Recent Articles

Smog before birth may hurt IQ

Photo Essay of Conservation Corridor threatened by the Border Wall

Improve Health with a Carbon Diet

Carbon Permit System Will Pay

EPA may regulate carbon dioxide under Clean Air Act

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Smog before birth may hurt IQ

Researchers for the first time have linked air pollution exposure before birth with lower IQ scores in childhood, bolstering evidence that smog may harm the developing brain.

The results are in a study of 249 children of New York City women who wore backpack air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy. They lived in mostly low-income neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx. They had varying levels of exposure to typical kinds of urban air pollution, mostly from car, bus and truck exhaust.

At age 5, before starting school, the children were given IQ tests. Those exposed to the most pollution before birth scored on average four to five points lower than children with less exposure.

That’s a big enough difference that it could affect children’s performance in school, said Frederica Perera, the study’s lead author and director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health.

It suggests that you don’t have to live right next door to a belching factory to face pollution health risks, and that there may be more dangers from typical urban air pollution than previously thought, he said.

“We are learning more and more about low-dose exposure and how things we take for granted may not be a free ride,” he said.

While future research is needed to confirm the new results, the findings suggest exposure to air pollution before birth could have the same harmful effects on the developing brain as exposure to lead, said Patrick Breysse, an environmental health specialist at Johns Hopkins’ school of public health.

And along with other environmental harms and disadvantages low-income children are exposed to, it could help explain why they often do worse academically than children from wealthier families, Breysse said.

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“It’s a profound observation,” he said. “This paper is going to open a lot of eyes.”

The study was released in the August edition of Pediatrics.

Author: Lindsay Tanner
Source: Associated Press

Photo Essay of Conservation Corridor threatened by the Border Wall

Launch the photo essay featuring the Chihuahuan Desert!

In the heart of North America’s largest desert lies a biological oasis—a little-known expanse of basin and range straddling both sides of the boundary between the United States and Mexico. The Chihuahuan Desert Borderlands, as it is called, is a sparsely populated 30- million-acre wilderness where barren lunarscapes, arid scrublands and cactus forests coexist with majestic canyons, lush grasslands and pine-oak woodlands.

To the abundant populations of year-round and migrating wildlife, the borderlands is a land without borders, a single ecosystem that rivals Greater Yellowstone in its biodiversity. Hundreds of species use the borderlands as a migratory megacorridor, including monarch butterflies, black bear and more than 10 species of hummingbirds. Populations of elk, pronghorn and desert bighorn sheep flourish as well.

Hovering several thousand feet above are sky islands—desert mountains whose peaks snag clouds and drain their moisture. These mountains nourish the region’s relict forests of oak and pine trees and isolated stands of Douglas fir and quaking aspen. This rich habitat is one reason why more than 400 bird species have been seen in the 800,000-acre Big Bend National Park—more than in any other national park in the United States.

The borderlands are the linchpin of one of North America’s most vital wildlife corridors. And yet the region is also the focus of plans that would fashion a barrier along the border, although it is difficult to imagine a more effective deterrent than the canyon walls that rise as high as 2,000 feet above the river.

While most of the discussion about fences has centered on urban areas, concern is being voiced about the potential impact barriers in more remote areas would have on wildlife. “The specter of any kind of barrier that would preclude the movements of native and migratory wildlife back and forth between the United States and Mexico causes us a great deal of consternation,” says Carter Smith, director of the Conservancy’s Texas chapter. Other, more conservation-friendly tactics should be considered in the Chihuahuan Borderlands, he says, such as vehicle barriers, surveillance technologies, and stepped-up border and aerial patrols.

Whatever the outcome, the Conservancy and partners plan to press ahead. “The borderlands is one landscape, irrespective of political boundaries,” says Smith. “We are participating in an extensive binational conservation effort.” Private land owners, agricultural cooperatives, corporations, governments and conservation groups have banded together to place more than 2 million acres on both sides of the border under some kind of protection. And more land is being added every year. Through their efforts, the borderlands remains one of the continent’s wildest places.

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Aurhor:  Joe Nick Patoski

Source: nature.org

Improve Health with a Carbon Diet

Few of us realize it, but the food we put in our mouths each day dramatically affects the global climate. The typical American diet requires the staggering equivalent of 400 gallons of oil each year. That, in turn, generates, nearly as much planet-warming carbon dioxide as the average U.S. car creates.

In this modern food transportation system, wasted energy reaches absurd levels. For example, a lettuce farmer near Atlanta, Georgia who wants to sell lettuce to a Safeway in Atlanta, must first ship the lettuce 621 miles to Upper Marlboro, MD for inspection, then ship it back down to Georgia. This transportation not only consumes fossil fuel but takes up extra road space and leaves the lettuce less fresh!

These diet-related impacts on our climate and natural environment could be dramatically and painlessly reduced if Americans took three easy steps. These are 1) buy locally raised foods whenever possible; 2) buy organic foods; and 3) reduce meat and dairy consumption.

How? 

Thankfully, buying local food that has not been trucked thousands of miles gets easier every year. According to the US Department of Agriculture, regionally based farmers markets with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables have grown from 300 in the mid 1970s to 3100 in America today.  Such markets simultaneously decrease transportation inputs while increasing community interconnectedness. One study estimates that people have 10 times as many conversations at farmers’ markets than at supermarkets. Visit www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/map.htm for a farmers market nearest you.

People across America can also buy directly from a specific farm nearest their home thanks to a practice called “community-supported agriculture (CSA).” For a set annual price, you essentially “subscribe” to a farm, receiving a standard weekly share of whatever the farm produces during the growing season. Visit www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/csa/csastate.htm for a CSA nearest you.

A second important step, beyond buying locally, is to buy organically raised food. On average, organic farms use 37 percent less energy than conventional farms. Also, unlike soils rendered nearly biologically lifeless from petroleum inputs, organic soils are full of plant matter and various biological processes that naturally absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. According to a 23-year study by the prestigious Rodale Institute, one acre of organic crops “sequester” as much as 3,700 pounds per year of CO2, the world’s leading greenhouse gas. So organic food consumers fight climate change with every meal they eat.

Meat, eggs, and dairy products are high-energy, high-impact foods. It takes 40 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.  Simply put, America could feed most of Africa with the grains we feed to livestock, while Americans are consuming twice the government’s daily recommended allowance of protein. 

A vegetarian diet also dramatically reduces your risk of heart disease, the nation’s number one cause of death.

17 percent of U.S. energy use now devoted to food, it’s clear we’ll never solve the climate crisis with wind farms and hybrid cars alone. We must - and obviously can - cultivate and consume “clean-energy” food, grown close to home for the benefit of the whole world.

Author: Mike Tidwell

Source: www.chesapeakeclimate.org

Carbon Permit System Will Pay

As envisioned by President Barack Obama’s budget proposal, the federal government will soon begin tapping into a huge new source of revenue by requiring companies to pay for the permission to emit so-called greenhouse gasses linked to global warming.

The Obama budget blueprint assumes that by 2012, the Treasury will be collecting $78.6 billion in new revenue from carbon emissions permits. From 2012 to 2019, it envisions that a total of $645.7 billion would be raised from auctioning of such emission allowances.

A “cap-and-trade system” would be created, under which the government would place a cap, or limit, on the total amount of greenhouse gasses that can be emitted. Companies that need to exceed their allotted level must buy offsetting permits from those that emit less.

What impact would the emissions curbs have on consumers?
Congressional Budget Office director Peter Orszag, who is now head of the Office of Management and Budget under Obama, testified last year that the firms that were required to buy permits would pass the costs along to their customers in the form of higher prices. The price increases, he said, would “be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program” because they would be the mechanism by which businesses and households would be forced find ways to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

Won’t that harm consumers, especially the poor?
A recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, said, “Low-income consumers are the most vulnerable (under such a system) because they spend a larger share of their budgets on necessities like energy than do better-off consumers.”
They also are “least able to afford purchases of new, more energy-efficient automobiles, heating systems and appliances,” it said.

Obama proposes using about 80 percent of that anticipated revenue — or $526 billion — to pay for tax credits for low- and middle-income people to help offset higher energy costs. The rest of the money would subsidize alternative energy projects and firms.

The New York Times reported  that low-wage and middle-income workers would receive a $500 tax credit, or $1,000 to couples; but the credit would be phased out for single people with incomes above $75,000 a year and for couples with incomes of more than $150,000, it said.

Ultimately it will up to Congress to decide how the money will be used. 

read the full article on msnbc.msn.com

Author: Tom Curry

EPA may regulate carbon dioxide under Clean Air Act

February 18, 2009

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency said yesterday that it would reopen the possibility of regulating carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, tossing aside a December Bush administration memorandum that said the agency would not limit those emissions.

The decision could mark the first step toward the regulation of greenhouse gases emitted by coal plants, an issue that has been contested by the coal industry and environmentalists since April 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.

The industry has vigorously opposed efforts to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, asserting that it should be left to policy set by Congress. Moreover, current technology for capturing such emissions is expensive and virtually untested.

Environmental groups, however, say that building new coal plants with conventional technology locks in new greenhouse gas emissions for the entire 30- to 40-year lifetimes of the power plants, making it difficult to slow climate change. They have been urging the Obama administration and state governments to use the Supreme Court ruling to block air permits for new coal-fired power plants and rely on renewable energy and energy efficiency to meet power needs.

In response to a Sierra Club petition over an air permit for a coal plant in Bonanza, Utah, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said the agency would take a new look at the issue and solicit public comments.

Jackson did not issue a stay on the Bush administration memorandum and coal industry advocates found some hope in that.

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Source: Boston.com