Pollution Archives

I'm not usually much on "Top Ten" lists, but this one certainly reiterated for me that the worst pollution is correlated with weak property rights. That industrialized Western nations with strong property rights can't collectively crack the top 30 suggests an important panacea to environmental ills.

Not even 10 am here in the east yet, and already two ridiculous news stories have cast a pall on an otherwise unseasonably warm (and much welcome) Friday.

First, the Washington Post offers this lame story from Eric Pianin (surely one of the most mediocre environmental reporters at any major paper) about novelist Eugene Linden, who has written a novel about climate change in the form of a "who-dunnit" murder mystery set over a span of 4,000 years. Can’t wait.

Then over at the New York Times, Sen. Jeffords (who??) and another author raise the alarm about the EPA’s proposed changes to their annual measure called the "Toxics Release Inventory" (TRI). The TRI is one of the most burdensome reporting programs of the government, and even the EPA notes its serious limitations as an indicator of chemical risk or environmental quality. Now, I actually review all 500 pages of the TRI every year, and every year the EPA prominently says this:

"This information does not indicate whether (or to what degree) the public has been exposed to toxic chemicals. Therefore, no conclusions on the potential risks can be made based solely on this information (including any ranking information)." This last clause about "ranking information" is surely directed at the green groups that misuse the TRI data (that would be you, Environmental Defense, and your "scorecard" website) to produce rankings of polluters on the local level with the explicit purpose of scaring people.

So everyone can relax. The EPA is probably doing something sensible for a change. Jeffords will soon be gone from the Senate, probably to be replaced by an open socialist (Bernie Sanders), which will at least mean truth in advertising for a change. And much deserved for Vermont.

Law.com has this article on Alito and the Supreme Court's upcoming Clean Water Act cases.

I've just discovered that Elizabeth Brubaker's Property Rights in the Defence of Nature is now available on-line here. Brubaker, who works for Canada's Environment Probe, makes a compelling case that property rights were, and can be, an effective means of environmental protection. Her book chronicles the history, and erosion, of property-based pollution protection in Canada. The U.S. experience was similar, albeit not identical. Nonetheless, there are many important lessons for property-based approach to environmental protection.

Do environmental statutes encourage the application of strict liability for environmental harms? Perhaps they do, argues a new paper by Alexandra Klass. Although the general legal trend in tort law may be against the finding of strict liability (at least outside of the context of product liability), in the environmental area, the trend seems to go the other way -- and Klass thinks that is a good thing. The paper is here, the abstract is below.

Read More »

That's the title of an article over at mineweb regarding a grand jury's criminal charges against W.R. Grace employees in connection with the vermiculite that was mined at Libby, Montana for several years. The action states that the executives at Grace knew of the toxic effects of the asbestos fibers and were keeping it from the public.

Thomas V. Skinner, EPA's acting Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance Assurance said "this criminal indictment is intended to send a clear message" we will pursue corporations and senior managers who knowingly disregard environmental laws and jeopardize the health and welfare of the workers and the public."

Does anyone know the current state of hair sample testing for mercury? It would appear that Greenpeace is still running its nationwide campaign to encourage people to pay $25 for a mercury hair testing kit.

According to a WebMd story from a few years back, there are serious concerns about how accurate hair sampling is as a testing method. So I am curious whether hair sampling has improved its reputation or whether the interim results from Greenpeace should be considered questionable.

My guess is that $25 might be better spent as part of a mammagram, prostate exam, or even a dentist appointment.

Besides purchasing a kit, Greenpeace recommends that you host a mercury testing house party. Who's in the house!!!?? Merc- merc. Who's in the house? Mercury!!!

Those folks at Greenpeace know how to have a good time, but they fail to leave enough instructions on how to really whoop it up. When I throw my mercury testing parties, I like to make it a theme night, so be sure to have something from one of the Mercury Record labels playing in the background. For instance, Bob Marley or Bon Jovi as artists of Island Records, a Mercury label, really spice things up. Then, I like to serve lots of fish. Finally, everybody takes a shower using Aveda Products, in honor of the company's sponsorship of the Greenpeace hair testing project. If you aren't having fun by that point, well, down a few bottles of Mercury Rising and call me in the morning.

Reaction to an EPA announcement on mercury and river fish yesterday, exemplified by USA Today's lead story today, Warnings on river, lake fish jump (note that the print headline is different from the more circumspect web headline), could reasonably be described as alarmist. Take the first paragraph in the USA Today story, for example:

One third of the nation's lake waters and one-quarter of its riverways are contaminated with mercury and other pollutants that could cause health problems for children and pregnant women who eat too much fish, the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday

(Emphasis added). As the story notes, the warnings are not about fish in general but about fish caught from those particular lakes and rivers. Nowhere in the story is it estimated how many women eat so much river-caught trout that they may be at risk.

Moreover, as the story intimates, the "jump" in the headline is probably an artifact of increased reporting in two states. The EPA fact sheet (PDF link) says quite clearly (p.4):

In 2003, the geographic extent of the states under advisory for mercury was 13,068,990 lake acres and 766,872 river miles. The increase in acres and river miles under advisory is a result of the issuance of statewide mercury advisories by Montana and Washington in 2003 and the addition of rivers to Wisconsin’s statewide advisory.

All of which makes this statement from the Sierra Club outright misleading:

Today the Environmental Protection Agency announced in its 2003 National Listing of Fish and Wildlife Advisories that 766,872 miles of America's rivers and 13,068,990 lake acres are contaminated with so much poisonous mercury that the fish aren't safe to eat -- that is a more than 60 percent increase for river miles and an eight percent increase for lake acres since the 2002 report.

This increase is astounding considering that the technology exists right now that would put us on the road to cleaning up 90 percent of toxic mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants by 2008. As America's waters get more contaminated, the Bush administration continues dragging its feet, even endorsing a plan that would delay cleaning up mercury emissions from power plants for at least a decade and setting targets so weak that the industry will be allowed to emit three times more mercury after 2018.

Mercury emissions in the US for which humans are responsible dropped from about 375 tons per year in 1989 to 117 tons per year in 1999*.

Moreover, the EPA's health warnings themselves are based on studies from the Faroe Islands which inadequately controlled for the Islanders' diet, which contained a fair proportion of whale meat. A useful discussion of the science underlying EPA's guidelines on mercury and health is available here (PDF link).

The actual basis for the alarmist reaction is flimsy, to say the least.

UPDATE: Environmentalist blogger JLowe agrees that the Sierra Club reaction is inappropriate.

* Corrected from earlier numbers.

The federal Superfund program often discourages private cleanups of hazardous waste and chemical contamination. Yesterday, the New York Times reported on an alliance between Trout Unlimited, the Snowbird ski resort, and Tiffany & Company to clean up acidic mine runoff at American Fork Canyon in Utah. The U.S. Forest Service is also involved, largely because some of the contamination is on federal land. It's an interesting story about a largely private effort to address a neglected environmental concern.

Speaking of environmental fables, this past spring Reason's Ron Bailey revisited the story of Love Canal, New York, where the horror story of hazardous waste seeping into local homes provoked a local evacuation and eventually helped spur an environmental law disaster, Superfund. For those unfamiliar with the story, it's worth a look.

On June 22, 1969, just before noon, an oil slick and assorted debris caught fire under a railroad trestle on the Cuyahoga River. The fire attracted national media attention, including stories in Time and National Geographic. The image of a river ablaze seared into the nation's emerging environmental consciousness. Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Carol Browner probably spoke for many Americans when she said “I will never forget a photograph of flames, fire, shooting right out of the water in downtown Cleveland. It was the summer of 1969 and the Cuyahoga River was burning.”

The Cuyahoga fire was a powerful symbol of a planet in disrepair and an ever-deepening environmental crisis, and it remains so to this day. That a river could become so polluted to ignite proved the need for federal environmental regulation. Following on the heels of several best-selling books warning of ecological apocalypse and other high-profile events such as the Santa Barbara oil spill, the 1969 Cuyahoga fire spurred efforts to enact sweeping federal environmental legislation. “The burning river mobilized the nation and became a rallying point for passage of the Clean Water Act,” noted one environmental group on the fire’s 30th anniversary. The fire even inspired a song by Randy Newman, “Burn On.”

There’s a problem with this story. Much of it is myth. Despite repeated retelling of the day the river caught fire, the conventional wisdom on the Cuyahoga is wrong. Oil and debris on the river’s surface did burn in 1969, and federal environmental statutes were the result, but so much else of what we “know” about the 1969 fire simply is not so. It was not evidence of rapidly declining environmental quality, nor was it clear evidence of the need for federal action.

To continue reading about the "Fable of the Cuyahoga," see my NRO article here.

For those that want to know ALOT more about the Cuyahoga River fire, see my extended treatment of the river fire in the Fordham Environmental Law Review here.