So sad are the politics of climate change initiatives in the US that even ones that have no immediate impact and might never have an impact are applauded by advocates as if they were groundbreaking efforts. On Monday, the Obama administration's proposed, and court-ordered, rules for greenhouse gas pollution from large power plants were released. They call for a limit of 1000 tons of CO2 for every megawatt hour of power produced. Most analysts think that standard favors natural gas over coal - a good description of the current marketplace. The standards don't apply to the sources where they could do he most good - older and dirtier coal-fired power plants, and in fact according to this report out of Austin's KUT, could actually result in a rush to build more dirty coal plants in the next 12 months to avoid them. Other, more aggressive measures, if they happen at all, will have to wait until after November.    Read More

After 21 years, four Presidents, countless political battles and lots of pollution, the EPA finally released its health reassessment of Dioxin this past Friday. Like so many environmental decisions from this Administration, the report splits important hairs. While confirming that ultra-low exposures (we're talking 1 millionth of a gram or less) to Dioxin can cause damage to a person's immune and reproductive systems, cause skin rashes and liver damage, EPA says that levels of exposure for most Americans have declined so much over the last two decades that there should be no significant risk. To at least one expert, that was an      "very odd statement." Arnold Schecter of University of Texas School of Public Health, noted that EPA's assurances really didn't jibe "because some people are more highly exposed than average and some groups, such as fetuses and nursing babies, are more sensitive to the effects." What other populations are more highly exposed to Dioxin? People who live downwind of facilities where its emitted - power plants, cement plants, and lead smelters, to name a few. DFW residents live downwind from all three. Exide's lead smelter in Frisco was the 9th largest dioxin polluter in Texas in 2009, releasing more of the poison than industrial facilities many times its size. While most exposures come through eating or drinking animal products that contain dioxin because the animals themselves were contaminated and store it in their fat, breathing in dioxins directly is also a pathway of exposure when you live near a place that burns hazardous wastes, smelts metals, or deals with a lot of chlorinated materials. Like millions of DFW residents. While there was a lot of disappointment by environmentalists at the lack of follow-through on the report, the food industry is sweating bullets over its conclusions. Last year, food industry groups wrote the EPA, stating that  most Americans could “easily exceed the daily [0.7 picogram limit] after consuming a single meal or heavy snack." Now they're afraid safer food advocates will use the report to push for new restrictions on how much of one of the most poisonous substances ever discovered can be included in their food products. Indeed. How unreasonable to expect less human-made poison dreck in your food. No release date for the part of the reassessment dealing with cancer risks.   Read More

This week, we've examined new studies linking brain damage to breathing. Let's take on heart disease now. Short-term exposure - less than seven days - to common air pollutants raises the risks of heart attack, according to a new study that looked at air quality from 100 studies on five continents. "...an improvement in air quality could have a significant effect on public health,” wrote the authors, led by Dr. Hazrije Mustafic of the Paris Cardiovascular Research Center at University Paris Descartes. Dr. Jesus Araujo, an assistant professor of medicine and director of environmental cardiology at UCLA, said there is now “more than enough evidence” from human, animal and cellular studies that air pollution kills. One of the most important findings of the new research is that it confirms that heart attacks increase even when exposures to worsening air quality are short in duration.“We don’t have to be exposed for weeks or months or years,” Araujo said. The study found harmful effects to the heart from breathing in microscopic particulate matter, or soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, often at levels that are considered "safe." “The more scientists look, the more they find effects at lower exposures,” said Jean Ospital, Director of Southern California's Air quality District, “This is a question that always comes up, how low do we need to go to protect public health? It seems to be a moving target in terms of where the health effects are, where we really need to go to have health protection.” Indeed.   Read More

Up until now, it's been relatively easy for the city of Dallas to play good guy over regional air quality issues. It didn't host any cement plants, or GM car factories, or coal-fired utility boilers. It could afford to take progressive stands to protect its public health, like adopting the nation's first green cement procurement policy, fighting Rick Perry's "coal rush" of 18 new power plants, and signing-on to co-sponsor a "Sustainable Skylines" initiative. But now push is coming to shove as the Barnett Shale gas operators eye moving further east into Dallas proper in a big way. The City Council's gas drilling task force is probably only going to be meeting two more times after today before its final recommendations are submitted. Among those recommendations is one to allow gas compressor stations to set up shop on a well pad site. Compressors are giant pressure-creating machines run to pump the gas through pipelines. They use a log of energy, make a lot of noise, and create a lot of air pollution - tens of thousands of tons of air pollution, every year. This is in addition to the pollution caused by drilling itself, and the off-gassing of storage tanks and pipelines. Dallas city attorneys have tried to steer the task force away from regulating the smog-forming and toxic air pollution from well and other gas facilities because the state and federal governments are supposedly already doing this and claim the jurisdiction. However, there is one important area of air quality that the federal government and the state agencies are currently NOT regulating - the emissions of Greenhouse Gases (GHG). In 2005, then-Mayor Laura Miller signed the Mayor's Climate Change Agreement that committed the city to reducing the city's own carbon footprint by 7% below 1990 levels by 2012. In two months, the city is expected to announce the results of a new GHG inventory that will tell us if the City of Dallas has managed to reduce the 98,401 metric tons of greenhouse gases necessary to meet it’s own goal, and the 5,748,843 tons of reductions necessary for the community to reach its promised target. In forecasting future GHG pollution loads for the city and community, gas-drilling emissions in Dallas were not considered. To give you some idea of how large the impact of those emissions could be, look at the results of the last city-wide GHG pollution inventory. In 2005 Dallas estimated that the total amount of GHG pollution from ALL stationary sources within the city was then only 23,000 tons a year. One compressor can emit anywhere from 25 to 90,000 tons or more of GHG annually. In its material describing a commitment to reducing GHG pollution, city staff writes that, “…additional reductions of greenhouse gases will be necessary to meet the challenge of the U.S. Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement. The City has the opportunity and the obligation to work collaboratively with the community to create a sustainability framework by which to meet our obligations as a signatory to the Climate Protection Agreement and to lead the region.”  Meeting that historic obligation will be impossible if Dallas allows a wave of gas drilling to take place without trying to blunt the impact of new emissions of greenhouse gases such drilling will bring.
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Reuters has the run down on the plethora of new EPA clean air rules coming down in the next year or so, including resolution of the cross-state regs, vehicle efficiency, fracking emissions, Greenhouse Gases, and Coal Ash rules. We know there's been a lot of justifiable disappointment with this Administration, but please look at this agenda and try to imagine that any part of it would be coming from an EPA run by any of the current GOP presidential candidates. It's pretty much impossible.   Read More

Many of you know the cliche of Chaos Theory made famous by  "Jurassic Park's" Jeff Goldblum, that "when a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it causes a hurricane in Florida." Now science has produced the environmental equivalent of that theory by showing how massive amounts of air pollution from China is affecting weather patterns in the western U.S. CBS News interviews a scientist working on the relationship at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "The atmosphere has no walls. So pollution on this side of the world can make it the other side of the world in about five days," she says. In this case, Chinese PM/soot is carried by the jet stream across the Pacific and stops the clouds in the western U.S. from producing rain and snow.   Read More

With the Star-Telegram abandoning the idea of having an environmental reporter all together, and the de facto abandonment of environmental beat coverage at the Dallas Morning News, DFW residents are having to rely on the alternative weeklies to provide the kind of coverage they used to get in the dailies. This week, the Ft. Worth Weekly provides another example of this trend with an excellent retrospective of where DFW air quality stands after the worst ozone season since 2007. Kudos to Weekly editor Gayle Reaves for taking up the slack and committing journalism in the name of public interest.   Read More

While there may be some signs of life in the national economic picture, it seems to be a terrible time to have the Lone Star State's name attached to your business. As the Thanksgiving holiday began, the stock price of TXI, aka Texas industries, aka the owners of a brand new permit to burn industrial wastes at its Midlothian cement plant, reached a 52-week low of about $22 per share, compared to more than twice that earlier in the year. That decline could have something to do with its "EBITDA to sales ration," basically an earnings to revenue formula that's supposed to tell you how financially healthy a company is supposed to be.  It's estimate of how many years of earnings would be necessary to pay back all the debt a company has. This ratio is considered to be alarming when it is greater than 3.0. TXI's is 146. It's next closest competitor in the construction materials market is Headwaters at 11. It's numbers like these that consistently land TXI on a list of companies ripe for takeover, especially in an industry that's been consolidating at a record pace the last twenty years. It's also what's motivating the company to turn itself back into a waste incinerator. By this time next year, TXI headquarters could be overseas. Meanwhile Energy Future Holdings, aka, the old Texas Utilities, is also swimming in debt thanks to ill-timed gambling on aging coal plants and hitching its fate to natural gas prices. "It's kind of like Greece -- by any cold, sober analysis, the math doesn't work,' said one power investment banker," according to Reuters lengthy analysis. The once mighty giant could hit a wall as soon as 2014 when it faces a $4 billion loan payment. Markets put the chance of EFH going into default at 91%. Changes in ownership mean changes in operation at the large polluting facilities of these companies. Could be good - jettisoning those old coal plants for example, or bad - cranking up the kiln to burn even more wastes to cut fuel costs. Stay tuned.    Read More

Twenty-two years ago, Congress deemed 200 kinds of chemical air pollution so toxic as to require strict enforcement and regulation of their release on a strict schedule in a speedy way. That hasn't happened. It hasn't happened in a spectacular, why-don't-we-all-have-jet-packs-yet kind of way. The Center for Public Integrity follows up last week's "Poisoned Places" collaboration with NPR with a great dissection of why the current system of regulating toxic threat is outdated and overwhelmed. It's the best argument for why new chemicals should be required to prove their benign effects up front - BEFORE they get released into the marketplace and we all become lab rats in someone else's experiment.   Read More