The Blue Marble: March 2008 Archives

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March 31, 2008

Ice Blocking Canada's Seal Hunt

Good news. Thick ice is slowing sealing boats from reaching the baby harp seals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, reports Planet Ark. Consequently, only three pups out of a quota of 275,000 were killed the first day. This after last year's "hunt" was affected by a lack of ice. The Canadian government has promised the slaughter will be more humane this year. How? After a hunter shoots or clubs a seal, he now must check its eyes to ensure it is dead, and if not, the animal's main arteries must be cut.

Okay, let's get clear about this. That does not qualify as humane.

The Canadian seal hunt is the largest mass slaughter of marine mammals on Earth, according to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Just what are they doing with all those dead baby seals? The furs are made into coats and clothes. And there's a growing market for seal oil, high in omega-3 fatty acid… and PCBs:

It is Sea Shepherd's opinion that Canada is misleading consumers by marketing seal oil in the health food industry as a "health" alternative. Seal oil contains bioaccumulative PCBs. A known animal carcinogen… PCBs are stored in body fat and are also dangerously bioaccumulated in the foodchain. Resistant to degradation, PCBs persist for many years in the environment. What Canada markets as benefits of seal oil is the Omega-3 and essential fatty acids. Sea Shepherd recommends these health supplements should be taken in plant form, such as hemp and flaxseed oils.

Meanwhile Agence France Press reports that a Canadian Coast Guard ship twice rammed Sea Shepherd's vessel the Farley Mowat while in the Gulf protesting the seal slaughter.

Alex Cornelissen, captain of the Farley Mowat, said in a statement his vessel was "twice rammed" in the port stern after he ignored warnings not to approach sealers on the third day of Canada's annual hunt. "They are ramming ships in dangerous ice conditions," Cornelissen said. "This is unbelievable. It's like the Coast Guard has declared war on seal defenders."

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the John Burroughs Medal Award. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.

American West Heating Twice as Fast

Don't think climate change is going to affect you? Well, if you live in the American West, it already is. In fact the west is heating up faster than the rest of the world, reports the National Resources Defense Council. The average temperature rise in the drought-struck Colorado River basin is more than double global average—especially bad news for the 30 million people living in Denver, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego, among the nation’s fastest growing American cities and all dependent on the Colorado for water.

The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization analyzed temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for 11 western states and found the average temp in the Colorado River Basin, from Wyoming to Mexico, was 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the historical average for the 20th Century, and more than twice the global rise of 1.0 degree. Throughout the West, the average temperature increased 1.7 degrees. "We are seeing signs of the economic impacts," says study author Stephen Saunders, including $2.7 billion in crop losses since 2000, commercial salmon losses, reduced hunting revenues, and shorter, less profitable ski seasons. The Colorado River Basin is in the throes of a record drought and climate scientists predict more and drier droughts in the future as hotter temperatures reduce the snowpack and increase evaporation. "We need strong leadership from western senators to pass America’s Climate Security Act," said Spencer.

How about any leadership? You know, turning off the lights one hour a year ain't gonna work. In 2007 I was optimistic about Earth Hour. A year later, I'm like, is this all we're ever going to do?

March 28, 2008

Sierra Club Boots Florida Chapter Over Clorox Deal

The Sierra Club voted this week to suspend its entire 35,000-member Florida chapter for four years and removed the chapter's leadership. The reason? The chapter openly criticized the Club's decision to partner with Clorox for Clorox's new "Green Works" line of "natural" cleaning products.

The dispute between the Florida chapter and the national organization started in December, when Sierra Club's national board of directors overrode the Club's Corporate Relations Committee to approve the deal with Clorox. So far, details about the exact nature of the agreement have not been revealed, except for the fact that Clorox will pay the Sierra Club for its sponsorship and the use of its logo on Green Works products, with the exact amount depending on product sales.

This is the first time in Sierra Club's 116-year history that it has endorsed a product and even Club executive director Carl Pope, who's been a driving force in the partnership, admitted that the decision by a well-known environmental group to endorse a company known for its bleach, plastics, and chemical products is "controversial." Just one example of the conflict of interests inherent in such a partnership: In the same month that the Sierra Club decided to put its logo on Green Works products Clorox was fined $95,000 by the EPA for donating illegal, mislabeled, Chinese versions of its disinfecting bleach to a Los Angeles charity.

Clorox's history of environmental malfeasance (they were called one of America's most chemically dangerous companies by U.S. PIRG in a 2004 report), has made opponents of the deal quick to call the Club a sell-out bereft of green street-cred. “The Sierra Club has become little more than another corporate front group,” said Tim Hermach of Native Forest Council. “Carl Pope has sold out the Sierra Club's mission of saving nature and now seems proud of his role as an obsequious and professional Uriah Heep.”

But to me what's really galling is not so much that the Sierra Club agreed to take profits from the company that makes Armor All, Formula 409, and Liquid Plumr. It's that the Club dealt out such a harsh punishment to its Florida chapter for even daring to voice opposition the deal. Such an action smacks of lock-step, corporate stoogery, not dedication to environmental protection.

March 27, 2008

Trees Cast Dark Shadow Over Solar Panels

In one of those "only in California" type lawsuits—a state that heavily promotes solar and renewable energy under the California Solar Initiative—homeowners Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett of Sunnyvale, California, have been forced to chop down two redwood trees in their backyard that were obstructing prime-time rays from their neighbor's solar array. Citing the Solar Shade Control Act, a remnant legislation from the energy crisis of the '70s, a Santa Clara County judge ruled in December in favor of solar array owner and Santa Clara resident Mark Vargas.

Vargas installed the 10-kilowatt solar array on his home in 2001. Treanor and Bissett’s redwoods, which were planted in 1997, eventually grew tall enough to shade more than 10 percent of Vargas' solar panels, inciting a not-so-neighborly feud. Aside from the tricky issues regarding property rights, the case also pits the benefits of carbon-dioxide-absorbing resources against those associated with sources of renewable energy.

The EPA estimates that trees and plant life sequester between 35 to 800 pounds of CO2 emissions annually. How does that compare to a solar panel installation? Well, it depends on a multitude of factors—most importantly the type of energy source it's displacing (coal, gas, hydro) and the emissions factor for that energy source. In California, where most electricity comes from relatively clean gas-fired power plants, approximately 0.6 pounds of CO2 emissions from power plants are offset per kilowatt hour (the commonly used measurement for electricity) of energy produced by solar photovoltaic panels.

That means in California the obstructed 10 percent of Vargas' 10-kilowatt system would offset nearly 1,300 pounds of CO2 emissions per year, whereas an average estimate for CO2 sequestration by the two soon-to-be-felled redwood trees would be about 835 pounds per year. So in this case, solar appears to have the better environmental payoff.

Unfortunately, the law may not always fall on the greener side, as the straight numbers calculation will vary by situation and state. (Nationwide, a 1-kilowatt system would offset only 915 pounds of CO2 emissions per year, according to the Energy Information Administration.) Concerned that the ruling would set a dangerous precedent, Treanor and Bissett entered Senator Joe Simitian's annual "There Oughta Be a Law" contest and won. Simitian has introduced a bill that would favor trees planted before the installation of a solar array.

But as of yesterday morning, the two redwoods are history.

—Joyce Tang

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from everystockphoto.com.

March 26, 2008

Is Your Collar Changing Colors?

This campaign season, we've been endured the candidates espousing their support for "green collar jobs." But does anyone know what these jobs are exactly? As the New York Times puts it, green collar jobs are just updated versions of blue collar jobs. If a steel plant goes from producing steel to make cars to producing steel for wind turbines, its workers' collars go from blue to green. But this doesn't necessarily mean the steel plant is producing less pollution or is, in itself, better for the environment.

Definitions for what makes a green collar job vary depending on job duties and the industry they're in, but it'd be nice to know what defines these jobs that now number 8.5 million in the U.S.

March 24, 2008

Global Warming for Fun and Profit

Sick of frittering away your hard-earned wages on March Madness? How about betting on melting ice instead?

An annual contest to guess the exact moment the ice breaks on the River Tanana, 300 miles north of Anchorage, is attracting global interest, both as a chance to win a $300,000 (£151,000) prize and as one of the world’s most precise scientific indicators of the effects of global warming.

Betting closes at midnight on April 5, and tickets are sold throughout Alaska.

Drilling Making Alaskans Sick

By now, most of us have heard about how oil and gas drilling does a number on ecosystems. But it's no good for people, either. By way of the British Columbia online magazine the Tyee comes the story of Nuiqsut, a coastal community of 523 people in northern Alaska, about 100 miles west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Back in the late '90s, the oil and gas companies wooed the local Inupiat tribe with promises of jobs and minimal environmental impact—just 14 acres of tribal land would be affected by offshore and land drilling, they said. But now, 14 looks more like 500, and the community is a whole lot worse for the wear, says Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, mayor of Nuiqsut and also a health-care worker:

Since 1986, when she first started working in the health field, the number of people needing medical help to breathe has risen dramatically.

Nuiqsut is 15 metres above sea level on the tundra, and Ahtuangaruak says she can see the natural gas flares from the clinic. The nights when they light up the sky are the same nights she, and other medical staff, can't leave the clinic for helping people with inhalers, nebulizers, steroids and antibiotics.

The chemicals used in oil and gas extraction, it seems, can irritate the lungs and cause a bunch of other nasty health problems, too.

The other thing about drilling: It's really noisy. Booms as loud as a jet takeoff have scared Nuiqsut's whales and caribou off, so along with their health, local people are losing their livelihood.

The Canadian government is currently trying to ignore an offshore-drilling moratorium enacted 34 years ago. What can coastal communities expect if officials succeed in wishing away the moratorium? Nuiqsut's hard times are probably a pretty good indication.

March 21, 2008

Bush & Company Choke on Clean Air

The EPA said last week it would improve air quality by cutting ground-level ozone limits from 80 parts per billion to 75 ppb. This should save thousands of lives a year. Sounds good? Well, according to New Scientist, the EPA's own scientific advisers told the agency last year of overwhelming evidence that an even tighter limit of 70 ppb would save thousands more lives. No go, said the EPA, apparently deciding those other thousands of lives are inconsequential.

Now the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) says the Bush administration wants to overhaul the whole process of setting air-quality controls by allowing political appointees to help draft advisory reports, taking the job away, at least in part, from researchers. New Scientist reports the words of Tim Donaghy of the UCS: "The administration has changed the rules along the way so that when the next administration gets into office, the role science plays in setting regulations will be greatly diminished."

This, by the way, dovetails with a call last month by the UCS for the next president and Congress to end political interference in science and establish conditions allowing federal science to flourish. "Good federal policy depends upon reliable and robust scientific work," said Francesca Grifo, director of the Scientific Integrity Program at UCS. "When science is falsified, fabricated or censored, Americans' health and safety suffer."

Well, more than Americans are going to suffer from Bush's bankrupt intellectual legacy for centuries to come. All thanks to the staggering ineptitude of a president who got into office by appointment, and further evidence of why political appointee it too often a euphemism for incompetent.

March 20, 2008

Philip Morris Cleans Up Its Act—By Genetically Modifying Tobacco

From the cigarette company that wants you to stop smoking comes a new frontier in tobacco consumption: the health-friendly (kind of), genetically modified chew. Researchers at North Carolina State University, funded by tobacco giant Philip Morris, are trying to take the cancer out of cancer sticks by removing the gene that turns the plant toxic when cured. As tobacco plants age, the nicotine in the leaves changes into the compound nornicotine, which in turn becomes a carcinogen when the plant is cured. Knocking out the gene that causes this change, the researchers report, leads to a 50% decrease in tobacco's most harmful toxins. No word on whether the alterations make nicotine any less addictive, but you have to give them credit for trying. h/t Wired

—Casey Miner

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user zombophoto.

Google to Launch Storm Surge Maps

Google is partnering with the National Hurricane Center to create a searchable map of areas at risk of storm surges during hurricanes. Users can plug in their address and determine how threatened (if at all) their homes are by surges of water that accompany hurricanes—surges that proved deadly during Hurricane Katrina. Google hopes to have the application online by June 1, just in time for the start of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season.

The National Hurricane Center says the idea for the map came from the overwhelming number of phone calls made to local weather and emergency information lines during the last few hurricane seasons: residents wanted to know what flood levels would be like at their homes. Hurricane forecasters have long had a computer model that estimates storm surge height, which is based on wind speed, hurricane strength, and trajectory, but only now will this information be available to the public directly.

Though this online tool will definitely help people get specialized information on storm surge risk for their own geographic location, I worry that it may not do much to help those who need the most help during hurricanes: the elderly. Post-Katrina evacuation analysis shows that those least likely to evacuate—even with clear instructions to do so from the mayor—were the elderly. Three-quarters of the people who died during Katrina were older than age 60. With some luck, though, younger internet users will be able to get themselves, and hopefully their older family members and neighbors out of harm's way.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from GISuser.

The Greening of March Madness

March Madness starts today, so it's time to get those last minute brackets in. (I'm playing in an office pool and a journalist pool, as well as on ESPN.com, Facebook, and John McCain's website. I really hope I win that last one.) If you don't have any idea which schools are good, you can always vote your principles. You'll find all the info you need on greenbrackets.com, where an effort called the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment has identified the greenest schools in the tournament. Top seeds UNC, Kansas, and UCLA make the list, as well as long shots George Mason, Portland State, and University of Maryland-Baltimore County (aka UMBC, the school name that sounds most like an investment bank). In all, 23 of the tournament's 64 teams are on the list.

According to the website, going green is good for your March Madness karma. Green schools have won four of the last five tournaments and have made up 50 percent of the Final Four over the last 10 years. So go win your office pool on the backs of environmentally friendly hoops.

By the way, a school is designated a green school if they sign onto this pledge. It could be stronger, but it's a start.

March 19, 2008

Reduce Carbon Emissions and Boost the Economy

Here's how. According to Yale's new interactive website, SeeForYourself, a national policy to cut CO2 by as much as 40 percent over the next 20 years could still result in increased economic growth. The study by Robert Repetto is a meta-analysis of 27 prior economic models and identifies seven key assumptions accounting for most of the differences in the model predictions.

The best part is SeeForYourself allows you to play forecaster and choose which assumptions you feel are most realistic. You can then view predictions based on your chosen assumptions. For instance, you get to rate assumptions such as: How likely is it that renewable energy technologies, such as wind and solar energy, will be available at stable prices and will be able to compete with fossil fuels once fuel prices rise far enough? Or: How likely is it that climate change will result in economic damages to the United States if U.S. emissions are not reduced?

It's fun, informative, and designed to convince our more feebleminded policymakers how easy it is to do the right thing and prosper. Descriptions of the models can be found in Costs of Climate Protection: A Guide for the Perplexed, World Resources Institute.

March 18, 2008

What's Worse? Exxon or Comfortable Footwear?

The Consumerist is having fun with its first-ever "Worst Company in America" survey. Today's corporate death match is between oil giant ExxonMobil and Crocs, the much-hated-upon yet oh-so-comfy rubber clogs. So who's worse? Here's a hint. And it looks like the Consumerist's readers are starting off on the the right foot, too.

Satellites to Rescue Starving Arctic Animals?

In the Artic, a lot still goes unseen. Take the weird weather event of October 2003 that killed 20,000 musk oxen on Canada's Banks Island above the Arctic Circle. Rain fell for days atop 6 inches of snow and seeped through to the soil. When the temperature plunged, the rain froze into a thick layer of ice that persisted all winter. Browsers couldn't dig through to feed on lichens and mosses, and one-third of a 70,000-herd of musk oxen perished. "Starvation happened over a period of many months and no one knew until they went up to do the population count the next spring," says Thomas Grenfell, research professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. The closest weather station, 60 miles away, didn't record any rainfall at the time and few people recognized the oxen's distress.

Now Grenfell and Jaakko Putkonen, also of UW, have found evidence of the 2003 rain-on-snow occurrence in passive satellite microwave imagery. This could provide a signature to help detect similar events in the future, throughout the sparsely-populated Arctic, including in Alaska, northern Canada, Siberia, and Scandinavia. They looked for patterns in data from 10 different satellite microwave channels that correlated with rain-on-snow events. "The subtleties in the microwave levels mean there can be high error margins on this information, but the Banks Island event stood out like a sore thumb in the data," said Grenfell. He hopes satellite data might make up for a scarcity of weather stations and enable native people, who depend on musk oxen, reindeer and caribou, to get food to the herds to prevent mass starvation.

Not explicitly stated but worrying nontheless—expect more rain-on-snow events as the Arctic warms. Which means, this is what we've come to, essentially taming wildlife to keep it alive. Sad benchmark. The study will be published March 25 in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

March 17, 2008

Green Buildings Cut CO2 Fastest

The fastest and cheapest way to cut deeply into CO2 emissions is to upconvert old buildings to green buildings and build new ones green from the start. Turns out that buildings are responsible for more than one-third of North America's CO2 emissions, says a new report by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. Promoting green design, construction, renovation and operation of buildings could cut North American building emissions from more than 2,200 megatons of CO2 annually to 500 megatons. Rapid deployment of emerging advanced energy-saving technologies could bring about these savings by 2030.

Currently, green buildings routinely reduce energy usage by 30 to 50 percent over conventional buildings. The most efficient now outperform them by more than 70 percent. The authors recommend ways to accelerate greening our homes and offices, calling upon government, industry and nongovernmental leaders to:

Create national, multi-stakeholder task forces for achieving a vision of green building in North America • Support the creation of a North American set of principles and planning tools for green building • Set clear targets to achieve the most rapid possible adoption of green building in North America, including aggressive targets for carbon-neutral or net zero-energy buildings, together with performance monitoring to track progress towards these targets • Enhance ongoing or new support for green building, including efforts to promote private sector investment and proper valuation methods • Increase knowledge of green building through research and development, capacity building, and the use of labels and disclosures on green building performance.

We need some national vision here. Yet another reason why 308 days, 19 hours, 37 minutes, and 1 second left (as of this writing) can't fly by fast enough.

Are Genetically Engineered Organics the Future of Farming?

This past weekend in the Boston Globe, Pamela Ronald, a U.C. Davis plant pathologist, tackled the debate over genetic engineering in organic farming. Without mincing words.

It is time to abandon the caricatures of genetic engineering that are popular among some consumers and activists, and instead see it for what it is: A tool that can help the ecological farming revolution grow into a lasting movement with global impact.

Bold, to be sure. But are these fightin' words? Probably.

Genetic Engineering (GE) is kind of the nuclear power of the food world: Its problem-solving potential is great, but it could create a real mess if it went wrong. And emotions around the issue run high. Greeenpeace is (predictably) against GE. The Sierra Club is more circumspect. Whole Foods says it wants all its "own company branded products to be created from non-genetically engineered ingredients and processes," but makes no guarantees. Trader Joe's reportedly banned GE products in 2002. And according to the Globe article, "most organic farming trade organizations are deeply, viscerally opposed to genetically engineered crops and seeds."

For her part, Ronald argues that neither GE nor organic farming alone is the answer to the world's food-supply problem:

By 2050, the number of people on earth is expected to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion. To feed those people with current crop yields and farming practices, we will need to clear, fertilize, and spray vast amounts of wild land...Clearly, there must be a better way to boost food production while minimizing its impact.

An alternative is to expand the number of organic farms, which do not use synthetic pesticides and thus support higher levels of biodiversity than conventional farms...But at current crop yields, farming will still need to absorb huge amounts of additional land that is now home to wildlife and diverse ecosystems. A clear challenge for the next century is to develop more productive crops, not just better farming techniques, and genetic engineering has demonstrated great promise here.

And she points out that unlike pesticides, GE crops have never made anyone sick.

So is Ronald right? Should a GE/organic combo approach be the future of farming? Theoretically, I think GE is still up for debate—no one has effectively convinced me yet that the worst-case scenarios of GE-genes-gone-wild are not as scary as they sound. But buried in Ronald's Globe piece is this fact:

Today 70 percent of all processed foods in the United States have at least one ingredient from genetically engineered corn, cotton, canola, or soybean.

Maybe it's already too late for skepticism.

March 14, 2008

President Bush Tells EPA How to Do Its Job; Clean Air Suffers

From the Washington Post:

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.

The Post adds, "the rules that the EPA issued Wednesday will help determine the nation's air quality for at least a decade."

March 13, 2008

The Best Doctor Blog You're Not Reading

One of the most candid and well-written ER blogs out there had the grave misfortune to be mentioned on NPR today. I give it six months, tops, before twitchy hospital admin and and overzealous privacy lawyers team up to shut it, like its ill-fated kin, down.

In the meantime, WhiteCoat Rants is a fascinating window into our national healthcare policy woes, as well as an insidery look at the gallows humor needed to patch people up for the same lunkhead problems, day after day after day.

Where else can you find a satire on how to make a tranquilizer dartgun using only trauma shears and discarded chest tube containers? Or the reason why, which would be to capture gazelles for the family dinner "while waiting for Medicare payments and [health] insurance approvals to come through?"

The Emergency Room—really the Emergency Department as some will sniffily correct—is the last stop not just for the uninsured, but for all of us. So the next time you're in the ED getting sewn up after a bar fight, or treated for back pain on a weekend, or soothed at midnight because your goo-producing kid has a weird fever, say thanks. You'll be among the few who do.

March 10, 2008

Enraged John McCain Charges Bears

You know, Teddy Roosevelt got a lot of mileage for being nice to a bear. The ubiquitous Teddy bear was the upshot of his refusal to shoot. So you think John McCain would know better. The Washington Post reports a great piece on McCain's standard stump speech fare about a $3 million study of the DNA of bears in Montana. "Unbelievable," he says. Well, what's unbelievable is that no one on McCain's staff has bothered to inform him of the real purpose of the study he's spent so much energy despising since 2003. Katherine Kendall, a kick-ass biologist, and the mastermind of the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project, is actually doing John McCain and his descendants a genuine favor by tackling the life-and-death issues of biodiversity. According to the WP:

Kendall is one tough field biologist: She's rafted wild rivers, forded swollen streams and hiked through remote backcountry for weeks at a time. She goes to places inhabited by all manner of large creatures with sharp teeth. She was once charged by an enraged grizzly. She stared the bear down… As a scientist with the US Geological Survey, she set out to get the first head count of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. She and her co-workers at the USGS have used DNA primarily as a bear-identifying tool… "There's never been any information about the status of this population. We didn't know what was going on—until this study," Kendall said. This was an astonishingly ambitious research project involving 207 paid workers, hundreds of volunteers, 7.8 million acres and 2,560 bear sampling sites [including the bear rub tree seen in the video]. The project did not cost $3 million, as McCain's ad alleges, but more than $5 million, including nearly $4.8 million in congressional appropriations. It had a strong advocate in Congress in Montana's three-term senator, Conrad Burns, a Republican who was defeated in his reelection bid in 2006.

Bear at a rubbing tree.

Bottom line: we need bears. We need tough field biologists whose dedication often means the difference between survival and extinction for their study animals. We need to stand up to McCain when he charges blindly and stare him down. Anyone up for attending a stump speech in a bear costume?

Prescription Drugs Are in our Drinking Water: What to do Now?

The biggest sex story of the day, besides the expensive sex life of the New York Governor, is the revelation that prescription drugs (including sex hormones) are in the drinking water of 41 million Americans. Forget Room 871's minibar. Maybe Spitzer got horny on tap water.

That drugs are in our water isn't new news, but the AP's five-month investigation will be sure to prompt a rush on Brittas and bottled snowmelt from the Alps. It will also probably lead to a reexamination of our wastewater treatment systems, including the policy of spreading sewage sludge on farmland--sort of the stealth turd in the swimming pool of water politics. Sludge, the black goop that comes out of sewage plants, contains drug residues that have the potential to be absorbed into plants and animals and run off into streams. So does the "purified" water that comes out of the same plants, but the sludge has gotten less attention as of late. Now almost forgotten is the high-ranking EPA scientist, David Lewis, who raised a stink over sludge a few years ago. The EPA fired him, though not before he exposed shortfalls in the EPA's science on sludge and some shady ties between government and industry.

For now, consumers will have to sort out how to deal with the drug-laced water problem on their own. In case you're wondering, one sure-fire water filtration method for removing pharmaceuticals from your tap is reverse osmosis. In arid Southern California, Orange County began operating a reverse osmosis system late last year that extracts drinking water from sewage (they call it "toilet to tap'). The superior cleanliness of this source relative to drinking water from lakes and rivers might have struck me as ironic--before Spitzer exploded my brain's irony synapse.

March 7, 2008

Foldable Cars Park (Stack) Like Grocery Carts

It's still only an idea. But a fine one f