Report Finds Cleaner Air Out There

  • According to a recent report, a decade of cleanup measures to reductions in emissions have paid off in cutting levels of deadly particle and ozone pollution. (Photo courtesy of the NREL)

A new report finds some of the cities with the worst air pollution are breathing a little easier. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

A new report finds some of the cities with the worst air pollution are breathing a little easier. Lester Graham reports.

The American Lung Association’s annual “State of the Air” report uses the latest data from 2006, 2007 and 2008. That’s just before the economy really tanked. Janice Nolan is with the American Lung Association. She says even though factories were still running at full tilt, improvement in air quality was seen across the nation. Particularly in cities the group watches closely.

“We’ve tracked some of the 25 most polluted cities each year to see how they’re faring and in each case we saw significant improvement in most of the cities in those twenty-five.”

Nolan says cleaner diesel fuel and new less polluting trucks… along with some improvements at coal-burning power plants helped. But she says other dirtier coal-burning plants and older diesel trucks continue to pollute the air.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Is Radical Homemaking the New Feminism?

  • Author Shannon Hayes says raising chickens and growing veggies is a new route for women who consider themselves feminists. (Photo courtesy of Nathan & Jenny CC-2.0)

Women who consider themselves feminists might be shocked to hear what some are calling the new wave of feminism: women heading back to the kitchen – and the garden. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Women who consider themselves feminists might be shocked to hear what some are calling the new wave of feminism: women heading back to the kitchen – and the garden. Julie Grant reports:

When Shannon Hayes was finishing her PhD, she made a list of all the female professors she’d ever had. There wasn’t one who had tenure who was also married with children. Hayes wanted a husband and family, and realized that if she wanted a big university job…

“I was not going to have these things. And they were as important to me as having a career. In fact, in truth they were more important to me.”

So, much to the dismay of her PhD committee members, she headed back to the northern foothills of the Appalachian mountains near the family farm where she grew up. She bought a teeny house with her husband. People whispered. What had gone wrong?

Once there, Hayes couldn’t even get a job interview. To make things worse, her husband lost his job two weeks after buying the house. So, they fell back on their domestic skills.

“Well, if something broke, we fixed it. If something ripped, we mended it. I was very good at canning, so any food we didn’t grow on the farm or didn’t grow in our gardens I wold go to the local farmers when it was in peak season and I would can it, freeze it, lacto-ferment it.”

Hayes says her idea of success changed. Spending time with her parents and children, cooking family meals – those are her successes.

And she’s found that more people are realizing the power of homemaking.

Hayes has now written a book called Radical Homemakers – which profiles twenty families that are saying “no” to regular jobs, and are instead raising chickens and growing veggies.

Hayes says homemaking is a new route for women who consider themselves feminists.

“I think that a lot of feminists are realizing that the family home life is extremely important. I do think that this is part of the next wave of feminism.”

One feminist blogger asked with disgust:
Are you telling women to get back in the kitchen?

Traditional feminists don’t like the sound of this one bit.

Brittany Shoot is another feminist blogger. She’s concerned with calling homemaking feminism. Shoot writes about eco-feminist issues for Bitch Media and The Women’s International Perspective. She says just because some women are doing it, does NOT make it feminism. She says Hayes’ message could be considered a step backward for women.

“I can’t imagine saying to my grandmother, ‘I’m going to stay home and just hang out.'”

Shoot says her grandmother struggled to attend university, and didn’t have nearly the choices Brittany has for a career. She would want Brittany to make the most of her opportunities.

“We’ve come so far. Why would you make this decision when you have the ability to have a career that may not only be lucrative, but fulfilling.”

But Shannon Hayes says we’ve been conditioned to want the money and status of a big job and that’s proving to be as empty for many women as it is for many men.

Hayes says being a housewife in the ‘50s and 60s was limiting. Back then, when Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, women were depressed by their role as homemakers. Women were losing their own identities to serve their husbands and children. But Hayes says women today are losing their identities to the workplace. She also says corporations have largely taken over in the home.
She says when women left the kitchen to join the workforce, that’s when everyone started eating processed, unhealthy foods.

“I think everybody should get back in the kitchen, not just women. But that’s because I don’t think you should be buying processed foods, and I don’t think you should be supporting industrial agriculture, and don’t think that you should be supporting food traveling thousands of miles.”

Hayes says becoming a homemaker isn’t abandoning feminism, it’s redefining it on her own terms. She’s sharing homemaking with her husband… and both are finding more balance between home life and work.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Climate Bill to Cut EPA Authority

  • Some senators say to pass any bill, they have to cut the EPA's authority, but environmental groups say this would be a mistake. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons GNU 1.2)

A big climate-change bill will be introduced in the U-S Senate next week.
Shawn Allee reports it’s expected to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases:

Transcript

A big climate-change bill will be introduced in the U-S Senate next week.

Shawn Allee reports it’s expected to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases.

Congress worked on climate bills for more than a year, but all that time, the US Environmental Protection Agency worked on its plans.

EPA’s got authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions on its own.

It’s doing that in case Congress waits too long or legislation’s too weak.

But some senators say to pass any, bill, they have to cut EPA’s authority.

Environmental groups say this would be a mistake.

Howard Learner is with The Environmental Law and Policy Center.

“The only justification to constrain the US EPA’s ability to do it’s job and do it well under the Clean Air Act is if Congress steps up in a comprehensive, thorough, durable, way to protect our public health and protect our environment.”

Lerner says we don’t know whether Congress’ approach to climate change will work, so the EPA should keep some power over greenhouse gas emissions … as a kind of back-stop.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Food Safety on the Farm

  • The government isn't requiring farms comply with its safety rules yet, but some grocery chains and food distributors are. (Photo courtesy of These Days in French Life CC-2.0)

More than year ago peanut butter made in the southern U.S. sickened hundreds of people and killed as many as nine.
The outbreak set off a scramble to make food safer and the impacts are starting to be felt on the farm.
But it’s not clear how much the push for “food safety” will change anything.
Peter Payette reports.

Transcript

More than year ago peanut butter made in the southern U.S. sickened hundreds of people and killed as many as nine.
The outbreak set off a scramble to make food safer and the impacts are starting to be felt on the farm.

But it’s not clear how much the push for “food safety” will change anything.
Peter Payette reports.

The government is not requiring farms comply with its safety rules yet, but some grocery chains and food distributors are.

Chris Alpers runs two farms in northern Michigan that grow both cherries and apples.
He figures he’ll spend $7,000 getting them certified.
When asked if that will make his fruit any safer he pauses.

“That’s a hard one to answer. I don’t think we’ve had any issues in the past, nor would we if we continue the way we are currently doing things. But I guess the possibility is there that something could happen so certain things they are requiring us to do might make the fruit a little safer I suppose.”

In fact, nobody has ever heard of this region’s main crop making anyone sick.
It’s hard to imagine tart cherries being a little safer.
They grow well off the ground. They’re not picked by hand and are soaked in water on the way to be processed.
Nevertheless, growers along the coast of Lake Michigan will line up this summer to pay inspectors ninety-two dollars an hour to make sure they’re following a list of rules.

These include things like making sure workers only water drink in the orchard and that they wash their hands properly.
Nobody complains the rules are unreasonable.
But Dave Edmondson says they’re impractical.

“They want me to sign a piece of paper that this is going to happen every single day. I can’t guarantee that!”

Edmondson says he’s happy to run his farm according to the new rules but there are limits.

“It’s like the Indy 500 come harvest time. You have to focus on the movement of the fruit and taking care of it.”

There’s also concern in this region about what new rules might do to the growing number of small farms.
There’s a trend here of farmers growing food to sell locally rather than for processing or to ship cross-country.
There’s even a distributor that supplies area restaurants, schools and grocers with local food.
That company, Cherry Capital Foods, is not requiring its farms be certified.

The manager Evan Smith says he doesn’t want to see the local food movement killed with new costs and paperwork.
Smith says they visit farms they work with and he thinks small farms selling to neighbors are not the problem.

“That’s not to say it can’t be better but I’m not sure we’re going to see a significant change in the amount of food-borne illnesses or a decrease in those because quite frankly we’re not seeing that occur right now.”

Still the dangers of a tomato or spinach leaf making someone sick are real.

That’s why Don Coe says it will be better if everyone tries show their farms are clean and safe.
Coe owns a winery and is a Michigan agriculture commissioner.
He says one illness caused by a small farm selling locally would smear the movement.

“That’s my concern, is that we have to have an acceptable level of compliance with good food handling systems. We have to back it up with some kind of inspection service. It doesn’t have to be as rigid as foods going into the major food channels.”

The U.S. Congress might soon decide who needs to pass what sort of safety tests.
Under legislation now pending a farmer selling a few bags of spinach at a farmers market could be subject to the same standards as huge processing plant.

For The Environment Report, I’m Peter Payette.

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Getting Chemicals Out of Drinking Water

  • Chemicals used as industrial solvents can seep into drinking water from contaminated groundwater or surface water. (Photo courtesy of Mr. McGladdery CC-2.0)

Some chemicals are getting into drinking water, and it’s not so easy to get them out. The Environmental Protection Agency says it’s working on the problem. Lester Graham reports on the agency’s plans:

Transcript

The Environmental Protection Agency is outlining a plan to reduce the amount of chemicals getting into drinking water. Lester Graham reports.

The EPA’s administrator, Lisa Jackson told members of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies about the new plan. She said it would work to improve technology to clean up water, get tougher with polluters, coordinate efforts with the states, and deal with contaminating chemicals in groups rather than individual chemicals.

James McDaniels is President of the water agencies group. He says that last idea might speed up the process of getting some contaminants out of water.

“Focusing too much on one contaminant and not looking at it holistically and not really seeing what the other ones are. We all have limited reso urces and as utility managers, looking at these things more holistically makes a lot of sense to us.”

Pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals make cleaning up drinking water a real challenge for the water agencies.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Clean Water Act Clear as Mud

  • Two Supreme Court rulings have left landowners, regulators, and lower courts confused over what waterways are protected by the Clean Water Act. (Photo courtesy of Abby Batchelder CC-2.0)

The nation started cleaning up lakes and rivers in 1972 after passing the Clean Water Act. But two U-S Supreme Court rulings have left some waterways unprotected from pollution. Mark Brush visited one couple who says a lake they used was polluted and the government has let them down:

Transcript

The nation started cleaning up lakes and rivers in 1972 after passing the Clean Water Act. But two U-S Supreme Court rulings have left some waterways unprotected from pollution. Mark Brush visited one couple who says a lake they used was polluted and the government has let them down:

Sheila Fitzgibbons and her husband Richard Ellison were looking for a good spot to open up a scuba diving business. They found Cedar Lake in Michigan. Unlike the other lakes they looked at, this was crystal clear water.

“Ours always stayed clean and it took care of itself and aquatic plants were very healthy. We had a lot of nice fish in here – healthy fish that only go into clear water.”

They said they could take six scuba diving students underwater at a time – and have no problem keeping track of them because the water was so clear.

But that all changed in the spring of 2004. Richard Ellison was in the lake on a dive:

“We were with our students down on the bottom, doing skills and stuff with them, and all of the sudden it sort of looked like a big cloud come over, you know. And the next thing you know, it just turned dark and it was just all muddy. It looked like we were swimming in chocolate milk.”

Ellison and Fitzgibbons say the lake was never the same after that. They blamed the local government’s new storm drain. They said it dumped dirty water right into the lake. Local officials said it wasn’t their new drain, but a big rainstorm that was to blame.

Fitzgibbons and Ellison sued in federal court. They said the new drain violated the Clean Water Act. The local government argued, among other things, that the lake was not protected by the Clean Water Act. The case was dismissed – and Fitzgibbons and Ellison closed their dive shop.

Just what can or cannot be protected by the Clean Water Act used to be an easy question to answer. But two Supreme Court rulings – one in 2001 and one in 2006 – muddied the waters.

After the rulings, it wasn’t clear whether a lot of isolated lakes, wetlands and streams still were protected by the Clean Water Act.

Some developers and farmers saw the court rulings as a big win. They felt the government had been exercising too much power over waterways, limiting what they could build or do on their own property.

Jan Goldman-Carter is a lawyer with the National Wildlife Federation. She says the people who enforce the nation’s water protection laws were left scratching their heads after the rulings:

“The confusion generated by these decisions has wrapped up the agencies, the courts, and even landowners and local governments with really not knowing when a water is protected or not. And that’s had the effect of actually, kind of, unraveling the fabric of the Clean Water Act, which really is our primary protection of our nation’s water supplies.”

Goldman Carter says – polluters are getting the signal. In many places – no one is watching:

“When the polluters recognize that basically the enforcers are not out there, and no one’s really in a position to deter their activities, it’s a lot cheaper for them to pollute than to follow the law.”

The New York Times recently reported that judgments against major polluters have fallen by almost half since the Supreme Court rulings.

In 2008 EPA officials said the rulings kept them from pursuing hundreds of water pollution enforcement cases. We asked for an interview with the EPA officials, but they would only answer questions by e-mail. They agreed the Supreme Court decisions do limit their ability to protect water quality.

The EPA is now calling on Congress to pass a new law. It’s called The Clean Water Restoration Act. The bill’s sponsors say they want to put back what was taken away by the Supreme Court.

The bill was introduced a year ago. It’s been stalled in Congress ever since.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Ad Campaign Targets Senators

  • The advertisements are running in eight states whose Senators could be swing voters on the resolution. (Photo courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol)

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski
wants to take away the Environmental
Protection Agency’s power to
regulate greenhouse gases. She’s
introduced a resolution that would
do that. Now, a new radio ad
campaign is urging Senators to
oppose the resolution. Samara Freemark has the
story:

Transcript

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski
wants to take away the Environmental
Protection Agency’s power to
regulate greenhouse gases. She’s
introduced a resolution that would
do that. Now, a new radio ad
campaign is urging Senators to
oppose the resolution. Samara Freemark has the
story:

The ads call Murkowski’s resolution the “Dirty Air Act”. They’re sponsored by a coalition of environmental and faith-based advocacy groups.

Eric Sapp is with the American Values Network, which co-sponsored the ads. He says the spots are running in eight states whose Senators could be swing voters on the resolution.

“They’re moderate Democrats and Republicans who have been getting a lot of pressure to vote the wrong way on this bill. And our goal in these is to make sure the people know what’s going on, and then to let the Senators know that we will be able to stand behind them if they vote the right way.”

It’s not clear exactly when Murkowski’s resolution will move forward – especially now that a major snow storm is blanketing Washington and disrupting the Senate calendar.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Interview: Coal’s Future

  • A coal mine in West Virginia. (Photo by Erika Celeste)

The coal industry wants us to
believe in the idea of ‘clean coal.’
But burning coal emits a lot of
carbon dioxide, the greenhouse
gas contributing to climate change.
The coal-burning electric power
industry is just now testing technology
to capture CO2 and to permanently
store it. The second round of tests
is happening at American Electric
Power’s Mountaineer Power Plant
in New Haven, West Virginia. Hank
Courtright is monitoring those tests.
He’s with the non-profit Electric Power
Research Institute. Lester Graham
talked with him and asked how the
tests are going:

Transcript

The coal industry wants us to
believe in the idea of ‘clean coal.’
But burning coal emits a lot of
carbon dioxide, the greenhouse
gas contributing to climate change.
The coal-burning electric power
industry is just now testing technology
to capture CO2 and to permanently
store it. The second round of tests
is happening at American Electric
Power’s Mountaineer Power Plant
in New Haven, West Virginia. Hank
Courtright is monitoring those tests.
He’s with the non-profit Electric Power
Research Institute. Lester Graham
talked with him and asked how the
tests are going:

Hank Courtright: We think it has great progress, it’s really the second step of a multi-step process that we’re doing. We had just concluded a project up in Wisconsin on a smaller scale, the same type of technology, and it was very successful. It capture 90-plus percent of the CO2 that passed through it and saw some great promises as far as reducing the cost of doing it. The idea here is that we’re scaling it up ten times larger at the mountaineer plant and so far the early results seem very good and we’ll continue to test that over a year plus to see how it does produce.

Lester Graham: I understand it takes a lot more energy to run this extra CO2 capture equipment, as much as 30% more coal has to be burned to generate the same amount of electricity, what’s being called a parasitic load. What’s this going to mean for our power bills?

Hank: Well, what we’re trying to Lester is that the parasitic load gets down into the, let’s say, the 10 to 15% range. If you get to that level, it means that the electricity out of a coal plant might be about 25% higher than it is. But right now coal is basically the cheapest form of producing electricity, so it still ends as being an economical option even if you might be increasing the cost of that coal plant by about 25%.

Lester: If they can accomplish that with this experiment, how long will it take to get this technology built into the bulk of coal burning power plants?

Hank: Well, you’re going to be working over this for several decades, really. If this plant at Mountaineer works well, our thinking is around 2020 you’re going to be able to have most new coal power plants use the carbon capture and storage. And you might be able to retrofit about 20%, 25% of the existing plants in the United States with this type of technology.

Lester: If all of these methods fizzle, we can’t capture carbon economically, or at the other end, we can’t find a way to sequester this carbon underground, or whatever type of method they can come up with, what’s next?

Hank: Well, that causes some difficulties because right here in the United States coal is used to produce about half our electricity. And if it doesn’t work on coal, it’s also the issue that it won’t work on any other fossil fuels such as natural gas, which produces about 20% of our electricity. So you’re into a difficult situation that if you’d wanted to significantly reduce the CO2 emissions to improve the climate change issue, then you’d have to be looking at a combination of probably nuclear power and a very large roll out of renewable energy. Both of those would have to take the lion share of electricity production. But our hope is that we can get this working because it is not only here in the US that you need it on fossil fuels of coal and gas, but also in places like China, Russia, India, Australia, country’s that very large reserves of coal and hope to use those natural resources.

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Cleaning Up Coal’s Future

  • Lester Graham at the coal mine Shay #1 in Macoupin County, Illinois. He's interviewing the mine general manager Roger Dennison. (Photo courtesy of Phil Ganet)

The coal industry is hopeful
an old technology will help
them clean up an increasingly
unpopular fuel. Lester Graham
reports, without it, coal faces
an uncertain future:

Transcript

The coal industry is hopeful
an old technology will help
them clean up an increasingly
unpopular fuel. Lester Graham
reports, without it, coal faces
an uncertain future:

[Editor’s Note: The script for this story will be posted shortly.]

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Cleaning Up Dioxin

  • West Michigan Park lies along the Tittabawassee River. Large swaths of its soil was removed and re-sodded due to dioxin contamination. The removal was part of a US EPA effort to have Dow clean up several hot spots in the rivershed. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

One thing we hear over and over
from the Obama Administration
is that when it comes to the
environment, science should set
the agenda. Right now, though,
the chemical industry is accusing
the administration of abandoning
that idea. Shawn Allee reports it has to do with the science
behind a potent toxin:

Transcript

One thing we hear over and over
from the Obama Administration
is that when it comes to the
environment, science should set
the agenda. Right now, though,
the chemical industry is accusing
the administration of abandoning
that idea. Shawn Allee reports it has to do with the science
behind a potent toxin:

President George W. Bush took it on the chin when it came to the environment. One accusation is that he ignored science that suggested we should get tougher on green house gas emissions.

President Obama’s Administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency is Lisa Jackson. She said things would be different.

“On my first day, I sent a memo to every EPA employee stating that our path would be guided by the best science and by the rule of law, and that every action we took would be subject to unparalleled transparency.”

It hasn’t taken long for the chemical industry to say Obama’s Administration is back-tracking.

“There’s been this notion to get things done, and it get it done fast.”

That’s David Fischer, an attorney for the American Chemistry Council. Fischer’s concerned about new standards on dioxins.

Dioxins are by-products from producing chemicals. They also get into the environment from burning trash and wood.

The government says dioxin causes cancer and reproductive and developmental diseases.

It’s known this for decades, but it’s been finishing a report to show exactly how toxic dioxins are. It’s been writing this dioxin reassessment for 18 years, and it was supposed to put out a draft last week.

But it didn’t do that, and it hasn’t said when it will.

That didn’t stop the EPA from proposing a new rule about how much dioxin should be allowed in the soil in peoples’ yards.

Fischer says that rule should wait.

“If they’re going to base goals based on the best available science, and they have, in fact, stated they plan to, it’s hard to imagine how you can do that before the reassessment’s finished because that does after all represent or should represent the best available science.”

The chemical industry’s concerned because dozens of sites across the country are contaminated with dioxins. And the rule would lower the amount of dioxin allowed in residential soil. It would go from 1000 parts per trillion to 72 parts per trillion – that’s a drop of more than 90%.

Fischer says that could cost companies millions of dollars in extra clean-up costs.

“Again, that begs the question, Why?”

One accusation is that the Obama administration wanted to finalize dioxin soil regulations in time to coincide with controversial, on-going dioxin clean-ups, such as one in central Michigan.

The EPA didn’t answer this question directly and wouldn’t provide an interview in time for this report. But it did say it’s got sound science to justify the proposed dioxin soil rule.

You might ask why this matters. Well, just look at central Michigan, where there’s a large, on-going dioxin cleanup.

Linda Dykema works with Michigan’s Department of Community Health. She creates state standards on how much dioxin should be allowed in water, fish, and soil. To protect people in Michigan, she needs help from the EPA.

“We rely a great deal on federal agencies to provide us with some hazard assessment for chemicals. The ability of the state to public health staff to do those kinds of assessments is pretty limited. They can do what needs to be done and what we can’t do here at the state.”

And a ruling on dioxin levels in soil should help Dykema. But this move by the EPA might cause more problems than it solves. For years, the chemical industry’s argued that the science behind dioxin isn’t complete.

This proposed soil rule gives the chemical industry another chance to say, ‘here we go again.’ And the justification it needs to keep fighting a rule the EPA insists protects people’s health.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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