Renewable Revolution

George Washington Carver


"I believe the Great Creator has put oil and ores on this earth to give us a breathing spell...As we exhaust them, we must fall back on our farms, which is God's true storehouse and can never be exhausted. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow."

- George Washington Carver -


Please read this article first:

Decades-old pollution loophole still burns people of color and the poor

By Brentin Mock


Petrochemical companies in the U.S. are into some really funky practices. 

You may know that refineries and other polluting industrial plants have to apply for government-issued permits to secrete toxins into the air. The permits ensure that those secretions don’t rise above certain air quality standards so people living nearby don’t get sick and die.

Even so, companies across the country have found ways to release more poisons into the air than is safe – nasties like soot, the product of incomplete combustion. Scientists have found no level of soot that is safe for humans breathe it in. There’s no 50 shades of this gray stuff; if you live next to one of these soot secretors and inhale even a little bit of the stuff, you increase your likelihood of dying early, period.

One of the excuses companies use is that their facilities release certain premature and post-operational emissions when they are firing up, shutting down, or when they break down. This is part of doing business, they say, so it shouldn’t count under the permit caps, even though it fouls up the air quality of the people who live near their facilities.

Roughly three dozen states allow for this type of pollution under rules called “startup shutdown malfunction,” or SSM,  by those who track this and who care about people’s health. It’s been going on for roughly four decades, and environmental justice groups want it stopped, like, yesterday.

The Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of finalizing a rule to do that by June 12 — thanks to a Sierra Club petition — but the groups want faster closure. After all, lives are at stake. On Earth Day, the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum on Climate Change sent a letter to President Obama urging him to “expeditiously move forward with finalization and implementation of this much- needed, long-overdue public health safeguard.”

The problem isn’t Obama, though. Like most things policy these days, it’s the states that have been obstructing progress. States are responsible for developing plans that ensure they are complying with national air quality standards. But not only have many states allowed for SSM excuses, but some provide additional cover for SSM pollution by waiving the financial liability — as much as $37,500 per violation daily — that normally comes with polluting beyond permitted limits. Called “affirmative defense,” it’s the kind of corporate affirmative action that hardly ever gets checked. (The EPA actually has allowed these affirmative defenses in the past, but a recent D.C. Circuit Court ruling, on a case brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council, will force the agency to rethink that.)

Luckily, states don’t have final say on air quality plans, especially if they are not up to snuff. Congress granted the EPA the last say, under the Clean Air Act, meaning the federal agency becomes the ultimate dominatrix tasked with whipping state plans into shape if proven flaccid.

Such federal ceilings and check systems are needed because, as I’ve written before, states sometimes pretend that their stink don’t **** on other states. Also, because China.

The EPA knew SSM was a problem back in 1977.  But when it set the rules, it had neither the resources nor the staff expertise to actually do anything when the rules were broken. That’s not a knock against the EPA; many new federal agency rules have a trial-and-error period when they are refined through tests and challenges. Also, Congress often bestows rule-making powers on federal agencies, but with little guidance on how to exercise those powers. Environmental groups help mold and finesse the rules via public comments … and by suing the **** out of the government agencies responsible for upholding them.

But when it comes to SSM, companies have been allowed to pollute with impunity for so long that it’s as if they feel entitled. (Remember this next time Republicans give a budget speech cursing the “entitlements” of low-income Americans.) I’m sure it hasn’t helped that the victims of this lack of oversight have mostly been communities of color and poor residents. Those neighborhoods generally don’t matter enough for anyone to care to change their practices.

Fact is, little cracking down happened for too long. Today, air pollution can be better tracked and mapped, and the data better organized and stored — though all far from perfect. Environmental groups just want the rules and their enforcement finally brought into alignment with the updated info.

To understand the urgency of this, listen to the stories of some of the people who live on the fencelines of these polluters, collected from a Sierra Club document about state plans to address SSM issues:

Birmingham, Ala.

The Walter Coke plant has been raining down pollution since the 1880s, a practice that hasn’t slowed even as Jefferson County recently ranked tenth in the nation for cancer risks from toxic air.  The company is no stranger to SSM, having invoked it over 80 times from 2008 to 2012 alone. This has meant hell for Charlie Powell, who lived close-by for nearly 40 years, developing respiratory problems in the process, and his wife developing cancer. His 70-year-old aunt Eunice Webb also has asthma after 20 years of living within a mile of the plant, as does one of her grandchildren who lives with her. Her mother and sister, also Walter Coke neighbors, have suffered heart attacks and her husband died from cancer.

Detroit, Mich.

The 48217 zip code is the most polluted in the nation, thanks to the Detroit Marathon Refinery. A $2.2 billion expansion in 2008 to process Canadian tar sands for crude oil couldn’t have helped. The funky sulfuric emissions from Marathon flaring has burdened long-time 48217 resident Regina Woodard-Smith with breathing problems, when not regularly over-peppering her home and yard with soot. For Sherry Griswold, who lives within a few hundred feet of Marathon, the monster flaring has shaken her home so badly that ceiling tiles dropped loose. She has stopped bringing her grandchildren over after tiring of washing soot off their skin from playing outside.

Shreveport, La.

The Calumet refinery released over 320,000 pounds of excess air pollution over the neighboring community between 2005 and 2012. There are four elementary schools in close proximity. Velma White, who’s lived in the community for almost 40 years, became concerned about Calumet’s pollution after her daughter fell ill to renal failure. Many others in the neighborhood have developed respiratory illnesses, asthma, heart disease, skin problems, and cancer. She has suffered from Calumet’s flaring and funky emissions herself, with constant burning sensations in her nose and mouth and nausea.

It doesn’t sound like these communities are getting any pleasure out of living close to these refineries. Since many of the residents are elderly and low-income, they have few if any options to move away. This is why environmental groups are hoping Obama hears their hollers.

 

Brentin Mock is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who writes regularly for Grist about environmental justice issues and the connections between environmental policy, race, and politics. Follow him on Twitter at @brentinmock.

Well said. It needs to be shouted from the rooftops until the deliberately hard of hearing oligarchy that runs our country gets it. I  posted the following on a seemingly totally different subject to show the toxic relationship of white privilege to people of color and the poor of any color by "greed is good" true believers that have cursed our country from the outset:

http://grist.org/cities/decades-old-pollution-loophole-still-burns-the-poor-people-of-color

The subsequent post is connected through an indirect route to the above article. The post is my rant against Koch lies about biofuel sources being "bad" for the environment at Cleantechnica followed by praise of Brenton for writing (at Grist)  about how the poor of color are set up to breath toxic air in the USA.

In answer to an article claiming corn is a poor biofuel source (  http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/27/cornstalk-biofuels-can-generate-greenhouse-gases-gasoline-research-finds/ ) :

This is grossly erroneous information. But just for the hell of it, let's say it is true. Hello? Have you morons erudite luminaries heard of Duckweed or Azolla (mosquito fern, duckweed fern, fairy moss, water fern)? Never mind sugar cane, which beats the stuffing out of corn (a crop set up as a biofuel source by big oil deliberately to fail!), both Azolla and Duckweed have higher growth rates, actually sequester carbon rather than simply being carbon neutral and can grow in just about any place that humans live on this planet, including non-arable land because you grow them with water that does not ever have to be replenished from the initial shallow tank amount, thank you very much.

Sorry folks, spare me the hemming and hawing about "unproven" crops and biofuels, this is really another Koch funded piece of clever half truth.

Do you remember how our ancestors crowded the native Americans and Blacks into the worst living conditions imaginable, took away their quality of life, pride of ownership and any hope for a decent future and then "lamented" how "genetically lazy and prone to theft and immoral behavior" said people were as compared to whitey?    Sure you do! Well, guess what? Big oil has been doing that with renewable energy in general and biofuel crops in particular for several decades. Have you ever heard of hemp? Did you know you can make any plastic there is from it cheaper than from fossil fuels? Did you know we were doing just that in the 1930s until a "strange" series of fires destroyed our first major chemurgy refinery? Get real people. Big oil is just "doing what they have done for over 100 years! . We need fossil fuels like a hole in the head.

Corn was always a poor, lousy, stupid choice for biofuels because you need to plow a field - you need lots of fuel for the machinery in a self defeating loop of irrationality when you are looking for biofuels, it's an annual instead of a perennial - a guarantee of leaking carbon into the atmosphere! The Kansas Land Institute proved all this (and provided a thorough laundry list of perennial grasses that don't require plowing or pesticides - all much more cost efficient for biofuel stock than stupid corn) and told it to Congress over 15 years ago and Congress would not listen. -And that's the way big oil wanted it!

Learn our history or be doomed to be suckered by big oil again and again!

http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/fossil-fuel-folly/how-the-promise-of-chemurgy-was-dashed-by-big-oil/msg3/#msg3

And by the way, Brentin. I wish to say I admire your articles which exemplify integrity and veracity in reporting. I am certain you know of this African American scientist that could have changed our energy history in the 1930s if the Chemurgy technology he invented to make hydrocarbons out of plant carbohydrates had not been sabotaged by Standard Oil's seven sisters (Rockefeller and oil cartel friends, that Teddy Roosevelt <b>never actually dismantled </b>),  working hand in hand with Dupont (tetra ethyl lead fuel additive) and bought and paid politicians.

http://classprojects.cornellcollege.edu/stewart/AAMuseum/lifeswork(Chemurgy).htm

George Washington Carver, “Father of chemurgy”
http://darkroom.baltimoresun.com/2012/06/celebrating-fathers-of-on-fathers-day/memory-05/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik3iWiTlln8&feature=player_embedded