three decades from now.

Q. EPA is analyzing the bill now. Any chance they’ve been in contact with you? Any indication your approach might be making headway?

A. EPA can’t use our approach—a full employment model by definition can’t really account for the impact of an increase in investment during a recession.

Q. That’s just dumb, though. Is it not just dumb?

A. EPA would probably say that 200,000 jobs in a 135 million employee labor force is noise, which is not the politically astute answer but is the economically correct answer. Their model is there to look at 50-year trends. It’s not supposed to be a near-term macroeconomic model.

I think CBO will look at this. I don’t know whether they will do it quantitatively or just qualitatively, but I think they will explore changes in investment. In the past they’ve always assumed no change in GDP or employment when they model the bill. But they recently put out a literature review of studies that look at the employment impacts of pricing carbon, which suggest they are ready to wade into this debate.

EIA has a work item on this, on how to better capture changes in investment in the power sector. It’s coming up with a methodology for doing it that’s robust … it’s taken them a little bit of time. But they’re looking at this approach as well.

Q. One more nerdy question?

A. Dave, I learned what I know about CBO scoring from you, so the nerdier the better.

Q. Under traditional full-employment models, if government takes money out of one part of the economy and put it back in another part, it reduces economic efficiency and incurs transaction costs. According to these models, government literally can’t act without creating a drag on the economy.

A. Always. By design.

Q. One way of getting around that is your way, which is by taking into account recession. Is anybody out there challenging it more directly, by arguing that in some circumstances it is possible to determine that the economy is not deploying resources efficiently and correct that with tax and regulatory policies?

A. There’s four areas. First is what the energy-efficiency literature focuses on, a whole category of market failures. The second is regulatory reform. There’s some work on RES’s [renewable energy standards] in the West that show net-worth enhancement because the RES forced reform of utility monopolies in a way that was welfare enhancing. The third is infrastructure investment.

The fourth one is R&D. There’s a lot of literature on the welfare-enhancing benefits of R&D, because over the long term, you can only grow your economy in three ways: you pile on capital, you pile on labor, you change technology. Nothing else you can do. Those first two variables are somewhat fixed, barring immigration policy changes. So it comes down to technological change. That’s the hardest to quantify but potentially most powerful economic impact of pricing carbon and all the complementary polices that come along with it: Does it force innovation? It’s a really tough thing to model.

If you can’t improve the model, then you need to be very upfront about its shortcomings. That was the biggest weakness of the CBO report on employment. I understand the weaknesses of our existing models in capturing some of these employment effects, but people who don’t work with models don’t understand how frail they are. They think they are definitive answers on what the economy will look like in 20 years. They think models are science, when they are tools for evaluating possible scenarios, and flawed tools at best.

Stronger, more upfront statements about what models can do and can’t do should be on all of these reports right up at the top. The press will grab what the press will grab, but a clear acknowledgement of the shortcomings of models would be useful.

Related Links:

Michigan: Where U.S. clean energy, emissions, efficiency policy really counts

How utilities plan to continue evading toxic air pollution controls

Coal: Good News, and An Opportunity for More

by Frank O’Donnell.

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

As federal authorities struggle to deal with the BP oil disaster in
the Gulf of Mexico, it is probably useful to remember that power
companies continue poisoning water bodies throughout the nation.  The
power industry’s successful campaign to sidestep toxic pollution
controls has left a legacy of poisoned
rivers and lakes.  As ugly as this legacy seems, the power industry
appears to be maneuvering once again for further delays, trying to use
pending Senate climate legislation as an escape hatch.

A draft version of the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act would
create a new task force to examine pending EPA air pollution rules for
the power industry, and make recommendations about weakening or
eliminating public health safeguards in the name of electricity
generation reliability. The American Lung Association has warned that
this provision could undermine
EPA’s efforts to tackle toxic emissions from power plants. That
concern was echoed by NRDC, long a leader in the effort to clean
up toxic mercury:

Specifically, the draft bill establishes a highly
objectionable task force to examine utility industry calls for
exemptions from federal environmental laws and regulations that
utilities allege are impeding power plant retirements or transitions to
cleaner energy. The provision’s language is suffused with utility
industry complaints and rhetoric and pleas for payment, making clear the
design for a biased exercise. Polluter lobbyists deliver a
deregulatory wish list to Congress and federal agencies. The
agencies then are authorized by this bill to propose regulatory changes
to carry out those wishes.

A spokesman for the utility industry said it welcomed
the provision.

The language of the American Power Act is the latest in a long
history of compromises. When Congress passed sweeping and generally
positive revisions to the Clean Air Act in 1990, the legislation
compromised on toxic air pollution.  Frustrated with the generally slow
pace in cleaning up hazardous air emissions, Congress ordered the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency to take action to clean up industrial
sources of mercury and other hazardous pollutants.  But, in one fateful
last minute compromise, Congress caved to pressure and gave a special
deal to the powerful electric power industry: EPA was told it could
not set toxic air pollution standards for electric power plants
until it had completed a special study of the industry.

Law makers in 1990 probably could not have imagined that two long
decades later, mercury and other toxic emissions from power plants
remain uncontrolled—even though the power industry is the biggest
domestic source of toxic mercury air pollution in the nation, which has
contaminated all 50 states.

This saga
of delay has several
low points worth recalling:

1995: EPA missed
its initial study deadline, but agreed in a legal settlement with
the Natural Resources Defense Council to complete work on the project.

2000: Despite massive lobbying by the coal-burning power industry,
EPA found that “mercury emissions from electric utility steam generating
units are considered a threat to
public health and the environment,”  and decided to require maximum
achievable controls at all power plants by 2008.  But industry
continued its lobbying campaign—both in Congress and at the EPA.  The
Bush administration’s Orwellian “Clear Skies Initiative” would have
eliminated the mercury control requirement and substituted a weaker
cap-and-trade control strategy.  This may have reduced mercury levels
but could have perpetuated mercury “hot spots.”

2005: After Congress rejected the “Clear Skies” plan, the Bush
administration attempted to rescind tough toxic air pollution control
requirements for the power industry and substitute a weak cap-and-trade
system that would not have required any mercury-specific pollution
controls before 2018.  Because of delays inherent in such a trading
system, the plan would have required approximately a 70 percent reduction in
mercury emissions—but not until the year 2026! A federal court threw
out the Bush plan as illegal, and ordered EPA to go back and follow
the law.

EPA is currently under a legal agreement to propose toxic pollution
requirements for the power industry by March 2011 and to set final
standards by November 2011.  These standards are critical. As the EPA
notes, “Coal-burning power plants are the largest human-caused source
of mercury emissions to the air in the United States, accounting for
over 50 percent of all domestic human-caused mercury emissions.”

As the Environmental Integrity Project recently reported, overall
mercury emissions from power plants were virtually
the same in 2008 as in 2000—and more than half of the dirtiest
power plants actually increased their mercury emissions from 2007 to
2008!

It’s a no-brainer that we need to reduce global warming from power
plants, and the American Power Act would be a step in that direction. 
But it’s critical to reduce mercury and other toxics as well.  Two
decades of delay is far too long.

Related Links:

A chat with energy analyst Trevor Houser about how to assess climate legislation

Deforestation reductions could save U.S. farmers, ranchers, and foresters $220 Billion

Big energy vs. coal ash regulation

by Brad Johnson.

Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

Officials have finally admitted that the Deepwater Horizon blowout is the worst oil disaster in American history, exceeding the Exxon Valdez spill. After a month of insisting that the damaged well was only spewing 210,000 gallons (5000 barrels) of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, officials admitted this morning that was a gross underestimate. In a conference call, Dr. Marcia McNutt, U.S. Geological Survey Director and chair of the technical group convened to determine the flow rate, announced that the Deepwater Horizon disaster has now spewed between 15 and 40 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, greater than the estimated 11-million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster.

McNutt explained that the flow rate group used multiple kinds of analysis: satellite imagery, mass balance analysis, and undersea video. McNutt expressed her greatest confidence in the mass balance analysis which estimated the flow rate over the first 27 days of the disaster at between 462,000 and 800,000 gallons (11,000 to 19,000 barrels) of oil a day. The video analysis team estimated an upper bound of one million gallons of oil a day.  When asked if this spill exceed the Exxon Valdez disaster, McNutt replied, “You can do the math.”

A week and a half ago, McNutt said, officials were able to directly measure the composition of the plumes coming from the leak points. They found that 75 percent of the plumes were in fact natural gas, and only 25 percent oil, which is why outside video analysis that did not use that figure was so much higher.

If the top-kill efforts are unsuccessful and the gusher continues for the two months before the relief wells are estimated to work, the ultimate amount of oil spilled could be greater than 100 million gallons.

Throughout the course of the disaster, BP and administration officials made false claims about the scope of the disaster and the importance of finding out the flow rate, despite far different estimates from outside experts. As late as this week, National Oceanic and Atmospheric administrator Jane Lubchenco continued to insist the laughably low-ball number used since April 28 was the “best estimate.”

Update: More explanation of the mass balance analysis:

A mass-balance team made its estimate based upon the volume of oil seen on the surface of the water, saying that it believed 130,000-270,000 bbl [5.5 million to 11.3 million gallons] of oil was on the surface on May 17. Using that estimate along with calculations of oil already burned, skimmed, dispersed, or evaporated, the team calculated a flow rate estimate of 12,000-19,000 b/d [500,000 to 800,000 gallons per day].

Update: Documents released by Global Warming Committee chair Ed Markey reveal the 5000-barrel estimate was made April 26, with a error range of 1000 to 14,000 barrels, based on both satellite imagery and undersea analysis, something BP later claimed was impossible.

 

Related Links:

The Climate Post: BP oil spill washes up on Potomac shores

The Climate Post: BP Oil Spill Washes up Potomac

Finally: Obama halts new offshore leases and stumps for climate bill

by Agence France-Presse.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama on Thursday unveiled moves to suspend new oil drilling and exploration following the Gulf of Mexico disaster, while denying the government was too slow to tackle the crisis.

After reviewing an Interior Department report into the massive oil spill, Obama outlined four steps to prevent such an accident from happening again, including suspending 33 deepwater exploratory wells being drilled in the Gulf.

“If nothing else, this disaster should serve as a wakeup call,” Obama told a press conference, as official data showed the five-week-old spill was now the worst in U.S. history.

The government was extending an existing moratorium on deepwater drilling as well as suspending the issuing of new permits for six months, Obama said, as expert data said the oil was gushing at up to four times previous estimates.

Planned exploration in two locations off the coast of Alaska was suspended, and “we will cancel the pending lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico and the proposed lease sale off the coast of Virginia.” And, Obama added, “we will suspend action on 33 deepwater exploratory wells currently being drilled in the Gulf of Mexico.”

He was speaking as BP’s risky “top kill” of the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well appeared to stop the oil flow Thursday.

Obama dismissed charges that the government had acted too slowly in the crisis. “The United States government has always been in charge of making sure that the response is appropriate,” Obama said.

“This notion that somehow the federal government is sitting on the sidelines and for the last three or four or five weeks we’ve just been letting BP make a whole bunch of decisions is simply not true,” he said.

“This entire White House and this entire federal government has been singularly focused on how do we stop the leak and how do we prevent and mitigate the damage to our coastlines.”

But the president said that “more than anything else, this economic and environmental tragedy—and it’s a tragedy—underscores the urgent need for this nation to develop clean renewable sources of energy.”

He said it was time to move forward on legislation to promote renewable energy sources.

“It’s time to accelerate the competition with countries like China who have already realized the future lies in renewable energy and it’s time to seize that future ourselves.”

Related Links:

The Climate Post: BP oil spill washes up on Potomac shores

Michigan: Where U.S. clean energy, emissions, efficiency policy really counts

Obama preaches green tech gospel to California choir

by Agence France-Presse.

NEW ORLEANS—BP’s risky “top kill” of its
ruptured Deepwater Horizon well appeared to stop the oil flow Thursday, even as
new data showed the Gulf of Mexico leak had already become the worst in U.S. history.

Moving to ensure
the United States is never hit with such a disaster again, President Barack
Obama was clamping down on the oil industry,
putting on hold any deepwater oil exploration or drilling for the next six
months.

Coast Guard
chief Thad Allen, who is coordinating the federal government’s battle against
the spill, said the “top kill” maneuver begun on Wednesday by BP to
plug the leak had stopped the gush of oil from the mile-deep well.

But he cautioned
it was still too early to declare victory as the British energy giant pumps
heavy drilling liquids, dubbed “mud,” into the fractured wellhead to
beat back the flow of oil, before sealing it with concrete.

“They’ve
been able to stabilize the wellhead, they’re pumping mud down it. They’ve stopped the hydrocarbons from coming up,”
Allen told local radio WWL First News. But he cautioned that while they were
optimistic, “there is no reason to declare victory yet. We need to watch
it very, very carefully.”

BP officials
said they hoped to know later Thursday if the operation had succeeded.

It was the first
flicker of good news for BP in the five weeks since the Deepwater Horizon rig
leased from Transocean exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers, and then sank.

But government
scientists confirmed fears that the Gulf of Mexico spill is set to be the worst
in U.S. history, saying oil was flowing out at a rate up to four times higher
than previously estimated.

Unveiling new
data, they said the oil had been gushing from the burst pipe at a rate of
between 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day—much higher than the previous
estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

Under such a
scenario, that would mean that between 18.6 million and 29.5 million gallons of oil have poured into the Gulf.

The 1989 Exxon
Valdez disaster off Alaska saw some 11 million gallons of crude spilled into
the state’s pristine waters, in what was until now the worst U.S. oil disaster.

BP has come
under increasing pressure from the Obama administration and furious residents
of the Gulf region helplessly watching oil wash ashore, with 100 miles of
Louisiana’s fragile coastal wetlands and beaches now contaminated. The sticky
crude is already imperiling rare species of animal and plant life, and has also
led to a major fishing ban in the marine rich waters.

In a new
development highlighting environmental and health problems, all 125 commercial fishing boats helping to clean up the oil
off Louisiana’s Breton Sound were recalled after four workers reported health
problems. The crew members aboard three separate vessels working in the area
reported experiencing nausea, dizziness, headaches, and chest pains, officials
said. It raised new questions about the
risks of working with the thick gobs of oil washing up on shores here and the
toxicity of tens of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants used by BP to
break up the slick.

Amid the
desperate cleanup, there was more ominous news from U.S. experts, who warned
the upcoming hurricane season could be one of the worst on record. It is feared
that high winds could sweep huge oil-soaked waves further up onto the shores of
Louisiana and its neighbors, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida.

A White House
aide said Obama would extend for
six months a moratorium on offshore oil drilling in deep water. He also will
delay planned oil exploration projects off Alaska, and cancel plans to lease
drilling rights in the western Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Virginia,
officials said.

Meanwhile amid a litany of reported failures at the well,
The New York Times said BP chose a casing for the deepwater well that was the
riskier of two options, partly because it made “the best economic
case.” Citing a BP document, the Times said it was feared that if the
cement around the casing pipe chosen by BP did not seal properly, gases could
leak all the way to the wellhead, where only a single seal would serve as a
barrier. The other option under consideration would have provided two barriers
in case of a gas leak, the Times said.

Related Links:

The Climate Post: BP oil spill washes up on Potomac shores

The Climate Post: BP Oil Spill Washes up Potomac

Finally: Obama halts new offshore leases and stumps for climate bill

by Randy Rieland.

Obama To-Do List, May 27, 2010:

Head of Minerals Management Services: Say good-bye

Deepwater oil drilling permits: Freeze, six months

Oil lease sales off Alaska coast: Cancel

Oil
lease sales in Western Gulf: Cancel

Oil
lease sales off coast of Virginia: Cancel

Safety
standards: Get tough

Find out more.

BP
beatdown

BP is medicore at plugging leaky oil wells, but has finger-pointing down. The oil giant’s report
to Congress suggested crews working for Transocean missed “warning signs” of
serious problems under the rig before it exploded, and raised questions about Halliburton’s cement
work. But what goes around comes around.  

Ian Urbina, writing in the New York Times, reports that just days before the explosion, BP
chose to use a cheaper, but riskier casing for the well. And more details have begun spilling out
about a heated explosion-day argument on the rig. Transocean reps wanted no part of a plan to
replace heavy drilling fluid in the pipe with lighter sea water. A BP “company man” overruled them.

The
New Orleans Times Picayune is
starting to lay some wood on BP too:

It’s
unclear whether the disaster would have been prevented had the drilling mud not
been pumped out prematurely, but the blowout would definitely have been less
likely. Removing the fluid was BP’s call, and the firm needs to own up to its
mistakes.

Greenpeace
is soliciting redesigns of
BP’s sunny green logo.

ODrama 

The next two days will go a long way
in determining whether the president gets stuck in BP’s muck. Extending the drilling freeze today and
flying to the Gulf tomorrow may rehabilitate his feskless image. And if
the “Top Kill” works, he can go all presidential and take control of the cleanup. But
he’s still on the high wire. 

Here are two takes on his dicey
dilemma from a New York Times online
debate. 

 Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com
columnist:

Far more
significant will be the perception that he (Obama) failed to “protect” us from
this threat, a potentially devastating belief in a society where “protecting us
from harm” has come to be seen as the president’s overarching responsibility
(far higher than what the Constitution actually describes as the prime
presidential duty: “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”).

Samuel Thernstrom,
resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute:

The president
must juggle competing concerns: He can correctly point to mounting evidence
that both BP and Transocean cut crucial corners in their haste to finish this
well, but he cannot succumb to the natural temptation to demonize drilling if
he wants to preserve the opportunity for bipartisan climate and energy
legislation.

Cry them a
river

Finally, Christine Dell’Amore,  writing for National Geographic notes a little discussed, self-destructive fallout from the
spreading spill: it could end up doing serious damage to the oil
industry’s infrastructure in the Gulf.  

If oil kills off marsh plants,
wetlands will turn to open water, putting the shallowly buried coastal
pipelines at risk of ships strikes, storms, and corrosive salt water. Each rip
means more leaking oil, costly repairs and replacements, and in some cases, new
wetland-restoration projects.

 

Related Links:

The Climate Post: BP oil spill washes up on Potomac shores

Michigan: Where U.S. clean energy, emissions, efficiency policy really counts

Obama preaches green tech gospel to California choir

by Ed Bruske.

The Washington, D.C. city council yesterday agreed to fully fund a recently approved “Healthy Schools” initiative—providing more money for school food, as well as
funding local produce in school meals and establishing grants to expand
school gardens and increase physical education—but not with a controversial “soda tax” as had been proposed. Rather, the city will begin imposing a more traditional sales tax of 6 percent on all soft drinks sold in the District.

What, you might be asking, is the difference between these two approaches to taxing sodas?

The beverage industry mounted an all-out assault on the penny-per-ounce excise tax, with radio and newspaper ads plus automated telephone calls to city voters, because it would have raised the shelf price that consumers see when they purchase soft drinks. (The excise tax had a cap of 30 cents per container.) The sales tax of 6 percent, by contrast, appears only on the sales receipt after beverages have been purchased.

The industry has also managed to defeat soda taxes proposed in New York and Philadephia. Although the industry also opposed the sales tax, it brings the District in line with neighboring Maryland, which already taxes soft drinks at 6 percent, as well as many other states. Virginia levies a much lower 2.5 percent sales tax.

D.C. council members were more comfortable with the traditional sales tax approach because it is already familiar, in contrast to the more progressive excise tax, which was aimed not only at raising money to improve food served in the District’s public schools, but also was seen as a weapon to combat obesity by making sugary sodas more expensive to city residents, who are seen as consuming too many cheap and non-nutritious calories.

The excise tax would have applied only to sugar-sweetened beverages. Diet drinks, calorie-free drinks, juices (with at least 70% juice), milk, coffee, and tea would have been excluded. The 6 percent sales tax applies also to artificially sweetened beverages, including diet and zero-calorie drinks, sports drinks and energy drinks. It will not apply to beverages containing milk, coffee, juice or tea.

The 6 percent sales tax is projected to raise more revenue—$7.92 million annually—in the District of Columbia, compared with $6.3 million for the penny-per-ounce tax. Costs associated with the “Healthy Schools” initiative are expected to run about $6.5 million per year.

But the “soda tax” may not be dead. An aide to Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), who authored the “Healthy Schools” legislation, said last night Cheh will continue to press for the excise tax. Because the obesity epidemic is such a enormous health crisis in the District—73% and 72% of residents in Ward 7 and 8 are overweight or obese!—it “is a good health policy.”

Related Links:

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Forget broccoli—Berkeley students aren’t keen on beans either

by Sue Sturgis.

A special Facing South investigation.

After coal is burned at power
plants, leaving massive heaps of ash, not all of the waste ends up in
landfills and impoundments like the one that failed
catastrophically in east Tennessee in December 2008.

A growing share of the nation’s coal ash is being reused and recycled,
finding its way into building materials, publicly used land and even
farmland growing food crops. And despite the presence of toxins like
arsenic, chromium, and lead found in coal ash, these reuses go largely
unregulated by state and federal officials.

The latest
report from the American Coal Ash Association, the industry group
representing major coal ash producers, found that of the more than 136
million tons of coal ash produced in 2008, about 44 percent—60
million tons—was reused. Some of the reuses for coal ash, such as
recycling it into concrete, are not very controversial even among
environmental advocates, since they’re believed to lock in toxic
contaminants.

But there are growing concerns about other reuses
of coal ash. For example, the recent revelation that
Chinese-manufactured drywall made with coal ash was releasing noxious
chemicals inside people’s homes spurred a
CBS investigation that also found problems with U.S.-made drywall
products. The discovery led the Consumer Product Safety Commission to
call for a closer look at drywall products made with coal ash.

Another
popular destination for coal ash that is raising concern is its use as a
substitute for fill dirt in construction projects. Because this reuse
can put coal ash directly in contact with groundwater, environmental and
public health advocates fear serious contamination problems. Right now,
the Environmental Protection Agency is mulling
new rules for the use of coal ash, including whether it should
strictly regulate ash used in fills or simply put forward guidelines and
leave oversight up to the states.

As federal officials consider
how to regulate reuse of coal ash, North Carolina’s experience in
overseeing structural fills provides a case study with valuable lessons
for the entire country.

North Carolina: A case study in
neglect?

North Carolina has long been a leader in promoting
the use of coal ash as structural fill. Heavily dependent on coal, with 60
percent of its electricity generated by coal-fired plants, the
state has a glut of ash to contend with—and has been encouraging
utilities to use it as fill for more than 20 years.

“It is
encouraging to see the commitment being made to develop reuse
applications for the coal ash as opposed to the continued use of county
landfills,” stated a
1989 letter from North Carolina’s solid waste chief to ReUse
Technology, now known as Full Circle Solutions. The Georgia-based firm
is a wholly owned subsidiary of Charlotte-based Cogentrix, which in turn
is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Goldman Sachs Group and operates a number of
small coal-fired power plants in the eastern U.S.

The letter
continued, “The Solid Waste Management Section has and will continue to
support the reuse and recycling of waste materials when performed in a
manner consistent with the environment.”

But the use of coal ash
as fill has not always been done in a manner “consistent with the
environment.” Even though North Carolina began overseeing coal ash fills
in 1994 after groundwater contamination was found at one fill site,
state records and independent research show that the rules—which were
cooperatively written by utilities and state regulators—have failed
to prevent coal ash fills from damaging the environment and threatening
public health.

Facing South examined records from the state
Division of Waste Management, which oversees the use of dry coal ash as
fill, and the Division of Water Quality, which is responsible for fills
that use wet coal ash from impoundments like the one that failed at the
Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston plant. We also considered the
findings of a recent report from the Sierra Club’s North Carolina
chapter titled “Unlined
Landfills? The Story of Coal Ash Waste in Our Backyard.”

The
public record shows that dry coal ash was used as a substitute for fill
dirt at more than 70 locations across North Carolina from the late
1980s through 2009 (click here for a spreadsheet with details about the locations). Sites sitting on
top of coal ash fills include airports, roads, industrial parks,
shopping centers, office buildings, a municipal gym, a church, a science
center at Duke University, a rifle range at a Marine base, and
livestock pens at a commercial hog farm.

Unlike new surface
impoundments where coal ash is dumped in North Carolina, which now must
be lined under state law, liners are not mandated for even the largest
fill sites. As a result, coal ash has contaminated groundwater or
surface water in at least three structural fill sites across the state:

*
At the Alamac Road site in Robeson County, N.C., about 45,000
tons of coal ash from small power plants owned by Cogentrix were used as
structural fill on 12.8 acres of land. ReUse began placing ash at the
site in 1992 without proper state authorization, and state tests of
groundwater near the site found levels of contaminants exceeding state
groundwater standards. In 1993, the North Carolina Division of Solid
Waste Management issued a notice
of violation, stating that tests showed “levels of arsenic,
cadmium, chromium, lead, selenium, sulfate and total dissolved solids”
exceeding safety standards—and that some of the contaminated samples
came from a monitoring site near a private residence thought to have a
drinking water well.

In response, ReUse removed the coal ash from
the site in 1995 with plans to use it elsewhere, including at an
agricultural demonstration project testing the ability of coal ash to
enhance crop yields—an increasingly common
way for coal ash to be reused, especially in the Southeast and
Midwest.

The EPA’s new proposals for coal ash regulation don’t
address the agricultural use of coal ash, but the agency and the U.S.
Department of Agriculture are currently studying such uses and are
scheduled to release a report of their findings in 2012.

* At the
Swift Creek site in Nash County, N.C., ReUse placed coal ash
from Cogentrix plants as fill on a property along Highway 301 beginning
in 1994. Two years later, the company got special
permission from the Division of Waste Management to also use ash
from a facility burning a mix of coal and shredded tires, which contain arsenic and other
toxic substances.

A 2004
letter from the state agency to ReUse, which by then had changed
its named to Full Circle Solutions, reported that state tests of
groundwater samples taken near the site found arsenic at almost three
times the state standard for groundwater and lead at more than four
times the standard. The letter stated, “The detection of contamination
beyond the boundary of the fill shows that constituents from the [coal
ash] are migrating.”

* Though our own review of the division’s
files did not turn up any mention of violations at the location, Sierra
Club found records showing that state environmental inspectors
discovered high levels of arsenic, iron, and selenium in wetlands at the Arthurs
Creek coal ash fill site in Northampton County in 2009. Since 2004,
the 21-acre site has been the dumping ground for ash from
Kentucky-based energy giant E.ON’s Roanoke Valley Energy plant near
Weldon, N.C. There are plans to eventually build office buildings and a
parking lot atop the fill.

The problem of groundwater
contamination at structural fill sites across North Carolina may be even
more widespread, because state law does not require groundwater
monitoring at such sites—or even require regular inspections. Most of
the problems that have been found to date were discovered following
complaints from nearby residents.

The areas of North Carolina
contaminated by coal ash fills are notable for being poor and having
large African-American, Latino, and Native American populations.

While
the statewide poverty rate is 14.6 percent, the poverty rates for the
counties with known damage cases from coal ash fills are much higher—
15.5 percent in Nash County, 26.6 percent in Northampton, and 30.4
percent in Robeson, according to Census Bureau data.
Those counties’ non-white populations are also greater than the state’s
26.1 percent, at 39.4 percent in Nash, 59.4 percent in Northampton and
64.2 percent in Robeson.

Building a community on coal ash

Water contamination is not the only
problem that’s occurred at structural fill sites across North Carolina.
At some of the sites, work occurred without the required notification
of state regulators. At others, the companies improperly excavated the
sites before placing the ash, increasing the risk that the coal ash
would come in contact with groundwater. And in some instances, coal ash
generators may have made ash available for use as fill that shouldn’t
have been allowed because it contained excessive levels of contaminants.

For
example, state Division of Water Quality records show that Progress
Energy distributed ash for fill use that exceeded limits for arsenic.
“Based on your 2007 annual report, 14,025 tons of ash was distributed in
December of 2007 in which the arsenic concentrations of all three
samples exceeded the ceiling and monthly average concentration,”
according to a March
2009 letter from the agency to the company. “Based on the 2008
annual report, five out of the 12 ash samples exceeded the ceiling
concentration.”

Progress Energy’s permit allows coal ash with
arsenic concentrations exceeding those limits to be distributed for fill
as long as it will be overlain by impervious surfaces like pavement so
rainwater can’t penetrate and leach out contaminants. But the division
was apparently not sure that was the case: It asked the company for a
site plan showing where the ash was used, but no plan was included in
the files.

Furthermore, some coal ash fill sites in North
Carolina had problems with erosion that left the toxic waste exposed—
posing a direct threat to local residents.

Among those was the
Fountain Industrial Park site near the city of Rocky Mount in Edgecombe
County, N.C. In 1989, ReUse Technology in cooperation with the Edgecombe
County Development Corp. began placing at the site ash from various
Cogentrix plants as well as from the coal-fired cogeneration facility at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Following
Hurricane Floyd in 1999, the industrial park was turned into a trailer
park for about 370 eastern North Carolina families displaced by the
disaster. Many of the residents were from Princeville, a historic
African-American community that was devastated by flooding from the
storm. By that time the soil covering the fill had eroded, leaving ash
exposed.

Employees of a nearby correctional facility, who for
years had watched industrial-sized trucks dumping large quantities of
unknown materials at the site, began asking if this was a good place to
locate a trailer park. They brought their concerns to the attention of
Saladin Muhammad with the group Black Workers for Justice, who was
working with trailer park residents. He in turn discussed the situation
with graduate students at the University of North Carolina’s School of
Public Health, and one of them—Aaron Pulver—investigated the
situation for his master’s
paper.

Pulver’s experience in trying to track down the
history of the site shows how difficult it can be under the current
regulatory environment for the public to get information about the use
of coal ash for structural fill.

While the Edgecombe County
development officer told Pulver a study of the land had been done prior
to construction of the trailer park, she refused to release it to him— as did the director of the N.C. Office of Temporary Housing.

When
Pulver finally managed to get a copy of the report, he discovered there
had actually been no thorough testing of the site for possible health
impacts before the placement of the trailers. His adviser, UNC
epidemiology professor Dr. Steve Wing, raised concerns about inhalation
of the coal ash dust and children ingesting it while playing in the
dirt.

In response to mounting worries about the site’s safety,
epidemiologists with the state health department collected samples from
the trailer park for testing, comparing the
results to EPA’s standards for potential health effects. One of the
samples exceeded those standards for two contaminants, with arsenic at
25 milligrams per kilogram compared to a recommended level of 22, and
chromium at 31 mg/kg compared to the standard of 30.

However, a press
release put out by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services
—under the headline “SOIL TESTS FIND NO PROBLEMS AT FOUNTAIN TRAILER
PARK”—said only that the soil samples “showed no significant risk”
for the residents. It did not mention the elevated arsenic and chromium
levels.

‘We’ve been unable to bring attention to this’

The problems that have occurred at
coal ash structural fill sites across North Carolina highlight the
difficulty states face in overseeing ash placement programs in the
absence of federal regulations.

Under North Carolina’s rules,
companies placing dry coal ash as fill are supposed to record its
presence on the property deed—a provision fought by Duke Energy,
which along with Progress Energy is one of the state’s two big
investor-owned utilities and a major producer of coal ash.

However,
the Sierra Club found that only 56 percent of the closed structural
fill sites that held 1,000 cubic yards or more of coal ash had complied
with the deed-recording requirement.

State officials aren’t
required to do their own tests of coal ash fill to see if it has
potentially dangerous levels of arsenic of other contaminants—that’s
left up to the companies, and there’s no rule to check the accuracy of
what the companies report. No advance permits are required for fills,
even for the largest sites. And while the state can comment on a
company’s coal ash fill plans, it does not have the power to deny them.

Following
the Kingston disaster in Tennessee in 2008, state Rep. Pricey Harrison
(D-Guilford) tried to change the way coal ash is regulated in North
Carolina, including its use in structural fills. In 2009, she introduced
a bill that would have created a permitting system for coal ash fills—but
the final
version of the legislation that passed the General Assembly and was
signed into law by Gov. Beverly Perdue (D) had the structural fill
provision stripped out.

Instead, the measure simply subjected the
state’s massive coal ash impoundments to dam safety rules, an approach
aimed at preventing catastrophes like Kingston but that does nothing to
protect against potentially more insidious environmental contamination
from ash fills.

But even that basic safeguard was difficult to
win at the state capitol, with the politically
powerful utility companies and electric cooperatives working
against it. “They fought every aspect of the bill tooth and nail,”
Harrison said. “They lobbied hard against even a hearing.”

This
week Harrison introduced another
bill to better regulate structural fill sites in North Carolina.
And as co-chair of the state Environmental Review Commission and House
Environment Committee, she is also planning on holding hearings on coal
ash next month.

Meanwhile, spurred by the Kingston coal ash
disaster in Tennessee, North Carolina regulators have stepped up their
inspections of structural fill sites. In 2009, they visited 48 sites—
and found violations at 28 of them, ranging from water contamination to a
lack of cover that could stop coal ash from escaping fill sites.

But
the regulators themselves acknowledge that more must be done.

“We’ve
been unable to bring the attention to this that we feel it needs,” said
Paul Crissman, chief of the Division of Waste Management’s Solid Waste
Section, which oversees dry coal ash fills.

Since the
recession-triggered state budget crisis began in 2008, Crissman’s staff
has declined from 54 to 49 people, while the workload has increased. He
does not expect that situation to change any time soon, with state
lawmakers facing a $1
billion budget gap.

“We’ve got more work to do in a day than
workers to put at it,” Crissman added.

While North Carolina’s
regulatory approach to coal ash fill has proven inadequate for ensuring
against environmental damages, the administration of Gov. Perdue does
not support strict federal regulation of coal ash as hazardous waste. In
fact, her departments of Transportation and Commerce are both on record opposing that regulatory approach. The state’s Utility Commission and the commission’s Public
Staff also oppose strict regulation, citing cost concerns.

What
next from Washington?

The lack of strong state rules for
using coal ash as structural fill in places like North Carolina has
caused community health and environmental advocates to rest their hopes
for protective standards on Washington.

The EPA’s
much-anticipated new proposals
for regulating coal ash released earlier this month allow for the
continued recycling and reuse of coal ash. However, they draw a
distinction between turning the waste into manufactured products, which
would not be regulated under the proposals, and the reuse of coal ash in
large fills, which as the EPA notes pose “an array of environmental
issues” and would be regulated as a type of land disposal.

How
the EPA will address the issue won’t become clear until after the
comment period for the proposed rules end and final regulations are
announced. The agency has not announced any time line for that.

In
the meantime, patchwork and scatter-shot state regulations like those
in North Carolina continue to carry the day—a situation that
environmental advocates say amounts to allowing utilities to push their
ash waste problems onto the public in dangerous ways.

“Because
this ‘reuse’ is subject to little or no regulation in many states,” contend the watchdog groups Earthjustice and the Environmental Integrity
Project, “some structural fills may be little more than dumpsites in
disguise.”

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Coal: Good News, and An Opportunity for More

Endocrine disruptors really do suck

by Tom Laskawy.

Michelle
Obama’s anti-obesity initiative, Let’s Move, has kicked into high gear. The Presidential
Task Force on Childhood Obesity released
a landmark report documenting the scale of the problem, complete with a list
of 70 recommendations and a set of benchmarks, including the goal of returning
the childhood obesity rate to its 1972 level of 5% by 2030. And
this week came the announcement that a new industry partnership called the
Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, which includes most of the major food
companies, agreed to reduce the number of calories in its members’ products by 1.5 trillion calories by 2015.

It
would be churlish of me to downplay the significance of either the report or
the industry announcement. As nutritionist Marion Nestle observed,
whatever skepticism one may rightly have regarding industry self-regulation,
the fact that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—whose public health
credentials in general and anti-obesity efforts in particular are beyond
reproach—will be auditing the calorie-cutting plan should keep industry shenanigans
to a minimum.

But
what will a 1.5-trillion calorie cut look like? In an article that
helpfully explains how companies might go about reaching their goal—lower-calorie Lunchables! Smaller Kraft Cheese slices!—former food industry
executive Hank Cardello puts
the cuts into context:

…[T]his
is a drop in the bucket and represents only a 0.5 percent reduction in the 300
trillion calories available for Americans to consume each year. That translates
to less than 1.5 pounds of added weight per person. Hardly enough to resolve an
obesity crisis.

That context
was left of out of the comments by David Mackay, chair of the Healthy Weight Commitment
Foundation, at the White House announcement. But he
did express his deep pleasure that the concept of “calories in/calories
out” is a foundational concept of the White House childhood obesity initiative.

“Calories in/calories out” refers to the idea that balancing consumption with exercise
is the key to maintaining a healthy weight. It also happens to be the industry
mantra, since it mostly leaves industry off the hook. It becomes an individual’s
responsibility to count calories and get enough exercise. Industry can offer a
helping hand with programs like this one, but on the whole can be left to its
own devices.

And
certainly, industry desperate wants to be left along. As Kelly Brownell, head
of the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity said
to the Washington Post‘s Jane Black: “My
guess is that they were going to do this anyway… The hidden motive here is to
convince government to back off and not regulate the industry.”

The
question then becomes if these impressive-sounding but small-bore industry
initiatives will make up for an apparent lack of political will from the Obama
administration to force government to do its part. The Task Force report is
full of things the government should do, but has only a handful of things it will do.

Meanwhile,
one of the core commitments the Obama administration has made to address obesity—through the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, aka the National School Lunch Program—is stuck in congressional limbo. The bill, already disappointing
in its minimal increases in funding, appears stalled at least until after
the 2010 midterm elections.

Indeed,
I’d feel better about the administration’s supposed laser-like focus on the
National School Lunch Program—already overdue for reauthorization and operating under
an extension of the current version, with all its flaws—if it showed a
little more engagement with the current congressional bottleneck. I suspect,
however, that with the coming of the political season surrounding the midterm
elections, even a public health crisis on the scale of the obesity epidemic
must take a back seat to more pressing concerns.

In
essence, the task force’s report—with its laundry list of recommendations and benchmarks,
most of which don’t start until 2015 and don’t end until 2030—feels less like
the roadmap its reputed to be and more like a poorly written recipe. The
ingredients are excellent, and there’s a beautiful picture of what the final
dish will look like, but the step-by-step instructions are missing. We don’t
know the order or even the precise amounts of each ingredient. We do know
there’s a great dish in there somewhere, but we don’t know how to make it.

Now,
it’s clearly unreasonable to expect the task force to have created a precise recipe to fix a social problem on this scale. But of the dozen or so recommendations that were identified as
the government’s responsibilities, which will the Obama administration enact? Where
was the call from the President for all federal agencies mentioned in the
report to draw up a specific action plan in response to the recommendations?

We’re
just not going to meet these benchmarks without government policy playing a
significant role. Industry needs to be a partner, of course. But we are after all talking about the
industry that gave us the
now infamous Smart Choices label,
with guidelines so slack that even Froot Loops could qualify. The same industry that tried to pass
off sugar-sweetened
Cocoa Krispies as immune boosting. The same industry that had the CEO of
one of its most powerful companies refer
to soda as a “staple food.” And the same industry that targets
children with billions of dollars in advertising so that it can take advantage
of the “nag factor” at the supermarket. It is, in short, not to be
trusted.

Along
those lines, I was not encouraged by a recent interview
in Politico with Melody Barnes, the administration’s director of the Domestic Policy
Council, and chief architect of Let’s Move. When Mike Allen asked
what the government itself was going to do to address obesity in the wake of
the task force’s report, Barnes gave a lengthy description of the
administration’s efforts on the school lunch program and its Healthy Food Financing
Initiative, which would fund grocery stores in so-called “food deserts.” Both predate the task force report. When Allen pressed on the
subject, Barnes offered no other initiatives.

We
have learned over the last decade and to our great chagrin that a change in
administration can undo decades of good government. The more that Let’s Move relies on industry good
behavior and bully pulpit exhortations from the White House as it tries to
avoid writing policies into law that might change the underlying structural
foundation of the obesity epidemic, the more likely we are to risk falling back
to old patterns once our enthusiasm flags or—dare I say it—a Republican
returns to the White House, which could happen well before the final obesity
benchmark in 2030.

Drops
in the bucket, even dozens of them, just won’t get the job done.

Cross-posted from markbittman.com.

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Lessons from Berkeley schools: The truth about kids and vegetables

by Ashley Braun.

Kids have a right to know the possible scopes of their own demise. You don’t have to put a monkey on trial to figure it out: It’s either gonna be biblical plagues or global climate change. Thank goodness both make a snazzy diorama!

Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming

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