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Power co. hits green deals
A Canadian power company is laying the groundwork for a major legal battle with the Bay State over what it’s calling a “tainted” process for signing renewable-energy contracts.
Industry experts warn that TransCanada Power could soon challenge the constitutionality of National Grid’s controversial deal with Cape Wind Associates.
The Canadian company is also calling into question recent deals signed by Nstar with three Western Massachusetts wind farms, according to a recent filing with the state.
“They’re basically challenging the validity of all these contracts,” said Robert Rio, a senior vice president at the Associated Industries of Massachusetts. “This is big. It could have serious implications, especially for Cape Wind.”
Soot from coal power plants like this one near Emmitt, Kan., has been linked by scientists to rapid melting of Arctic sea ice.
Soot from diesel engines, coal-fired power plants and burning wood is a bigger cause of global warming than previously thought, and is the major cause of the rapid melting of the Arctic's sea ice, Stanford climate experts say.
The evidence of mounting pollution by carbon particles in soot has been inadequately counted in international government debates over policies to cope with the warming problem, according to Stanford's Mark Z. Jacobson, leader of the university's Atmosphere and Energy program and a professor of civil and environmental engineering.
In a report to be published Thursday in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Jacobson noted that soot particles - both black and brown carbon - come not only from burning fossil fuels in industry and transportation, but also from the immense quantities of wood and dung that are burned for heating and cooking throughout the developing world.
Those factors combined make black and brown carbon in soot an even more powerful contributor to global warming than industrial emissions of methane, which until now have been considered the second most important cause of climate change, Jacobson said.
And because soot absorbs sunlight as it falls on ice and snow and radiates back to Earth from clouds and layers of the atmosphere, it is the major reason for rapidly melting sea ice in the Arctic region, he said.
Controlling soot may be the only way to significantly slow Arctic warming over the next two decades, Jacobson said.
As lawmakers and health experts wrestle over whether a controversial chemical, bisphenol-A, should be banned from food and beverage containers, a new analysis by an environmental group suggests Americans are being exposed to BPA through another, surprising route: paper receipts.
The Environmental Working Group found BPA on 40 percent of the receipts it collected from supermarkets, automated teller machines, gas stations and chain stores. In some cases, the total amount of BPA on the receipt was 1,000 times the amount found in the epoxy lining of a can of food, another controversial use of the chemical.
Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst with the environmental group, says BPA's prevalence on receipts could help explain why the chemical can be detected in the urine of an estimated 93 percent of Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"We've come across potentially major sources of BPA right here in our daily lives," Lunder said. "When you're carrying around a receipt in your wallet for months while you intend to return something, you could be shedding BPA into your home, into your environment. If you throw a receipt into a bag of food, and it's lying there against an apple, or you shove a receipt into your bag next to a baby pacifier, you could be getting all kinds of exposure and not realize it."
In about two years, if all goes according to the plans of the Transportation Security Administration, those vintage airport magnetometer metal detectors will be replaced by electronic body scanner machines at all 2,200 security checkpoints in all 450 commercial airports in the United States.
If the heavy reader e-mail response to my recent columns about body scanners is any indication, passengers fully understand the rationale for the better technology — that magnetometers obviously don’t detect the serious threat posed by nonmetallic explosives. Yet it’s fair to say that travelers also do not fully trust the security agency’s assurances that the new machines are safe, that they can’t be defeated by a terrorist and that personal privacy will be protected — at least, to the extent the agency has claimed.
Let’s just focus today on radiation, a concern with one kind of body scanner that is being installed at airports, the so-called backscatter machines. As of last week, the agency had bought 250 backscatter units, which scan body surfaces using an “ultra low dose” of X-ray radiation, according to the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems.
The T.S.A. says it had also bought 242 other body scan machines that use millimeter wave technology, which doesn’t emit radiation but uses “harmless radio waves,” according to its manufacturer, L-3 Security and Detection Systems.
As of last week, the agency said, there were 99 backscatter units and 43 millimeter wave units at 41 airports. The machines cost about $150,000 each.
WASHINGTON — A proposed rule on mercury, a pollutant bad for fish and the people who eat too many of them, could help the administration of President Barack Obama get near its short-term climate goal, even if the U.S. Congress fails this year or next to pass a bill tackling greenhouse gases directly.
Senate Democrats crafting an energy bill have abandoned it until September, and for the rest of the year they probably will not debate climate measures like carbon caps on power plants and mandates for utilities to produce more power from renewable sources like wind and solar.
But while many people concerned about climate control have been focusing on the Senate, the Environmental Protection Agency, under its administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, has been quietly preparing to crack down on coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel, as never before.
Under Ms. Jackson — a former chemical engineer for an oil company who has said the idea that progress on the environment has to hurt the economy is a “false choice” — the agency declared late last year that greenhouse gases endangered human health and welfare.
Environmental activists were delighted to have Barack Obama replace George W. Bush as president. But greens are increasingly unhappy with Obama’s record – especially on climate change.When Barack Obama took over the White House from George W. Bush, environmental activists breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Under Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, resource extraction – logging, mining, drilling for oil and gas – as often as not were favored over protection of habitat and endangered species. So was carbon-emitting energy production over conservation and “green” renewable energy.
No surprise there, since both Bush and Cheney had been oil men. It was more than symbolic that environmentalists got short shrift in the backroom meetings of Cheney’s energy task force.
But things would be different with a progressive, young Democrat in the White House, enviros thought.
'A green, dream team'
Just as important to those looking for a change in direction were Obama’s appointments to high environmental offices: Carol Browner, who’d headed the EPA under Bill Clinton, as White House climate and energy policy chief; Lisa Jackson, former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, as EPA administrator; former director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and US Senator Ken Salazar as secretary of the Interior; and as secretary of Energy, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu.
Together, they were seen as “a green dream team,” as Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters, put it at the time.
WASHINGTON — The nation's farmers could face severe restrictions on the use of pesticides as environmentalists, spurred by a favorable ruling from a judge in Washington state, want the courts to force federal regulators to protect endangered species from the ill effects of agricultural chemicals.
The eight-year-old ruling by a federal judge in Seattle required the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Environmental Protection Agency to review whether 54 pesticides, herbicides and fungicides were jeopardizing troubled West Coast salmon runs.
The agencies moved recently to restrict the use of three of the chemicals, including a widely used one with the trade name Sevin, near bodies of water that flow into salmon-bearing streams, and they're considering restrictions on 12 additional chemicals. The Washington State Department of Agriculture says such restrictions would prevent pesticide use on 75 percent of the state's farmland.
A federal judge in California has issued a similar ruling that involves 11 endangered and threatened species and 75 pesticides in the San Francisco Bay area.
Rather than continuing to file piecemeal lawsuits, the Center for Biological Diversity says it will file a broader suit this summer that involves nearly 400 pesticides and almost 900 species that are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Washington state officials said the restrictions that could result from that lawsuit could affect agricultural production significantly in at least 48 states.
Coal-fired power stations are a major producer of the greenhouse gas CO2, but there is no alternative to the fuel in the near future. Energy companies are hoping that carbon capture and storage technologies may be the answer, but many local residents don't want CO2 stored under their backyards.
When Rolf Martin Schmitz, a manager with the German energy giant RWE, drove to the North Sea resort island of Sylt last summer, he immediately noticed the signs. Along the side of roads throughout the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, he was greeted by images of skulls. Residents had installed the billboards to protest against underground storage sites for carbon dioxide that may be built in the region.
Citizens fear dangerous leaks of the gas, which can be hazardous at high concentrations, and other health risks. Schmitz, on the other hand, is worried about the future of his company.
Schmitz is the head of the domestic operations of RWE, Germany's second-largest electricity producer, whose most important energy source is coal. Burning the material creates large amounts of the greenhouse gas CO2. Energy companies are working at full speed to develop so-called carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which involves capturing CO2 and storing it underground. Schmitz believes that the technology provides a way to solve the emissions problem associated with coal-fired power plants.
Cordless telephones emit as much radiation as cell phones, the Health Ministry stated yesterday in a warning to the general public.
The radiation emitted by cordless phones is non-ionizing, the same as cell phones. Still, the ministry says it's better to use regular landline telephones.
Non-ionizing radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation that does not possess enough energy to cause ionization in matter, the Environmental Protection Ministry explains. Its wide spectrum includes ultra-violet light, visible light, infrared radiation, radio frequency and more.
"Information passes through the base unit and the handset [the mobile unit - the actual phone] in the form of radio waves," the ministry explains.
While studies into the potential hazards of cell-phone use are ongoing, on its website the Health Ministry counsels the public to err on the side of caution.
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