Boston, MA vs West, TX

This is a brief post, just because this thought has been bugging me all day....  Two douchebags with jihadi ideas in their heads and some homemade bombs blow up the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring-- what, 170?--and we turn over every stone in six towns to find them....as it should be. 

Some douchebags in Texas decide to flout federal laws that have been in force for decades, because obeying would cost them money, and as a result get sloppy with explosive chemicals and blow a small town off the map, killing 14 people and injuring we don't even know how many....

One is a national tragedy, and the other is ultimately going to be written off as an 'industrial mishap.'  Are the douchebags in Texas really any less evil than the douchebags in Boston, for all that their motivation to save a buck on safety and upkeep was so banal? 

Actually, not to moralize, but alhough it lacks the visceral horror of the Boston tragedy-- which is murder by two guys whose sole goal was death and havoc, plain and simple-- IMHO the Texas thing is in some ways worse because it was ENTIRELY PREVENTABLE.  We can't blame a McVeigh or an abdel-Rahman or a bin Laden or a Tsarnaev for this. 

In my experience working in the environmental industry, stuff like the West fertilizer plant explosion doesn't happen unless you have a really serious and ingrained climate of sloppiness, lack of maintainance, and safety provisions that are just plain missing, all of which can usually be blamed on management's bad decisionmaking and wilful neglect, and that in turn is usually due to either management not caring, not understanding (two problems we have a lot more of nowadays, since plant managers USED to be mostly engineers rather than MBAs), or not  wanting to spend the money.  That OSHA hadn't been to the plant since 1985 isn't an excuse-- you're supposed to follow these procedures becasuse they will help prevent disasters, not because OSHA might fine you a few thousand dollars. 

Just for clarification, there's a lot more to OSHA than just "lift with your legs, not with your back," hardhats, and safety railings.  Most of the requirements for safe storage and handling of explosive, flammable, and toxic materials are part of OSHA.

That's all I've got tonight....

Burning Plastic Can Kill You

Just as a PSA-- a firefighter friend of mine was recently hospitalized for several days after responding to a fire and unknowingly inhaling hydrogen cyanide (HCN). The 'fire' was a plastic dish that an elderly woman had mistakenly put on a stove, and which melted, ignited, and gave off hydrogen cyanide. It wasn't much of a mess but it was still enough to almost kill someone. DO NOT BURN OR MELT PLASTIC.

You can also take this as a good reason to rationalize the use of plastics on the whole.

Everyone knows fires contain lots of things that are dangerous to breathe-- carbon monoxide, smoke, too-hot air, etc.  HCN poisoning is rapidly becoming a major concern for firefighters; a lot of good people --residents, neighbors, and firefighters alike-- have been sent to the hospital over the last few years with HCN poisoning.

With the increased use of plastic in the last couple decades, particularly in building materials themselves (PVC pipe, plastic-based carpet, vinyl tile) fires are actually becoming even more hazardous than they used to be, since the air in and near the buildings is saturated with toxic (and I MEAN toxic) vapors,  fumes, and particulates.(footnote 1)  This is one reason SCBA tanks and full-face respirators have become standard turnout equipment for fire crews rather than specialty kit, and why departments able to afford them in these days of eagle-squeezing budgets are issuing HCN alarms to their first responders.

During the 2003 Station Nightclub fire in Providence, Rhode Island, which killed 100 people-- and which my brother survived, may any gods who might be listening be thanked-- the fire generated enough carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide to turn the place into a gas chamber in NINETY SECONDS.(footnote 2)
Building materials or plastic products don't typically contain HCN itself (unless, as a remote possibility, as a dye) but hydrogen cyanide itself is very flammable and solid HCN will probably burn to nothing before it can become a hazard, if nothing aerosolizes or evolves it to a gas.

The atmospheric problems are created when the compound forms as a combustion byproduct, e.g. the vinyl component in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) reacts with the nitrogen in the atmosphere or another nitrogen compound. The vinyl chloride donates the hydrogen and carbon, the ammonia donates the nitrogen and more hydrogen, and the fire provides the energy to fuel the reaction.   A related reaction can also generate hydrochloric acid (HCL) gas, using hydrogen and the chlorine component.

This article from Fire Engineering.com  sums up some of the hazards of HCN in the atmosphere.  You can get dangerous quantities of HCN from even very small and apparently insignificant incidents-- case in point, what happened to my friend.  A plastic dish on a stove almost killed him.

If significant concentrations are inhaled, it can be extremely dangerous within very short time windows, since HCN poisoning shuts down cell respiration.  HCN poisoning Initial symptoms of cyanide poisoning can occur from exposure to 20 to 40 ppm, including weakness, headache, mental confusion, vertigo, fatigue, anxiety, shortness of breath, and sometimes nausea and vomiting (your body is trying to detox itself). The mental weakness is a killer because it hinders your ability to recognize the problem and escape.
10 minutes' exposure in an atmosphere of ~300 milligrams per cubic meter of air will kill you.  2200 milligrams per cubic meter will kill you in ONE minute.   HCN gas has a bitter almond odor with an air odor threshold concentration of about half a part per million.  Unfortunately, your sense of smell won't save you because if there's burning plastic around, it'll stink enough to mask the HCN odor.

The current Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) permissible exposure limit (PEL) for hydrogen cyanide is 11 mg per cubic meter as an 8-hour time-weighted average (TWA) concentration.
The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) has assigned hydrogen cyanide a not-to-be-exceeded ceiling limit value of 4.7 ppm (5 mg/cubic meter of air. NOTE THE DIFFERENCE. (Footnote 3)

The standard treatment (in the US, at any rate) is a small inhaled dose of amyl nitrite, followed by intravenous sodium nitrite, followed by intravenous sodium thiosulfate, usually in conjunction with supplied oxygen to keep the cell respiration and the lungs going and to keep off cyanosis or hypoxia.

Hydrogen cyanide IS naturally occurring and is found in some foods, e.g. apple seeds  and almonds, but when ingested and digested it is harmless, unless you have chronic exposures like people in Africa who eat lots of cassava roots for thirty years and don't get enough Vitamin B.  Ferrocyanide compounds are very stable and can be consumed safely-- they don't degrade, get metabolized, or bioaccumulate in the human body, they just go out the other end.

Be safe, everyone.

Tom

Footnote 1 - I can't stop myself from being pedantic here.  Vapors and fumes are different things.  Vapors are the gas form of liquids; a fume is very small airborne particles that have cooled from a very hot vapor or aerosolized solid (usually from metal, e.g. the workplace hazard 'metal fume fever'). The difference between a vapor and a fume is important when designing ventilation systems or selecting respirators.


Footnote 2 - I use the gas chamber term with all seriousness, because the Zyklon B gas used in the gas chambers Nazi death camps like Auschwitz was essentially HCN adsorbed to a carrier, and which had been a commercial pesticide before the Nazis decided that certain racial elements were pests.


Footnote 3 - Lemme just note here-- as a professional working in the environmental industry, it is my very considered opinion that most OSHA standards are unscientific and indefensible crap, based on a limited set of knowledge that mostly hasn't been updated since the 1970s, and that they are not sufficiently protective... and when I say that I mean protective of ME and my coworkers.  Unless faced with a regulatory requirement I can't argue my way past, I use the ACGIH standards because they have an additional thirty years' worth of research and toxicology experience behind them, and as a result of that, are usually much more stringent than OSHA's.  At one point about fifteen years ago, OSHA tried to adopt the ACGIH's standards as OSHA's own, but the legal people and ACGIH (who weren't thrilled with the idea) shot the idea down and told OSHA they couldn't copy the product of a private organization, and to do their own damn homework.

My Letter to Earthjustice

I wrote a very angry letter to Earthjustice today.  Normally I support environmental advocacy groups, but every once in a while I come across something that makes me shake my head in despair.  In this case, the issue is the regulation of coal ash from power plants.  Coal ash is currently a topic of much dispute, given the potential hazards it can create (e.g. the Kingston, Tennessee ash lagoon disaster in 2008).  Suffice it to say I know a lot about coal ash.

Earthjustice published this online press release regarding the handling and disposal of coal ash in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The press release unfortunately contained some glaring errors, and I wrote the letter below in order to assist Earthjustice in correcting the errors.  I regret using some of the angrier words that I employed, but I was feeling a bit insulted by what they had published, and was angry when I wrote this.

Unfortunately, sometimes you owe your friends the duty of shouting at them when they screw up badly enough.  (Apologies in advance to any friends of mine who read this!)


This experience has been a big disappointment for me, since I want groups like Earthjustice to succeed and flourish.  I've donated time and money to helping a number of them (though lately they seem only to want my money). 

The role of environmental advocacy groups, such as Earthjustice, MassPIRG, the Sierra Club, etc. is to inform the public on environmental hazards and other issues.  It's therefore essential that the advocacy groups provide the correct information-- complete, properly researched and sourced, technically astute, and cognizant of the relevant state and federal regulations and statute.  That's not easy.  It's a sad fact that advocacy groups like these don't have very many technical people on their staffs.  This is why people like EPA whistleblower William Sanjour (a personal hero of mine) are so valuable, because they possess both the personal inclination and the professional expertise to make a solid case for an environmental cause.  Enthusiasm and public outreach are excellent and indispensable things, but they cannot replace expertise in the subject matter. 

Wrong or incomplete information ultimately does more harm than good; when exposed as incorrect after an advocacy organization used it to beat the drum of public opinion, the public responds with cynicism and apathy, the advocates are exposed to ridicule, and the cause itself loses credibility, leading to a situation best described with a quote from an angry Bodie Broadus on The Wire-- "...and now we look like bitches."  We expect hyperbole and glibness with facts from Fox News-- a news organization that blames its excesses on being entertainment, and which once claimed as a legal defense to have no legal obligation to broadcast the truth-- and we damn them for it.  These groups should at least aspire to be better than Fox News.  I haven't read everything Earthjustice has written, and I hope that this document was an isolated incident.

Earthjustice has promised a reply, which I will post when it arrives.



Ego servire huic veritatem.....

June 12, 2012

Ms. [Name Redacted], Legislative Associate

Earthjustice

Suite 702

1625 Massachusetts Avenue

Washington, DC 20036

Dear Ms.[Name Redacted]

I recently reviewed Earthjustice’s press release, Massachusetts Coal Ash Disposal and Reuse, and noted several serious errors in it.

As an environmental professional working in Massachusetts and specializing in hazardous and solid waste management (including coal ash, things that go boom, and worse), and as a self-identified tree hugger who helps to run the Green Drinks meet-up in Springfield, MA, this is a disappointing smack in the face from an environmental advocacy organization that I ordinarily respect. 

Accordingly, writing on my own behalf, I offer the following comments as assistance to Earthjustice in correcting the errors.

Your document’s most significant error is an egregious misinterpretation of a statutory exemption in the Massachusetts Public Health Law, Chapter 111 Section 150A, which your document presents as exempting coal ash from state waste management requirements. Your document then incorrectly informs the reader that Massachusetts somehow uniquely does not regulate coal ash (which is not actually possible, given the federal requirements of Subtitle D of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, as amended). 

The relevant passage from your document states, as quoted verbatim:

State Law Deficiencies

·         The Massachusetts Solid Waste Act, Chapter 111, s. 150A, specifically exempts coal ash from solid waste regulations. The use of coal ash as fill or for any commercial or industrial purpose (or when stored for such use) does not need approval from the local board of health and is not regulated by the Department of Environmental Protection.

·         Chapter 111, s. 150A also currently exempts the disposal of coal ash in a monofill (single waste landfill) from solid waste regulations, including the requirement to obtain approval from local boards of health.

None of these statements are correct.  To the contrary, Massachusetts does regulate coal ash, but not necessarily or automatically as a waste material.  The Massachusetts Solid Waste Regulations and Hazardous Waste Regulations, and their authorizing statutes, each place great emphasis on recycling.  Materials that are recycled are not considered to be a waste, since they have value, can be productively used, and are not being discarded.  This paradigm is consistent with federal statute and regulation. 

In particular, the relevant text from Section 150 reads:

Ash produced from the combustion of coal, including but not limited to fly ash and bottom ash, shall not be construed as refuse, rubbish, garbage, or waste material under this section when used as a raw material for concrete block manufacture, aggregate, fill, base for road construction, or other commercial or industrial purpose, or stored for such use. (Emphasis mine) 

This is a targeted exemption included in the statute specifically to encourage the recycling of coal ash into usable products, such as concrete, in preference to land disposal.  It is emphatically not a blanket exemption from regulation since ash not being reused or stored for reuse is a waste and remains subject to solid waste management laws.  The original intent of the exemption was to avoid requiring commercial facilities such as concrete block manufacturers or areas of highway where coal ash was used as a structural fill to seek approval as registered landfills or solid waste facilities (in MA, this is dubbed “Site Assignment”) on top of their existing requirements.  They are still required to handle the materials appropriately and are subject to civil and criminal enforcement actions for failure to do so. The same part of Section 150A later specifically notes,

[The MassDEP] shall have jurisdiction to determine, after notice and hearing, that the establishment or operation of such a [recycling] location has created a nuisance condition by reason of odor, dust, fires, smoke […]

The reuse of coal ash as a base for road construction, landfill cover, or fill material also is not taken for granted, but requires the proponent file a site-specific Beneficial Use Determination with the MassDEP, in which analytical data collected from the actual ash or other material is used to conduct a pre-construction risk assessment for human health or ecological risks, based on the same 1x10E6 (one chance in one million chances) risk factors used for MassDEP’s pollution remediation standards.  All such determinations are subject to MassDEP approval.

Coal ash that fails TCLP analysis or otherwise qualifies as a hazardous waste may not be beneficially reused unless the method of reuse (as proven to MassDEP’s satisfaction) prevents human health or ecological damage.  In the interim, the material must be managed as a hazardous waste rather than as a solid waste. 

Ergo, even recycling operations are subject to regulatory oversight and must conform to established standards for the protection of human health and the environment.

If the ash is not going to be reused, it is a waste and is subject to the standard solid waste (and sometimes hazardous waste) requirements (e.g. disposal only at a DEP- approved facility).  Any inappropriate use or disposal of ash is subject to civil or criminal penalties.

The same part of Section 150A states that:

No final disposal of ash produced by the combustion of coal may be accomplished by burial of such ash in the ground, other than as base for road construction or fill, unless the place where such disposal takes place has been assigned for such disposal by the board of health and plans for such disposal have been approved by the department pursuant to this section.  [In other words, coal ash may only be landfilled at permitted solid waste landfills]

These provisions have been part of Chapter 111 statute in their current form, unchanged, since 1976.  QED, coal ash is not exempt from statutory or regulatory requirements, as your document claims, and hasn’t been for over three decades.  I note that your document is not dated, but two of the footnotes reference documents from 2007, so I presume it was written later than 2007.  This sort of gross error is inexcusable and embarrassing, and damages the credibility of environmental advocacy organizations.

                       

In addition, since your document claims that boards of health are barred from taking action against coal ash facilities, please note that under Chapter 111 statute and under the implementing regulations, solid waste management and enforcement is directed jointly by MassDEP and the municipal boards of health, and since Massachusetts is a home rule state, municipalities retain the authority to regulate coal ash either under Chapter 111 or by means of local bylaws, e.g. as the City of Haverhill has done with a bylaw specifically prohibiting its storage or use within the city.  Boards of Health also possess considerable enforcement authority, and may take enforcement action independent of MassDEP.

In addition, the statement that “The advanced age of these [coal ash] ponds makes it unlikely that they have critical safeguards like liners and leachate collection systems” is questionable to say the least.   State and federal construction standards for lagoons went into effect in the 1980s, which antedates the construction of at least some of the ponds you list.  In any case, the construction and inspection plans for the lagoons are readily available in MassDEP files, and the presence or absence of liners and leachate collection systems could easily be verified with a few telephone calls, without even the need for a Freedom of Information Act request.

I’m not sure where the claim that coal ash is “exempt from monitoring” comes from, but it’s flatly not true.  All landfills in the Commonwealth, including coal ash monofills, are subject to groundwater monitoring requirements while in operation and for varying periods of time after the landfill is closed and capped.  Incidentally, the Mount Tom ash landfill, which you describe as still in operation, actually closed in the late 1990s and has been capped. 

The only other exemption I’m aware of for coal ash is an exemption under the Massachusetts Contingency Plan—the state’s remediation regulations—that exempts coal ash (together with wood ash and unburnt coal) from some but not all requirements of the cleanup regulations, under which it is exempt from release notification requirements only; if the ash poses a hazard, it must still be dealt with.  The rationale for this is that drilling a hole anywhere in a mill town or other urban area in the Commonwealth is almost certain to encounter coal ash or contaminants stemming from coal ash (typically metals or PAHs) because prior to the 1960s, coal bottom ash was widely used as fill material in urban properties.  Even undisturbed land accumulated coal residues from a century and a half of atmospheric deposition of the particulates that we now trap and manage as fly ash.  It is wholly impracticable to regulate such small and ubiquitous amounts of coal ash residues.

As a corollary to the above, Massachusetts has required all landfills opened in the Commonwealth since the early 1980s to be (at minimum) constructed according the RCRA Subtitle D requirements, including a liner, leachate collection system, etc.  Older pre-Subtitle D unlined landfills undergoing final closure and capping must receive leachate collection systems if leachate is a problem at the facility.  Unlined landfills in Massachusetts could not receive solid waste after 1992 (c.f. Chapter 153 of the Acts of 1992), but were required to dispose all further waste in lined landfill cells that meet or exceed Subtitle D requirements. 

On a final note-- the West Springfield power plant was originally built to be dual-fueled with coal and oil, but has not burned coal since at least 1999 (it currently burns fuel oil and natural gas), and the coal-firing equipment has been removed.  It is inaccurate at this point, thirteen years later, still to consider it a coal-fired plant. 

Professionals like myself work very hard to protect the environment.  I do not wish to be rude, but gross misinformation of this sort, written by people who self-evidently have not done due diligence in their research and consequently have no idea what they’re talking about, only makes our job harder by forcing us to re-fight battles in the legislature and in the court of public opinion over non-existent problems.

Accordingly, I politely suggest that Earthjustice remove the document from the Internet and correct it.

If you intend to continue publishing documents to raise public awareness of environmental issues—and I sincerely hope you continue—please make sure your facts are correct, or you will do a great disservice to everyone, including yourselves and those for whom you advocate.

I am at your disposal (no pun intended) if you have any further questions on the matter.

Yours,

[me], CHMM

Salt, Pollution, and Capitalism

I was reading a friend's blog on Commonground, a community forum for environmental engineers, geologists, the occasional lawyer, etc., and he referenced this article here, from the Economist of all places. It's a review of a book titled, The Case for Business in Developing Economies, by Ann Bernstein.

The Economist's summary email read:

Companies shouldn't worry about their "triple bottom line”—profits, people and the planet—since, ultimately, it's simply by pursuing profits that companies help their community, argues Ann Bernstein. Nebulous goals such as helping humanity and the environment sound worthy but don't add up to much, Bernstein says, so companies should stick to what they do best: making money and spreading prosperity through society as a whole.

With that, how could I pass it up? I pulled some strings and got an advance copy of the book. It has some good points, and it has some very bad points.


The author, Ann Bernstein, presents her book as a response to Naomi Klein’s wildly popular No Logo, a popular 2000 book criticizing globalization in the aftermath of the 1999 World Trade Organization popularly known as the “Battle in Seattle.” This book has, over the last ten years, become an international best-seller and one of the seminal texts of the anti-globalization movement, particularly in encouraging the public to seek out the sources of what they consume and the circumstances under which it was produced.


Bernstein offers her book (in her own words) “in praise of enterprise and corporations.” Her complaint is that businesses, particularly industrial corporations, are unfairly limited by expectations of “corporate social responsibility,” which impose on businesses responsibility for social and environmental stewardship. This book is essentially a polemic in favor of business regulated only by itself, as Bernstein argues that business should be given a free hand to do what it exists to do—make money—so that what benefits business can (notionally) ultimately benefit all. This is Atlas Shrugged with a corporation standing in for John Galt.


Bernstein’s book is, to put it mildly, poorly researched, poorly organized, and poorly thought out, with a number of gross internal inconsistencies between her evidence and her argument. Without even a pretense at an evenhanded analysis, she lumps environmental activist groups in with terrorists and blackmailers (31), while a glance at the bibliography reveals that a number of her most heavily-cited sources are press releases, interviews, or other documents from corporations such as Texas Instruments, Coca-Cola, and Wal-Mart. Certain of her other sources are themselves controversial opinion pieces, particularly Paul Dreissen’s Eco-Imperialism – Green Power Black Death, a racially-tinged 2003 argument against emphasizing sustainable energy in developing African nations.


Ms. Bernstein is the founder and director of the Center for Development and Enterprise, an independent policy “think tank” based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was formerly head of the Urban Foundation, a business-backed NGO that had lobbied the Apartheid-era government for economic reforms, and a board member of the Development Bank of Southern Africa. Doubtless she was considered a hopeless liberal by the unbending standards of the erstwhile de Klerk government, but to modern eyes her argument reads as a paean to deregulation and wild-hunt capitalism. Granted, her business-as-the-solution stance may be influenced by South Africa’s 25% unemployment rate and lackadaisical record of corporations investing in long-term projects without government sponsorship, financial guarantees, and considerable leeway in dealing with both people and the planet.


Ms. Bernstein’s central argument is that for-profit corporations should play a greater role in fostering economic development in the developing world, what was once less charitably described as the Third World. That makes a certain amount of sense, given that for-profit corporations tend to be more efficient at generating wealth from a given resource than other organizations. She further argues that in the interest of encouraging more rapid development, corporations should not be required to include environmental or social stewardship elements into their operations, and focus exclusively on the money-making end of things.


Granted, Ms. Bernstein does not voice the desire that the whole of the developing world be carved up among corporate interests, ala King Leopold’s domain in the Congo. One of her better arguments was for encouraging development by locally-owned corporations, preferably locally-owned, rather than internationals, NGOs, who would hopefully keep the wealth local and plow it back into the country’s economy rather than pumping it off to London or New York (or more likely these days, the Cayman Islands). So far, so good.


That still leaves us with Ms. Bernstein’s desire to ditch the other two elements of the ‘triple bottom line,’ namely people and the planet, the two elements which charge a corporation to embrace some element of social and environmental stewardship—if not making the world a better place, then at least not making it worse. In her case studies of corporate success stories in the developing world, she wholly omits discussing their effects on natural resources, e.g. air and water pollution from foreign-owned plants, and singularly avoids discussing more destructive industries such as oil and gas production, mining, and the like.


“People” and “the planet” are notionally the two principal areas of corporate public responsibility, the two metrics by which we judge whether or not a corporation is behaving as a “good citizen,” or when the corporation demonstrates that it cares about something more than itself. From a corporation’s point of view, though, these initiatives are usually public relations at best or balance-sheet liabilities at worst, and more likely to be obstacles than assets.


Ms. Bernstein cites the example of a pipeline that global energy giant ExxonMobil built in Chad. Although the project was eventually completed, Ms. Bernstein uses it as an example of the kind of extra costs that “people” and “planet” concerns can impose on a project, including relocation and compensation of villagers, a circuitous route, and avoidance of gorilla habitat.


Her argument in this instance is that the added costs, negative publicity, and other difficulties nearly convinced Exxon to abandon the project altogether, and that such concerns actually make companies reluctant to invest in Third World projects.


What makes these requirements so burdensome that abandoning them would be a good thing? Their purpose is to ensure that the benefit of the development—which invariably comes at a cost in damage to the environment—is not the corporation’s alone.


The author also quotes a vitriolic statement from James Shikwati of Kenya (borrowing the passage wholesale from Dreissen):

Why do Europe’s developed countries impose their environmental ethics on poor countries that are simply trying to pass through a stage they themselves went through? After taking numerous risks to reach their current economic and technological status, why do they tell poor countries to use no energy, and no agricultural or pest control technologies that might pose some conceivable risk of environmental harm? Why do they tell poor countries to follow sustainable development doctrines that really mean little or no energy or economic development?” (Bernstein 108, Dreissen 30)

Although Ms. Bernstein does not explain who Mr. Shikwati is, he is a prominent Kenyan libertarian economist, founder and Director of the Inter Region Economic Network, and has argued that foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa does nothing materially to aid the common people, but only abets government corruption and unbalances the national economy.


In response to Ms. Bernstein, and by extension to Mr. Shikwati, it is true that the position of the developing world is different from that of the developed world when it comes to issues such as clean energy and the development of natural resources. The developed world has the comparative luxury of an existing infrastructure, so that introducing clean power, for example is essentially a matter of replacing old fossil fuel plants with cleaner power sources on the same grid. Developing nations often have to build a nation’s infrastructure from scratch, grid and plants alike, which understandably results in a measure of frustration when foreign pressures are brought to bear to invest in unfamiliar wind turbines or solar power, rather than simply burning readily-available coal.


The same paradigm is true for many other issues, such as food or water resources—what appear to be ‘luxury items’ in the developed world, such being able to afford to turn away from effective but toxic pesticides such as DDT, genetically-modified food, infrastructure projects like dams—are simply not options to states such as Kenya. Without DDT there are malaria epidemics, without dams there is no water for irrigating farmland, and without genetically-modified food, there is famine.


The paradoxical result is that the developed world can afford unspoiled land but has only land scarred by two centuries of man’s labors, while the developing world has unspoiled land but cannot afford not to spoil it. Ms. Bernstein argues that nations in the developing world should have a free hand to regulate their own environmental practices, free of interference by NGOs or strings attached to loans from the World Bank, and by extension those of the corporations operating under their jurisdiction—in essence, to retain the right to sacrifice the environment in exchange for economic progress.


Although Ms. Bernstein disingenuously ignores it, the fact remains, that the developed world has come to its current state of environmental knowledge through bitter experience—consider the Great Smog of London, the Love Canal toxic waste dump in the US, the Bhopal catastrophe in India, or the Hungarian sludge lagoon disaster of 2010.


The last century and a half of the developed world’s experience offer a valuable object lesson on the merits of corporate good citizenship in environmental matters, and are relevant for two reasons. First, the developing world is repeating mistakes the developed world has already made, suffered through, and recovered from. Secondly, many of the corporations engaged in the developing world –for example, Royal Dutch Shell or AngloGold Ashanti--are multinational organizations born in the developed world, which have now extended their reach—sometimes for the express purpose of evading stricter standards in their home base countries. In addition to being closer to the source of production, oil refineries built in Nigeria do not have to have the same expensive pollution control systems as oil refineries built in Texas.


So much for Bernstein.


As it happened, I was reading Mark Kurlansky's Salt today-- it's a layman's history of salt production and consumption. I happily recommend just about everything Kurlansky's written.


What struck me is that Ms. Bernstein's argument—profit above all else, with profit and its trickle-down payoffs supposedly a panacea for a region’s problems-- is pretty much exactly the one that Kurlansky describes being advanced by Salt Union Ltd. in Cheshire (part of the northwest coast of England) in the late 19th Century. Most of the geology of Cheshire is rock salt, and people had been pumping brine out of the ground and evaporating it into table salt or packing salt for centuries. Pumping the salt-saturated (25% salt by weight) brine out of the ground drew fresh water into the salt formations, which dissolved the rock salt into new brine, much as water erodes limestone and creates caves.


By the late 1800s, though, the quantities and rates of brine withdrawal were causing severe subsidence problems throughout the county, had created, enormous sinkholes, and had pretty much obliterated most of the area's sources for potable water. Salt Union didn't start the damage, but did exacerbate it, and had bought up most of the other salt producers by 1890, by which time it controlled three-fourths of the British Empire's salt business and was the wealthiest corporation in the UK or any of the colonies.


When the locals in Cheshire focused on Salt Union as the cause of the damage and demanded compensation, the corporation gave them the same line Bernstein did-- the people whose houses have suddenly fallen into holes had been compensated by the profit brought to the area by the salt industry. The legal battles went on for years and eventually wound up in Parliament, and weren't settled until the government established a Compensation Board, funded by a flat tax on all producers (which promptly drove many small producers out of business, to Salt Union’s benefit) that handled reimbursements for damage caused by subsidence. Salt Union, Ltd. is still in business to this day.


If Bernstein had her way, her book argues, companies operating in the developing world would be free to act like Salt Union did, and divest themselves of any obligations toward environmental or social responsibility in the name of the almighty dollar. In fact, this is how most oil and gas producers, mining concerns, and other industrial corporations have operated in the developing world since the end of colonialism.


I find it surprising that she would write this, given the environmental problems in the developing nations with which she is presumably most familiar. Multinational corporations such as Shell have left an enormous environmental footprint in southern Nigeria, leaving vast swaths of land ruined with clear-cutting, defoliation, hasty drainage work that fouls rivers and drowns farmland, displaced people, and wholesale pollution of soil, water, and air, while oil revenues account for 90% of the Nigerian government’s income. State monopolies such as the Israeli Chemical Company have exploited scare resources (e.g. the Jordan River and the Dead Sea) to the point of ruining them.


In Ms. Bernstein’s own South Africa, beginning in the 1930s the government essentially rezoned the district of South Durban by government fiat, evicting thousands of residents and converting the area a vast petrochemical industrial park. As recently as the year 2000, South Africa had no legally-binding pollution regulations. The average concentrations of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide in another South African city, Cape Town, which is usually considered a comparatively pleasant seaside city-- are significantly higher than those in the slums of Calcutta, India, which has yet to live down allusions to the infamous “black hole.” Organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides, banned in most of the rest of the world due to their toxicity, remain in common use on South African farms. The major cleanup provisions of the National Environmental Management: Waste Act are soon to go into effect, requiring property owners to clean up contaminated sites, but the government lacks the ability to enforce the laws.


It’s fair to say that nearly all of the world’s economy consists of the workings of corporations of one sort or another, to the extent that the term ‘corporations’ is nearly synonymous with the private sector in general. Corporations are organizations that ultimately exist primarily on paper, and (current US election laws notwithstanding), corporations are emphatically not people. They do not eat, breathe, drink, get cancer, or worry about their children. They are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil. For all their potential size and legal complexity, corporations are ultimately as simple as a liver fluke. Corporations are money-making operations, which take some sort of resource and process it, sell it, or otherwise extract some kind of value from it, expressed as money.


Therefore, since corporations are the part of society that has the most to do with extracting resources and generating wealth, if corporations are not held responsible for environmental impacts of their work, who will be held responsible? Who else is there? The government? The local citizenry, who are already inconvenienced? Or, should polluters be given a free pass, with everyone else told up to shut up, suffer the side-effects of development, and live with the mess, all in the name of a (likely brief) spell of prosperity? Life in the developing world is already hard enough—a multibillion dollar corporation like Shell shouldn’t get a free hand to make it worse.


Take the United States as an object lesson in exactly how corporations behave in the absence of regulations to protect the environment.


Prior to the 1970s, industrial corporations in the United States had essentially no legal, popular, or moral expectations to meet regarding environmental stewardship, and the result of this was catastrophic air pollution, destruction of the nation’s rivers and lakes (to the point that a large part of Lake Erie, for example, remains essentially biologically dead to this day), abandoned mines pockmark dozens of states, hundreds of thousands of properties polluted by hazardous wastes, and untold millions of people have been sickened or killed by toxic exposure. The sheer scope of the United States’ environmental problems, as belatedly realized in the 1970s, was such that the new regulations included requirements to protect public health as well as ecological damage.


Yes, we as a society benefited from the industries that created this pollution. The American way of life from the 1950s onwards was built on it, fueled by cheap plastics, cheap gasoline, and cheap food from farms using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. We would not be where we are now without strip mines, coal-fired power plants or lavish use of asbestos and chlorinated hydrocarbons. That’s “better living through chemistry,” all right.


The obvious response to such wholesale pollution, is to hold the polluters responsible for the damage the caused. To do anything else is to essentially privatize the profits generated by a polluting operation, while socializing the costs and damages. This does nothing to protect the environment or public health, and in fact essentially subsidizes polluters by relieving them of the financial consequences of their actions. The environment’s financial status would revert to the sort of ‘tragedy of the commons’ scenario that Garret Hardin discussed in his seminal essay in Science in 1968.


A corporation’s bottom line is always the first concern—since corporations exist to make money, and if a corporation does not make money it goes out of business, and everything else is moot.


In other words, if environmental stewardship isn’t an enforceable requirement, or at the least loaded with very powerful incentives or penalties, the corporation probably won’t do it. This is not to damn all corporations as calculatedly indifferent to anything save the almighty dollar (though some doubtless are).


One of the most damning examples of this behavior is Monsanto’s behavior concerning polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. In 1937, the Harvard School of Public Health completed a study that determined PCBs were toxic to humans and most other forms of life. Monsanto and two other industrial giants, Westinghouse, and General Electric, sat on the study for forty years because PCBs just brought in SO much darn money-- $22 million (in 1970 dollars) yearly for Monsanto alone. Monsanto was the sole US manufacturer of PCBs, and both General Electric and Westinghouse manufactured thousands of products containing them, including electrical equipment, paints, hydraulic oil additives, plasticizers, and a million other uses. After several years’ worth of investigations into the harmful effects of PCBs the US banned the manufacture of PCBs in 1977.


Of these three, Monsanto became the textbook case for corporate malfeasance and bottom-line rationalization, in large part because numerous lawsuits and government investigations over the past forty years have forced the corporation to disclose reams of confidential documents that recount the corporation’s attitude towards the environment, the public, and even its own customers. Monsanto fought the PCB ban for ten years, to the point of conducting fraudulent toxicological studies that ‘proved’ PCBs were nontoxic. The directors of the laboratory that conducted studies on Monsanto’s behalf, Industrial Bio-Test Labs of Northbrook, Illinois, were subsequently convicted of fraud.


As an example of Monsanto’s behavior, corporate records show that in 1969 executives decided that although fish died within minutes of wastewater discharges from the corporation’s plant in Anniston, Alabama, “there was no reason to go to expensive extremes in limiting discharge form the plant” where PCBs were being manufactured. Much of the town and the nearby waterways are now heavily polluted with PCBs, due in large part to the dumping of vast quantities of PCB waste into the river and into landfills. Thousands of local residents have suffered severe health problems over the ensuing years—in 2003, Anniston lead the state in the number of birth defects found in newborns, and the cancer rate is 25% higher than the state average. Anniston residents first learned of the contamination in 1995, over a quarter century after Monsanto was indisputably aware of gross pollution problems at the Anniston facility.


That industrial corporations—in whatever nation-- have historically regarded environmental stewardship as a cost or liability becomes quite obvious when you look at how difficult it has been to pass regulations requiring stewardship of the planet from those extracting its resources. Monsanto spent over a decade actively arguing that PCBs were safe, and still refuses to acknowledge their danger. Even something as straightforward as the 1969 incarnation of the Safe Drinking Water Act –which did nothing more or less than to ensure the water the nation drinks is safe to consume-- took nearly five years to get through Congress due to the heavy lobbying from the oil, mining, and manufacturing sectors.


Perhaps the root of the problem is that money-focused corporations and actual human beings have different perceptions of what is valuable.


Money is not the only thing of value. Yes, this is 2011. Yes, pretty much every business decision made lately comes down to the pennies column in the financial spreadsheets. Yes, the economy trumped every economic and social issue save President Obama himself for the 2010 midterm elections. Yes, anyone with money is practically fawned over, whether he is a billionaire hedge-fund manager buying a fourth yacht or a restaurant owner able to put a down payment on a suburban house. Yes, it is very difficult to quantify “clean air” in dollars, Euros, or yuan when speaking in front of the stockholders or board of directors.


By contrast, the population of Dimock, Pennsylvania quite understandably values safe drinking water over corporate “money now” profits now that a natural gas hydrofracking project has ruined the town’s drinking water supply.


The people of Madhya Pradesh in India certainly valued the lives of people killed when the run-down and undermanned pesticide plant belonging to Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary suffered a catastrophic failure, releasing a cloud of poison gas over the city of Bhopal in 1984.


The residents of the La Toma region in Colombia certainly value their land, which the South African mining concern AngloGold Ashanti would very much like to strip-mine for gold over the heads of the local inhabitants and small private mine owners, citing mining rights granted to it by the Colombian government.


Residents of the Niger River delta in Nigeria are accustomed to oil spills as a routine part of life. The country’s first major environmental activist, Ken Saro Wiwa, was murdered by the Sani Abacha regime in 1995 after taking the environmental crisis there to the world stage.


As you can see, money is still not the only thing of value.


Money is fungible, yes, and can be exchanged for goods and services (Homer Simpson's brain said so, so it must be true) but while money is replaceable, most of the other “goods,” such as clean water, clean air, critter habitat, whales, passenger pigeons, etc. are far more fragile than Hardin understood them to be, and pretty much irreplaceable. Once land is ruined—for example, by careless open-pit mining, with nothing left behind save slag-heaps, pits, and polluted water—it changes from an asset to a liability. You can’t farm it, you can’t live on it, you can’t sell it, the water is worthless, and you can’t get any financial return out of it unless you spend a lot more money and a great deal of time to render it safe.


Sometimes natural resources are immediately necessary to sustain human life, let alone economic viability. In many places in the US, and many more overseas, such as most of Africa, simply having enough water, let alone drinkable water, is vitally important. The eastern United States generally doesn’t worry very much about water rights, but they are a very common and very contentious cause of disputes in the west. Nobody raised the issue of drilling in the Catskill Mountains region, from which New York City draws some of the best drinking water in the world without need for treatment or filtering, until the last few years. Meanwhile, concerns over drinking water have been percolating for decades in much of the Midwest, the Rockies, and the agricultural areas of rural California. If the water supply a Texan cattle rancher uses to water his herds dries up or becomes polluted and unusable, he is in dire straits indeed. If the source area for New York City’s drinking water is damaged, the economic costs just from the need to construct a treatment plant could run into the tens of billions of dollars. Now ask yourself why New York City’s water should be so protected, and Aba, Nigeria’s shouldn’t be.


A hypothetical upper-middle class businessman’s seven-figure salary is going to do him a fat lot of good if his drinking water is loaded with arsenic from mine tailings or fizzing with dissolved methane freed by gas hydrofracking. Granted, he could pay for a super-Brita or a lifetime supply of Dasani bottled water, but that costs money. He could sue the gas producer or the mining company, but that costs time and money, which in turn cuts into his quality of life.


This ruining of the commons is exactly what’s going on right now in Ms. Bernstein’s metaphorical backyard, in one of the economies for whom she is advocating industrialization and intensified resource extraction as a means to social and economic progress. Consider Nigeria again, where a reported 400 children have died since March 2010. They died of lead poisoning caused by unregulated gold mining.


Even clean air is a fragile resource. It’s been over fifty years since the UK passed air-quality legislation in response to the Great Smog of London in 1952—which killed over four thousand people in less than a week—and London air is still nothing pretty. It’s still better than Cape Town’s, though.


More to the point, the 'commons' - air, water, groundwater, public land, and so on—are not and should never be either open cookie jars or pollution-sinks. They are public resources, and public resources should not be used to subsidize private prosperity. Exactly what moral, legal, or economic arguments can be mustered in favor of allowing a chemical plant to discharge untreated toxic wastes into a publically-owned water body, thus ruining it for everyone else, simply to save the plant's owning corporation the cost of a wastewater treatment plant? Likewise, should they have the right to withdraw so much water from the water body that it leaves too little water for anyone else to use? Since when does, say, Omega Chemical's interest in its bottom line outweigh my right to go swimming without having my skin peeling off in sheets afterwards?


It’s a rather morbid and little-known fact, but the Environmental Protection Agency actually puts a dollar value on a single human life, for the purpose of evaluating the cost-effectiveness of hazardous waste cleanup options. It’s $7 million. Until the second term of the Bush administration, it was $8 million. The general idea of this grim calculus is that if the cost of a particular cleanup method costs more than $7 million per human life that would be saved, it’s not cost-effective and another method should be evaluated.


In conclusion, as much as some wish, we cannot have an economy without corporations, factories, mines, oil wells, and the like. Extracting resources from the earth will almost inevitably cause at least some damage to the environment. At the same time, however, some things are more important than "money now."


People and the natural environment are both resources that exist in and for the long term, and which require careful use and long-term planning to get the best out of them—“money later.” If you don't take care of your resources, you might have 'money now' in the short term, but you won't have 'money later' because there won't be anything to sell, or anyone to sell it to.

Is Offshore Drilling a Legitimate Enterprise?

Offshore oil drilling has, in the last two years, attracted more attention from the general United States public than it has had at any point in its history. Even before the April 20, 2010 disaster that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drill rig and unleashed a torrent of crude oil into the waters and beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, offshore drilling had developed into a significant battleground issue with economic, cultural, and political dimension.


Depending on one’s point of view, offshore drilling is a necessary evil, a legitimate exploitation of natural resources, a second-best option forced on the oil and gas industry by excessive regulation of possible onshore oilfields, or a dangerous process justified only by profit and the US’s dependence on petroleum.


The dispute over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska has recurred in Congress every few years since drilling was first proposed in 1977, and was a major rallying point for liberals after the Bush administration endorsed the idea in 2005. The chant of “Drill, baby, drill,” first heard at the 2008 Republican National Convention, likewise served as a rallying cry for conservatives during the latter part of the 2008 election and on through the first years of the Obama administration, right up until the news of the Deepwater Horizon disaster hit the world news on the morning of April 21, 2010.


This public tumult comes at a time when offshore drilling has, for all its hazards, become a vital part of the United States’ energy economy. A steadily increasing percentage of domestically-produced oil and natural gas comes from offshore sources: in 2009, 31% of the nation’s domestically-produced crude oil and 11% of its domestically-produced natural gas came from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone. Data gathered by NOAA and MMS accounts for 3,858 oil platforms in just two of the “planning areas” in US waters in the Gulf of Mexico. According to a 2009 Minerals Management Service report, “proved reserves in the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are estimated to be 20.30 billion barrels of oil and 183.7 trillion cubic feet of gas from 1,229 proved fields,” or roughly twice as much oil and seven times as much natural gas as the Prudhoe Bay cornucopia on the northern shores of Alaska was estimated to contain when that oilfield was first developed in the 1960s.


The complexity of offshore drilling has also grown immensely in the last several decades. In 1983, the deepest offshore well in the world was drilled in 760 feet of water, 13 miles off the coast of San Pedro, CA. A quarter century later, dozens of new wells are being installed each year in deep-sea locations (1 to 1.5 miles deep) and much further offshore; depths that were once extraordinary are now perforce normal. In 2009 alone, over three hundred new production wells were drilled in US waters in the Gulf, and nearly two-thirds of the active oil leases in the Gulf are in water more than 1,000 feet deep.


These deepwater locations are comparable to the one that blew out in April 2010 –designated MC 252-- during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, since most of them are being installed in the same oil and gas bearing geological formations. The deeper the water and the deeper the drilling, the more complex, expensive, and dangerous the operation becomes. Somewhat ironically, the last well the Horizon had completed prior to beginning the fateful one was the deepest well yet drilled at the time, a whopping 30,918 feet into the seabed under 4,132 feet of water.


The reason drilling in such difficult or sensitive areas has increased so dramatically is simple. The global oil economy is rapidly approaching “Hubbert’s peak,” a phenomenon first predicted by the scientist M. King Hubbert in 1956 and commonly known as “peak oil.” While new oil and gas resources can still be found, much of the accessible oil – the “reserves” or “proven reserves” in industry and governmental language-- has been consumed or is currently being extracted. In order to expand production or to replace wellfields that have ceased producing worthwhile quantities of oil and gas, the petroleum industry has to look to other sources, and what is left is more difficult and expensive to get. The days when a wildcatter in Texas or Wyoming could find vast new oilfields simply by looking for oil sheens on creeks are long gone. In many cases ‘new’ sources such as those in ANWR or the tar sands of western Canada have been known about for decades, but the cost/benefit balance that would render them profitable didn’t work out until oil became more scarce, driving up the worth of a resource that in earlier decades was of negligible value and making it cost-effective to exploit the resource.


On June 4, Sarah Palin complained on her Facebook page that “Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your [referring to ‘radical environmentalists’] protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it." This allegation is simply not true. What is true, though, is that most of the allegedly “safer” areas are already producing, already exhausted, or are too inaccessible, small, or difficult to be worthwhile. Most of them aren’t actually any safer, when all things considered.


The dilemma of whether to drill in ANWR or the ocean is a complex one. In either case, there is the potential for irreversible destruction of the environment—neither area is truly ‘safer’ than the other. Each area is home to numerous rare species of animal and plant life, who would be trampled and poisoned.


Other concerns include possible incompatibilities with other uses of the areas. The Gulf of Mexico, for example, is both a major commercial fishing area and crosshatched with scores of shipping lanes, and freighter captains enjoy navigating hundred-thousand-ton cargo ships through an obstacle course of oil platforms about as much as fishermen enjoy pulling up nets full of oil-poisoned shrimp.


Drilling in the ANWR or other remote areas is also not much simpler or cheaper than drilling in mile-deep water tens or hundreds of miles out to sea, or for that matter, not much easier than drilling at the South Pole. Consider the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, where a massive infrastructure of roads, pipelines, well complexes, oil storage facilities, supertankers, and company towns had to be constructed in a bitterly hostile arctic environment in order to extract the oil and get it to market. The 800-mile Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System alone cost $8 billion. All of this infrastructure is extremely expensive to operate and maintain. There is even a television show about the truck drivers who regularly ferry supplies north across the ice and tundra. The truth is that as profitable as it has proven, Prudhoe Bay wasn’t considered economically worthwhile until the gasoline shortages of the early 1970s drove petroleum prices up sharply.


The oil industry routinely weighs the costs of a offshore drilling against on-shore drilling, based on the amount and quality of oil and gas that could be extracted, and the cost to get it out of the ground and onto the market. A fifth-generation mobile drill rig such as the Deepwater Horizon—built at the cost of half a billion dollars, and with a billing rate of nearly half a million dollars a day for the rig, her crew, and all the support ships and other necessities—is a major item on any budget sheet. Add to that against the costs of having to fit out another arctic oilfield on the scale of Prudhoe Bay. BP is, in fact, contemplating exactly such a project, involving constructing an artificial island in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska.


Offshore drilling is an intrinsically dangerous and environmentally risky process. It can be done safely, if the proper safeguards are in place to prevent spills or to clean up pollution before it does too much damage. The problem is that the equipment and infrastructure to cope with oil pollution on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon’s simply does not exist. While a great deal of thought and effort has been put into devices such as blowout preventers and “Christmas trees,” which are intended to prevent spills, it is surprising to see how little the art and science of cleaning a spill up has advanced since the late 1960s, when the primary source of spills were leaks from ships in harbors rather than the relatively few and comparatively small offshore drilling and production rigs in use at the time. Despite the media attention given to “magic boxes,” “top hats,” and similar devices used in attempts to shut off the flow of oil and gas from the well, the primary tools for cleaning up spilled oil are still containment booms, skimmers, pumps, and brute manpower, and they are wholly inadequate for combating spills of the current magnitude.


Congressman John Culbertson of Texas described the Deepwater Horizon disaster as a ‘statistical anomaly’ in a June 18 open letter to President Obama, in which he protested the federal government reinstating its off-again, on-again moratorium on new offshore drilling. In one sense he is correct—only one of the thousands of wells in the Gulf blew out. On the other hand, consider the amount of damage this one well has done, the inability of BP and the federal government to cope with the disaster, and the amount of destruction that even three or four more blowouts of the same size could wreak.


In the long run, however, the choice between wildlife preserve and ocean will ultimately disappear, once scarcity and the inevitable depletion of existing oilfields has driven the cost of oil up and availability down. The situation will change from an either/or decision to a both/and situation, in which the US is forced by economic necessity to drill everywhere there is oil, regardless of the increasing costs to extract it.


Prudhoe Bay is estimated to be four-fifths depleted. Unless the US can reduce its dependence on petroleum, it will ultimately face the need to drill in both areas regardless of cost and consequences, simply because it cannot do without the oil. Bearing that sad truth in mind, the nation should seriously attempt on a large scale what has been often talked about over the last twenty years, but towards which nothing has been done—developing renewable energy sources and reducing the need for fossil fuels.

CAFOs: A Collective Colonic Cornucopia

Swine flu is overwhelming the news lately, but there is one aspect of the problem that seems to have fallen through the cracks.

Swine flu (H1N1, as the Center for Disease Control has designated it) is not a food-borne illness; you do not get it from eating pork products. It is spread by contact between people, the same as any other sort of flu. The name ‘swine flu’ is applied because it was originally an animal illness that has started infecting humans too.

Yes, it’s a new and fairly nasty disease, but if you behave reasonably and take the precautions that you would if you knew any other flu was going around your school or office, you will be fine. Essentially, do all the stuff your mom told you to do when you were five years old—blow your nose, don’t pick; wash your hands; load up on Vitamin C and drink a lot of water; stay home if you’re sick; and go to a doctor if you really feel horrible.

The Mexican government blames the outbreak on a hog farm in La Gloria, Veracruz, Mexico, with the first human cases of swine flu identified in the vicinity of the farm in early February. The current hypothesis is that fecal particles transported by wind or insects were somehow ingested by humans, allowing the disease to make the jump to humans.

The farm in question is owned and operated by Smithfield Foods, Inc., of Virginia, one of the world’s largest food supply companies, with an annual revenue of $11 billion and an annual production of approximately 5.9 billion pounds of pork and 1.4 billion pounds of beef.

Agribusiness is big money—the 10 million hogs raised annually in North Carolina are the state’s largest cash crop, surpassing Big Tobacco with $2 billion in annual revenues. 92% of these animals are raised on factory farms with more than 2,000 animals per facility. In 1983, North Carolina had about 23,000 hog farms, most of which had fewer than 200 hogs. By 1997, however, those ratios had changed. There were now fewer than 5,000 hog farms, but the average was now 2,000 or more animals per farm, and 480 farms had more than 5,000 animals each. Most of the small farmers were simply run out of business by large conglomerates like Smithfield Foods.

Agriculture is, in the United States, a uniquely privileged industry, one that was originally exempt from many state and federal environmental protection regulations such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act, as well as wetlands and natural resource protection requirements. Some popular pesticides (such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT) were, however, specifically banned for their damaging effects on wildlife. The reasoning for this, when these regulations were created during the 1970s, reflected government and the public’s sympathetic attitude towards farmers, and a recognition of the shoestring profit margins on which most farmers lived. The Clean Water Act did, however, identify those factory farms that existed then (mostly poultry farms) as ‘point sources’ of pollutants which could affect water quality.

That was more than thirty years ago, however, and the exemptions made somewhat more sense in the 1970s than it does today, given the consolidation and industrialization that has occurred in the agriculture sector over the last three decades, and the exponentially larger number of factory farms operating today. The autonomous family farm in the United States is no longer a meaningful part of the American food supply or economy, a victim of the unforgiving need for economies of scale in agriculture, and the inability of private owners to absorb the loss of a harvest as easily as a multibillion dollar corporation. Most family farms these days are contract farms, to whom a firm like Purdue or Tyson will subcontract the work of raising and feeding animals. Most of our food is produced, processed, and provided by a surprisingly small number of immense agribusiness combines, such as Smithfield Foods, ConAgra, Tyson Foods, and a few others. Monsanto and a few other firms also hold a firm sway over the fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, and other products used to support agriculture, particularly pesticide-resistant strains of ‘Roundup Ready’ plants, which allow a farmer to blast a field with weed killer without fear of killing the wheat along with the weeds.

Farms like the Smithfield facility in La Gloria frequently cram tens or hundreds of thousands of animals into a feeding complex. The layman’s term for such industrialized operations is a ‘factory farm,’ but many regulatory agencies, trade publications, environmental groups, and others generally refer to such operations as CAFOs, which, depending on who you ask, stands variously for Confined Animal Feeding Operation, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or Combined Animal Feeding Operation.

The current US EPA regulations for CAFOs, the 2008 CAFO Final Rule, define a facility as a “Large CAFO” (and thus subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act):

if it stables or confines as many as or more than the numbers of animals specified in any of the following categories:

• 700 mature dairy cows, whether milked or dry;
• 1,000 veal calves;
• 1,000 cattle other than mature dairy cows or veal calves. Cattle includes but is not limited to heifers, steers, bulls and cow/calf pairs;
• 2,500 swine each weighing 55 pounds or more;
• 10,000 swine each weighing less than 55 pounds;
• 500 horses;
• 10,000 sheep or lambs;
• 55,000 turkeys;
• 30,000 laying hens or broilers, if the AFO uses a liquid manure handling system;
• 125,000 chickens (other than laying hens), if the AFO uses other than a liquid manure handling system;
• 82,000 laying hens, if the AFO uses other than a liquid manure handling system;
• 30,000 ducks (if the AFO uses other than a liquid manure handling system); or
• 5,000 ducks (if the AFO uses a liquid manure handling system).

These are minimum thresholds, you understand—some facilities have ten times the number of animals needed to qualify as a Large CAFO. There is also a category called the Medium CAFO, which can cover smaller facilities with more direct potential for impact on the environment.

A CAFO can be summarized as an enormous number of animals crammed into a few buildings, unable to move more than a few feet in any direction, and essentially living in their own feces. Lots of animals mean big barns and enormous amounts of poop. Two years ago, I worked on a commercial poultry farm that had housed 25,000 turkeys, which is small by CAFO standards—some poultry farms in the Midwest, in the MidAtlantic, or elsewhere can house ten times as many birds. I can personally attest that the floors in these buildings were covered to the depth of a foot with excrement, wood chips, and the skeletal remains of dead turkeys, and that even months after the business had ceased operating, the stench was eye-watering.

Pigs in a CAFO facility.

Animals understandably do not thrive under these brutal conditions without substantial assistance from mankind, so it should be no surprise that factory-farmed animals are typically pumped full of hormones, antibiotics, and other substances from the day they are born until they are slaughtered. Diets are carefully adjusted to produce the most lean meat per animal for the least cost, which in some cases has a deleterious effect on the meat that is the end result—this is why pork is so much more lean now than it was ten years ago. Likewise, most factory-farmed cows are fed a steady diet of corn, which is cheap but fibrous, not easily digestible, and not very nutritious when compared to the grass that a cow is biologically structured to eat, which is why cows have to be stuffed full of nutritional supplements and pharmaceuticals.

Meat is not murder. Meat is manufacturing.

By contrast, the rule of thumb for non-industrial cattle raising, as suggested by the Ohio State University Agricultural Extension Program, is five acres of land per cow. A CAFO can raise hundreds or thousands of cows on the same land area, because it doesn’t depend on land area and grazing—it just locks the cows in stalls and shovels in the corn. Thirty years ago, treatment like this earned the raising of veal calves lasting opprobrium as an inhumane way to raise an animal, but it is for all intents and purposes how most cows are raised in the US today.

A typical CAFO, showing barns, lagoons, and support buildings. Photo courtesy of US EPA.

The large oblongs next to each group of barns are the manure lagoons. Guess why the fields in the above photos are that dark brown color.....

One of the most odious aspects of the livestock industry is the poop the animals produce, and which they by definition produce in almost unimaginably vast quantities. Nationwide, farm animals produce an estimate 1.6 billion tons of excrement per year. Some sixth-grade math will tell you that the farm animals produce in one day what the human population of the United States produces in three years.

Now imagine a factory farm in rural Iowa or Michigan holding ten thousand cows. A cow typically excretes twenty to twenty-five pounds of poop per day, or approximately ten times as much as an adult human. Ten thousand cows, then, produce 200,000 to 250,000 pounds of poop per day, equivalent to the excrement produced by the human population of the city of Manchester, NH. One dairy alone, the Vreba-Hoff II facility in Michigan, has a storage capacity of 22 million gallons of poop.

Vreba-Hoff Dairy II, south of Hudson, Michigan, partially flooded in 2003.

Unlike the collective daily bowel movements of the Queen City of New Hampshire, however, the poop produced by these ten thousand cows does not go into a sewer and does not go to a treatment plant. It goes, if we are lucky, into a storage lagoon the size of a football field, and there it sits. And sits. And sits. All through the hot summer, swarmed by flies, reeking to high heaven. Eventually, it may be composted, dried and sold as a fertilizer (such as the ever-reliable Bovung) or most likely, diluted into a slurry and sprayed onto fields. Poop, as any backyard gardener knows, can be a very valuable and useful commodity for growing plants, serving as a fertilizer and soil restorative. Given the sheer quantities of poop produced at a CAFO, however, the unfortunate facility manager is now often faced with the prospect of having more poop than he can use, forcing him to apply more than the appropriate amount of poop per acre (18.7 tons of wet-weight hog poop per acre being an industry rule of thumb, and worth about $50 at current prices), applying poop to frozen ground during the winter, or onto wet ground, just in order to free up lagoon space. These are not recommended practices, since the poop just runs off the ground surface without improving the soil and winds up in the nearest stream, pond, or other drainage nexus.

Any individual CAFO has the potential to become a collective colonic cornucopia, a fecal Frodi’s Mill which produces more excrement than even the best-intentioned crew can handle, leaving the CAFO’s staff running around like sorcerer’s apprentices trying to get rid of it all.

That practice spraying onto the fields, and the potential for the poop to affect streams and other waterways, was the subject of a 2003 rule issued under the Bush Administration by the Environmental Protection Agency, which required CAFOs to obtain National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits under the Clean Water Act. A NPDES permit, which can cover anything from an industrial wastewater treatment system to a construction project’s runoff controls, allows a party to discharge a certain quantity of material into a waterway, within strict limits and requiring chemical treatment and other safeguards to minimize the environmental impact of the discharge. The 2003 rule was itself the result of a 1992 consent order issued by a court in response to a suit by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which essentially told the EPA it had to do its job whether it wanted to or not. The 2003 rule, however, essentially rendered the NPDES requirements essentially toothless, since it gave CAFO operators a free hand in deciding on their own what ‘compliance’ meant, in addition to specifically exempting them from several important and longstanding federal regulations:

• The rule allowed factory farms to write the part of their permits that limit spraying poop on fields without state or federal review or approval, and without notifying the public. The preparation of permits is usually done either by government officials, or the permits are subject to government approval.

• The rule did not require CAFOs to use technological controls to reduce bacteria and other pathogens in the manure, even relatively simple and inexpensive technologies like methane digesters and odor controls.

• The rule exempted factory farms from meeting water quality standards.

These exemptions meant that any NPDES requirements essentially existed only on paper, without any real effect on the CAFO’s adverse effect on human health and the environment.

The Waterkeeper Alliance, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and filed a suit against the EPA in 2005, alleging that the 2003 rule had violated not only the 1992 consent order, but the Clean Water Act itself, thus putting the EPA in the awkward position of having violated a law which it is charged with enforcing. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, threw out the 2003 rule, and ordered the EPA to start afresh, with specific requirements for pollution controls and public notification of permits.

Innumerable local initiatives have been launched over the last ten years to draw public attention to CAFOs and their environmental impacts, including Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Michigan, who maintain the website www.nocafos.org.

This is not 1900 or 1950, when after milking the cows a boy growing up on the farm could wander down to the creek for some idyllic fishing. Not only are there probably no fish in the creek now, let alone any fish safe to eat, but the smell of the water alone would probably make a prospective fisherman nauseous.

In 1895, over a century ago, the New York State Department of Health considered a four-square-mile area of waterway adequate to absorb the 11,350 pounds of raw sewage produced daily by a neighborhood of five thousand people. Granted, that was nineteenth-century engineering and displayed a degree of conservatism and caution that fell out of favor over the succeeding eight decades, but it does put the sheer quantities into perspective.

The vast amounts of animal poop introduced into the nation’s rivers, ponds, wetlands, lakes, and so on easily overwhelms most of the natural ecological processes, converting streams into vast open sewers worthy of Calcutta, India. Several of the Great Lakes, a large part of the Florida Everglades, and the Chesapeake Bay are virtually biologically dead, due to the combined uncontrolled runoff from tens of thousands of acres of agricultural land.

Assume a hog farm CAFO in North Carolina, with two thousand hogs. A hog will produce about two tons of poop in one year. Two thousand animals times two tons of poop per animal per year equals four thousand tons of poop—enough to cover a football field to a depth of eighteen feet, or to fertilize 213 acres of farmland. Much of that poop could, however, wind up flowing into nearby waterways, or even seeping into the ground and contaminating aquifers.

A worst-case situation—a CAFO on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, with feeding barns, poop lagoon, and visible flooding that would carry enormous amounts of contamination into the adjacent river.

Rainwater, floodwater, or irrigation runoff, which account for most of the material carried into waterways, can transport dissolved solids (such as fecal particles) as well as ammonia, phosphorus, hydrogen sulfide (the asphyxiating and potentially corrosive ‘fart gas’), organic acids, bacteria, viruses, parasites, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, pharmaceuticals, and various other undesirable materials, all of which winds up in the stream, lake, etc. The result is not so much a stream as a noxious brown soup unable to support life.

Many of these substances, such as bacteria (notably fecal coliform), phosphorus, and ammonia are also found in human-derived sewage, in which case they must be treated in a wastewater plant or septic system (which is a wastewater treatment plant in miniature) to protect human health and the environment. The exponentially larger quantity of animal poop, however, is not require to be so treated, and in most cases does not even receive the more cursory runoff controls generally required of construction projects.

Ammonia, which accounts for the eye-watering reek of mammal urine and bird excrement, presents a particular problem. Ammonia is by itself a weak base, with a typical pH of 4.5, and if enough of it reaches a water body it can alter the pH of the water to the point where it’s no longer suitable for native plant and animal life. Ammonia is, however, a nitrogen compound (NH3) and when it breaks down it releases nitrogen into the environment. Nitrogen is great as a nutrient for plants, but sometimes it is too great. When introduced into water bodies in vast quantities such as agriculture produces, it provides a surprise banquet for algae, microscopic plants that live in water, resulting in ‘algae blooms,’ in which the water becomes so clogged with algae that nothing else can live there. Fish, frogs, newts…. Everything but the algae has to leave or die.

Human health is also potentially at risk, since poop or the chemical constituents thereof can leach into groundwater, rendering the water unsafe to drink due to contamination with fecal coliform, nitrate, nitrite, and other compounds. Tyson Chicken settled in 2004 a $7.4 million lawsuit brought by the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which found that Tyson’s operations had contaminated the city’s potable water supply (drawn from municipal groundwater wells) with alarming levels of phosphorus. Tyson Chicken has been found guilty of twenty separate violations of the Clean Water Act for its Sedalia, Missouri plant, although this was a processing facility and not a CAFO, as well as facing suits and racketeering allegations about the deliberate recruiting of illegal immigrants as factory labor. Smithfield Foods was the subject of the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the Clean Water Act in 1997, a paltry $12.7 million – 0.035% of the company’s 1997 earnings. Other potential pathways for CAFOs to affect public health are through air quality degradation through fecal particle and gaseous emissions, and damage to other crops, fish, or other livestock in the vicinity of the CAFO that people could consume.

The bottom line is that although poop is an animal product, in the context of modern industrialized agribusiness it is an industrial waste and should be regulated as such. The natural environment could absorb the waste generated by ten thousand cows if they were spread over fifty thousand acres, but ten thousand cows concentrated in five acres is a contaminant source that overwhelms natural processes and damages the environment. This is not the liberal establishment picking on Ma and Pa Kettle. This is a matter of industrialized big business, the equivalent of the public’s realization thirty years ago that hazardous wastes posed a clear and present danger to human health and the environment. The nation owes it to itself to address the problem before we have another disaster on the scale of Love Canal.

As a footnote to the above, there remains one major issue which must be addressed, which is the safety of our food supply. Within the last two years, we have seen panics over peanut products, dog food, beef, Malt-O-Meal cereals, Nestle candy bars, and Gerber cereals. Given the relatively small number of hands our food supply passes through these days, a failure in one plant or factory farm can have enormous ramifications. If a Tyson Chicken plant has a bad day, all of the 100,000 birds processed that day could potentially be contaminated, a problem that may not be caught for months or weeks afterwards.