From the story titled, Electrical pollution from cell phones and WiFi may be hazardous
“In 1990, the city of La Quinta, CA, proudly opened the doors of its sparkling new middle school. Gayle Cohen, then a sixth-grade teacher, recalls the sense of excitement everyone felt: “We had been in temporary facilities for 2 years, and the change was exhilarating.”
But the glow soon dimmed.
One teacher developed vague symptoms — weakness, dizziness — and didn’t return after the Christmas break. A couple of years later, another developed cancer and died; the teacher who took over his classroom was later diagnosed with throat cancer. More instructors continued to fall ill, and then, in 2003, on her 50th birthday, Cohen received her own bad news: breast cancer … ”
This one falls under the environmental “Duh” category. Can you believe that Chinese smog drifts over the Pacific Ocean, adding to the West Coast’s pollution problem. It’s only a phenomenon that’s been heavily reported for years, and makes it way into our book, Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution In Los Angeles based on a 2005 Wall Street Journal story. Well, the L.A. Times is catching up. Hooray. They can use a “recent study” to explain why they’re just awakening to a seriously scary pattern of atmospheric assault. Story link.
“Ozone from Asia is wafting across the Pacific on springtime winds and boosting the amount of the smog-producing chemical found in the skies above the Western United States, researchers said in a study released Wednesday.
The study, published in the journal Nature, probes a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists in the last decade: Ground-level ozone has dropped in cities thanks to tighter pollution controls, but it has risen in rural areas in the Western U.S., where there is little industry or automobile traffic.
The study, led by Owen R. Cooper, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, examined nearly 100,000 observations in the free troposphere — the region two to five miles above ground — gathered from aircraft, balloons and ground-based lasers.
It found that baseline ozone — the amount of gas not produced by local vehicles and industries — has increased in springtime months by 29% since 1984. The study has important implications both for the curbing of conventional pollution that damages human health and for controls on greenhouse gases that are changing the planet’s climate, experts said.”
Finally, Bill gets a little digital ink in the Huffington Post with a book review about the Southwest’s perennial drought. That silky prose dances on the page.
“The Environmental Protection Agency proposed the nation’s strictest-ever smog limits this morning, a move that could put large parts of the country in violation of federal air quality regulations.
The EPA proposed allowing a ground-level ozone concentration of between 60 and 70 parts per billion, down from the 75-ppb standard adopted under President George W. Bush in 2008.
That means cracking down even further on the emissions from power plants, factories, landfills and motor vehicles which bake in sunlight and form smog.
Obama administration officials and environmental groups say the new standards align with the levels scientists say are needed to safeguard against increased respiratory diseases, particularly in children, and that they could save $100 billion in heath costs over time. The EPA also said compliance costs could total up to $90 billion nationwide.
A 65-ppb standard — the middle of the proposed range — would avert between 1,700 and 5,100 premature deaths nationwide in 2020, compared to the 75-ppb standard, the EPA estimates. The agency projects the stricter standard would also prevent an additional 26,000 cases of aggravated asthma, compared to the Bush-era standard, and more than a million days when people miss work or school …”
“Jane Goodall, the champion of chimpanzees, knelt Monday over a newly planted sticky monkey flower and kissed its leaves for good luck.
She had come to Calabasas to tour a restoration project at the headwaters of the Los Angeles River. But as luck would have it, the sticky monkey flower had yet to be planted.
So the world-renowned primatologist and conservationist knelt, grabbed a handful of soil and sunk the plant into the earth.
While she travels all over the world to talk about the importance of conservation and environmental responsibility, Goodall said it all comes down to a very simple message: One flower planted on a hillside can evolve into a global movement.
“I’ve visited these types of restoration projects all over the world, and it always amazes me how Mother Nature restores herself,” Goodall said …”
Global warming:
* The latest on President Obama’s energy bill, and the politics of cap and trade. It’s about the mighty benjamin. Washington Post story.
* A still frightening Washington Post story about how fast temperatures may rise this century.
* Aspens dying off from global warming. Sounds pretty familiar to Ponderosa Pines and smog. This time we’re smarter, right? Story link from the L.A. Times.
* EPA cracking down on coal-fired power plants. Story.
Odds and ends, green-style:
* Terrifiic piece of enviro. investigative reporting. Gosh, what a connect. From a New York Times piece of late.
Will the list ever end? Here’s the latest about urban smog and health in the the L.A. Times. Link.
” … Research on air pollution has been conducted worldwide for decades and is part of the basis for government regulation of air quality. Study after study has found more hospitalizations and higher death rates when certain pollutants are high. In addition to respiratory effects, research has established that air pollution increases the risk of cardiovascular events such as arrhythmia, heart attack and stroke, and the incidence of certain cancers.
In the appendicitis study, published Oct. 5 in the Canadian Medical Assn. Journal, researchers examined records for 5,191 adults admitted to Calgary hospitals for appendicitis from 1999 to 2006. The dates of the patients’ admissions were compared to air pollution levels in the preceding week, using data from three air quality surveillance sites in the city.
The scientists found a significant effect of pollutants on appendicitis rates in the summer months among men, but not women …”
We hunker down and focus on the connection between good ol’ L.A. smog, in its many permutations, and the physical wellbeing of millions of Southern Californians exposed to it pretty much daily for years on end, in our book, Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.
The fantastical cap-and-trade fraud story involving former Pasadena emissions broker Anne Sholtz and a cast of shadowy players has kicked up a bit of dust, and they’ll followups. The story, which originally appeared in the Pasadena Weekly/Southland Publishing chain and here, has now run as a two-part installment in the California Energy Circuit (click here and here), and will make its debut on newgeography.com this Thurday. They’re both terrific sites, but I’m biased.
The story certainly has tickled emotions about whether a greenhouse gas market can work without massive white-collar fraud, and generated some conspiracy minded notions about Sholtz’s entanglements with men claiming to be currency hunters with CIA, Special-Ops and military backgrounds.
In other news …
Has cap-and-trade worked where it’s been rolled out? A very good enviro writer takes a swipe at answering this.
The Station Fire that chewed and flattened and burned so much of the Angeles National Forest blew enough smoke, ash and detrius to remind Southern Califorians of their decades strangled by man-made smog. Let’s hope it stays nostalgia. Relief is here.
What’s the future of the San Joaquin Valley? Bleak without some changes. Newsweek covers it.
While we dealt with recession, terrorism, subprime mortgages, and rising Earth temperatures, California showed it hasn’t lost all of its environmental courage in setting standards for chromium six, a subject I know a little about.
Californians are less concerned about smog and global warming than they used to be. Here’s the story about the poll in the Los Angeles Times.
Why some scientists now believe climate change is worse than many imagined is the focus of this Newsweek piece. “Shock” is not a word you want to hear.
Freeways and air pollution are synonymous, especially in L.A. To save the teetering roadways and remmants of our old lifestyle, authorities will now allow solo drivers into carpool lanes on two freeways for a price. Basically, we have to try gimmicks like this to slowly kill the freeway with piecemeal deterrence wrapped up in putative innovations. My two cents, anyway. L.A. Times link
Moms and the planet – an aside from our little interview last month on KCRW’s “Which Way L.A.?” Click here.
Effects of pollution on animals. Follow the turtle. Story
From the MSNBC story about the asbestos situation in Montana, where the government declared, for the first time, a public health emergency. If you read our book, Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, you’ll see how close Southern California was for asking for that same designation, even if the EPA was decades from being created.
“… Asbestos contamination from a now-closed vermiculite operations near Libby has been cited in the deaths of more than 200 people and illnesses of thousands more. Vermiculite is used to make insulation material but the ore found in Libby was eventually found to be contaminated with a toxic form of naturally-occurring asbestos …
Miners carried vermiculite dust home on their clothes, vermiculite once covered school running tracks in Libby and some residents used vermiculite as mulch in their home gardens …”
Here’s another recap of what’s happening with a renewed federal effort in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, where the mining of uranium ore on Najavo lands “left a legacy of disease and death.”
“The federal government plans to spend up to $3 million a year to demolish and rebuild uranium-contaminated structures across the Navajo Nation, where Cold War-era mining of the radioactive substance left a legacy of disease and death.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its Navajo counterpart are focusing on homes, sheds and other buildings within a half-mile to a mile from a significant mine or waste pile. They plan to assess 500 structures over five years and rebuild those that are too badly contaminated …”
Finally, in our last item of environmental news catchup, comes this health study by USC, UCLA and the California Air Resources Board that shows particulate matter drifts signifcantly and dangerously farther than once assumed.
“Environmental health researchers from UCLA, the University of Southern California and the California Air Resources Board have found that during the hours before sunrise, freeway air pollution extends much further than previously thought.
Air pollutants from Interstate 10 in Santa Monica extend as far as 2,500 meters — more than 1.5 miles — downwind, based on recent measurements from a research team headed by Dr. Arthur Winer, a professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA School of Public Health. This distance is 10 times greater than previously measured daytime pollutant impacts from roadways and has significant exposure implications, since most people are in their homes during the hours before sunrise and outdoor pollutants penetrate into indoor environments …”
“For those wondering just how much effect cleaning up the air can have, researchers now have a much fuller picture.
Reductions in particulate air pollution during the 1980s and 1990s led to an average five-month increase in life expectancy in 51 U.S. metropolitan areas, with some of the initially more polluted cities such as Buffalo, N.Y., and Pittsburgh showing a 10-month increase, researchers said Wednesday.
The reductions in pollution accounted for about 15% of a nearly three-year increase in life expectancy during the two decades, said epidemiologist C. Arden Pope III of Brigham Young University, lead author of the study appearing today in the New England Journal of Medicine … “
Think about, if you dare, what the enormous pricetag would add be if we toted up WORLDWIDE costs. Trillions perhaps? As this latest study from Cal State Fullerton shows, air pollution is deadly for people and other living organisms, and is seriously toxic for the publicly funded healthcare, government budgets and the average taxpayer. Roughly 3,000 premature deaths a year are attributed to exposure – more than war and gang violence, let alone car accidents; we suspect this number is conservative .Of course, this complex point is a focal point of our book, Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles. In it, we discover officials were onto this massive expense and its trickle-down effects as far back as the late 1950s. While ozone and other smog-forming chemicals are way down from our choking past, they have proven more lethal than originally believed and have fanned out far and wide from just your typical industrial city. In Central California, the misey is astounding.
Here’s two stories well worth reading: Los Angeles Times (about this latest health cost study) and from Discovery via MSNBCabout pollution-induced tornadoes. (We’ll be writing more about subjects like this in the future.) For now, just remember that smog history is far from written.
From the Times piece: The California economy loses about $28 billion annually due to premature deaths and illnesses linked to ozone and particulates spewed from hundreds of locations in the South Coast and San Joaquin air basins, according to findings released Wednesday by a Cal State Fullerton research team.
Most of those costs, about $25 billion, are connected to roughly 3,000 smog-related deaths each year, but additional factors include work and school absences, emergency room visits, and asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses, said team leader Jane Hall, a professor of economics and co-director of the university’s Institute for Economics and Environment Studies.
It wasn’t just urban myth. It was a real product intended to make the inventors a little scratch while broadcasting, with cynical camp, that a famously upbeat people now regarded air pollution as part of the regular weather cycle. There’s some neat trivia about products like this and the gestalt behind them in our book. And there’s always the Internet if it’s a must-have for your souveneir case. Take that greenhouse gas.
