Just five companies make BPA in the United States: Bayer, Dow, Hexion Specialty Chemicals, SABIC Innovative Plastics (formerly GE Plastics), and Sunoco. Together, they bring in more than $6 billion a year from the compound. Each of them referred questions about BPA’s safety to their Arlington, Virginia — based trade association, the American Chemistry Council.
Of the more than 100 independently funded experiments on BPA, about 90% have found evidence of adverse health effects at levels similar to human exposure. On the other hand, every single industry-funded study ever conducted — 14 in all — has found no such effects.
I pulled these quotes from a much longer article on BPA in Fast Company.
Categories: environment
Proposed Powerline Route
The Sunrise Powerlink: A proposed power line from the California coast to the solar, wind, and geothermal rich Imperial Valley.
The Route: Would likely be extended to avoid a state park, an Indian reservation and most of a forest, in addition to avoiding harm to any endangered species.
The Opposition: The Sierra Club, Centre for Biological Diversity, other similarly situated environmental groups are “holding out for a guarantee that the line will be used to transmit electricity solely from renewable sources.”
This is environmental idealism at its worst. Pursuit of the perfect preventing the good. We need new transmission lines. Holding out for exclusive access is ridiculous. Particularly in light of the existing renewable energy regulations. Progress cannot be achieved in one go. It requires gradual change. The shift to renewable sources is not going to happen over night. It will take time. Litigating for perfection in a case like this does nothing but harm environmental progress.
To an extent this is a dispute between pragmatism and idealism. Politicians like Mr Schwarzenegger tend to believe that energy projects should be judged on whether they improve on current practice. Activists, by contrast, prefer to measure them against an environmental ideal. “A little bit better than the status quo isn’t good enough,” explains Bill Magavern, the Sierra Club’s California director. He wants power to be generated close to those who will use it, and envisages a rash of solar roofs in San Diego.
Solar powered roofs in San Diego? Pipe dream.
Source: The Economist
Categories: environment
Tagged: big green, Energy, environment
Planet Hazard
Learn about the unknown hazards around you – the toxins you may be breathing. PlanetHazard uses information from the EPA to map over 86,000 companies throughout the United States that emit hazardous air pollutants.
Check out the Top 10 Polluters in the US here. Number one is Sacramento Regional Sanitation District at 470,481,000.85 total emissions. The one thing I couldn’t find here was units.
Categories: environment
Costs of Clean Energy
Grist has a post from Tom Casten, chairman of Recycled Energy Development LLC. The post has some interesting analysis of the costs of various new energy options. Be sure to read the comments, and note that the source of the chart is Recycled Energy.
Source: Internal analysis of Recycled Energy Development LLC. via Grist.org
Categories: environment
Tagged: Energy, environment
The complete rankings can be found at SustainLane. James Elsen of SustainLane explains the methodology in this Grist post.
Overall Top Cities:
1. Portland, OR
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Seattle, WA
4. Chicago, IL
5. New York, NY
6. Boston, MA
7. Minneapolis, MN
8. Philadelphia, PA
9. Oakland, CA
10. Baltimore, MD
There are also rankings by various categories, for example:
Local Food and Agriculture
Air Quality (which we
now know is important)
etc…
Categories: environment
Tagged: environment, health, sustainable
Reductions in particulate air pollution during the 1980s and 1990s led to an average five-month increase in life expectancy in 51 U.S. metropolitan areas, with some of the initially more polluted cities such as Buffalo, N.Y., and Pittsburgh showing a 10-month increase, researchers said Wednesday.
They concluded that for every decrease of 10 micrograms per cubic meter of particulate pollution in a city, average life span increased a little more than seven months — about the same amount seen in previous, smaller studies.
“We are getting a return on our investment to improve air quality,” Pope said.
The reductions in pollution accounted for about 15% of a nearly three-year increase in life expectancy during the two decades
Source
Categories: environment
Tagged: air quality, environment, health
Thomas Friedman published Hot, Flat and Crowded last fall. The book is Friedman’s take on climate change, energy technology, and population growth. But apparently for Mr. Friedman, like Al Gore, it is more profitable to talk the talk (write the write?) than walk the walk.
Matt Taibbi has this to say:
Along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism….
…Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95…
…This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.
Categories: environment
Tagged: book, environment, green
Moving to a stable World Population
Lester Brown writes about population growth over at Gristmill. Here is the bottomline:
When countries move quickly to smaller families, growth in the number of young dependents — those who need nurturing and educating — declines relative to the number of working adults. In this situation, productivity surges, savings and investment climb, and economic growth accelerates. This effect lasts for only a few decades, but it is usually enough to launch a country into the modern era. Indeed, except for a few oil-rich countries, no developing country has successfully modernized without slowing population growth.
While that is interesting, I thought even more so was the impact of telenovelas in Mexico.
While the attention of researchers has focused on the role of formal education in reducing fertility, soap operas on radio and television can even more quickly change people’s attitudes about reproductive health, gender equity, family size, and environmental protection. A well-written soap opera can have a profound short-term effect on population growth. It costs relatively little and can proceed even while formal educational systems are being expanded.
Go read the article to read about Iran’s experiments with population.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “Renewable is Cheaper than Nuclear”
Video at FORA.tv
President Bush quotes on the Environment
from Joseph Romm. My favorites:
“The new steps I’ve announced today are the capstone of an eight-year commitment to strong environmental protection and conservation.” January 6, 2009
“Congress also must understand they’ve got to pass an energy bill. You see, an energy bill will be good for jobs. An energy bill will be good for national security. We need an energy bill that encourages consumption …” Trenton, NJ Sept 23, 2002
The Bush Record
NRDC has a great interactive graphic on Bush’s environmental legacy here.
Categories: environment
Tagged: bush, Energy, environment, nuclear, population
I haven’t been posting, but have been collecting interesting items I wanted to post. I cleaned out the backlog today and posted the most interesting of the lot below:
Energy
Recycling
Fish and Food
Grab Bag
Categories: environment
Tagged: Energy, environment, fish, food, health, recycling
