Pesticides & Parkinson’s in California’s Central Valley

Posted on November 30, 2013 by

Horowitz, J. 2012. Parkinson’s Alley.  Recent studies have found statistical links between pesticide use and an outbreak of Parkinson’s disease in California farm towns. Researchers even know which chemicals are the likely culprits. What’s the government doing about it? Not much. Sierra Magazine.

Some neurologists dub the 300-mile-long string of Central Valley farm towns between Bakersfield and Sacramento “Parkinson’s Alley,” and recently released statistics back them up. A study published last year by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that Central Valley residents under age 60 who lived near fields where the pesticides paraquat and maneb had been used between 1974 and 1999 had a Parkinson’s rate nearly five times higher than other residents in the region. Ziram is also of concern. The EPA banned maneb on corn, grapes and apples in 2005, but still allows it to be used on almonds.

Research into the link between pesticides and Parkinson’s in the Central Valley dates back to 2000, when UCLA epidemiologist Beate Ritz began comparing mortality records with pesticide-application reports. She discovered that California counties reporting the highest pesticide use also had the highest rates for Parkinson’s-related deaths. Examining agricultural records from 1989 to 1994, Ritz found that when insecticides were applied to more than a third of a county’s acreage, the risk of its residents’ dying from Parkinson’s disease increased 2.5-fold. She also found studies that revealed that as many as 40 percent of the area’s Parkinson’s cases are never mentioned on death certificates, possibly because many migrant workers fail to report the disease, or move on before symptoms arise.

Ritz and her research team found that Central Valley residents who consumed private well water and lived within 500 feet of farmland with documented long-term pesticide use were almost twice as likely to get Parkinson’s disease. In the Visalia area, over 1 million people have tap water that isn’t safe to drink because of nitrate contamination from manure, fertilizers, and leaking septic tanks. More than half of Central valley communities use groundwater for their drinking supplies.

It’s expensive to test for pesticides, and it isn’t required.

For the article, the author tested 10 wells and found herbicides bromacil, diuron, and simazine, the weed killer atrazine, banned in Europe but still widely used here.

In 2007 the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the EPA tested for pesticides in 278 domestic, school, and farm wells in 16 states and found pesticides in 152 of them (45%).

 

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New York Times review of “Countdown” by Alan Weisman

Posted on November 30, 2013 by

A book review by Nathaniel Rich, October 11, 2013, New York Times of:

COUNTDOWN. Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? By Alan Weisman

If we wanted to bring about the extinction of the human race as quickly as possible, how might we proceed? We could begin by destroying the planet’s atmosphere, making it incapable of supporting human life. We could invent bombs capable of obliterating the entire planet, and place them in the hands of those desperate enough to detonate them. We could bioengineer our main food sources — rice, wheat and corn — in such a way that a single disease could bring about catastrophic famine. But the most effective measure, counterintuitive as it may be, would be to increase our numbers. Population is what economists call a multiplier. The more people, the greater the likelihood of ecological collapse, nuclear war, plague.

As Alan Weisman’s “Countdown” amply demonstrates, we are well on our way. Some seven billion people are alive today; the United Nations estimates that by the end of the century we could number as many as 15.8 billion. Biologists have calculated that an ideal population — the number at which everyone could live at a first-world level of consumption, without ruining the planet irretrievably — would be 1.5 billion.

Weisman’s jeremiad amounts to a world tour of our overpopulation misery. He begins in Jerusalem, where he learns that construction firms worry about running out of sand, despite the fact that half of Israel is a desert. Water is in short supply, too. Because of agricultural irrigation, the Jordan River is now a “fetid ditch”; pilgrims who attempt to bathe at the spot where Jesus is said to have been baptized will develop a rash and, if they swallow the water, will most likely vomit.

Niger has the world’s highest fertility rate (about seven births per woman), maintained in part by the persistence of human slavery. The Philippines have a glut of fishermen, but are running out of fish. Pakistan is set to become the world’s fourth-most-populous nation by 2050. “We’re praying that Pakistan only doubles,” the director of a Pakistani health organization says. “We are a crowded, underdeveloped nation — more a crowd than a nation. So we’ll have more illiterates, more youths without productive jobs and more chaos.

If we dramatically reduce the planet’s human population, we might have a future here. Then again, it might already be too late. Weisman raises the example of the passenger pigeon. During the 19th century it was one of the most abundant birds on earth, with as many as five billion in America alone. The passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914, but it was doomed long before then, even as it still numbered in the millions, since its habitat and food supply had already dwindled beyond sustenance level. “Was it possible,” Weisman writes, “that my own species might also already be the living dead?

“Countdown” is a bleak sequel to “The World Without Us,” Weisman’s elegant account of what would happen to the planet should human beings suddenly vanish. That book drew its subtle and visceral power from Edenic descriptions of an Earth reclaimed by its forests and oceans, healing from the wounds inflicted by civilization. With its imaginative force and vivid storytelling, it had the power of the best speculative fiction; but in “Countdown,” “there’s no imagining.

Perhaps motivated by the urgency of his theme, or frustration over the intransigence of the problem, Weisman abandons subtlety in favor of making his message — we need to slow our rate of procreation, if we want to survive — explicitly and didactically in every chapter. His dire warnings, and the warnings of the scientists and government officials he interviews, are unrelenting, with variations of the following sentence appearing at regular intervals: “In the entire history of biology, every species that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash — a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species.

Weisman visits more than 20 countries and interviews countless local scientists, families and policy directors, but the problem is always the same: There are too many people. The culprits are:

  1. modern medicine, which has caused life expectancy in the last two centuries to nearly double;
  2. innovations in agronomy, which have dramatically increased global food production;
  3. a failure to provide contraception to women.

From Thomas Malthus to Paul and Anne Ehrlich, authors of “The Population Bomb” (1968), population doomsayers have endured ridicule and vilification, largely because their predictions of imminent doom fail to materialize on schedule.

Even when fertility drops below the ­replacement rate, it will take decades for the population to begin to decline. At today’s rate, world population would stabilize at 10 billion by 2100. But that will most likely never happen, Weisman writes, because seven billion people “are already turning the atmosphere into something ­unlivable.

The grim prophecies are illustrated with statistics. Each year the world adds the equivalent of another Germany or Egypt; by 2040, China will have more than 100 million 80-year-olds. We add another million people every four and a half days.

Over the course of the book, man is likened to a cancer; to “a voracious monoculture” that sucks “resources in at the cost of the rest of life on the planet”

Posted in Extinction Books, Overpopulation | Comments Off on New York Times review of “Countdown” by Alan Weisman

Algal blooms more toxic due to climate change and crop fertilizer runoff

Posted on November 30, 2013 by

Paerl, H.W. et al. October 25, 2013. Blooms Bite the Hand That Feeds Them. Science Vol. 342 no. 6157 pp. 433-434 

Eutrophication from climate change, dams, higher carbon dioxide concentrations, drought, and nutrients from farm and urban runoff is increasing the size, duration, and toxicity of algal blooms in freshwater lakes and estuaries around the world, which threatens aquatic organisms, ecosystem health and human drinking water safety.

One of their toxins, microcystin, is a liver toxin and possible carcinogen.  Cyanobacteria go back around 3.5 billion years and are some of the oldest microorganisms on the planet, existing when there was no oxygen. They’re extremely adaptive, having survived ice ages, mass extinctions, and other disasters — so adaptive that now they’re threatening some of the life they once made possible.

Of the 123,000 lakes in America larger than 10 acres, at least a third may have these toxin producing cyanobacteria.

August 9, 2014. Don’t feed the Microbes. NewScientist.

THIS is not a health drink. The waters of North America’s Lake Erie turned lurid green this week, thanks to a bloom of toxic bacteria. The bloom has now receded and the water is drinkable again, but the challenge is to stop it happening again. The blue-green cyanobacteria Microcystis aeruginosa built up at the western end of the lake, which is the main source of drinking water for Toledo, Ohio. The bacterium produces a toxin called microcystin, forcing Toledo to turn off the water supply. Such blooms are increasingly common in Lake Erie, as phosphorus from fertilisers runs into the water and feeds the cyanobacteria. To prevent blooms, Ohio must stem the flow of phosphorus, says Jeffrey Reutter of Ohio State University in Columbus. Farmers should test soil to help them only use as much fertiliser as is necessary, and apply it when planting so unused phosphorus isn’t left lying around.

 

 

 

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US Department of Energy 1980 oil rationing plan

Posted on November 25, 2013 by

Preface. This plan was written after the two energy crises in the 1970s, but never enacted. Republicans voted it down in Congress. Perhaps the Republican plan is to ration by wealth. But how well would that work? Chaos and looting will make it hard to buy gasoline or drive anywhere and not have your car stopped and looted.

Which makes me more optimistic that Stan Cox’s certainty rationing has to happen is quite likely.  His book “Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing” is one of the top plans the U.S. should be making for the future. The book has far more sophisticated plans than the 1980 one, and it ought to be ready to implement before oil shortages occur.

Alice Friedemann    www.energyskeptic.com women in ecology  author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity, XX2 report

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USDOE. June 1980. Standby Gasoline Rationing Plan. U.S. Department of Energy Economic Regulatory Administration, Office of Regulations and Emergency Planning.  PDF: D1980 Department of Energy Gasoline Rationing Plan

Excerpts:

This report details how gasoline would be rationed, the way allotments will be distributed, how to allocate rations to private individuals, what share motorcycles/mopeds will get, hardship needs, etc.

Agriculture will receive what it needs from the outset, what remains afterward will be divided on a state-by-state basis.  Ration coupons that have not been redeemed will be freely transferable.

Supplemental allotments will be issued for certain priority activities, such as national security, agriculture, law enforcement, fire fighting, United States Postal Service, emergency medical services, public passenger transportation, sanitation services, search and rescue, snow removal, telecommunications services, gas and electric utilities service, newspaper distribution, energy production activities, vehicle rentals and firms engaged in for hire mail and small parcel transportation and delivery.

Allocation of coupons to individuals

570.24 Limitation on Distribution of Ration Rights. One of the recurring comments on the issue of whether ration coupons should be allotted to licensed drivers or registered vehicles was that the per vehicle system disproportionately favors persons who already own more cars or who can afford to purchase additional cars. Another popular comment was that people will buy several “junkers” in order to receive extra ration rights.

In response to these comments, DOE has incorporated a new § 570.24 in the final regulations which provides authority to limit the number of allotments distributed to any person or household. As a matter of policy, it is desirable to impose a reasonable limit on the total number of allotments given to persons or households that have several registered vehicles, not all of which are used intensively. DOE has not yet arrived at a practical mechanism that would accomplish that objective, so the plan does not provide for any specific limitation. During pre-implementation, however, an equitable and enforceable means of imposing a limitation on allotments will be developed.

Many comments urged that motorcycles and mopeds be provided with the same allotments as passenger cars to reward use of the more fuel efficient two-wheeled vehicles. We have not been persuaded by this argument. First, many people may be tempted by such a proposal to buy a relatively inexpensive moped to receive an extra allotment of coupons for their car. Second, owners of motorcycles and mopeds would not benefit by being able to drive more because of their increased allotments. Our analysis shows that allotments for motorcycles and mopeds which are in amounts less then allotments for automobiles still would allow the more fuel efficient motorcycles and mopeds to be driven significantly more than the average mileage for such vehicles. Therefore, full allotments more likely would result in only a monetary windfall since the excess coupons would be sold on the exchange market. Motorcycles and mopeds therefore will receive an allotment index less than 1.0.

In the comments section, you’ll see that people representing groups such as marinas, telecommunications, rental car companies, Alaskan residents, etc., asked for special allotments. Businesses argued they should get more coupons, since individuals can cut back their discretionary driving.

Diesel-powered vehicles also will not receive an allotment index, as diesel fuel will not be subject to rationing under this plan.

The plan provides that eligibility for ration allotments will be determined primarily on the basis of motor vehicle registrations, taking into account historical differences in the use of gasoline among States. The regulations also provide authority for supplemental allotments to firms so that their allotment will equal a specified percentage of gasoline use during a base period. A priority classification, including, for example, national security, newspaper distribution, rental vehicles, agriculture and for hire mail and small parcel transportation and delivery, is established to assure adequate gasoline supplies for designated essential services.

Ration rights are required by the regulations to be provided by end-users to their suppliers for each gallon sold, and suppliers must provide “redeemed” (cancelled) ration rights to their suppliers on a gallon-for-gallon basis in order to be re-supplied. Ration rights are freely transferable. A ration banking system is created to facilitate transfers of ration rights and redeemed ration rights. Each State will be provided with a reserve of ration rights to provide for hardship needs and to alleviate inequities. A small national reserve also is established to meet emergency needs and other national purposes.

Development of any end-user gasoline rationing plan necessitates difficult tradeoffs between equitably meeting the diverse needs of millions of gasoline users and creating a program capable of rapid implementation with limited administrative complexity. Although the rationing plan, if fully implemented, would be costly and administratively complex, options have been incorporated into the plan to provide, to the maximum extent practical, equity among gasoline users though out the Nation and to provide flexibility to minimize disparities within States.

Any gasoline rationing plan will inconvenience large numbers of gasoline users and will cause hardships to many persons. But in times of serious shortage, gasoline rationing would assure access to some gasoline by all motorists (particularly priority users) and would also help to eliminate waiting lines, stabilize the market for gasoline, and mitigate the economic dislocations caused by a severe petroleum shortage.

The hostage situation in Tehran and the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan have continued to provoke further turmoil and unrest in the Middle East, an area which supplies over 60 percent of the petroleum consumed by the Western industrial nations. The beginning of the 1980’s, therefore, is characterized by insecure foreign sources of petroleum and a potential threat of gasoline shortages, underscoring the need for the government to have in place a Standby Gasoline Rationing Plan as soon as possible so as to be prepared to manage a severe gasoline shortfall.

EPCA sec. 201(d) defines a severe energy supply interruption as a national energy supply shortage which the President determines has resulted or is likely to result in a 20 percent shortfall, with respect to projected normal demand, of gasoline and middle distillate fuels for a period of at least 30 days. The shortfall must be one which is not manageable under other energy emergency authorities, is expected to persist for a substantial period of time and is expected to have a major adverse impact on national health or safety or the national economy. An international energy program obligation must have comparable impacts. The President must notify the Congress of his finding together with a request to implement rationing.

For each ration period, DOE will project the national total available supply of gasoline. This amount will determine the total number of ration rights that will be made available. These ration rights will be distributed generally as follows:

(1)   A small percentage of these rights will be reserved for distribution for a National Ration Reserve.

(2)   The total number of ration rights to be distributed to classes of end-users within each State will be determined on a State-by-State basis that takes into account historical use of gasoline by those classes in that State. With the exception of agriculture, allotments for firms and priority activities in each State will be taken from that State’s share of total allotments. Agriculture priority allotments will be distributed before distributions are made to individual States to avoid distortions that might otherwise be caused to other classes of end-users because of the size of this priority category. Under this procedure, each class of end-user in one State would share any shortfall equally (as measured against historical use) with the corresponding class of end-user in other States.

(3)   A percentage of each State’s ration rights will be reserved for a State Ration Reserve, from which the State will make distribution to meet hardship needs.

(4)   DOE will provide allotments to firms and priority class activities on the basis of their historical use of gasoline.

(5)   In each State, the remaining ration allotments will be distributed to all other registrants, eligible individuals and other persons entitled to allotments on a per vehicle basis.

Entitlements for Ration Allotments

  1. Eligibility for ration allotments will be primarily on the basis of motor vehicle registration. However, DOE will implement a system by which such allotments will be supplemented for all business firms and priority users based upon their historical use of gasoline. Persons (whether individuals or firms) with the most recent valid vehicle registration for an eligible vehicle will receive ration allotments. Authority is provided for a limit to be imposed on the number of ration rights distributed to any person or household. Provisions will be made for the expeditious transfer of eligibility for ration allotments when a vehicle is transferred. Provisions also will be made to enable purchasers of new cars to obtain ration rights on an expedited basis.
  2. All vehicles, except motorcycles and mopeds, will receive the same allotment. Motorcycles will receive one-fourth of the allotment for other vehicles, and mopeds will receive one-tenth of an allotment. Firms will receive the same per vehicle allotments but will be able to supplement them with additional allotments to reflect their historical usage of gasoline.
  3. DOE will issue supplemental allotments for certain priority activities, such as national security, agriculture, law enforcement, fire fighting, United States Postal Service, emergency medical services, public passenger transportation, sanitation services, search and rescue, snow removal, telecommunications services, gas and electric utilities service, newspaper distribution, energy production activities, vehicle rentals and firms engaged in for hire mail and small parcel transportation and delivery.

G. The Ration Rights Market

  1. Ration coupons that have not been redeemed will be freely transferable. DOE does not intend to regulate the ration rights market directly, but the final plan reserves the right to do so, if in DOE’s judgment such regulation becomes necessary to prevent abuses.
  2. In order to facilitate the establishment of a market for ration coupons, DOE has the authority under the regulations to sell some ration rights to the public, provided such sale does not cause the total number of issued ration rights to exceed the total amount of gasoline available. In addition DOE can authorize the States to sell ration rights from the State Ration Reserves (see below). DOE also is authorized, to the extent appropriations are available, to buy and sell coupons whenever necessary to equilibrate the number of issued ration rights with the actual supply of gasoline.

H. National Ration Reserve

A percentage of the total ration rights issued will be reserved for the establishment of a National Ration Reserve. The National Ration Reserve will be used to meet national disaster relief needs and other national emergencies, to provide allotments to Canadian and Mexican firms that drive vehicles across the border for the purpose of conducting business in the United States, and for such other purposes as DOE finds necessary.

I. States’ Role in Gasoline Rationing 1. A percentage of the ration rights to be issued within each State will be reserved for distribution to that State as a State Ration Reserve, to be used by the State primarily for the relief of hardship. The States will have broad discretion and flexibility in the administration of the State Ration Reserves but will be required to submit to DOE a plan describing how the State Ration Reserve will be administered before receiving the ration rights. DOE can authorize the States to sell to the public a portion of the State Ration Reserve in order to facilitate the establishment of a market for ration coupons.

The definition of “emergency services” has been expanded to include search and rescue activities and utilities services. These activities too will be entitled to receive supplemental allotments of ration rights as priority class firms.

It should be noted that this plan deals only with the rationing of gasoline. Gasohol, which typically is a blend of 90 percent unleaded gasoline and 10 percent ethyl alcohol, will be subject to rationing only to the extent of its gasoline content. Therefore, the purchase of a 90/10 blend of gasohol will require only nine-tenths as many ration rights as the purchase of the same volume of pure gasoline.

The focus of this issue is gasoline use for agriculture, a priority activity, which constitutes a significant portion of gasoline use in some States. By way of illustration, during certain calendar quarters gasoline consumption for farming in several farm States ranges from 15 to 50 percent of total consumption. Additional amounts of gasoline are used in these States for distribution and processing of agricultural products. In other jurisdictions, gasoline use for agriculture is much less significant. If, as proposed in the notice of proposed rulemaking, the supplemental allotments for agriculture were deducted from each State’s distribution of the total available ration rights, and assuming that the agriculture priority class is provided 90 percent of its base period gasoline use, then in a 20 percent shortfall the average non-farm motorist in a State with 50 percent base period agricultural use would receive about 68 percent of his base period use. This is to be compared with 78 percent of base period use for the average motorist in a State where agriculture consumed only 10 percent of the base period supply of gasoline.

In order to cure this disparity and assure that the average motorist class of end-user in a State with substantial gasoline use for agriculture does not suffer a disproportionate burden of the shortfall, we have made an adjustment to the calculation formula. Under this adjustment, supplemental allotments for the agriculture priority are taken from the national supply of ration rights before calculating each State’s allotment, rather than being taken from each State’s allotment. The effect is that agriculture receives exactly the same amount as it would have had its ration rights been taken from the State’s allotment, but the ordinary motorist class of end-user will not suffer a disproportionate burden in a highly agricultural State. Such an adjustment is not necessary with respect to other priorities because there is no evidence that gasoline usage by any other priority class of end-user will dis-proportionately affect in any material way the gasoline available to the ordinary motorist class of end-user. Thus, under the plan, each class of end-user within a State will share the shortfall equally (as measured against historical use) with the corresponding class of end-user in other States.

Many people who commented urged that motorcycles and mopeds be provided with the same allotments as passenger cars to reward use of the more fuel efficient two-wheeled vehicles. We have not been persuaded by this argument. First, many people may be tempted by such a proposal to buy a relatively inexpensive moped to receive an extra allotment of coupons for their car. Second, owners of motorcycles and mopeds would not benefit by being able to drive more because of their increased allotments. Our analysis shows that allotments for motorcycles and mopeds which are in amounts less then allotments for automobiles still would allow the more fuel efficient motorcycles and mopeds to be driven significantly more than the average mileage for such vehicles. Therefore, full allotments more likely would result in only a monetary windfall since the excess coupons would be sold on the exchange market. Motorcycles and mopeds therefore will receive an allotment index less than 1.0.

All vehicles (except motorcycles and mopeds) will have the same index number and therefore will receive the same ration allotment (in a given State), regardless of fuel efficiency. This will give a significant advantage to fuel efficient vehicles.

Diesel-powered vehicles also will not receive an allotment index, as diesel fuel will not be subject to rationing under this plan.

570.24 Limitation on Distribution of Ration Rights. One of the recurring comments on the issue of whether ration coupons should be allotted to licensed drivers or registered vehicles was that the per vehicle system disproportionately favors persons who already own more cars or who can afford to purchase additional cars. Another popular comment was that people will buy several “junkers” in order to receive extra ration rights.

In response to these comments, DOE has incorporated a new § 570.24 in the final regulations which provides authority to limit the number of allotments distributed to any person or household. As a matter of policy, it is desirable to impose a reasonable limit on the total number of allotments given to persons or households that have several registered vehicles, not all of which are used intensively. DOE has not yet arrived at a practical mechanism that would accomplish that objective, so the plan does not provide for any specific limitation. During pre-implementation, however, an equitable and enforceable means of imposing a limitation on allotments will be developed.

The allotment limitation would not be intended to preclude the distribution to a person or members of a household of additional ration rights granted from the State Ration Reserve. Thus a person or household with a bona fide need for more than the prescribed limit of allotments would have the opportunity to recoup lost allotments from the State Ration Reserve. Section 570.24(b) provides that ration rights that would be distributed to a person or members of a household but for the limitation in subsection (a) will go to the State Ration Reserve so that the State would not in any way lose ration rights as a result of the limitation.

For purposes of this section, household is defined in § 570.24(c) as persons related by blood or marriage who live together in a single residence.

We specifically asked for comments on the question of whether business should receive a higher ration level than individuals. Most businesses which commented supported this concept, agreeing that individuals can conserve by eliminating discretionary driving.

Section 570.43(b) of the regulations provides that unredeemed ration rights are freely transferable. This provision constitutes the authority for a ration rights exchange market, which should promote a more efficient use of available gasoline. We do not anticipate regulating the ration rights market through price controls or any other mechanism. However, in order to prevent abuses in the market that might arise, § 570.43(b) gives DOE authority to regulate the market if necessary. Furthermore, as noted in earlier sections, DOE will be authorized by the proposed regulations to buy and sell coupons.

References

Cox, S. 2013. Any way you slice it: the past, present, and future of rationing. New Press

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Zero to One Child per Woman: The only possible solution at this late date

Posted on November 24, 2013 by

Excerpt from “The Sky Is Falling: Chicken Little Was Right All Along” by Don Wilkin Nov 2013.

“I am convinced the only equitable, humane, and effective way to pull our fat out of the fire at this late date, if it could be done at all, would be to immediately and dramatically reduce human fertility worldwide to half of replacement for the next three to four generations, somewhere between “one or none” and “one will do, stop at two.”   All other attempts to live more sustainably would be – in fact are being – entirely undone by our huge and growing numbers.  Such restraint would have to continue until we got our numbers WAY down, certainly below a billion, and possibly below half a billion depending on how long it took.  That level of voluntary reproductive restraint, I don’t need to tell you, would be unprecedented in human history.  Economic collapse is a far more probable resolution to our overshoot problem.

Realistically, most of us won’t survive global economic collapse.  The vast majority of us have neither the skills nor the resources to survive in a purely local economy.  Despite the earnest efforts of groups like Sierra Club and the Transitions network, it is unlikely that anything can now stop the global economy – and human civilization with it – from collapsing around our heads sometime in the next two to four decades.  Most will apparently blithely continue to enjoy our final faux prosperity while it lasts.  By the time the meltdown gets their full and undivided attention, it will be too late.

I take little comfort in being old enough to be cashing in my chips before the most serious stages of civilization’s decline and collapse.  That doesn’t make it any better for my kids and grandkids.  I feel we owe them a realistic assessment of the predicament we have left them.  My heartfelt warning to them is that children born today are probably being sentenced, should they survive to adulthood, to living through the darkest period of human history.  The decision to bring a child into the world today is – or should be – an excruciating one, a choice between small hope for a survivable future with starkly limited opportunities versus a far higher probability of a much more debased, dispiriting one.

If this past century represents the pinnacle of human ability to sustainably manage and equitably share our global commons, and if, despite our big brains and digital libraries overflowing with the accumulated wisdom of all human history, we can aspire to no higher economic goals than ever-greater material consumption, constant growth, and perpetual crowding at the expense of all other species on this planet, including other humans, it might be better if human reproduction were put on the evolutionary back burner for a very long while.  Only a radical pruning provides any hope for a post-human “founder” population sometime in the future with substantially more reverent attitudes toward Earth and more caring and social responsibility toward one another.”

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Book Review of Visit Sunny Chernobyl

Posted on November 9, 2013 by

Alice Friedemann’s book review of Andrew Blackwell’s 2012 “Visit Sunny Chernobyl and other adventures in the world’s most polluted places”

If you want to see photos from Blackwell’s travels, go to his website “Visit Sunny Chernobyl”

Blackwell is the ideal travel companion, if only I could hire him to take along on my vacations, how much more fun they’d be!  He always manages to find something wonderful about all the places he visits, as he did in Linfen, China:

“Sometimes I despair at the prospect of growing old in my own country. In the United States, seniors are supposed to keep to the house, or at least stick to the park benches. You don’t exactly see them playing Frisbee in Central Park. In Linfen, though, citizens old and young come to exercise in the public square, and sing old songs, and play hacky sack. They dance, they slide electrically, they watch their kids or grandkids ride plastic tricycles around like lunatics. They write poems in water on the flagstones, and watch them evaporate. This place was pretty great”.

This despite the grim and polluted city streets, which he describes as “The smell of burning solder. Capacitors underfoot. Shattered components spilling from beneath a closed gate. Cellphone face-plates in heaps three feet tall, leaves raked up in autumn. We turn a corner. Ten-foot-tall drifts of gray computer plastic lie waiting to be sorted and recycled, like dirty snow dumped by a plow. Old keyboards stacked on pallets, cube on cube, bales of electronic cotton. A warehouse of keyboards, a soccer field’s worth of keyboards. A team of men shovel hay from the bed of a large truck, tossing it over the side into a heap. The timeless gesture of bodies shoveling hay, but it’s not hay. they’re shoveling circuit boards. naked and green, the clattering square fronds pile up…Women toss piles of scrap aluminum into the air with shallow baskets, separating the wheat from the chaff.  With broad, circular sieves, a family shakes out resistors and capacitors of different sizes…Did they use these tools on the farm?”

In a cab at night: “Beside the highway, the squat, flaring glow of a refinery floated by, bladerunner-like in the haze”.

A surreal description of the Linfen Spring Festival “Large mutant rabbits made of wire and fabric loomed over us.  It was the Year of the Rabbit, and although the Spring Festival had already ended, that didn’t save us from being leered at by cartoon bunny rabbits everywhere we went.”

Chernobyl

After Chernobyl, Russia had workers hired people to be “liquidators”. They were exposed to a lot of radiation to clean up Chernobyl so radioactive waste wouldn’t be tracked out or blown into the air and spread further.  These workers are now entitled to benefits depending on how much radiation dosage they received.

It hadn’t occurred to me that every time there’s a forest fire, the fallout of Chernobyl continues, because trees take up radioactive particles, which are released by fire again.

After Chernobyl exploded, firemen rushed over and kept the fire from spreading to an adjacent reactor — most of them died, but their bravery kept Chernobyl from creating an 800 kilometer no man’s zone, instead of the 30 kilometer zone that exists today.

Russia is planning to put a concrete dome over Chernobyl that will last for 150 years.  Blackwell describes this as “The reactor building, though, will be dangerous for millennia. So maybe there will one day be a shelter for the shelter for the Shelter Object, and then a shelter for that, and we will continue down the generations, building–shell by shell– a nest of giant, radioactive Russian dolls.”

There are tours of Chernobyl, here’s a description from the book: “Dennis’s radiation meter topped out at 1300 micros, about 30 times the background radiation in New York City. He twisted around in his seat to face me. “Yesterday it was up to 2,000″. There was a hint of apology in his voice. Perhaps he was worried I might feel shortchanged for having received less than the maximum possible exposure …, as if I had come to Nepal to see Mount Everest, only to find it obscured by clouds”.

The Chernobyl core “was the size of a small building, a thick bucket standing several stories tall. It felt impossible to understand the power embodied in such a machine. A quarter ounce of nuclear fuel holds nearly as much energy as a ton of coal; the core had held more than a hundred thousand times that much”.

Fort McMurray Canada Tar Sands

Blackwell is imaginative and witty — check out his descriptions of the tar sands and mining machines:

“The mines themselves were nowhere visible, but at the north end of the lake rose the Syncrude upgrading plant, the flame-belching doppelganger of Disney’s Enchanted Kingdom, built of steel towers and twisting pipes, crested with gas flares and plumes of steam.”

“…then I saw the second truck. Four hundred tons of sticky, black earth–a solid mass as large as a two-story building, and enough to make 200 barrels of oil–slid smoothly off its upturned bed and down the maw of the hopper.  I had the sensation of having seen an actual physical organ of the animal otherwise known as our voracious appetite for fossil fuels“.

“The wheel itself was more than 40 feet tall, with two dozen steel mouths gaping from its rim, each worthy of a tyrannosaur, with teeth as large as human forearms. I stared up at it, nursing a euphoric terror, imagining how it once churned through the earth, lifting tone after ton of oil sand as it went.  It was the bastard offspring of the Eiffel Tower and the Queensboro Bridge, abandoned by its parents, raised by feral tanks”.

Pacific Garbage Patch vortex

Here’s a description of the sailing vessel he’s on in search of the giant plastic garbage patch:  “The sailing life is supposed to be the apotheosis of freedom and adventure, but it seemed notable to me mainly for its indignities, and for the endless tasks, both awkward and arcane, on which our safety depended. It was like owning a house, but more likely to get you killed.”

Amazon rainforest 

“A needle of pain in my thigh. I looked down to see a green dagger sticking out of my leg… The air’s suffusing odor of loamy decomposition suddenly took on new significance. It was the smell of the jungle breaking down and digesting anything that didn’t keep moving. The Amazon wasn’t just a lung. It was a stomach.”

“In the middle of the road, a thin cable of succulent green hung out of the sky. I held it, felt the elastic connection between my hand and the distant canopy–and then gave it a tug. It broke, length after length of vine spooling down on my shoulders.”

“We ran to the edge of the clearing and into the forest. A corridor of crushed vegetation led deeper into the jungle. Something had been through here. Tres were scraped and bruised where it had passed. From the forest, we heard the shriek and growl of an engine. It heaved into sight: the skidder. This was how logs were brought out from the inaccessible interior, where they had been felled. They were dragged out behind this narrow, streamlined tank, a low, blunt-nosed hedgehog of a machine that was now headed our way”.

India

And finally this image as he’s standing next to a river of S***: “A printed picture of a blue-skinned deity came floating downstream. Before I could make out if it was Shiva or Kirshna, the oar struck it on the downstroke, folding the image and plunging it into the black water”.

Where are the evil villains?

No matter how hard he tries, there are so many nuances and shades of gray and complexities, that it’s very hard to find the evil doers and pin them to the wall like an insect collection.  Each problem area is messy, there are no easy solutions, the environmentalists aren’t always 100% right.

Disaster travel books

If you enjoy the emerging field of disaster travel (coming soon to a place near you as the “9 boundaries we must not cross” extend themselves), you might also enjoy Craig Childs “Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth” and Jonathan Watts “When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind — Or Destroy It”

When I saw the latest 2013 list of the 10 most polluted places at Scientific American, I thought — great!  Now Blackwell can write a second book!  But then I read the descriptions and was reminded of the dangers he exposed himself to.  So I hope he’ll come up with a less dangerous theme for his next book.

Scientific American’s “The World’s 10 most polluted places” by David Biello

AGBOGBLOSHIE, GHANA:

Recovering precious metals and other components of computers and electronic devices accounts for the bulk of the pollution at this dump in the city of Ghana. For example, recyclers burn off the plastic sheathing on copper cables and wires, often using locally available fuels like Styrofoam. As a result, heavy metals incorporated in the cables such as lead travel with the smoke before settling onto local homes and soils. Samples from the perimeter of the dump site where more than 40,000 people live have lead levels as high as 18,125 parts per million, or 45 times higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s lead contamination limit. Some workers have blood levels of heavy metals as much as 17 times higher than international standards. One solution might be to strip wires with hand tools but burning remains cheaper and easier—and the amount of e-waste both at Agbogbloshie and globally is only set to grow.

CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE:

Despite the multiple meltdowns at Fukushima in Japan, Chernobyl remains the world’s worst civilian nuclear accident. Nearly 30 years later 150,000 square kilometers of land remain contaminated with various radioactive isotopes such as cesium 137 or plutonium that were released when the reactor exploded, putting as many as 10 million people at risk. “It is not possible to relocate five [million] or 10 million people,” notes Stephan Robinson of Green Cross Switzerland. “This is a pollution problem where there is no quick and easy fix, and probably even money cannot help.” But a new sarcophagus contains the radioactive remnants of the exploded reactor and Green Cross Switzerland has been teaching residents how to farm in ways that lessen the radionuclides taken up in crops as well as new cooking techniques that can reduce the risk of ingesting the radioactive particles.

CITARUM RIVER, INDONESIA:

At least nine million people live in the Citarum River Basin, which covers 13,000 square kilometers of the island of Java. More than 2,000 factories line the waterway, which also provides water for drinking and bathing as well as rice irrigation. Metal contamination has been found in the water above international safety standards, including lead, mercury and even the poison arsenic.

DZERZHINSK, RUSSIA:

This city of 245,000 has been in the top 10 since 2006—and was dubbed the most chemically polluted city in the world by Guinness World Records in 2011—boasting a “white sea” in the middle of town that is the residue of Soviet-era chemical manufacturing. For more than 60 years at least 300,000 metric tons of chemical wastes were improperly buried in the region. Some 190 different chemicals have been detected in the groundwater, and life expectancy—47 for women and 42 for men—is 10 to 15 years lower than the already low average life expectancy in Russia.

HAZARIBAGH, BANGLADESH:

Roughly 90 percent of the 270 registered tanneries in the country cluster in this neighborhood of Dhaka on roughly 25 hectares of land. Each day the tanneries dump some 22,000 cubic liters of toxic waste, including carcinogenic hexavalent chromium, into the main river, the Buriganga. Worse, at least 185,000 people live in Hazaribagh, although that may be an underestimate, thanks to informal settlements in the area. All of them may be being poisoned by the industry that employs between 8,000 and 12,000 people.

KABWE, ZAMBIA:

The second largest city in this southern African country was home to one of the continent’s largest lead smelters as well as ubiquitous lead mines that have contaminated the entire city in lead dust. Young men still mine the leftover lead ore for profit, releasing yet more of the toxic heavy metal. As a result, some children in Kabwe have lead levels as high as 200 micrograms per deciliter, or 40 times higher than the safe limit proposed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The average blood concentration is between 50 and 100 micrograms per deciliter. The city remains on the most polluted list “because very little is being done,” noted Jack Caravanos, Blacksmith’s research director.

KALIMANTAN, INDONESIA:

Here’s how millions of small-scale miners get gold around the world: Liquid mercury is added to ore; the mercury forms an amalgam with the gold that is then burned off, releasing mercury into the air as small quantities of pure gold are left behind. Such artisanal gold mining is the second-largest source of mercury pollution in the world (after coal-fired power plants) and it is the reason this area of Borneo is included on the list. More than 1,000 metric tons of mercury enter the environment each year, despite the fact that mercury is a known brain poison, accumulating in water and fish.

RIO MATANZA–RIACHUELO, ARGENTINA:

This 60-kilometer-long river basin in Buenos Aires is home to at least 15,000 small industries that pollute the river. As a result, soil along the banks hosts high concentrations of heavy metals. For example, chromium can be found at an average level of 1,141 parts per million, or more than 900 ppm higher than regulated levels in the U.S. The heavy metals also contaminate the drinking water for at least 20,000 people.

NIGER RIVER DELTA, NIGERIA:

The global addiction to oil has turned the Niger River Delta into a sacrifice zone. This densely populated region of roughly 70,000 square kilometers has been polluted with petroleum since the 1950s, and at least 240,000 barrels of crude oil have been spilled into the delta each year, with attendant impacts on fishing, the ability to grow crops in the swamplands and human health. “People are breathing in a toxic mix and it’s gotten into the food chain,” noted David Hanrahan, Blacksmith’s chief technical advisor.

NORILSK, RUSSIA:

This city above the Arctic Circle retains the world’s largest metal smelting complex and, therefore, it’s place on this list due to terrible air pollution. As a result of the haze, trees do not grow within 30 kilometers of the city, founded only in the 1930s. The bad air is also not good for people and life expectancy in the city of 135,000 is 10 years below the Russian average. Respiratory disease is common, along with cancers of the lungs and digestive system. Upgrades to smelter equipment could cut down on the air pollution.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=10-most-polluted-places-in-the-world

 

 

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Our interlinked infrastructure is so vulnerable one piece can take the others down with it

Posted on October 31, 2013 by

This article by Robinson et al is a very prescient article written back in 1998, long before 9/11 and he also points out how vulnerable U.S. infrastructure is to cyberwar and cyberattacks at a time when our infrastructure wasn’t nearly as dependent on the internet as it is now.

Nor is this likely to change, since 85% of infrastructure is privately owned and doing nothing to protect their companies because it costs them too much.  Yet another reason capitalism will fail, among others…

C. Paul Robinson, et al. Critical Infrastructure: Interlinked and Vulnerable. Computers and communications are boosting performance, but interconnection increases the risk of a technological domino effect. Issues in Science & technology. National Academy of Sciences.

The infrastructure of the United States-the foundations on which the nation is built-is a complex system of interrelated elements.

Those elements-transportation, electric power, financial institutions, communications systems, and oil and gas supply-reach into every aspect of society.

Some are so critical that if they were incapacitated or destroyed, an entire region, if not the nation itself, could be debilitated. Continued operation of these systems is vital to the security and well-being of the country.

Once these systems were fairly independent. Today they are increasingly linked and automated, and the advances enabling them to function in this manner have created new vulnerabilities. What in the past would have been an isolated failure caused by human error, malicious deeds, equipment malfunction, or the weather, could today result in widespread disruption.

Among certain elements of the infrastructure (for example, the telecommunications and financial networks), the degree of interdependency is especially strong. But they all depend upon each other to varying degrees. We can no longer regard these complex operating systems as independent entities. Together they form a vast, vital-and vulnerable-system of systems.

The elements of infrastructure themselves are vulnerable to physical and electronic disruptions, and a dysfunction in any one may produce consequences in the others. Some recent examples:

  • The western states power outage of 1996. One small predictable accident of nature-a power line shorting after it sagged onto a tree-cascaded into massive unforeseen consequences: a power-grid collapse that persisted for 6 hours and very nearly brought down telecommunications networks as well. The system was unable to respond quickly enough to prevent the regional blackout, and it is not clear whether measures have been taken to prevent another such event.
  • The Northridge, California, earthquake of January 1994 affecting Los Angeles. First-response emergency personnel were unable to communicate effectively because private citizens were using cell phones so extensively that they paralyzed emergency communications.
  • Two major failures of AT&T communications systems in New York in 1991. The first, in January, created numerous problems, including airline flight delays of several hours, and was caused by a severed high-capacity telephone cable. The second, in September, disrupted long distance calls, caused financial markets to close and planes to be grounded, and was caused by a faulty communications switch.
  • The satellite malfunction of May 1998. A communications satellite lost track of Earth and cut off service to nearly 90% of the nation’s approximately 45 million pagers, which not only affected ordinary business transactions but also physicians, law enforcement officials, and others who provide vital services. It took nearly a week to restore the system.

Failures such as these have many harmful consequences. Some are obvious, but others are subtle-for example, the loss of public confidence that results when people are unable to reach a physician, call the police, contact family members in an emergency, or use an ATM to get cash.

The frequency of such incidents and the severity of their impact are increasing, in part because of vulnerabilities that exist in the nation’s information infrastructure. John Deutch, then director of the CIA, told Congress in 1997 that he ranked information warfare as the second most serious threat to U.S. national security, just below weapons of mass destruction in terrorist hands. Accounts of hacking into the Pentagon’s computers and breakdowns of satellite communications have been reported in the press. These incidents suggest wider implications for similar systems.

Energy availability is vital to the operations of other systems. DOE will be studying the vulnerabilities of the nation’s electric, gas, and oil systems and trying to determine the minimum number of systems that must be able to continue operating under all conditions, as well as the actions needed to guarantee their operation.

Achieving public-private cooperation. A major issue in safeguarding the national infrastructure is the need for public-private cooperation. Private industry owns 85 percent of the national infrastructure, and the country’s economic well-being, national defense, and vital functions depend on the reliable operation of these systems. [If you read my book reviews on cyberwar and cyberattack, you’ll discover that private companies aren’t willing to spend the money to take their systems off of the internet or improve security because that would take money away from shareholders, and they believe that ratepayers or the government would be on the hook if something went wrong].

Or as Auerswald puts it: “Although private firms uniquely understand their operations and the hazards they entail, it is clear that they currently do not have adequate commercial incentive to fund vulnerability reduction. For many, the cost of reducing vulnerabilities outweighs the benefit of reduced risk from terrorist attacks as well as from natural and other disasters. If industry itself is not motivated to invest in protection against attack and the federal government does not take the initiative, who will take responsibility for protecting chemical plants, rail lines, and other critical infrastructure? Who will make it harder for terrorists to magnify the damage of an attack by first attacking the infrastructure on which effective response depends? Who will ensure that these and other elements of the infrastructure are not used as weapons to kill or maim thousands of people in our cities?”

Philip Auerswald. 2005. The Challenge of Protecting Critical Infrastructure. Issues in Science & technology. National Academy of Sciences.

National Academies, Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism, Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism, Lewis M. Branscomb and Richard Klausner, co-chairs (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2002).

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Hazardous Waste Overview

Posted on October 31, 2013 by

To give you an idea of how much waste is generated, here are some 10+ year old stats from the Department of energy Table AF-2. WASTE FUN FACTS

1 ounce   = NOx emissions generated from 3.6 gallons of gasoline
3 ounces  = municipal solid waste generated per person per hour
2.5 pounds = emissions of sulfur oxides (SOx) generated from 90 pounds of coal
4.4 pounds = municipal solid waste generated per person per day
20 pounds  = carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions generated from 1 gallon of gasoline
31 pounds  = municipal solid waste generated per person per week
162 pounds = CO2 emissions from 8 gallons of gasoline
207 pounds = CO2 generated by 1 million Btus of coal
290 pounds = industrial waste generated per person per day
1,600 pounds  = municipal solid waste generated per person per year
2,000 pounds  = 1 U.S. ton

2.3 tons  = CO2 emissions generated from 1 ton of coal
= industrial hazardous waste generated per person per year
53 tons  = industrial waste generated per person per year
440 tons  = industrial waste generated per second
1,600 tons  = hourly production of municipal solid waste
21,000 tons = Ohio class ballistic missile submarine
26,600 tons  = industrial waste generated per minute
114,000 tons = aircraft carrier, Nimitz class
600,000 tons  = U.S. daily production of municipal solid waste
1.6 million tons  = U.S. industrial waste generated per hour
3 million tons = industrial toxic waste generated per year in the U.S.
= 24 pounds of industrial waste generated per person per year in the U.S.
10 million tons = industrial airborne pollutants generated per year
(e.g., SOx, NOx, VOCs, CO) in the U.S.
= 80 pounds of airborne pollutants generated per person per year in the U.S.
38 million tons = industrial waste generated per day in the U.S.
200+ million tons  = 1,600+ pounds municipal solid waste generated per person per year in the U.S.
600 million tons  = 4,600 pounds industrial hazardous waste generated per person per year in the U.S.
= 2.3 tons of industrial hazardous waste generated per person per year in the U.S.

2+ billion tons = industrial waste generated by the U.S. chemical industry
= industrial carbon dioxide emissions per year in the U.S.
14 billion tons = industrial waste generated by the U.S. per year
= 107,000 pounds of industrial waste per person per year in the U.S.
= 53 tons of industrial waste per person per year in the U.S.
= weight of 35 automobiles per person per year in the U.S.
560 billion tons  = carbon in all life
4,000 billion tons = carbon in recoverable fossil fuels ÷ 720 x 109
tons of carbon dioxide in atmosophere

I’ve been researching nuclear waste recently, which has been given an impossible requirement of guaranteed 1 million years safety.

This in turn led me to find out that there are other kinds of waste that are far more hazardous and permanent that only require 30 years of safety!

A large number of other important human activities also generate wastes that present persistent or permanent hazards. These include mining wastes; coal ash; deep-well injected hazardous liquid waste; and solid wastes such as lead, mercury, cadmium, zinc, beryllium, and chromium that are managed at Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and Superfund sites.

For these wastes, the longest compliance time required by the EPA is 10,000 years for deep-well injection of liquid hazardous wastes. For all forms of shallow land disposal, compliance times are substantially shorter. For RCRA solid waste management facilities, a typical permit is for 30 years, and the operator bears responsibility over a time horizon of less than a century. RCRA sites cannot reside in a 100-year flood plain unless they are designed to resist washout by a 100-year flood. Although coal and mining wastes pose potential health risks, federal legislation excludes them from the category of hazardous waste.

The short regulatory compliance times for much hazardous waste do not mean that these materials do not pose any potential long-term danger. David Okrent and Leiming Xing at the University of California Los Angeles have analyzed what would happen over the long term at an approved RCRA site for the disposal of arsenic, chromium, nickel, cadmium, and beryllium. Assuming a loss of societal memory and the absence of monitoring or mitigation, individuals in a farming community at the site 1,000 years in the future would face an estimated 30% lifetime probability of cancer due to this exposure.

The reason that most chemical risks are not subject to long-term regulation is not that policymakers are unaware of the danger. Rather, society has made a deliberate decision to place more weight on the analysis of near-term risks— as well as the benefits derived from these sources of risk— than on very long-term risks. It is also worth noting that some of these risks are not all that long-term. For example, current scientific understanding suggests that the peak risks from 20th- and 21st-century fossil fuel CO2 emissions may occur within several centuries, resulting in major ecosystem alteration, including substantial changes in ocean chemistry and a sea-level rise of up to seven meters.

Coal generates 54% of U.S. electricity and utilities have plans to install an additional 62 gigawatts of coal-fired generation [my comment – delayed by fracked gas, but coal will be back by 2018 as this energy resource declines]. Using 5 billion tons of coal would create 700 million MT of ash and flue-gas desulfurization sludge requiring shallow land disposal, discharge over 650 MT of hazardous mercury, and result in approximately 300 U.S. coal-worker fatalities. And on top of this, coal burning would produce an enormous quantity of carbon dioxide that would contribute to climate change.

References.

Per Peterson. Nuclear Waste and the Distant Future. Regulation of nuclear hazards must be consistent with rules governing other hazardous materials and must balance its risks against those linked to other energy sources. Issues in Science & Technology. National Academy of Sciences.

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Groundwater depletion consequences

Posted on October 31, 2013 by

Robert. Glennon. 9 Oct 2002. The Perils of Groundwater Pumping. The excessive “mining” of our aquifers is causing environmental degradation on a potentially enormous scale. Issues in Science and Technology. National Academy of Sciences.

Groundwater is more than 25 percent of U.S. water supply, and more than half of the population relies on groundwater for their drinking water supply.

It takes a lot of energy required to lift groundwater

Because water is heavy, about two pounds per quart, more energy is needed to lift water from lower levels.In Arizona, the electric energy to run a commercial irrigation well may cost $2,000 per month.The deeper the well that needs to be drilled, the more expensive it will cost.

Deep groundwater often has arsenic, fluoride, and radon

Pumping from lower levels may produce poorer quality water because naturally occurring elements, such as arsenic, fluoride, and radon, are more prevalent at deeper levels in the earth, and the earth’s higher internal temperature at these levels dissolves more of these elements into solution.

Overdrafting: Saltwater intrusion, land subsidence, lakes & rivers dry up

  • Overdrafting can cause the intrusion of saltwater into the aquifer, rendering the water no longer potable. This problem is quite serious in California, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina.
  • Overdrafting can lead to land subsidence. The land cracks or drops. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the land surface dropped  25 to 30 feet between 1925 and 1977. Land subsidence has damaged homes and commercial structures and reduced property values. Pumping north of Tampa Bay in Pasco County has cracked the foundations, walls, and ceilings of local residents’ homes, resulting in lawsuits, insurance claims, and considerable ill will.
  • Pumping affects surface water, including lakes, ponds, rivers, creeks, streams, springs, wetlands, and estuaries. In Arizona, groundwater pumping has dried up or degraded 90 percent of the state’s once perennial desert streams, rivers, and riparian habitats

From Tucson to Tampa Bay, from California’s Central Valley to Down East Maine, rivers and lakes have disappeared, and fresh water is becoming scarce. Groundwater pumping–for domestic consumption, irrigation, or mining–causes bodies of water and wetlands to dry up; the ground beneath us to collapse; and fish, wildlife, and trees to die. The excessive pumping of our aquifers has created an environmental catastrophe known to relatively few scientists and water management experts and to those who are unfortunate enough to have suffered the direct consequences. This phenomenon is occurring not just in the arid West with its tradition of battling over water rights, but even in places we think of as relatively wet.

Groundwater pumping in the United States has increased dramatically in the past few decades.

Domestic use alone jumped from 2.9 trillion gallons in 1965 to about 6.8 trillion gallons (of 28 trillion gallons total) in 1995, or 24,000 gallons for every man, woman, and child.

Farmers use 66% of groundwater to irrigate crops.

The mining industry, especially copper, coal, and gold production, pumped about 770 billion gallons.  In 1995, California alone pumped 14,500 billion gallons of groundwater per day. Groundwater withdrawals actually exceeded surface water diversions in Florida, Kansas, Nebraska, and Mississippi.

Groundwater pumping has become a global problem because 1.5 billion people (one-quarter of the world’s population) depend on groundwater for drinking water.

Groundwater is an extraordinarily attractive source of water for farms, mines, cities, and homeowners because it is available throughout the year and it exists almost everywhere in the country. During the various ice ages, much of the country was covered with huge freshwater lakes. Water from these lakes percolated into the ground and collected in aquifers. Unlike rivers and streams, which are few and far between, especially in the West, aquifers exist below almost the entire country.

Recommended reading

William M. Alley, Thomas E. Reilly, and O. Lehn Franke, Sustainability of Ground-Water Resources (U.S. Geological Survey, circular 1186, Denver, Colo.: 1999).

Robert Glennon and Thomas Maddock, III, “The Concept of Capture: The Hydrology and Law of Stream/Aquifer Interactions,” in Proceedings of the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Institute (1997): vol. 43, 22-1 to 22-89.

Robert Glennon and Thomas Maddock, III, “In Search of Subflow: Arizona’s Futile Effort to Separate Groundwater From Surface Water,” Arizona Law Review 36 (1994): 567­610.

Wayne B. Solley, Robert R. Pierce, and Howard A. Pearlman, Estimated Use of Water in the United States (U.S. Geological Survey, circular 1200, Denver, Colo.: 1998).

Thomas C. Winter, Judson H. Harvey, O. Lehn Franke, and William M. Alley, Ground Water and Surface Water: A Single Resource (U.S. Geological Survey, circular 1139, Denver, Colo.: 1999).

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Aquatic Invasive species

Posted on October 31, 2013 by

Allegra Cangelosi. 9 Jan 2003. Blocking Invasive Aquatic Species. Federal law must be updated to stop introductions of nonnative organisms, especially by ships. Issues in science and technology. National Academy of Sciences.

Examples of invasive aquatic species

  • Voracious snakehead fish from China crawl out of a Maryland pond
  • 100-pound Asian carp smash into recreational boats on the Mississippi River
  • Armies of alien rats, numbering in the millions and weighing up to 20 pounds, raze wetland vegetation in Louisiana.
  • Softball-sized snails called Rapa whelks silently devour any and all Chesapeake Bay shellfish in their paths
  • A wasting syndrome afflicting the fry of native sport fish in Lake Ontario results from the adult fish eating nutritionally deficient nonnative forage fish.
  • Recent die-offs among Great Lakes waterfowl due to botulism are being traced to the zebra mussel infestation that occurred more than 15 years ago.
  • In Texas, an exotic snail carries parasites that are spreading and infecting native fish populations.
    In the Gulf of Mexico, a rapidly growing Australian spotted jellyfish population is threatening commercially important species such as shrimp, menhaden, anchovies, and crabs.
  • The ruffe, a small perchlike fish native to southern Europe that has become the most abundant fish species in Duluth/Superior Harbor (Minnesota/Wisconsin) since 1986. The ruffe has spread to the Firesteel River in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the easternmost record in Lake Superior. The ruffe is expected to have major effects on important fish species, such as the yellow perch. The ruffe could cause fishery damages that may total $100 million once it becomes established in the warmer, shallow waters of Lake Erie.
  • The Asian swamp eel threatens the Everglades National Park ecosystem. These eels are voracious predators of native fish and invertebrates.
  • The zebra mussel from the former Soviet Union has clogged the water pipes of many electric companies and other industries, particularly in midwestern and mid-Atlantic states. It also threatens the existence of many endemic native bivalve molluscs in the Mississippi Basin. Infestations in the midwest and northeast cost power plants and industrial facilities nearly $70 million between 1989 and 1995.

How do they get here?

Scientists believe that most invasive aquatic organisms hitch rides to U.S. coastal waters by adhering to the hulls of commercial ships or by traveling in their ballast water (the water pumped into below-deck tanks to increase a ship’s stability). Today, ships move more than 80 percent of consumer goods, and the steady growth in global trade is increasing the opportunities for invasive species to reach new habitats.

References & Recommended reading

Carlton, J. T., Introduced Species in U.S. Coastal Waters: Environmental Impacts and Management Priorities. Arlington, Virginia: Pew Oceans Commission, 2001.

Committee on Ships’ Ballast Operations, National Research Council, Stemming the Tide: Controlling Introductions of Nonindigenous Species by Ships’ Ballast Water. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996.

Schmitz, Don. 9 Jul 2001. Needed: A National Center for Biological Invasions. Issues in science and technology. National Academy of Sciences.

U.S. Coast Guard, Report to Congress on the Voluntary National Guidelines for Ballast Water Management, November 2001.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Aquatic Nuisance Species in Ballast Water Discharges: Issues and Options, September 2001.

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