In 2005, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were 35% higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. (Data courtesy of the US EPA. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
The EPA recently announced that
it’s moving forward with regulations
to limit global warming pollutants
like carbon dioxide. Now, some
Senate Republicans want to stop
the EPA. Samara Freemark has that story:
Transcript
The EPA recently announced that
it’s moving forward with regulations
to limit global warming pollutants
like carbon dioxide. Now, some
Senate Republicans want to stop
the EPA. Samara Freemark has that story:
Senate Republicans say, if the country wants to regulate greenhouse gases, Congress should do it – not the EPA.
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski represents Alaska. She’s drafted an amendment to put a hold on EPA greenhouse gas regulations for one year.
Critics say the amendment would strip the EPA of an important regulatory tool.
Anne Johnson is a spokesperson for Senator Murkowski. She says regulatory action from the EPA would be too broad and could hurt American businesses.
“Senator Murkowski represents Alaska. It’s ground zero for climate change. There’s no denying that. She knows that we need to do something, and she’s committed to that. At the same time, she’s committed to not harming the economy.”
Murkowski could introduce the amendment as early as this week.
Burning fossil fuels such as
oil and coal creates carbon
dioxide. CO2 contributes
to climate change. Samara Freemark reports
some scientists say we could
capture the emissions from
smokestacks and put in in the
ground – and they think they’ve
found a good place:
Transcript
Burning fossil fuels such as
oil and coal creates carbon
dioxide. CO2 contributes
to climate change. Samara Freemark reports
some scientists say we could
capture the emissions from
smokestacks and put in in the
ground – and they think they’ve
found a good place:
It’s called carbon capture: collecting CO2 from smokestacks, liquefying it, and piping it underground for permanent storage.
A big question is exactly where to bury the carbon dioxide so it doesn’t escape.
A new study from Rutgers University says one good place might be the underwater lava formations that run all along the eastern seaboard.
Dennis Kent is one of the study’s authors. He says the formations are full of basins that could double as CO2 reservoirs. And they’re conveniently close to population centers.
“You have to get it from the power plant to wherever the reservoir is. So having it closer would be an advantage. Take the Co2 down the road somewhere and lock it away.”
The study measured the capacity of one basin off the coast of New Jersey. It found the basin could hold a gigaton of carbon dioxide- or, the amount of gas a coal-burning power plant produces in four decades.
Researchers at the Census for Marine Life have spent the past decade counting fish.
(Photo courtesy of NOAA)
You’ve heard there are lots
of fish in the sea, but nobody
knows exactly how many. That’s
what a project has been trying
to find out. Samara Freemark reports the results
will be out soon:
Transcript
You’ve heard there are lots
of fish in the sea, but nobody
knows exactly how many. That’s
what a project has been trying
to find out. Samara Freemark reports the results
will be out soon:
Researchers at the Census for Marine Life have spent the past decade counting fish. They want to get as accurate a count as possible of how many animals are in the sea.
The project is based at the University of Rhode Island, but 2000 scientists around the world are collaborating.
Darlene Crist works with the Marine Census. She says the project used a huge range of tools to sample fish populations: electronic tags, robots, cameras– as well as some pretty unconventional research methods.
“We’ve used old tax records, ship logs, even restaurant menus.”
Now Crist say they’re done counting and they’re starting to crunch numbers.
Researchers say the data will serve as the first baseline measure of life in the ocean. They hope it will help policymakers better manage the fish stocks that remain.
The study showed that in some cases, dishes had twice as many calories as they were supposed to.
(Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)
Counting calories is easier
to do now that more restaurants
are publicly posting calorie
information about their food.
But Samara Freemark
tells us why those numbers might
be misleading:
Transcript
Counting calories is easier
to do now that more restaurants
are publicly posting calorie
information about their food.
But Samara Freemark
tells us why those numbers might
be misleading:
18% – a new study says that’s the average amount that restaurants underreport the calories in their dishes.
Researchers at Tufts University analyzed the calorie content of meals from chain restaurants. Then they compared those numbers to the calorie counts posted publicly by restaurants on websites and menus.
Susan Roberts is the senior author of the study. She says in some cases, dishes had twice as many calories as they were supposed to.
“You just assume that the numbers are right, you don’t really think about, well, is this number only half what it really is? To have the calories on the web or in the restaurant, that would be a great thing. But they do have to be accurate.”
Roberts says the biggest culprit is portion size – restaurants serve larger amounts of food than advertised. She says the researchers also found that many restaurants served extra side dishes that weren’t included in posted calorie counts.
The EPA found that 44% of the nation's lakes ranked fair or poor.
(Photo by Randolph Femmer, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)
The Environmental Protection Agency
has released its first comprehensive
survey of the nation’s lakes. Samara Freemark tells us what
the study turned up:
Transcript
The Environmental Protection Agency
has released its first comprehensive
survey of the nation’s lakes. Samara Freemark tells us what
the study turned up:
More than half the nation’s lakes are in good condition. That’s according to a nationwide survey just released by the EPA. But the agency found that 44% of lakes ranked only fair or poor.
The survey identified two major problems facing lakes. First, many of them are surrounded by development. And that can mean dirt and polluted water running off into the lakes.
And second, many lakes contained high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus, which can lead to harmful algae blooms.
Susan Holdsworth is with the EPA. She says those findings were concerning.
“These stressors are both widespread and pose a significant threat to the condition of our nation’s lakes.”
Holdsworth says the EPA will use the data to assess how well government programs are doing at protecting lakes. The results will also help set future EPA priorities.
Right now, there are no federal laws regulating offshore fish farming.
(Photo by Randolph Fermer, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)
Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:
Transcript
Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:
Critics of aquaculture say the practice can spread disease, introduce invasive species, and pollute the environment.
The Ocean Conservancy’s George Leonard says that’s a problem.
“In the absence of an overarching framework, aquaculture continues to move forward kind of in fits and starts here in the US. And we think if it proceeds that way, many of the environmental concerns will kind of fall through the cracks.”
Legislation introduced last week in Congress could change that. The bill would require fish farmers to apply for federal permits before setting up shop. Those permits would set standards to protect ocean ecosystems.
The bill would also provide money to research how aquaculture is impacting the environment.
Fracturing has increased available domestic natural gas supply by 35%.
(Photo source: TheSilentPhotographer at Wikimedia Commons)
A new wave of natural gas drilling
is spreading across the country.
But the process is on hold in New
York state while regulators and
citizens debate the issue. Samara Freemark reports
that some New Yorkers see drilling
as a way to save the economy of a
particularly depressed part of the
state. But others say it could ruin
the economy for good:
Transcript
A new wave of natural gas drilling
is spreading across the country.
But the process is on hold in New
York state while regulators and
citizens debate the issue. Samara Freemark reports
that some New Yorkers see drilling
as a way to save the economy of a
particularly depressed part of the
state. But others say it could ruin
the economy for good:
When Kathy Colley heard that natural gas drillers were coming to upstate New York, it was kind of like someone had told her that the whole region had won the lottery.
“Here we have this wonderful god given opportunity. This is a blessing.”
That’s because Colley and her neighbors had learned that they had natural gas beneath their land.
New York State’s natural gas was supposed to be untappable- it was too far down, and it was suspended in tiny bubbles in shale rock. But a new technique called hydraulic fracturing made drilling possible in those kinds of shale fields. Fracturing has increased available domestic natural gas supply by 35%.
Drillers started moving into New York State last year. But officials there put a moratorium on the practice while regulators debated whether to allow fracturing.
For Kathy Colley, it’s a no-brainer. Drilling means saving a dying regional economy.
“It’s been such a depressed area. It’s struggling. The farmers are dying here. This is a time when it would just give people a life. Billions of dollars. Thousands of jobs. This is an opportunity to get healthy.”
A lot of local officials all across the country feel the same way. Gas drilling can mean tax revenues, and jobs, and economic development.
But some people say that while drilling may bring in some money at first, in the long run it’s a lousy way to develop a local economy.
“It’s an unsustainable form of economic development.”
That’s Adam Flint. He works with the Binghamton Regional Sustainability Coalition in upstate New York.
“However much gas is under the ground, it is unrenewable.”
And when the gas runs out, the jobs will go. So will the tax revenue. Flint estimates New York would get a couple of decades of gas production before the state’s fields are tapped dry.
That kind of boom and bust cycle is what Wes Gillingham is worried about. Gillingham is a farmer and environmentalist who heads an organization called Catskill Mountainkeeper. I met up with him and his family at his farm house.
He showed me a banjo he had bought cheap in Casper, Wyoming in the 1980s, at the end of an oil boom.
“I had never seen a place in my life that had so many pawnshops. And the pawnshops were just stuffed to the ceiling with really nice stuff- really nice stuff, at really cheap prices, cause everyone was just pawning everything they had.”
He’s afraid the same thing will happen in upstate New York.
“I always think about this when people say, ‘but we need the gas.’ Prices go up, companies come in, they put more rigs out, and there’s this huge influx of money and activity and then when the price drops back down they shut it all down. That has huge impacts on the community.”
And it’s not just the boom and bust. There are also environmental impacts like a legacy of water pollution, abandoned infrastructure, and habitat destruction.
Adam Flint says those kinds of problems would prevent upstate New York from ever developing any kind of stable long-term economy.
“It’s a question of which road to travel. We can have gas production and turn upstate New York into a major industrial zone. Or we can have tourism, agriculture, a green economy, alterative energy, jobs that all those things create. We can’t do both.”
New York state officials are almost certain to approve gas drilling this year – 2010. When they do, there’s a long line of community and environmental groups ready to challenge the state in court.
Frackers dig mile-deep wells and pump them with millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals.
(Photo by Vera Scroggins)
Natural gas burns a lot cleaner than
oil and coal, so a lot of people are
excited about gas’s role in a greener
energy sector. But drilling for natural
gas? That’s not quite so green. Samara Freemark tells us that
as a new kind of drilling spreads across
the country, so do environmental
concerns:
Transcript
Natural gas burns a lot cleaner than
oil and coal, so a lot of people are
excited about gas’s role in a greener
energy sector. But drilling for natural
gas? That’s not quite so green. Samara Freemark tells us that
as a new kind of drilling spreads across
the country, so do environmental
concerns:
It’s been about a year and a half since drilling companies first broke ground on natural gas wells in Dimock, Pennsylvania, in the northeastern corner of the state.
The drillers used a recently developed technique called hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. Frackers dig mile-deep wells and pump them with millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals.
Right now, fracking isn’t regulated by the federal government – though Congress is considering changing that.
So the process has generated a lot of concerns about pollution – in particular, fears that gas and chemicals could leach out into aquifers and groundwater.
Which is probably what happened in Dimock. Vera Scroggins is an anti-drilling activist who lives nearby.
“It started to happen pretty quickly because as they went down there, as they went through the aquifers they broke through the rock where the gas pockets are, and the gas got released into the aquifers and then it got into the water wells. So people started to notice like blackish, yellowish, bubbly water. So it’s been about 11 months that they haven’t drank their water.”
Since fracking started, Dimock has been plagued with environmental problems – chemical spills and leaks, gas found in drinking water, and fish kills in nearby streams. Dimock residents have filed suit against Cabot Oil and Gas, which controls most of the wells around Dimock.
And Scroggins says state authorities have penalized Cabot for spills and leaks.
“Cabot has been fined several times, even since September. They were closed down for two weeks for three spills in a two-week period. So it’s one accident after another.”
The drilling company says that doesn’t mean the problems were caused by drilling.
Ken Komoroski is a Cabot spokesman. He says the company is looking in to the incidents, but they haven’t found proof that fracking caused any problems.
“The company has not come to any conclusion as to whether or not its operations did cause contamination. It’s possible that it has, it’s also entirely possible that it has not.”
Many gas companies maintain that no one has ever proved conclusively that spills and leaks have harmed anyone. And it is hard to pin down figures on fracking accidents, since there’s no centralized database to keep track of incidents.
But problems have been reported at drilling sites across the country.
Many of the complaints center around the chemicals frackers mix with their pumping water.
Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Eric Goldstein showed me a list of those chemicals at an anti-drilling demonstration in New York City. The list was seven pages long – some 260 chemicals in all. Some seemed pretty harmless. But others were more troubling.
“I’m sure you could find a couple out of the 260 that you wouldn’t mind drinking. But you wouldn’t want to take any naphthalene, for example. Or petroleum naptha. Or any of the things we can’t pronounce here. You wouldn’t want to drink talc. Wouldn’t want to drink benzene. Why don’t we just stop right there. Ethyl benzene. That’s a known human carcinogen.”
Drilling companies say that while those chemicals might be dangerous, they’re used in such small quantities that they’re not harmful to people. And companies say they’ve developed protections that keep the chemicals from leaching out into aquifers. For example, drillers line their gas wells with cement casings to keep fracking fluid contained.
But Vera Scroggins – the activist from near Dimock – says she doesn’t believe companies have figured out how to drill safely.
“As they go along, they’re learning things. So we’re being experimented on.”
Until they’ve learned how to prevent all dangerous leaks and spills, Scroggins says, companies shouldn’t be allowed to drill at all.
Fracking has made billions of cubic feet of natural gas available. That’s fuel that can be used for cooking, heating, and some transportation.
(Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory)
A new technique for extracting
natural gas is making it profitable
to drill in new gas fields all over
the country. The technique is
called hydrofracking, and it has
raised the nation’s natural gas
reserves by 35%.
But hydrofracking is not without
its critics. Samara Freemark tells us why some people
say the industry is moving faster
than regulators can keep up:
Transcript
A new technique for extracting
natural gas is making it profitable
to drill in new gas fields all over
the country. The technique is
called hydrofracking, and it has
raised the nation’s natural gas
reserves by 35%.
But hydrofracking is not without
its critics. Samara Freemark tells us why some people
say the industry is moving faster
than regulators can keep up:
Ten years ago the American natural gas market wasn’t looking too hot.
“In theory, America was running out of natural gas.”
That’s Susan Riha. She’s a professor of earth sciences at Cornell University. Riha says underground pools of traditional natural gas were starting to dry up.
But there’s another kind of gas – ‘unconventional’ natural gas. It’s suspended in tiny pockets in shale formations, like water in a sponge. And there’s unconventional natural gas all across the United States, especially in the Western states and Pennsylvania and New York.
But recovering large amounts of natural gas from shale formations was until recently, pretty much impossible.
“In the past, it’s been extremely difficult to get that gas out of that rock. They drill down, but the gas is only going to flow from right where they drill. But people began to put effort in to figuring out how to get this gas out. And maybe starting about a decade ago they began to get economically viable ways of recovering shale gas.”
The technique that drillers developed is called hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. Frackers dig mile-deep, L-shaped wells and blast them full of millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals. That solution holds open tiny fissures in the shale so the gas flows out.
The process raises some eyebrows in the environmental community, but we’ll get to their concerns in a second.
First let’s look at the upside.
Fracking has made billions of cubic feet of natural gas available. That’s fuel that can be used for cooking, heating, and some transportation.
And natural gas is a domestic energy source. It burns a whole lot cleaner than coal and oil. A lot of people say it could be a crucial part of the transition to greener energy.
Which is the point Thomas West made when I met up with him at a public hearing on gas drilling. West is a drilling advocate and attorney who represents gas companies in New York State.
“You have to realize that the shale plays, these unconventional resources, have changed the game in the United States. We now have a hundred years of capacity, which means we no longer have to rely on Mideastern oil. Gas is very usable, it doesn’t take much to make it usable, and it has a dramatic impact on air quality.”
But critics say fracking is a mixed bag.
“Things too good to be true, usually are.”
That’s Al Appleton. He’s an environmental consultant, and he says hydraulic fracking can cause all kinds of environmental problems – water contamination, ecosystem destruction, noise and air pollution.
And Appleton says the process is essentially unregulated. In 2005, Congress passed a law specifically exempting fracking from almost all federal environmental regulations.
“Basically what the law said is that things like the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Hazardous Waste Materials Act, the Clean Water Act, and other significant pieces of federal environmental legislation were not to be applied to the natural gas industry. So in essence, what your local dry cleaner has to comply to all sorts of regulations, the natural gas industry, they don’t have to follow these.”
Some members of Congress are trying to change that. They’ve introduced legislation to repeal fracking’s exemption, give the Environmental Protection Agency authority over the process, and require the industry to disclose what kinds of chemicals it injects into wells. As you might expect, the fracking industry is fighting the bill.
The Piping Plover is on the Endangered Species List.Critics say there's not enough being done to protect endangered species.
(Photo courtesy of the USFWS)
An environmental group is threatening to sue the US government for dragging its feet on endangered species protection. Samara Freemark has the story:
Transcript
An environmental group is threatening to sue the US government for dragging its feet on endangered species protection. Samara Freemark has the story.
The Center for Biological Diversity says the government has missed deadlines to rule on whether 100 44 species belong on the endangered species list.
The Center says they’ll sue the Obama administration if the government doesn’t pick up the pace.
Noah Greenwald is with the Center. He says that under the Clin-ton administration, about 65 species were listed as ‘endangered’ every year. That slowed dramatically under Bush and Obama.
The Obama administration doesn’t share the ideological opposition that the Bush administration had to protecting endangered species. But on the other hand, the Obama administration hasn’t made the Endangered Species Act a priority.
So far, the Obama administration has only placed two species on the Endangered Species List. Without protection, some species are in danger of being wiped out.
In 2005, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were 35% higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. (Data courtesy of the US EPA. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
