Fight climate change and picture the sounds of silence

In just a town of 15,000 or more, even, picture:

Air quality problems cut in half due to no internal combustion engine exhaust, no gas pump vapor leaks and more.

Noise pollution greatly slashed, with tire and wind resistance noise still moderate concerns, but internal combustion engine noises gone.

Picture even getting halfway there, if half our vehicles are hybrids and half are all-electrics.

Picture the nearby power plants to make this happen being coated glass panels soaking up the sun, or 100-foot steel blades slicing through the air.

It's all available.

For a couple of Trillion with a T dollars.

That's the real cost to really fight climate change, per Carl Beijer. And he's right.

But that's freedom — just another word for nothing left to lose but a lot of carbon dioxide molecules.

Per the header, your typical larger city wouldn't be totally silent, of course.

You'd still have the sirens of emergency vehicles. Hybrids, rather than full electrics, would still have some internal combustion engine noises. Large cities would still have airplane noises near airports.

But, the changes would be huge.

People in larger cities might hear sounds and not know what they're hearing.

Until someone like me says "That's a mockingbird" or something like that.

And, some of this would be changes of more than a century.

New York City 125 years ago had tens of thousands of horses, or more, tromping its downtown every day. They were pulling buses, streetcars and delivery wagons as well as personal carriages.

They were creating their own levels of noise pollution plus even more air and water pollution. (Think of all the horse shit. Think next of all the dead horses.)

TX Progressives tackle political, possible editorial oiliness

The Texas Progressive Alliance looks at oiliness polluting the political, and perhaps editorial, landscape and other issues.

Brains and Eggs offers up highlights July campaign finance reports from key the Texas connection on the DNC reverse shift to take Big Oil donations.

DeSmog Blog discusses in detail how  the fracking industry is cannibalizing itself and causing environmental damage. This blogger suggests that Chronicle biz columnist Chris Tomlinson needs to start reading stuff like this, and more, before writing his next “fracking is great, period” column. (Hints have been dropped before.)

Downwinders at risk keeps beating the drums  for Metroplex air quality.

At the Dallas Observer, Jim Schutze gives resigned-in-disgrace former Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway a final kick in the pants, in part for supporting white folk much more than his own South Dallas constitutency.

David Bruce Collins sees faint hopes among today’s Dems but doesn’t expect realization for a generation or more.

The San Antonio Current says millennials are registering to vote.

SocraticGadfly wants to know more about all the alleged Texas atheists the Lyceum poll on the Cruz-O'Rourke Senate race said the state had.

Off the Kuff highlights July campaign finance reports from key State Senate and State House races.

Gaby Diaz documents her time knocking on doors for the Beto O'Rourke campaign.

Texas Standard says Valley schools are doing well.

But The Texas Tribune notes post-Harvey troubles in Port Arthur ISD schools.

David Brockman calls out the Christian right's politics of cruelty.

Free Press Houston wonders if that city will face a far-right rally.

Mark Smith stands up for public libraries

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The Rivard Report is moving to new digs. Will it hire new staff?

Irene Vázquez maps out where Houston is affordable.

El Jefe recaps the Jeff Sessions/El Tiempo debacle.

Dian Nostikasari explains why Houston's bike plan matters.

Like dirtier urban air? You've LOVE Obama

That's the latest olive branch semi-conservative President Barack Obama is extending to Big Oil and its ilk.

In the name of being more "business friendly" (but less lungs friendly) and eliminate allegedly "too burdensome" regulations, Team Obama wants to eliminate urban gas station vapor-trapping regulations.

Yep, those bellows on fuel nozzles at big city gas stations, already in place for a decade or more in larger urban areas, could be gone.

Here's the nugget:

The Environmental Protection Agency will eliminate requirements in some states for vapor recovery systems at gas stations, which are "redundant" because of improved air pollution controls in vehicles, saving $67 million annually.

Last time I checked, fuel pumps don't drive anywhere. Last time I checked, we'd added millions of new drivers to the road since the first vapor-control devices were required. Last time I checked, putting any additional petrochemical vapors in the air would not just be an air pollution problem but might add to global warming particulates, at least indirectly.

More proof that Obama's not even a neoliberal? Where his not-at-all liberal "tipping point" guru is presenting this:

Cass Sunstein, the White House regulatory chief, planned to describe the changes later Thursday morning in remarks to the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Meanwhile, the intensely political Obama is clearly trying to have his neolib cake with conservative frosting, and eat it politically, too:
Most proposals announced Thursday are not final and will be updated to reflect public comment, the White House said. That process is expected to last into the summer, said lobbyists who had been told about the plan.
So, he'll see how loud environmentalists scream versus how much pre-informed lobbyists contribute to his campaign. Got it?

Now, you people who say "Ooohhhh, we could get a Republican president if all good liberals don't vote for Obama"? What do we have right now?

China's Potemkin economy has its own energy crisis

Here's the problem in a nutshell, as the NYT describes it: Coal prices are soaring. Chinese coal-fired power plants are state-owned, or at least state-controlled, yet under a mandate to show a profit. But, Beijing, fearing economic disruption, has kept a VERY tight reign on price hikes.

So, the coal plants have taken drastic action — action they can control. They're rationing generation and power delivery. As in cutting a city of 360,000 down to getting electricity only every third day.

Hypercapitalists will note this shows the limits of a demand economy. But, not necessarily, at least not total limits. The state could, after all, jack up power prices to reflect the market.

What it shows, yet again, in part, is actually the bubbliness of the Chinese pseudomiracle. It shows WHY the government permits and even promotes bubbles — the fear of social unrest, 22 years after Tiananmen Square, is still high in many leaders' minds.

And, there's more fallout.

Also due to price issues, plus production issues, Chinese mines are selling only their crappiest, dirtiest, highest-sulfur coal. Weather and other problems have cut exports from Australia, a major Chinese coal supplier.

And, whether production cuts at factories due to electricity shortages, or price hikes due to realistically-priced electricity, the price of Made in China crapola coming to the U.S. will rise, in addition to rising shipping costs.

Don't expect jobs to move back here, though. Just sulfur compounds wafting across the ocean.

Good news/bad news in Four Corners

Good news? The Navajo Tribe preliminarily keeps 1,000 jobs for what is about as close as you can get to a Third World country in the United States.

Bad news? It does that by extending for 30 years the lifespan of the single largest nitrogen oxides emitter in the United States — the Four Corners Power Plant.

The good news? The lease was upped from $1.5M a year to $7M a year.

The bad news? Nothing in the contract about improved scrubbers or other environmental actions.

Now, the tribe has its own EPA, and says that any changes in federal standards on either NOx or SO2 will be incorporated into its standards. But, with Team Obama making nice to big business, is there any guarantee the U.S. EPA will keep its bureaucratic nose to the grindstone? Stay tuned.

Prenatal pollution lowers child IQ

Boy, this is a serious story; specifically, it’s about how pregnant mothers’ exposure to air pollution can lower the IQ of their children.

It involves fairly low levels of pollution, which is one matter of concern. Here’s another.

Patrick Breysse, an environmental health specialist at Johns Hopkins' school of public health, says the effect is similar to lead pollution.

China outpacing U.S. on cleaner coal power

Yes, China still uses a lot more coal than we do, and it has a lot of highly inefficient power plants that aren’t that old. But, when newly-built, or being-built, electric power plants are compared head to head, it looks like America needs to practice what it preaches on air pollution.

Hell, next the Chinese will be beating us on conservation.

Back to school, back to smog

A full one-third of school children attend school in areas of high air pollution.

That will add a bit to biology studies now, won’t it?

Air-purifying concrete highway

A road in the small Dutch town of Hengelo will be paved with an air-purifying concrete, or that’s the claim about it.

The University of Twente developed and tested concrete paving stones contain a titanium dioxide-based additive.

Under laboratory-controlled sunlight, the additive, which comes from a Japanese invention, binds the nitrogen oxide particles emitted by car exhausts and turns them into harmless nitrates.

The road should be done by the end of this year, with the first real-world tests of its effectiveness next summer.

Beijing hopes for a rainy day

In fact, China is trying to create more rainy days. The countryside could use rain as rain, of course, but the capital wants it as an “air shower” to scrub pollution.

Meanwhile, at least in the Sierras and Intermountain West, U.S. pollution (hello, California) seems to reduce rainfall.

Beijing – ‘it’s only mist’

Yeah, President Hu Jintao, tell a marathoner in another week that the soup in Beijing called air is only mist.

Actually, it’s not any Chinese government or Communist Party official claiming that.

It’s Arne Ljungqvist, chairman of the IOC's medical commission.

Read on and see if you agree.

Georgia smog get off of my cloud!

A study of weather patterns shows the Southeast is causing its own rain, but only on weekdays.

Storms in the middle of the week, when smog peaks, are stronger, rainer and wider than average.

Can you smell the sulfur?

If you live in the Eastern U.S., you’re going to get to smell it plenty.

It must be environmental clusterfuck Friday or something.

The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled today that the Environmental Protection Agency exceeded its authority when it established the 2005 Clean Air Interstate Rule.

Fallout? Big time.

At its most stringent, the regulations covering 28 states in the eastern half of the country, would have required 70 percent reductions in such major pollutants as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide beginning in 2015.

The ruling, along with a court decision issued in February striking down the environmental agency’s rule controlling mercury emissions from power plants, means that virtually all new controls imposed on the electric utility industry by the Bush administration have no force.

“The implications are huge,” said Lisa Heinzerling, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. “This is the administration’s major air pollution initiative.”

No shit. As John Walke of the National Resources Defense Counsel notes:

“The Bush administration has failed to achieve a single ounce in reductions of smog, soot, mercury or global warming pollution from power plants.”

You almost have to wonder if somebody in the EPA didn’t KNOW this was going to be found illegal and thereby deliberately propose the rule.

Bush EPA wants to smog up national parks

Squashing California’s attempt to regulate CO2 wasn’t enough. Signing off on “Clean Skies” wasn’t enough. Now, the Environmental Protection Agency and Administrator Stephen Johnson want to allow more air pollution in our national parks.

An EPA rules change would average daily air pollutions emissions in and around national parks over a full year, wiping out spikes in air pollution.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t visit national parks over a full year. I visit a specific park at a specific time.

A slew of National Park Service and EPA officials have challenged the rule change, arguing that it will worsen visibility in already-impaired areas, according to internal documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

And, it’s being done, the rule change, in a way that will allow more power plants to build near parks.

The National Parks Conservation Association has issued a report estimating the rule would ease the way for the construction of 28 new coal-fired power plants within 186 miles of 10 national parks. In each of the next 50 years, the report concludes, the new plants would emit a total of 122 million tons of carbon dioxide, 79,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 52,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 4,000 pounds of toxic mercury into the air over and around the Great Smoky Mountains, Zion and eight other national parks.

“It’s like if you're pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55 miles-per-hour zone, and you say, 'If you look at how I've driven all year, I've averaged 55 miles per hour,’” said Mark Wenzler, director of the National Parks Conservation Association’s clean-air programs. “It allows you to vastly underestimate the impact of these emissions.”

Don Shepherd, an environmental engineer at the Park Service's air resources division in Denver, said of the new rule, “I don’t know of anyone at our level, who deals with this day to day, that likes it or thinks it's going to make sense.

“We really want to have clean air at national parks all the time, and not just at average times,” Shepherd said in a telephone interview. “All of our national parks have impaired visibility. . . . It would really be a setback in trying to make progress.”

You know what to do, after reading the rest of the report.

Go to my links list on the right, click on “Earthjustice,” and find out how to donate. Because the National Park Service deserves a good lawyer.

And, as a violation of the NPS’s Organic Act, this is definitely actionable.

Dick Cheney helps pollute his own state

Did you ever think Wyoming would have ozone warnings?

Well, courtesy of all its oil and gas drilling, it now does.

And that’s not all:

The Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Ore., estimates that every year up to a half-million birds die in oil and gas waste pits in the Rockies. For comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill killed about a quarter-million birds. At what point will we take a hard look at energy development in the Rockies and figure out how we can do it responsibly? Right now, any calls for moderate development are deemed un-American, and when restrictions are proposed, the industry pouts and threatens to leave.

Of course, the author admits he drives a gas-guzzler (which probably actually gets offroad use in Wyoming), but says he is trying to conserve.

Can we bring our own air, too?

China officially “regrets” that the U.S. Olympic Team is bringing its own food supply to Beijing this summer. Well, given all the scandals of recent months, from pet food tainted with a plasticizing compound to toys swathed in lead paint, what do they expect?

(Also, some athletes worry that the amount of growth-boosting drugs used on Chinese livestock could produce positive doping tests.)

The heck with that — what’s Beijing smog, even with any short-term Chinese clean-up, going to do to a marathoner’s lungs?

The one coal waste you haven’t heard much about yet

It’s not the carbon dioxide of global warming. Nor is it the sulfur dioxide of acid rain, nor the mercury of smokestack-area pollution. Instead, it’s coal combustion waste, the solid byproducts of burning coal. In fact, air pollution smokestack controls wind up producing more solid waste.

Beyond mercury or sulfates, coal combustion waste can contain lead, selenium and arsenic, among other things.

The problem? Most power plants do little to nothing to dispose of combustion waste in an environmentally friendly matter, and the Environmental Protection Agency does little to make them. That’s mainly because EPA doesn’t consider it a hazardous waste, despite all the heavy metal content.

If stored in basically open areas, dust off the waste can blow in the air, or the waste can run off into water supplies after rains.

A primer on China’s lax environmentalism

Judging by the tenor of the story, we shouldn’t expect changes soon. How bad is the problem? A brief graf illustrates:

But China is more like a teenage smoker with emphysema. The costs of pollution have mounted well before it is ready to curtail economic development. But the price of business as usual — including the predicted effects of global warming on China itself — strikes many of its own experts and some senior officials as intolerably high.

The details of the problem?

The level of particulate (pollutants) is measured in micrograms per cubic meter of air. The European Union stipulates that any reading above 40 micrograms is unsafe. The United States allows 50. In 2006, Beijing’s average PM 10 level was 141, according to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics. Only Cairo, among world capitals, had worse air quality as measured by particulates, according to the World Bank.

And, it’s not just air pollution. Half of China lacks access to quality water supplies. Between the two, about 750,000 Chinese a year are killed by pollution.

On air pollution, a large problem is Chinese factory inefficiency:

Chinese steel makers, on average, use one-fifth more energy per ton than the international average. Cement manufacturers need 45 percent more power, and ethylene producers need 70 percent more than producers elsewhere, the World Bank says. …

Chinese buildings rarely have thermal insulation. They require, on average, twice as much energy to heat and cool as those in similar climates in the United States and Europe, according to the World Bank. A vast majority of new buildings — 95 percent, the bank says — do not meet China’s own codes for energy efficiency.

Part of the problem is that American businesses that outsource production to China also outsource pollution, and know that’s what they are doing. (Actually, not all the pollution is ultimately outsource; particulate pollution in L.A. comes partially from China.) The Chinese government, instead of making death threats against corrupt managers, should insist American businesses include at least a few dinero to help China pay for improving its pollution mess. Most of these American businesses have enough sunk costs in Chinese manufacturing that they’re not going to baulk.

Up to this point, both the failure of Beijing to think of something like this, and the willingness of American companies to outsource pollution has been a damning indictment on what is known as capitalism.

Texas is No. 1 — in dirty power plants

A work e-mail I received from the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) rates the country’s 50 dirtiest power plants:

The report will show that the 12 states with the heaviest concentrations of the 50 dirtiest power plants (in terms of one key pollutant) are: Texas (five); Pennsylvania (four); Indiana (four); Alabama (three); Georgia (three); North Carolina (three); Ohio (three); West Virginia (three); Wyoming (two); Florida (two); Kentucky (two); and New Mexico (two).

Standing by for comment from Gov. Rick Perry.

Besides polluting, ozone may contribute to global warming

How so? It inhibits plants ability to intake carbon dioxide, meaning more of it remains in the atmosphere. In addition, ozone can otherwise stunt plant growth