Chromium-6 found in 31 water supplies

A new report released Monday says a suspected cancer-causing form of chromium is contaminating the water supply in at least 31 U.S. cities.
The report by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found chromium-6, also known as hexavalent chromium, in the public water supplies of 89 percent of the cities it sampled.
Chromium-6 is the same chemical discovered by legal researcher Erin Brokovich in the water supply of Hinkley, California. That discovery led to the largest medical settlement in history paid by Pacific Gas and Electric.
The EWG report is the result of laboratory tests of tap water in 35 cities across the U.S. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires water utilities to test for total chromium, which includes chromium-3 or trivalent chromium, and chromium-6, but does not require tests specific for Chromium-6.
Chromium-3 is a naturally occurring chemical often found in runoff from surface disturbances such as construction, road building and mining. It is not thought to be carcinogenic. Chromium-6 can occur naturally in some geologies, but is typically the result of human activities. It is an ingredient in industrial lubricants and degreasers, and has been shown to cause intestinal tumors in laboratory animals in some studies. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has not yet made a definitive statement that chromium-6 causes cancer.
In my own community of Letcher County, Kentucky, hexavalent chromium was found in three streams during initial tests in 2005. Retesting in 2007 did not show hexavalent chromium, though chromium-3 was still present. The tests were conducted by Headwaters Inc., a nonprofit watershed group on whose board of directors I serve.
Tests on tap water for Letcher County were not immediately available.

Ain't no big thang

Climate change is a big deal, but some of the measures that can be taken to fight it aren’t.

The U.N. is demonstrating some of these small things at its Conference of Parties to the Framework Conference on Climate Change (COP16) to be held in Cancun, Mexico, November 29-December 10.

One very small thing that COP16 officials expect to make a difference in the carbon footprint of the conference is the dress code. For those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, outside the tropics, early December can be downright chilly. The mean temperature for December in Kentucky, where I live, is about 38 degrees. But the mean temperature for the same month Cancun is about 80. Combine high outdoor temperatures with hundreds of people packed into meeting rooms in business attire, and you need air conditioning and lots of it.

The COP16 answer? Ditch the business attire.

No, U.N. delegates aren’t going nude, but they aren’t wearing the worldwide corporate and government uniform, either. No coat, no tie, no hay problema.

Instead, U.N. organizers are recommending guayabera shirts and light-cotton dresses, traditional Mexican attire adapted to deal with the warm climate. Air conditioning will be minimized in order to reduce the impact of the large, multi-national gathering.

My personal recommendation? Ditch the air conditioning all together. Hold the meetings on the beach.

Clinging to coal

A new post is up on Going Green in Denmark. You can find it at http://greenindenmark.bloginky.com/2010/11/09/clinging-to-coal/

Reporting soon from Cancun

I have been named an Earth Journalism Network fellow and will be reporting on the COP16 from Cancun beginning in late November. I'll post updates before that, including the url for a new blog about the conference.

Like the Denmark trip last year, the new blog will be newsy, while this one will continue to focus on the lighter side. You can also follow me on Twitter @SamAdamsKY.

Coal should heed Senator's words

Finally, some common sense from a coal-state Senator.

Sen. Robert Byrd, the longest serving Senator in history, calls it as he sees it. If only someone would listen.

Sparks, anyone?

Why do cars have ashtrays?

I know people smoke, but really: Why do cars have ashtrays? If you've ever ridden in a car with a smoker, you know they don't use the ashtray. They roll the window down just a crack, and stick the tip of the cigarette out to knock off the ashes.

If you've ever been behind a car with a smoker in it, you know they seldom put the cigarette out in the ashtray either. They just shove the damn thing out the window.

Of the few who do use the ashtray, most only use it for temporary storage of the butts. As soon as they get to a parking lot, they pour the contents out on the pavement beside the drivers' door.

So again I ask, "Why do car's have ashtrays?" What they really need is smoke alarms.

A sad statement

Back on the ground in the states, and it was a jarring landing. Not the airplane – that was great. I mean the realization that our security procedures in this country are way more intrusive and aggravating than they need to be.

Getting on the plane in Denmark, I passed through three security checkpoints and a passport control station, showing my passport at each spot. The metal detectors were easy. I had to take literally everything out of my pockets, but I got to keep my shoes on, and no one frisked me. The screeners were always very friendly and courteous.

I got to Atlanta, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents greeted me with smiles and a “welcome home” as I went through passport control. Agents at baggage claim and the agriculture check station were very courteous as their dogs sniffed my bags and they asked the required questions about food items, and my visit to a farm.

Then I got to the TSA. That was end of smiles and courtesy.

First, the woman at the x-ray machine snarled at me for not laying the paper bag with my duty-free items flat, and for putting my shoes in a basket rather than directly on the conveyor. Then I forgot to take my belt off before I went through the metal detector. I have only one thing to say to Mr. Sideburns-and-Beer-Gut manning that machine: Being a jerk doesn’t make my travel any safer. It just makes me write a hostile blog.

And it wasn’t just me. They were universally nasty to everyone who passed through.

I realize that we’ve been attacked here, and I realize that we need security. But how much is too much?

While in Denmark, I had the chance to visit two government offices – the Center for Green Transport and the Climate and Energy Ministry. At the Green Transport building, we had only to walk through open front door and up the stairs to a receptionist.

A minister is essentially like a cabinet secretary in the U.S., though Danish ministers also serve in Parliament. Going to Minister Connie Hedegaard’s office required no sniffing, no metal detector and no snarling security officers in paramilitary uniforms. We walked through a glass door by the receptionist, and were then shown upstairs to her office.

That same night, during Copenhagan’s annual Kulturnatten (Night of Culture), hundreds and possibly thousands of people wandered through Minister Hedegaard’s private office, shaking hands and making small talk with her. There was not even one guy in sunglasses, dark suit and ear piece. And Connie Hedegaard, as nearly as I can tell, is the Hillary Clinton of Denmark.

Just as refreshing was the trip to Amalienborg Palace, home of Queen Margrethe and the Royal Family. No gates, no fences, no concrete barriers. Cars drove through the palace courtyard unimpeded. The only guards in view were a handful of Royal Life Guards, one at each of several small guard stands along the outer walls of the courtyard. In their bearskin hats and 18th century-style uniforms, they stood in front of small guardhouses and stared straight ahead, making no move to stop, question or search tourists and citizens coming into the palace yard.

The White House, on the other hand, is surrounded by an iron fence, concrete barriers and a very conspicuous police and Secret Service presence. No one drives through the gate or walks through the gate without an invitation.

How did we get to this place in our country? Presidents used to let the masses into the White House on Inauguration Day, one even had his clothes stolen while skinny dipping alone in the Potomac River.

It’s a sad statement on the world climate that our president, an officer elected by the people, has become more secluded and more guarded than a European monarch.

A more serious side to Denmark

Just a reminder that you can read a more serious account of my trip to Denmark at http://www.kentucky.com/greenspot. The blog there is called Going Green in Denmark.

The latest post is on wind energy and democracy on the island of Samso. Later today, I'll be posting something on energy-efficient housing.

Later still, I'll post the day's or week's absurdities and stream of consciousness here.

See below for a post on speaking Danish to Danes.

The knees knows

They say that when it comes to riding a bike, you never forget.

My knees definitely remember riding a bike yesterday. I cycled seven or eight kilometers (70 or 80 miles, I’m not sure of the conversion) around Copenhagen, Denmark, on a tour with the chief lobbiest and the project leader for the Denmark Cyclist Federation and four other bloggers/journalists.

Most of me loved it.

My knees were the exception. My left one has asked my thigh to tell me it’s never going to speak to me again. My right knee cut out the middle man and gave me the message personally.

You see, I haven’t ridden a bike for any distance in probably seven years, and the distance then was less than a mile. Since then, my biking experience has consisted of swinging a leg over my son’s bike and walking it out of the carport so I could air up the tires for him.

In Copenhagen, everyone rides. Lise Bjørg Pederson, the lobbiest for the cyclist federation, said there are 30,000 bicycle commuters in Copenhagen, compared to only 15,000 automobile commuters. All of them passed me yesterday.

I was so slow, parents taking their kids along for the ride in cargo cycles (think pedal-powered SUV – SUC?) passed me. There were little girls, young women, men of all ages, grandmothers. Everyone was pedaling – fast. The thing that impressed me as an American is that there were no fat people, unless they were the few driving by in Mercedes and Audi cars.

Suffice it say that there must be a huge market for talcum powder in Copenhagen, and a very small market for gasoline, er, petrol.

Today I’m off to the island of Samsø, where 100 percent of the energy comes from renewable sources. More on that tomorrow.

New blog is up and running

Going Green in Denmark is now up on Kentucky.com's Greenspot. You'll also see items from me soon on The Daily Yonder, as well as here.

I arrive in Copenhagen on Sunday, and I'll be writing about a variety of subjects. You can learn more about what to expect by reading today's post on Going Green in Denmark.

New blog coming up

Beginning next weekend, I'll be writing another blog -- this one attached to the Kentucky.com's Greenspot, the online environmental section of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader.

The blog will chronicle my upcoming trip to Denmark to explore the environmental infrastructure and culture there, and see how some of that technology and mindset might be adapted to Appalachia.

"Going Green in Denmark" will be in the blog list on the right side of Greenspot, just below Easy Being Green and The Kentucky Pride Blog.

Turning the Black Gold Economy Green

Five years.

2,000 jobs.

175,000 acres.

125,000,000 trees.

628,868,602 pounds of carbon.

It’s a pretty simple equation, really. Maybe too simple for people to wrap their heads around. It sounds like a con – like it couldn’t really be that easy.

But it is.

Plant an acre of hardwood trees, and in six to ten years, they’ll take at least 1.63 metric tons of carbon a year out of the air. Plant 175,000 acres of trees, take 285,250 metric tons of carbon out of the air every year, create 2,000 jobs, and reforest a seventh of the land left treeless by strip mining in Appalachia.

The Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative, which includes the U.S. Office of Surface Mining, state mining agencies in the seven Appalachian coal states, universities, environmental groups, citizens and industry representatives, is talking about just such a project. And the White House is at least considering it.

The beauty of the project is that it doesn’t require an argument about the appropriateness of mountain top removal mining, a hot-button issue that has led to violence and arrests, particularly in the West Virginia coalfields. This is something we can do for the environment and for the economy now. We don’t have to wait for a fight to play out in Congress or the courts.

This project, known as a Green Forest Works for Appalachia, deals only with formerly mined lands that are in a state of arrested natural succession. In plain language, land that isn’t growing trees.

In order to prevent landslides, regulators required coal companies to compact mine spoils. While it was the best science at the time, we now know that the combination of 200-ton trucks running repeatedly over the ground and bulldozers “tracking in” the rock and dirt creates a runoff coefficient roughly equivalent to a shopping center parking lot. That makes it impossible for tree roots to penetrate the soil, and contributes to erosion.

Add to that the fact that coal companies can hydroseed aggressive grasses, achieve the required percentage of ground cover and recover their bonds quickly, and it’s little wonder that Appalachia has ended up with somewhere between 500,000 and a million acres of barren grasslands with nary a tree in sight.

But several years of research has proven that trees will grow on those old, overly compacted sites, if they’re properly prepared. That means plowing the rocky ground at least four feet deep with a hook mounted on the back of a bulldozer.

Sites planted this spring by ARRI and its partner, the Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team, have a 90-percent survival rate after six months. The projects also proved that both coal companies and environmentalists will turn out to plant trees on abandoned mine lands. The projects were so successful that the two in Kentucky won ARRI and the ACCWT the Governor’s Environmental Leadership Award.

There are the obvious environmental benefits to the project, including reduction of erosion, reduced flooding risks, habitat improvement and carbon sequestration, but there are also economic benefits. Unlike previous tree plantings on strip mines, the current project plants a variety of high-value native hardwoods – oak, hickory, ash, persimmon, beech, black cherry. For owners willing to wait – land companies for example – those trees could represent a managed forest resource that will provide a future stream of income when the coal is gone.

And then there are the jobs.

Under the plan now proposed, 2,000 local workers would be hired by the fifth year, planting trees up and down the mountain range, but with most of the work centered in the central Appalachians – Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia – where the bulk of strip mining has taken place. And these jobs would not be limited to manual laborers with dibble bars and tree bags. The project would require heavy equipment operators, foresters, surveyors and administrative personnel. It would pump money into transportation, tree nursery operations, and local service industries ranging from restaurants and hotels to equipment rentals.

Will planting trees replace coal mining? No. But it is a piece of the puzzle.

An industry that provides 2,000 jobs is at least a start, particularly since many of the skills required are transferable from the coal industry, where jobs will be lost in the coming years. There is also a push to get active mines to adopt the Forestry Reclamation Approach. That method leaves the top four-feet of rock and soil uncompacted, negating the need to plow the land, but still creating a demand for skilled tree planters, nursery workers, and foresters.

While none of this addresses the energy problem, it does leave room for other solutions.

Wind and solar will become more in demand in the future, and where better to build those facilities than on mine sites that can’t be reforested? And if we are building that infrastructure on abandoned mine sites, why can’t we build the components on the mine sites that were reclaimed as industrial sites?

The coal production curve turns downward in 10 years, and our challenge is to replace coal with a sustainable economy before that happens. One question remains: Is 10 years long enough to turn an economy based on black gold green?

When the coal runs out

When coal companies began moving into central Appalachia a hundred or so years ago, jobs came with them. And that is how coal companies have framed the debate over mining practices ever since.

Now environmental groups opposing mountain top removal and coal-fueled power plants are trying to frame the debate in terms of the environment. There is the loss of miles of streams, the destruction of viewsheds, the loss of habitat and species, the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, mercury in fish tissue, coal ash spills, the danger of slurry ponds.

Coal companies are fighting back with the same argument they’ve made for a century, and all over the region, people scared by the possibility of coal jobs going away are wearing “Coal, our future” t-shirts, and the state of Kentucky has even issued a “Friends of Coal” car license tag that pumps money into the industry advocacy group.

Guess which argument is resonating with the majority of Appalachian residents?

As James Carvel famously wrote on the wall of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign headquarters, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Well, what if it really is about the economy?

And what if the economic outlook for coal isn’t as rosy as the industry would have us believe?

We have been told repeatedly that there are 200 years of coal left in the Appalachians, but so far not one industry advocate I’ve heard has said what that estimate assumes. For one thing, it assumes all coal, not just economically mineable coal. For another, it makes no distinction between low-sulfur and high-sulfur coal.

According to the industry, the equation is very simple: Coal production good; environmentalists bad.

But what if the real danger to coal mining jobs isn’t environmentalists?

What if the real enemy is increased coal production?

What if 200 years is a fantasy, and what if we really have a tenth that long?

What if I’m not making this up?

The U.S. Geological Survey released the National Coal Assessment in July. That report says that coal companies in Appalachia can increase production levels for only 10 more years. That’s when economic coal reserves in the most heavily mined counties run out, and the production curve turns downward.

TEN YEARS!

Production is expected to drop to less than a third of current levels before the end of the century.

What then?

There are undeniable economic truths in the coal industry. Coal is a boom or bust industry. When demand goes up, price goes up and the coal economy booms. Production goes up and employment goes up.

Up until now, the downside of that cycle was that companies tend to over-produce, causing market gluts, followed by declines in production and employment. But if the USGS report is right, we are about to enter a different kind bust cycle.

And this bust cycle won’t end with the next cold winter. It will continue until the coal runs out.

Demand will go up, price will go up, production will go up, and employment will go up, in the short term, but then the supplies will begin to dwindle. Price will continue to go up because supply will not be able to keep pace with demand. This time, production will be hamstrung by the lack of mineable coal. Employment will go down because there isn’t enough coal to warrant a large workforce.

Given this equation, coal becomes more than just an environmental emergency, it becomes an economic and an energy emergency.

We have to address these issues. If production continues to rise, jobs will run out.

As coal production declines, energy will become more and more expensive.

It’s only a matter of time – and less time than anyone is willing to admit publicly.

The question then, is what alternatives do we have? I’ll explore some options in the coming weeks, from reforestation to wind, to alternative mining techniques.

Back in the Saddle Again

It's nearly a year since I posted, but I'm going to be back in full swing soon.

I've spent the past two years immersed in environmental work related to coal, including stream testing, and reclamation of abandoned mine lands using a technique known as the forestry reclamation approach. Now I'm going to be putting that new knowledge and experience to work in writing.

Keep watching this spot, and others to be announced, for posts about energy technology, green jobs, and how we in the rural U.S. can learn from other countries. Plans are in the works for an environmental tour of a nation that is 100 percent energy independent, and I'll be blogging about the trip.

Stay tuned.