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NewEnergyNews

Gleanings from the web and the world, condensed for convenience, illustrated for enlightenment, arranged for impact...

WALL STREET JOURNAL'S Environmental Capital selected NewEnergyNews as one of the "Blogs We Are Reading" in March, April and May of 2007 and quoted NewEnergyNews on June 5, 2007

MOTHER EARTH NEWS' Energy Matters selected NewEnergyNews for its "What We're Reading" list in September 2008

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Anne B. Butterfield of DAILY CAMERA, a biweekly contributor to NewEnergyNews

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  • The big ka-ching in our health care wallet
  • Anne B. Butterfield
  • June 19, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

    While Americans wonder with noisy drama what the Obama Administration will do to our current health care system, wouldn’t it be great if we could materially reduce the cost of health care in our country by tackling climate change?

    Virtually all of the power for our transportation and electric utilities comes from petroleum, coal, and natural gas, the combustion of which emits the toxins that are heavily involved in costly degenerative diseases such as cancer, heart disease, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), to name a few. Rural or urban, we are sitting in a faint bath of toxic chemicals that can exacerbate our symptoms or hasten acute suffering and death, and when that happens it is a big ka-ching in our health care wallet.

    The emissions and other by products of fossil fuel use are so ubiquitous, and often well hidden, that they slip from our awareness. Their presence and health effects have become “just the way life is.” Here are a few of our fossil fuel chemical friends:

    Nitrogen oxides (NOx) are precursors to smog, that brown smear of ozone and particulate matter that collects over cities under high air pressure conditions. Smog alerts are accompanied by higher than average hospital admissions and deaths.

    Particulate matter excerbates asthma, COPD, bronchitis, cardiac events as well as congestive heart failure. When smog mingles with very small particles (known as PM 2.5) the risk of mortality for men over 65 rises to 24 percent above average; for women of this age the death rate is 80 percent above average.

    Three hundred counties in the US are designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as clean air non-attainment areas, being perpetually outside of the recommended air quality standards. Pass the nebulizer!

    Coal fired power plants emit about a third of all human-caused release of mercury, a neurotoxin so widely spread that women and children are advised to limit their eating of fish. In Colorado one-fifth of waterways have mercury-based fishing advisories.

    Another health cost of using coal as heavily as we do is the ash waste. All over our country, ash waste is dumped in unlined pits in or near the water table. A 2007 report of the EPA found that poorly lined waste sites (60 percent of all) pose a cancer risk through ground water that is 900 times what is acceptable.

    Environmental groups have fought for national standards for the handling of coal ash waste, to keep state officials from competing in a “race to the bottom” for corporate clients’ sake. But rather than put coal waste under the EPA’s regulation, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has just announced that the locations of 44 coal ash dumps cannot be disclosed; their toxicity and precarious engineering make them attractive terrorist targets. Meanwhile two senators are seeking support to make sure that coal ash waste is treated less rigorously than household trash.

    Ontario, Canada released a report finding that each kilowatt hour of coal-fired power creates 12.7 cents of health and environmental effects. The next time you get your electric bill, picture two-thirds of your kilowatt hours each causing 12 cents of medical and other costs. Utilities like to talk about delivering low-cost energy, but that sector’s emissions of known toxins, at 722 million pounds each year, dwarfs all other industrial competitors. A large part of our health care costs belong on our utility bill and other energy related costs.

    California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger put it best: “We pay for the fuel we burn but not for the pollution we emit. That pollution causes serious damage to our world, and in the long run, we all pay for it...Imagine if we decided to let everyone dump their garbage on their neighbors' lawns instead of being forced to pay for trash pickup. Sure, it would be cheaper, but it would be disastrous to public health.”

    The climate bill coming through Congress is guaranteed to be inadequate, so our path to the post-fossil fuel era will be long. We should keep up the support for local communities, like Coal River Valley in West Virginia, which is fighting to stop mountain top removal mining, and our own effort in Boulder to rapidly decarbonize our electric supply.

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    Anne's previous NewEnergyNews columns:

  • The big ka-ching in our health care wallet (June 19, 2009)
  • It takes a Governor (May 24, 2009)
  • Want a job? Think Wind. (May 10, 2009)
  • Just Say No to Xcess Energy (April 28, 2009)
  • NREL’s history of fickle funding (April 12, 2009)
  • Wagons firmly circled: Governance at REA’s and Tri-State (March 26, 2009)
  • A new migratory pattern: Colorado youth go to Washington (March 12, 2009)
  • Even coal is in for a revolution (February 22, 2009)
  • High Flyers and the Commons (February 11, 2009)
  • Come on Baby, Sit by Me (January 25, 2009)
  • A return on investment (January 3, 2009)
  • Mr. Secretary, we're watching you (December 28, 2008)
  • Canary in the Coal Mine (December 13, 2008)
  • Crash test dummies (November 16, 2008)
  • Needless markup (November 2, 2008)
  • The flap about 58 (October 19, 2008)
  • Hip towns and a clever measure (October 7, 2008)
  • Are we afraid of change? Still? (September 21, 2008)
  • Cheney in a chignon (September 7, 2008)
  • Don't tick off the blonde (August 10, 2008)
  • Buying us time on global warming (July 27, 2008)
  • Hint from Heloise - It's the pH, Stupid! (July 13, 2008)
  • Nukes: the position ridiculous and the expense damnable (June 29, 2008)

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    NOTEWORTHY IN THE MEDIA:

  • Young, Green Entrepreneurs Flock to Carbon Market, from NPR's Morning Edition: "...climate change and a billion-dollar carbon market that trades in carbon credits — as if they were pork bellies — have created a new career niche."

  • Ethical Markets TV: A remarkable TV series showcasing people who “…illustrate the triple bottom line, respecting people and the environment while earning a profit…” Part of Ethical Markets: “Your gateway to cleaner, greener 21st century economies.”

  • Energy Security and Global Warming, from Warren Olney's TO THE POINT at KCRW in Santa Monica: "US energy demands are rising as the price of oil goes through the roof...Canadian tar sands and domestic coal would provide energy security, but at the risk of increased global warming. Can renewables be developed in time?"

  • Designer Biofuels, from KQED Radio in San Francisco: "...making a gasoline alternative to run our cars has great promise but there are huge problems...The next answer [may come]...from a UC Berkeley lab, a Silicon Valley start up or...the jungles of Costa Rica."

  • HELEN’S WAR: Portrait of a Dissident, showing periodically on the Sundance Channel (click title for listings), profiles the medical doctor turned anti-nuclear activist as she continues her nearly 4-decade-old campaign to educate the public on the serious drawbacks to the development of nuclear energy.

  • A CRUDE AWAKENING: The Oil Crash, showing periodically on the Sundance Channel (click title for listings), studies the implications of world dependence on oil and declining availability of it.

  • Lee Iococa predicts the Plug-In Hybrid will be the next big thing in cars NPR’s Morning Edition: Thursday, April 26, 2007.

  • Robert Redford Presents "the GREEN": A weekly block of New Energy and Environmentally-Friendly programming. Check local listings.

  • John Rabe's OFFRAMP, Saturdays at noon (and podcasts) via NPR-affiliate KPCC-FM. A radio magazine show about Los Angeles, sometimes covering energy issues but frequently featuring John telling anybody he can about his vegetable oil-burning, converted Mercedes.

  • NOW: PBS's David Brancaccio talks with Laurie David, a producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and a major environmental activist.
    • Stream it at your convenience here.

  • Living with Ed, an HGTV tons-of-fun reality/comedy show about the trials, tribulations, hilarity and rewards in the marriage of environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr., and his appearance-oriented actress-wife Rachelle Carson. Click here for listings

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  • My Novels: OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades & OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction
  • Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades by Mark S. Friedman
  • OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades, the second volume of Herman K. Trabish’s retelling of oil’s history in fiction, picks up where the first book in the series, OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction, left off. The new book is an engrossing, informative and entertaining tale of the Roaring 20s, World War II and the Cold War. You don’t have to know anything about the first historical fiction’s adventures set between the Civil War, when oil became a major commodity, and World War I, when it became a vital commodity, to enjoy this new chronicle of the U.S. emergence as a world superpower and a world oil power.
  • As the new book opens, Lefash, a minor character in the first book, witnesses the role Big Oil played in designing the post-Great War world at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Unjustly implicated in a murder perpetrated by Big Oil agents, LeFash takes the name Livingstone and flees to the U.S. to clear himself. Livingstone’s quest leads him through Babe Ruth’s New York City and Al Capone’s Chicago into oil boom Oklahoma. Stymied by oil and circumstance, Livingstone marries, has a son and eventually, surprisingly, resolves his grievances with the murderer and with oil.
  • In the new novel’s second episode the oil-and-auto-industry dynasty from the first book re-emerges in the charismatic person of Victoria Wade Bridger, “the woman everybody loved.” Victoria meets Saudi dynasty founder Ibn Saud, spies for the State Department in the Vichy embassy in Washington, D.C., and – for profound and moving personal reasons – accepts a mission into the heart of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Underlying all Victoria’s travels is the struggle between the allies and axis for control of the crucial oil resources that drove World War II.
  • As the Cold War begins, the novel’s third episode recounts the historic 1951 moment when Britain’s MI-6 handed off its operations in Iran to the CIA, marking the end to Britain’s dark manipulations and the beginning of the same work by the CIA. But in Trabish’s telling, the covert overthrow of Mossadeq in favor of the ill-fated Shah becomes a compelling romance and a melodramatic homage to the iconic “Casablanca” of Bogart and Bergman.
  • Monty Livingstone, veteran of an oil field youth, European WWII combat and a star-crossed post-war Berlin affair with a Russian female soldier, comes to 1951 Iran working for a U.S. oil company. He re-encounters his lost Russian love, now a Soviet agent helping prop up Mossadeq and extend Mother Russia’s Iranian oil ambitions. The reunited lovers are caught in a web of political, religious and Cold War forces until oil and power merge to restore the Shah to his future fate. The romance ends satisfyingly, America and the Soviet Union are the only forces left on the world stage and ambiguity is resolved with the answer so many of Trabish’s characters ultimately turn to: Oil.
  • Commenting on a recent National Petroleum Council report calling for government subsidies of the fossil fuels industries, a distinguished scholar said, “It appears that the whole report buys these dubious arguments that the consumer of energy is somehow stupid about energy…” Trabish’s great and important accomplishment is that you cannot read his emotionally engaging and informative tall tales and remain that stupid energy consumer. With our world rushing headlong toward Peak Oil and epic climate change, the OIL IN THEIR BLOOD series is a timely service as well as a consummate literary performance.
  • Oil history journal articles by Dr. Trabish: Oil Stories and Histories
  • Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction by Mark S. Friedman
  • "...ours is a culture of energy illiterates." (Paul Roberts, THE END OF OIL)
  • OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, a superb new historical fiction by Herman K. Trabish, addresses our energy illiteracy by putting the development of our addiction into a story about real people, giving readers a chance to think about how our addiction happened. Trabish's style is fine, straightforward storytelling and he tells his stories through his characters.
  • The book is the answer an oil family's matriarch gives to an interviewer who asks her to pass judgment on the industry. Like history itself, it is easier to tell stories about the oil industry than to judge it. She and Trabish let readers come to their own conclusions.
  • She begins by telling the story of her parents in post-Civil War western Pennsylvania, when oil became big business. This part of the story is like a John Ford western and its characters are classic American melodramatic heroes, heroines and villains.
  • In Part II, the matriarch tells the tragic story of the second generation and reveals how she came to be part of the tales. We see oil become an international commodity, traded on Wall Street and sought from London to Baku to Mesopotamia to Borneo. A baseball subplot compares the growth of the oil business to the growth of baseball, a fascinating reflection of our current president's personal career.
  • There is an unforgettable image near the center of the story: International oil entrepreneurs talk on a Baku street. This is Trabish at his best, portraying good men doing bad and bad men doing good, all laying plans for wealth and power in the muddy, oily alley of a tiny ancient town in the middle of everywhere. Because Part I was about triumphant American heroes, the tragedy here is entirely unexpected, despite Trabish's repeated allusions to other stories (Casey At The Bat, Hamlet) that do not end well.
  • In the final section, World War I looms. Baseball takes a back seat to early auto racing and oil-fueled modernity explodes. Love struggles with lust. A cavalry troop collides with an army truck. Here, Trabish has more than tragedy in mind. His lonely, confused young protagonist moves through the horrible destruction of the Romanian oilfields only to suffer worse and worse horrors, until--unexpectedly--he finds something, something a reviewer cannot reveal. Finally, the question of oil must be settled, so the oil industry comes back into the story in a way that is beyond good and bad, beyond melodrama and tragedy.
  • Along the way, Trabish gives readers a greater awareness of oil and how we became addicted to it. Awareness, Paul Roberts said in THE END OF OIL, "...may be the first tentative step toward building a more sustainable energy economy. Or it may simply mean that when our energy system does begin to fail, and we begin to lose everything that energy once supplied, we won't be so surprised."
  • Oil history journal articles by Dr. Trabish: Oil Stories and Histories

    • About Me

    Name: Herman K. Trabish
    Location: La Crescenta, CA

    *Doctor with my hands *Author of the "OIL IN THEIR BLOOD" series with my head *Student of New Energy with my heart

    View my complete profile

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    CONTACT: herman@newenergynews.net

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      A tip of the NewEnergyNews cap to Phillip Garcia for crucial assistance in the design implementation of this site. Thanks, Phillip.

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    Pay a visit to the HARRY BOYKOFF page at Basketball Reference, sponsored by NewEnergyNews and Oil In Their Blood.

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    • Thursday, April 03, 2008

    CORN ETHANOL AND HUNGER

    “Why is so much money still being poured into such a misguided enterprise?” Time Magazine’s Michael Grunwald asks about the U.S. agrofuels, and especially the corn ethanol, industry.

    Original calculations suggested the total greenhouse gas (GhG) emissions from agrofuels, even after the emissions in their growing and refining, were 20% (corn ethanol) to 90% (other crops) below those from burning petroleum fuels.

    But there was a miscalculation. Grunwald: “…no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots…It turns out that the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels…”

    Though far more effective as “carbon sinks” when they were forests and savannahs, Grunwald found the economic impetus to grow corn for ethanol is resulting in Brazilian land being coverted to farming and grazing purposes. Grunwald: “Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous…”

    And there is another problem. Using crops to make fuel drives food prices up. A U.N. official recently called agrofuels a “crime against humanity” for pitting “800 million people with cars against the 800 million people with hunger problems.” University of Minnesota researchers recently revised their calculations to include the problem of agrofuels and raised their estimate of the world’s hungry in 2025 from 625 million to 1.2 billion.

    Here’s how it happens: U.S. farmers sell 20% of their corn crop for ethanol so U.S. soybean farmers switch to corn, so Brazilian farmers use cattle pastures to grow soybeans, so Brazilian cattlemen clear Amazonian rainforests for new cattle pastures. Sandro Menezes, biologist, Conservation International in Brazil: "The price of soybeans goes up…and the forest comes down."

    Bottom line: There is money in deforestation and none in preservation, or even conservation. Homero Pereira, Brazilian congressman/Mato Grosso farm bureau head: "If you don't want us to tear down the forest, you better pay us to leave it up!"

    Agrofuels have become Big Business. In the U.S., Iowa derives $1.8 billion in revenues and has 53,000 jobs in the industry. Agrofuels is also Big Politics. In 2007, the Bush administration pushed through legislation requiring a fourfold increase in biofuels production by 2022. When Senator Clinton told Iowans she would require all gas stations to provide ethanol by 2017, Senator Obama criticized her – for not supporting ethanol earlier. In 2000, straight-talking Senator McCain referred to ethanol as “an agribusiness boondoggle” but in 2006, his eyes on the presidency, he said corn ethanol “a vital alternative energy source.”

    Brazilians want at the Big Business and resent moralizing by U.S. forest preservationists. Blairo Maggi, farmer/Governor, Mato Grosso, Brazil: "You make us sound like bandits...But we want to achieve what you achieved in America. We have the same dreams for our families. Are you afraid of the competition?"

    Governor Maggi is the personification of the free market at work, as are, ultimately, U.S. politicians and business people who advocate corn ethanol incentives. Fortunately, the free market offers a solution for the rainforests. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change will soon offer emissions credits for preserving the forests, thereby creating an economic incentive, via emissions trading markets, for the good guys. Maybe it will not be too little and too late.

    Only a personal transportation revolution is likely to end the ethanol scam. A breakthrough in second-generation cellulosic ethanol or algae biofuel would render corn economically irrelevant – but that breakthrough is unlikely to come soon. A switch from liquid- to electricity-fueled vehicles is also a solution and also not on the near-term agenda.

    Short of such changes, as Grunwald concludes, “…the world is still going to be fighting an uphill battle until it realizes that right now, biofuels aren't part of the solution at all. They're part of the problem.”

    Sugar makes sense in Brazil, corn is a complete disaster everywhere and cellulosic is a great concept. Concept. (click to enlarge)

    The Clean Energy Scam
    Michael Grunwald, April 7, 2008 (Time Magazine)

    WHO
    Micheal Grunwald, Time Magazine; John Carter, ranch owner, Mato Grosso, Brazil; Blairo Maggi, farmer/Governor, Mato Grosso, Brazil

    Clean energy is NOT a myth. Corn ethanol is a boondoggle of the most cynical proportions propped up by greedy politicians and the oil-auto lobby. (click to enlarge)

    WHAT
    Time Magazine’s Michael Grunwald examines how and why the U.S. emphasis on corn ethanol is causing rising food prices and rising problems of hunger around the world.

    WHEN
    - University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman estimates it will take 400+ years of biodiesel use to "pay back" peat lands clearing for palm oil; 93 years for grasslands clearing for corn ethanol;
    - Another study concludes corn ethanol has a 167-year payback period for its deforestation.
    - The U.S. quintupled ethanol production in the last decade.
    - 1995 world investment in biofuels: $5 billion; 2005: $38 billion; Projected for 2010: $100+ billion.

    It's losing its humor. (click to enlarge)

    WHERE
    - The report focuses on the Amazon and Cerrado regions of Brazil but touches on devastation in Indonesia and Malaysia as well.
    - Brazil now ranks 4th in world greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from deforestation.
    - High corn prices have caused tortilla riots in Mexico City. High flour prices have destabilized Pakistan.
    - Deforestation in Indonesia has moved it from the world’s 21st worst emitter to 3rd.
    - Malaysia is running out of cultivatable land.

    WHY
    - Ethanol is ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter.
    - Investing in biofuels: Richard Branson, George Soros, GE, BP, Ford, Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group.
    - Deforestation causes 20% of world GhG emissions.
    - In Brazil, sugar growers provide 45% of the nation’s fuel with only 1% of the arable land, are reducing on fertilizers and use waste for biomass-generated electricity.

    For research, consider algae: A BIOfuel, not an AGROfuel. (click to enlarge)

    QUOTES
    - John Carter, ranch owner, Mato Grosso, Brazil: "It's like witnessing a rape."
    - Grunwald: “Everyone I interviewed in Brazil agreed: the market drives behavior, so without incentives to prevent deforestation, the Amazon is doomed…The trouble is that even if there were enough financial incentives to keep the Amazon intact, high commodity prices would encourage deforestation elsewhere. And government mandates to increase biofuel production are going to boost commodity prices, which will only attract more investment…”

    posted by Herman K. Trabish @ 6:18 AM

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