Global Warming – Idling Cars Add to Air Pollution

Millions of people do it everyday. Sitting at a traffic light. Warming up in the drive way. Waiting for your order at a fast food restaurant. Idling cars add tons of pollution to the air we breathe.

About 30 states and dozens of municipalities have measures in place to limit the amount a vehicle can be left idling, typically around three to five minutes.

New York City has had a three-minute law in place citywide since 1971, but advocates say it is rarely enforced or advertised.

A new measure signed into law this month cuts the allowed idling time from three minutes to one minute around schools, and gives more city agencies the power to issue violations. It also requires an annual violations report so officials can track enforcement.

A new report by the Environmental Defense Fund estimates that idling cars and trucks produce 130,000 tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide each year in New York City, contributing to global warming. The group believes the one-minute idling limit next to schools is the toughest such law in the United States.

This is one of many ‘little’ thoughtless action’s we do everyday that if halted could prevent tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides from entering the atmosphere, not to mention the millions of gallons of gasoline we could collectively save.

Listen to the Children

Too often we adults shun advice from children as too naïve and not worth our time to listen to.

Here is a twelve-year-old who has something meaningful and worthwhile to say and actually says it better than most adults. She addressed the United Nations meeting in Brazil with an elegance and style far beyond her years.

Please, take the time to listen, it is only a five minute segment of her speech but in that short time she paints reality far more succinctly than any adult I know ever has.

From her we have so much to learn and just maybe we can learn to share what we have with those who have nothing.

China’s whitewashed green initiative

China plans on shutting down many Beijing-area factories and cement plants for two months beginning in late July as a key part of the effort to clean the city's famously polluted air for the Olympic Games. Sorry China, temporary closures, while all eyes are on you during the Olympics does not count as cleaning up the environment.

Oh but they are planning on banning the use of half the city's 3.5 million vehicles, disallowing spray paint and other harsh chemicals to be used outdoors, closing about one-tenth of the city's gas stations, and halting construction in the Beijing area, which now has about 40 square miles of construction sites. This is only a temporary measure. They are basically going to put the city on hold during the Olympic games.

Their idea of staging “green games” does not involve anything more than to temporarily mothball 19 heavily polluting enterprises, including steel mills, coke plants and refineries. Coal-burning power plants, in China, account for a marked increase in soot, toxic chemicals and other climate-changing gases emitted into the atmosphere last year. In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific. An American satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed the American West Coast.

The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.

Sulfur dioxide production threatens the health of China’s citizens, contributing to about 400,000 premature deaths a year. It also causes acid rain that poisons lakes, rivers, forests and crops. Photo courtesy of Chang W. Lee, New York Times.

China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

China has a history of buying cheap and often antiquated equipment from well connected domestic suppliers rather than importing costlier more fuel efficient modern equipment from other industrialized nations that would better serve to help clean up the gases and other pollutants emitted from their coal burning plants.

China is beginning to enjoy the increased access to electricity that until only recently was available for a few hours in the evening for many rural families. Bringing electrical power to hundreds of millions of people will take some time and the quickest and cheapest way to do this is through burning through their abundant supply of coal. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is suffering from the resultant pollution.

Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are the darkest that we've seen" outside smoggy urban areas, said Steven S. Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Davis.

Shutting down a few factories and banning cars from Beijing’s roads may help visitors breathe a little easier during the Olympics but China has a long way to go clean up the air we will all breathe after the Olympics are over.

Kansas strikes down another pollution producer

Is this state legislature for real? With all the proof of global warming landing like a brick wall squarely on their heads, the Kansas legislature has the temerity to introduce a bill that would not only allow the spewing of 11 million more tons of greenhouse gas into our atmosphere, they also had written in the bill excusing energy producers from adhering to the state’s stricter-than-the-EPA-standards of pollution.

Sunflower Electric power Corp tried twice in the last year to obtain approval to add two 700 –megawatt units at a facility in western Kansas. I can’t believe anyone is still pursuing this outdated filthy form of power generation. It is morally irresponsible to actually want to add pollution to our atmosphere. Sunflower president Earl Watkins had the nerve to threaten Kansas families with higher electric rates saying that if the bill did not pass it would “punish our Kansas workers and industries”.

Just who does this guy think he is fooling? Pollution to our bodies and our planet is a far greater threat than the increase in home and business utility rates that we have come to expect almost annually anyway.

"Of all the duties and responsibilities entrusted to me as governor, none is greater than my obligation to protect the health and well-being of the people of Kansas," Governor Sebelius said in her veto message.

Thank-you governor for showing some common sense against outdated dirty energy producing power plants and legislators who cannot see past the dollar signs being waved in front of them.

Sources: Kansas City Star, Reuters, Associated Press

EPA gets tough on smog

Everyone has noticed it, it is no secret how the very air we breathe has been slowly deteriorating to the point that many cities now regularly post air quality warnings on their television, radio and newspaper news broadcasts.

After failing to enforce air quality standards imposed by the EPA decades ago, they are going to try again. Obviously, if those standards had been enforced when first introduced we would not be in the mess we are in today.

So, what is the EPA going to do differently this time? To start, they are ordering a multibillion-dollar expansion of efforts to clean up smog in cities and towns nationwide. Sounds like a plan. Corporations will of course not be bothered by it because they will slow-dance around in the court system delaying the requirements crying that they are too cost-restrictive for them, just as they did before, and nothing will ever come of it.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced it was tightening the amount of ozone, commonly known as smog, that will be allowed in the air. But the lower standard still falls short of what most health experts say is needed to significantly reduce heart and asthma attacks from breathing smog-clogged air. Falling short. Sound familiar? It should. The recent attempt to get automobile manufacturers to improve their cars fuel mileage and lower emission levels fell short too.

This government is more about talking a good game than actually taking the steps to do anything about it. All the while insuring that their corporate buddies don’t suffer any loss to their bottom line.

Admittedly it is a very big problem and just writing some stricter standards is not going to change anything.

The ‘most stringent standards ever’ claims EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson. But they are only going to be enforced in 345 counties out of the more than 700 monitored. That means that 355 counties are still going to continue polluting at their current rate. Fifty percent seems to be on par with the output level of the EPA. This is what we commonly refer to half-assed.

This new ‘get tough’ policy comes from the same people that refused to allow California and a host of other states to get tough on automobile pollution within their own states.

This administrator is ignoring two of the EPA’s own science advisory panels on air quality and children’s health by lowering the ozone parts per billion from 80 to 75 when the panels have proof that it needs to be lowered to 60. In this move, Administrator Johnson is leaving the most vulnerable members of our society, children, the elderly and asthma suffers to fend for themselves. Then he has the nerve to make the statements that “…I adhered to the science” and the new standard will ”yield health benefits valued between $2 billion and $19 billion."

Sure its going to cost us more to clean up this mess, this is what happens when you allow polluters to not adhere to standards for so long. Since you did not enforce the previous standards what makes us believe you will enforce these?

The utility and oil companies of course opposed stricter standards, even at this very minute level, saying it will increase their costs and therefore ‘hurt the economy’. Give me a break. The oil company is especially being audacious when they claim to care about the economy in light of the fact they are instrumental in raising oil prices to record level.

George W. Bush, in his usual corporate-profit driven mindset, wants to over throw the 1970 federal Clean Air Act that says costs cannot be a factor when setting health standards.

Health experts and environmentalists view the setting of health standards without consideration of cost as essential for assuring public health. As well they should. This clearly shows Bush and Johnson as protecting corporate profit over protecting the public.

Corporations are complaining about the stricter standards now as a preliminary for lobbying for more protection from the government in the form of tax breaks and incentives, which they will most likely get. They care very little about the economy because the government will always bail them out.

The setting of this new standard is nothing more than setting up corporations for getting more money from our government. It has nothing to do with protecting us or our environment.

Once again we see more talk and a little less action.