Sarah Gilman

Assistant Editor

Gather round folks, it’s time for a natural gas sing-along (a la the Beverly Hillbillies theme):

“Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed
A poor roughneck, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was drilling for some gas,
And up through the ground came a bubblin’ mess.

Salty coalbed methane water, that is. . .”

Gas companies seeking coalbed methane have pumped untold (and undoubtedly massive) quantities of the often briny stuff from the ground over the last decade and dumped it in streams, irrigation ditches and holding ponds in Wyoming and Montana’s Powder River Basin. Meanwhile (and much to the chagrin of many a Powder River area rancher), the feds have done little to study its impacts or regulate its discharge.

Federal officials are only now starting to review what’s known about CBM water and determine what information gaps need to be filled, reports the Associated Press, a full year after the deadline set by the 2005 federal energy bill. The review apparently came only after three environmental groups sued the Interior Department in February.

But this is not the first time the feds have dragged their feet on regulating this subset of the gas industry. (Read on …)

Sarah Gilman

Assistant Editor

Have you ever stood on the edge of a strip mine, stared into the kelly-green waste water pooled at the bottom, the bright mineral colors of eroding earth and tailings, and thought to yourself: “God, that’s beautiful”? Then there are the lit towers — strange gothic cities — of coal mines and refineries at night; the eery, soundless sweep of oil derricks pumping in a greening field; the twisting arcs of sprawling suburb streets seen from the air.

If you’re like me, you find yourself struck dumb by such scenes. There is something of the sublime in them. They have the power to entice and repel, and challenge us with the idea that development, industry, even poison, have their own strange, terrible loveliness.

(Read on …)

Ernie Atencio

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is proposing something called “Complex Transformation” at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. Some agency bureaucrat must have come up with that benign and diversionary term to downplay the terrible thing our government is planning.

The plan is to increase production of plutonium pits, the triggers for nuclear weapons. The first pit was made at Los Alamos in 1945 and detonated at White Sands. The second pit destroyed Nagasaki and 74,000 of it’s inhabitants. Now NNSA wants to produce 50-80 pits per year.

Los Alamos produced and stockpiled thousands of pits until 1952, when the Hanford site in Washington state then the environmental disaster called Rocky Flats in Colorado took over. After Rocky Flats shut down and as Cold War mania faded in the 1990s Los Alamos took it up again at a rate of 20 pits per year.

The U.S. already has about 23,000 pits — 10,000 in weapons and 13,000 in an Amarillo, Tex. storage facility. The 2002 Moscow Treaty requires that deployed nuclear weapons be reduced to 2,200 by 2013. That the math doesn’t add up is only part of the problem.

(Read on …)

Ed Quillen

Nothing like a crisis to unite a community, right? Well, not if that community is Leadville, Colo., seat of Lake County and the highest incorporated city in the United States at 10,152 feet above sea level. The old mining town has been in the news lately on account of a clogged mine drainage tunnel.

There’s a water treatment plant at the mouth of the 12,000-foot-long tunnel. But somewhere behind it there’s a blockage that may date back to 1995, and contaminated water has accumulated underground. If the growing water pressure pushed through or around the blockage, it might wash out the treatment plant and a nearby mobile-home park, and send a toxic plume down the Arkansas River.

Lake County Commissioners despaired that the tunnel’s owner, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, would ever get around to fixing the problem. So a month ago, they declared a state of emergency. This worked like the proverbial two-by-four applied to a mule: It got the beast’s attention. Even the New York Times has covered the story.

As someone who lives 60 miles downstream from Leadville in Salida, it was fine by me. We are dependent on river-related tourism here, and the last thing we need is another (there was one in 1983) big release of orange mine-murk discharge that kills most aquatic life in the river.
(Read on …)

Francisco Tharp

If you’ll be spending any time in the San Francisco Bay area summer and fall, you may want to hold your breath–while you’re there, that is.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that California’s agriculture department plans to cover San Francisco, Marin County and the East Bay with Checkmate, a hormone that impedes the reproductive efforts of the light brown moth. Beginning in August, the dustings will occur at night.

State officials see the spraying as a preemptive strike against WMD (Widespread Moth Destruction), which could devastate California’s agriculture industry.

But those rascally health aficionados in the area (yes, the same area that outlawed plastic bags in 2007) are outraged. Hundreds of folks who were sprinkled with Checkmate in Santa Cruz and Monterrey Counties from September to December reported coughing, wheezing, and headaches, among other symptoms.

The article says,

The USDA’s Hawkins said the EPA has generally not been concerned over the toxicity of Checkmate. For example, he said, the agency never set a maximum limit for the pesticide in food or required farm workers to stay out of fields that had just been sprayed.

Somehow this doesn’t make me feel any safer. After all, the USDA doesn’t see anything wrong with genetically modified crops (see HCN’s “Brave New Hay”), and the Environmental Protection Agency extinguished California’s attempt to cut CO2 emissions.

Click here to see why one organization is ready to “run” and “escape” from “a toxic cloud of government corruption.”

Or, click here to see why we have nothing to fear…that’s right, nothing to fear at all.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

They’re all the rage, because:

They use less energy. They save you money on your electricity bill. And they kind of save the planet, or at least, they reduce the upward trend of global warming.

So we’re all installing compact fluorescent bulbs in all the light fixtures in our houses.

Turns out, “there’s a catch.”

That’s the warning from the new Santa Barbara-based Miller-McCune think tank:

Low-energy bulbs — also known as compact fluorescent lamps — contain small amounts of mercury. … (And) when you break a bulb with mercury in it, the mercury instantly vaporizes in the air and poses a health risk to people who inhale it. The U.S. National Institutes of Health warns: “Exposures to very small amounts of mercury can result in devastating neurological damage and death.”

One country — the United Kingdom — has begun alerting the public:

So this month, as stores throughout the United Kingdom began pulling traditional tungsten bulbs from their shelves as part of a government mandate to completely replace them by 2011, ministers at the Environment Agency were simultaneously calling for more public education — including warnings printed on bulb labels — about the health and environment risks presented by low-energy lights.

As a sober BBC report put it: “Official advice from the Department of the Environment states that if a low-energy bulb is smashed, the room needs to be vacated for at least 15 minutes. A vacuum cleaner should not be used to clear up the debris, and care should be taken not to inhale the dust. Instead, rubber gloves should be used, and the broken bulb put into a sealed plastic bag, which should be taken to the local council for disposal.”

Sheesh. The Miller-McCune story is here. Is no type of progress completely safe?

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Cancer, infertility, birth defects…just some of the health problems attributed to endocrine disruptors, chemicals found in pharmaceuticals, soaps, plastics, fabrics, cosmetics, soft drinks, dental fillings, egg cartons and pesticides, just to name a few.

Endocrine disruptors are synthetic chemicals and natural plant compounds that may affect the endocrine system (the communication system of glands, hormones and cellular receptors that control the body’s internal functions). Many of these substances have been associated with developmental, reproductive and other health problems in wildlife and laboratory animals.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Pat McGavran, an Idaho Statesman reader, has written a column about all the people who leave their engines idling while they go into latte shops etc etc etc etc …

Among McGavran’s points:

Idling excuse/myth: Continually turning the engine on and off is bad for the car.

Fact: Frequent restarting has little impact on engine components (battery, starter) but excessive idling can damage cylinders, foul spark plugs and corrode the exhaust system.

Idling excuse: Starting the car uses more fuel than letting it idle.

Fact: Idling for 10 seconds uses more fuel than restarting. Every 15 minutes of idling wastes a quarter of a gallon of fuel and idling for 10 minutes each day costs 22 gallons or $66 a year.

McGavran also says, with modern vehicles, you don’t need to warm up your engine in cold weather.

She’s begun a campaign to ask idlers to PLEASE TURN OFF THE ENGINES!

I’ve been tempted to make the same request, countless times. Idling is one of my pet peeves, for reasons such as: Air pollution in our Western cities gets worse and worse. We fight wars over fuel supplies. Idling exemplifies some bad character traits (selfishness and insistence on personal comfort regardless of impacts).

I see the idlers everywhere. Those not behind the wheel are all types New West, Old West, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and so on and on and on.

McGavran’s column is here. Maybe, inspired by her, I’ll finally get the gumption to ask some to turn it off — trying to be polite about it — and maybe you’ll consider doing the same?

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Recently we received a card here at High Country News, which said only this: “Dear Human Race, So sad about us.” No one had to ask what the writer meant, though possibly each of us interpreted it in a personal way. As for me, I think about the mounting evidence of human-created global climate change, and the war in Iraq, sucking resources, lives and hopes. I consider the results of our various human endeavors now coming back at us — the disappearing species, the toxic waste, the unbreathable air, the speed and insanity of the urban areas of our planet.

But what really brings it home to me is the garbage island in the Pacific. It sounds like a sci-fi story, but it’s been covered by reputable journalists and discussed by reputable scientists, so — unbelievable as it is — I’m compelled to accept it as fact.

Here’s the story: “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” alternatively known as “The Earth’s Eighth Continent,” is located in the Pacifica Ocean between California and Hawaii, in the North Pacific Gyre, which creates a debris-trapping vortex. The Patch is roughly twice the size of Texas, and made up primarily of human trash, about 80 percent of it plastic. It weighs about 3.5 million tons with a concentration of more than 3 million pieces of garbage per square kilometer. It reaches more than 30 meters down into the ocean. Since the 1990s, it’s tripled in size, and is predicted to grow tenfold in the next ten years.

As we know, plastic doesn’t biodegrade — instead it photo-degrades, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces which retain the original molecular composition. These tiny pieces look like food to sea birds and fish, who eat it and eventually starve to death since the plastic can’t be digested. In addition, the small pieces of plastic act as sponges for several toxins, concentrating chemicals such as DDT to 1 million times the normal level. Even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, plastic nodules outweigh plankton by a ratio of six to one. Nearly 300 species have been reported to have eaten from, or become trapped in, the Patch.

The seas are awash in plastic, and it’s pretty clear why. Nearly every human on the planet uses plastic materials every day, starting with plastic diapers, milk bottles and toys and moving on to condoms, diaphragms and birth control containers. We drink from 34 billion newly manufactured containers annually. Some 60 billion tons of plastic products are created every year around the planet. It’s been estimated that each of us uses 190 pounds of plastic every year.

As Paul Watson notes in a piece called The Plastic Sea, even the plastic eaten by birds and fish that die and decompose on a beach is blown back into the sea, where “these vicious little inorganic parasites continue to maim and kill in an endless assault upon life in our oceans.”

What can be done? Is it not too far gone already? Shall we simply rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and enjoy the cruise while we can, skirting the nasty new “island”? Nobel Peace Prize co-winner Steve Running, professor at the University of Montana, says not.

Running won the Nobel for his work as one of the lead authors of the fourth assessment report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

He’s adapted Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s “Five Stages of Grief” model to climate change, and he sees people going through the familiar pattern: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.

This can be applied not only to our reactions to climate change, but to the damage we have done and continue to do to the planet in other ways, such as our use of plastic — just one part of our dependence on petroleum, a big part of the climate change story.

I admit to swinging between denial and acceptance, and often being bogged down, like our letter writer, in depression. But now, knowing about the Patch, I can no longer be blase about my use of plastic, nor continue to forget my cloth bags when I go to the market. One small thing done by one small person, but I can only believe it’s better than doing nothing.

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Despite the threat of emissions caps, more coal-fired plants are being built in the United States than at any time in the past seven years, according to an article in The Economist.

Around the planet, demand for coal is expected to grow by 2.2 percent until the year 2030 — faster than the demand for oil or natural gas. Why? Coal is cheap. Even though demand has pushed the price of coal upwards, it is still the least expensive of the common fuels for power stations relative to the amount of heat it generates. In India and China, coal is booming and there are no limits on emissions. The biggest exporters of coal, Indonesia and Australia, are strugging to keep up with orders.

Politicians in Europe and the U.S. talk of carbon prices eventually being so high that coal-fired plants will be viable only if they capture their emissions and store them underground. But no such plants yet exist. And in the U.S., most of the proposals for regulations to reduce emissions involve generous handouts to the coal industry.

See related HCN stories: here and here.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Not to condemn the whole industry: There are some responsible drillers, and some who insistently behave like toddlers who make messes.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

In the old mining towns of Silverton, Colo., the sticky issue of acid mine drainage is getting some press, and it’s not all about death and environmental destruction. In Silverton, local volunteers and a host of government agencies are celebrating ten years of a cooperative effort to clean up abandoned mines.

Silverton’s issue has been a tough one for the public or the press to wrap its mind around. It lacks the sexiness of a David vs. Goliath, scruffy-hero-saves-the-environment from corporate rape and pillage. Sure, some people still try to frame it that way: The mines are spilling toxic sludge into the streams and killing all the fish. Only it’s not that simple.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

This is probably worth seven minutes of your time (how long this particular web video runs):

Felicity Barringer, an intrepid, middle-aged reporter covering the environment for The New York Times, takes us on a trail winding up 14,494-foot Mount Whitney, California’s highest peak.

The environmental issue: The feds have erased all the outhouses and now all hikers must carry official little plastic bags to collect their own poop. I use the official term. A trail sign tells hikers: “Pack out your poop!”

The video takes us through pines, over lots of gray rocks, up 99 switchbacks, with scenery that includes a sped-up moonset over the peak. It’s kind of humorous, kind of serious, and nice meeting other people on the trail, some of whom don’t want to poop in the official bags.

Sample dialog:

“After all, isn’t part of the wilderness experience being able to do what the bears do?”

The video (a brief ad comes first) is here, and the story (for retrograde readers who want actual printed words) is here.