Our World and Everything in It

 
I watched the Sierra Club’s DVD “Living a Nightmare; Animal Factories in Michigan.” My mind is still in a blip skip mode much like an old vinyl record from the revelation that there are over 200 of these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFO’s in Michigan. If you read my blog Pig PooWho Knew relative to Rolling Stone’s article “Boss Hog” by Jeff Tietz (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters), then you’ll know why I can’t get past the amount of CAFOs in Michigan, let alone that they aren’t just hogs, but cattle that produces even more waste than a hog. One cow produces the waste of 23 people!
If you are new to CAFO’s and have become numb to shocking journalism because of all the suffering witnessed around the world then read Rolling Stones article first and then watch the Sierra Club’s DVD. I say this because the Sierra Club was kind, did not mention names, did not show the horrific suffering of imprisoned animals but was still enough to make a person want to hunt down not only the perpetrators but the politicians who have not only turned a blind eye and done nothing but have supported industrialized farming. In Michigan, this would be mostly the Republican factor. Just before the election last year Republicans planned to introduce bills into Michigan that would make it even easier for these farms to come here and operate.
How would you like to not only lose your home, your land, and your livelihood, but also end up pretty much like the animals, compartmentalized in an environment of putrid stench, flies, runoff from fields saturated with animal waste, bacteria, blood and fats, pesticide, and antibiotics that are the brew of open air “slurry” lagoons, an integral part of industrialized farms?  Oh and don’t forget the occasional rotting cow leg or hog face lying about for your kids to find. You can’t simply sell and leave. Who else would live where you live besides Satan himself? Hear that Jerry Falwell. He stated he sees Satan in the environmental myth. I see the “Great Deceiver” in the environmental truth.
This is what hundreds of farm families are going through in Michigan. If you think they haven’t fought and petitioned anyone and everyone, think again. This is the biggest hypocrisy I’ve seen yet in Michigan. This big push to clean up our lakes, the world’s largest freshwater supply while doing nothing about the contamination of the earth, air, and groundwater throughout central Michigan due to inhumane CFO’s is a practice in futility. If one barn holds even 1,000 head of cattle, then the feces is equal to 23,000 people. The number of cattle that are housed are much greater than 1,000 but just multiply that by 200 farms. The waste of 23,000 people times 200 is the waste of 4 million 600 thousand people in one day? The livestock in this country produces 130 times the pollution of our entire human population. And we are overproducing for what purpose? To become more obese? We certainly aren’t curing starvation around the world.
And it isn’t just about containing this stuff. The farms in Michigan also go the extra mile, just like the Rolling Stone article, to blow this stuff all over the ground, in the trees. It makes it’s way to the ditches, becomes part of the groundwater and ends up in our many subsidiaries that flow to the lakes. Are you not angered by the head scratching done by officials as reported on the tube when confronted with questions about responsibility for E coli outbreaks and the recall of spinach and lettuce supplies that contained harmful bacterial substances. Duh! Visit rural Mexico for a lesson as to why you shouldn’t eat the lettuce. It won’t be long if this keeps up that all of our ground is polluted and leaching into our water supply.

Now flash back to my last post where Bush proposed a $400 million cut to the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. It provides low interest loans to pay for upgrades to sewage treatment plants that federal studies show will need $300 billion over the course of the next 20 years. Local communities may not get the needed help to upgrade their infrastructures to meet stricter clean water standards. Is this administration trying to kill us? And we’re worried about terrorists tampering with our food supplies. If people are sick in the surrounding CAFO areas, think of the animals we eat as food. They are in an updraft of this noxious brew beneath them continuously, 24 hours a day.

I’m just trying to connect the dots for you. There is a little hope in the horizon however. Since Jeff Tietz article and at very least, but still not enough, Smithfield Foods, the largest meat packer in the world will be phasing out the crates that hold each animal in confinement for their lifetime by 2017. Arizona has most recently banned crates for animals also. But that doesn’t address the pollution. Livestock friendly states like Kansas and Oklahoma are onto this pollution problem. ‘”Because of the noxious and obvious problems associated with CAFOs, many states have enacted severe restrictions on permits. For example, in 1997 the legislature of typically livestock-friendly Oklahoma mandated setbacks and other pollution controls, and in 1998 that legislature enacted a moratorium on new livestock permits. Kansas is another typically agriculture-friendly state that recently has enacted a moratorium on CAFO, and it is considering legislation to end CAFOs”‘  http://www.pmac.net/AM/property_values.html. Now that’s what we want to hear throughout the country.
Again, I want to know what is wrong with Michigan? We always lag so far behind. Who in God’s name allowed the first CAFO into a state surrounded by freshwater to begin with? Who are the Republicans that just months ago tried to make it easier for them to get in? It’s nice for the Sierra Club to note elsewhere that many of the CAFO’s in Michigan are Dutch owned. But Smithfield Foods is in Michigan also and more than likely linked to my favorite grocery store Kroger. With Smithfield comes far too much power, money, and political contributions. I’m not as nice about naming names. A few Dutch companies may be involved but a monopoly of only 6 American firms control 75% of the retail hog market. I can only guess a handful own the cattle and poultry markets as well. These few have put thousands of small farmers out of business across the country, while also tormenting them with pollution, stench, and a stranglehold for ever getting out their environment. As a result the meatpackers reap billions, enough money to buy their rights and everyone’s silence. Anymore, this is a free country for the wealthy only.     

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There was a small, interesting article my husband brought home from Friday’s Free Press, page 5B. Scott Edwards the legal director of Waterkeeper Alliance (God bless em) filed charges in an Ontario court against none other than DTE Energy for mercury and other harmful deposits into the St. Clair River. There is enough to upset the fish evidently. The Belle River and St. Clair coalburners are to blame. Canadian law permits private citizens to come up with a case against a company for any kind of breaches to Canada’s laws. Upsetting the fish habitat is considered a violation of Canada’s Fisheries Act. Edwards is hoping that DTE installs mercury control technologies in those plants. That would be the scrubbers DTE plans on installing in its coalburners throughout Michigan.

 
But DTE countered that is meets all state and federal EPA regulations. It tried to make a case that Ontario doesn’t have any specific laws relative to mercury emissions despite the many coal burners. I assumed that is why Edwards is using the more specific Fisheries Act. So is DTE saying Ontario has a lot of nerve complaining about mercury hurting the fish when they have no mercury laws of their own? This just might be the trigger Ontario needs to establish a new mercury emissions law. Then what? That will be interesting if it happens. Now we have one country suing another over pollution. And that sets a precedent. Since the U.S. contributes 25% of our world’s entire pollution, it could just open Pandora’s pollution box for the U.S. 

As far as DTE’s claims that it is in compliance with state and federal EPA laws well let’s just say the latest Bush plan to cut $500 million from the EPA’s budget will render nothing more than a joke of an agency that almost completely relies on the goodwill of big energy and every other polluter to take care of things in their own backyard. Never going to happen. Stephen Johnson, the head of the EPA doesn’t seem to get it. His remark that “Our air, water and land are cleaner than they were a generation ago and with this budget that progress will continue” shows he is out of touch with the environmental evolution taking place. I think he expects to creep along at the same snail pace to reluctantly clean up our mess as before. But our clean water is at risk from cuts also.

There is a proposed $400 million cut to the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. It provides low interest loans to pay for upgrades to sewage treatment plants that federal studies show will need $300 billion over the course of the next 20 years.  Local communities may not get the needed help to upgrade their infrastructures to meet stricter clean water standards.

Meeting EPA standards takes on a whole new meaning in light of these recent proposals. The other thing DTE’s spokesman John Austerberry downplayed was that the mercury released after the scrubbers are in place is minimal—”the equivalent of filling the Houston Astrodome with ping-pong balls and painting seven of them silver” (FreePress). Much like a disease lottery, who wants one of those silver ping-pong balls in their back yard? Mercury is small but mighty. Like I explained in another blog about mercury, it turns into methyl-mercury when it lands in water, is eaten by algae, and comes back out a whole new toxin. And it builds up in living organisms. Ingest it, and it stays. Eat the critters that eat the mercury and more of it builds up and stays. Once it’s there it can do damage to our nervous system as well as all the innocent creatures along our shores and in our lakes that are under our watch.

We have groups of parents across the country screaming about minute amounts of mercury in vaccinations as suspect for all types of childhood maladies including autism. So maybe we should stop being so glib about a little bit of mercury here, a little bit of mercury there. DTE should quit touting their plan for installing scrubbers that should have been there all along and move to the gasification process where just about all emissions are trapped. It isn’t like they don’t have the money, especially after last months heating bills. What do you think?

 
  
We’re going to be hearing a lot about biodiesel fuel and I happened to have someone in my class that reported on it. Our assignment was to find a website that presented misleading information. Of course I chose one that presumed to tell readers about “clean” coal. A fellow classmate chose a biodiesel website. The website stated, “Biodiesel runs in any conventional, unmodified diesel engine. No engine modifications are necessary to use biodiesel and there is no ‘engine conversion.’ This leads a reader to believe we just pour it into the fuel tank as is. 

 
Well I guess this isn’t so. He explained that “Biodiesel” is an environmentally friendly alternative fuel that can be used alone or blended with petroleum diesel. The blends with petroleum diesel are referred to by the percentage of biodiesel contained in it. For example, 20% biodiesel and 80% petroleum diesel would be known as B20, while 60% biodiesel and 40% petroleum diesel would be known as B60. Biodiesel not mixed with petroleum diesel is known as B100, or Pure biodiesel.”

Interesting. I didn’t realize there were different grades. And as he explained further, any grade over B20 may require engine modifications. The likelihood of this increases proportionately as the biodiesel amounts increase. Modifications to the car are due to the way the biodiesel reacts with natural and butyl rubbers, which are present in fuel system components such as fuel hoses and pump seals. They degrade from biodiesel. There are modifications that can be done to ensure that engines are immune to this problem, but it requires time and money.

This is important to know. I’ve heard the story flip flop back and forth that it’s ok to use the biodiesel without changing anything. Then there were the cautionary remarks about modifications necessary in older cars. Not knowing this could cause damage to an engine. Best bet is to ask a dealer if the car you are driving needs any type of modification to run biodiesel.

 
It is extremely important to know what grade biodiesel the pumps will be offering. A low-grade biodiesel such as B20 may be all right for any car, but it doesn’t look like it’s all that great environmentally. When I first read about all the grades of bio that might be offered, I immediately thought loophole. The word biodiesel should not be construed to mean environmentally good overall. Keep your eyes open as we see more and more biodiesel fuel pumps. If anyone else has some facts about biodiesel, weigh in.

 
Another earthquake occurred in Sumatra, Indonesia. 70 are dead so far in mostly rural areas. It measured 6.3 on the Richter scale with a 6.1 after shock. It is not unusual in that area because of a nearby volcano. Seismic activity and earthquake swarms are expected in hot spots and near volcanoes.  But is it just me or are there any awfully lot of them happening anymore? Just as suspected, a new and very recent study found that earthquake swarms are not necessarily clustered around volcanoes and in geothermal regions. They are occurring everywhere and anywhere there is seismic activity. Michigan is not excluded. I remember a pretty good tremor in 1978.  I lived at Charlotte Arms and was home in the afternoon when I thought someone either overshot their parking space and hit the building or someone dropped something awfully large while moving. The building shook. It wasn’t until later I learned it was an earthquake. There is some pretty interesting history about Michigan earthquakes at  http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/states/michigan/history.php. There were quite a few about 120 years ago that continued through the turn of the century.

 
As far as an increasing number of earthquakes, researchers gathered data from at least 40 earthquakes that did not follow the usual pattern of major shock followed by waves of small shocks or outbursts. According to a researcher “We saw a mix of the two kinds of events, swarms or earthquakes and aftershocks, wherever we looked. It confirms what people have suspected. There are earthquake swarms and they are responses to factors we can’t see and don’t have a direct way to measure.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061025184753.htm.
 
So earthquakes are another occurrence within our environment that is increasing but we don’t know why and caused by what. We know our pollution is affecting weather above the ground. What about the earth’s surface heating up more? I’ve wondered about that. The jet stream air currents bend and bow according to El Nino and El Nina which are created and directly affected by surface water temperature heating up in the Atlantic, so what about surface land temperature? Does global warming affect the frequency of earthquakes by heating up land surface also?  It will be interesting to see in the very near future the answers to these questions as our world struggles to change how we interact with and have a little more reverence for the environment that sustains us.

.If you remember the Pig Poo Who Knew blog I did quite a while ago about the horrendous amount of pollution caused by industrialized farming, specifically Smithfield Foods, than you will want to see this. The Michigan Chapter of the Sierra Club has created a 24-minute documentary about an industrial farm in Michigan. The tape is in DVD or VHS format for only a $10.00 donation. I’ve sent for mine but am afraid to view it. What I wrote about in the Pig Poo blog was bad enough.  As a video, it might be too graphic. Not to mention suffering animals, which is something that is totally unnecessary and I don’t want to see. That’s the problem for most of us; we don’t want to see it. But it’s there. In the past 15 years it’s been discovered pigs are highly intelligent yet in that same time span our supposedly ethical society allows animal factories like these. It is a testament to our hypocrisy.

I received my energy bill for this past cold blast. I’m on an energy reserve system so I’m lucky. I said lucky not happy. I use MXenergy that locks in my rate at $.851 which is the rate after the @ and ccf amount.  This is the url http://www.gasgeorgia.com/mxenergy/plans-prices.html, if anyone is interested in locking in for the next 3 years at $1.19, which is higher than my .851, but I switched the end of summer 2005. I’m surprised the prices aren’t higher than the $1.19.  Prices change weekly, so 7 days from now it might change.

 
 A reminder also, this rate is  locked in during the summer which usually drops to a lower rate of $.30-$.40’s. So know this, you will be paying the higher rate of $1.19 instead of those low $.30’s. But then most of us don’t use much natural gas in the summer. If I can get my husband to put up a clothesline, I’ll have no problem drying my clothes that way. Whites get soooo bright dried in the sun, and that wonderful smell. I’ve always got something drying on my deck railing. I don’t turn the oven on in the summer either. The grill is king.  So it’s all about what individual needs are.  If the only gas you use is for heat, than go for it.  Your regular energy service will charge a fee to carry the stuff to you, but it’s small. If I had over 2000 sq. ft. to heat, I would definitely look into this plan.  I would manage to install a couple of solar panels inconspicuously somewhere on my roof to save on my electric bill also.  See Bob Vila’s site for a good explanation as to how these panels really work, http://www.bobvila.com/BVTV/Bob_Vila/Episode-0224.html. They work like the shingled panels I want to invent, darn it.

 
What the episode explains is that just two solar panels can cut your bills significantly. These aren’t big black panels that stand up like road signs.  They look a little like skylights now. My shingled panels would be a whole lot better but don’t exist yet.  Unused electricity from your energy provider is stored. The solar panel electricity is used first. Stored energy registers back as a credit and that little wheel on your meter goes in reverse. Imagine that, especially after this past cold snap.

 
If global warming continues there will be more and more erratic weather. Global warming doesn’t mean everyone everywhere is going to fry. Other places will freeze according to fluctuating jet streams. A jet stream dip allowed the past freeze to drift down from Canada on us. It’s better to be prepared. Keep your fingers crossed spring doesn’t show up looking good only to turn into a monster. Tornadoes are worse than snowstorm, or are they? What do you think? What would be worse, a tornado or hurricane?

DTE Energy had a good article in Monday, Feb. 19^th Business section of the Free Press. The title was DTE’s Monroe Plant gets pollution control. The subhead said upgrade would bring facility in line with EPA mandates.DTE is spending $1 billion for scrubbers to reduce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury emissions and one catalytic reduction unit in advance of the governments requiring one. This is a start only and quite frankly those scrubbers should have been there all along.

MAKE NO MISTAKE this catalytic reduction unit and all the scrubbers around do not reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions. Nowhere is CO2 mentioned. Only the above will be removed. So this is what $1 billion buys? Do not confuse this with gasification plants where all emissions are trapped and stored. It’s still not a very good system but better than this. This $1 billion project does nothing to help global warming, only mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions. So the purpose of the big article in the same paper with Al Gore on the front-page…SPIN.

It’s best to stay informed, so as not to fall for the semantics of perpetual polluters. $1 billion dollars toward a new hydrogen facility would be easier to stomach and should be our prerogative considering the cost will somehow be handed off to us. We’re back to the control factor and being at the mercy of Big Energy and their decision making process of which we will ultimately pay dearly.

And as far as our illustrious EPA in this administration, get a load of this. It’s like something out of a soap opera.  Gale Norton was the head of the Department of the Interior, which oversees the EPA. Under Norton was Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles. Further down the line was Sue Ellen Wooldridge Deputy Chief of Staff to Norton. Here’s where the fun begins. Griles became a target for criminal prosecution in connection with corruption and lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He was the highest-ranking member of the administration to be targeted for corruption. He resigned and went to work for, of all things, Conoco Phillips as a lobbyist. Conoco Phillips is the third largest integrated energy company in the US and the fifth largest refiner in the world. Meanwhile, Norton promoted Sue Ellen to Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources despite the fact she was grilled about her relationship with Griles during the Interior’s investigation of him. Senator Ron Wyden asked her about this in writing. She didn’t answer the question honestly even when her new position would actually oversee the department’s ethics office watching Griles. For Pete’s sake, they live together in a condo in Virginia!
 
It gets better. An investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee found another love nest between Griles and Wooldridge with a third party, Conoco Phillips. It seems Conoco Phillips VP Donald Duncan, Griles, and Woodridge chipped in together to buy a million dollar plus beach vacation house in South Carolina.  Duncan owns 50%, with Griles and Wooldridge pitching in 25% each. The house was purchased before Wooldridge allowed Conoco Phillips to postpone a half billion-dollar pollution cleanup. I wonder where that was?  This is the most unethical love triangle in government yet. Of course Wooldridge resigned last month. Gale Norton resigned last year I believe. I wouldn’t be surprised if they all turn up working for an oil company down the line. It would make an interesting research topic. It would be a who’s who as to former Bush administration officials now working for Big Oil after resigning their government positions on the heels of an investigation. I bet there would be more than a handful of names.

In view of this little soap opera, EPA mandates are questionable at best. This group of strange bedfellows appears to have compromised the very core of ethics within the EPA. DTE’s billion dollar plus investment to meet EPA standards loses a lot of water in this light. Add the fact that CO2 wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the cleanup, I have to ask what’s the real purpose if not to mislead us into thinking everything is clean and tidy.
 
 

 
I just wrote the blog “Cruisin” last week and this week Trafigura, a Swiss trading Company, paid $22 million in fines to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Africa for dumping 500 tons of oil based waste off their coastline. The ship was a Greek owned tanker under Panamanian flag. According to the N.Y. Times, the waste that was “a fuming mix of petrochemicals and caustic soda — that started out in the Mediterranean and ended up in Africa could have been safely disposed of earlier in its journey.” It went on to say “Without strict, and strictly enforced, international rules on waste disposal, dangerous cargoes will find the course of least resistance, least cost, and least regulation, scarring the lives of some of the world’s poorest, worst governed and most defenseless people.”

 
100 people died. 100,000 had to seek medical treatment. Trafigura had $28 billion in revenues last year. The ship traveled from the Mediterranean to Amsterdam to unload the waste safely and legally. However, the disposal company found much more toxic waste than originally estimated to do the job for $15,000. When the Dutch company wanted $300,000 instead for the cleanup, and there may have been as much money wasted in delays, the ship went off looking for a cheaper place to dump. So they went to Africa. $28 billion in revenues and $300,000 to $600,000 in cost was too much for 100 lives and 100,000 people made sick. Nice, real nice. Trafigura deserved the $22 million fine. Of course they point fingers at the government there. And the government claims they didn’t know how much toxic waste was really unloaded. The Abidjan government has fallen as a result of its protesting citizenship.

 
Africa appears to be the dumping ground for many things these days. Oil fields are ruining both the Niger Delta and Nigeria from the interior and now a tankard is caught dumping around the exterior. Poachers run rampant killing endangered animals for everything from Gorilla hands, to ivory tusks, to a “bushmeat” trade for chimpanzee steaks. I think the N.Y. Times should have included scarring some of the world’s most wild and beautiful land and animals, as well as, most defenseless people in its article.

 
This should make us pause to think how easy it is for one tanker to make 100,000 people sick. This was no virus. This was manmade. Yet so many of us are still resistant to the fact man pollutes enough to adversely affect our environment. The Abidjanians didn’t suffer and die from natural causes in this case. We should not be smug in thinking our government wouldn’t allow such a thing either. Would this be allowed for a price? We spew pollution into the air everyday for a price. We pollute our ground and water with chemical runoff for a price. Industrialized farming does it with animal waste for a price. I think some people think our environment is a giant composter. Put anything out there and it will miraculously turn it into something good and useful again.

It’s just not so.