Plastic pollution of micron size has spread throughout our lives

From a Video Presentation by Dr. Sherri Mason, Penn State — Erie Campus, March 1, 2021

Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans has been publicized widely; we’ve heard about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Lesser known is the prevalence of microplastics in freshwater systems, which are conduits from land to the sea.

Dr. Sherri Mason, cutting-edge plastic pollution researcher and Sustainability Coordinator at Penn State Erie, will present an overview of what plastic is, its proliferation in our society, and its emergence as one of the most prominent environmental pollutants.

Dr. Sherri A. Mason completed her doctorate in Chemistry at the University of Montana as a NASA Earth System Science scholar. Her research group is among the first to study the prevalence and impact of plastic pollution within freshwater ecosystems. Among her many accolades Dr. Mason earned the Heinz Award in Public Policy in 2018.

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See also: Microplastics: An emerging threat to the Chesapeake Bay, David Alan, VRBO News Now, April 8, 2021

“You can see everything from water bottles to plastic bags,” said Chris Moore with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. We found a sneaker, dozens of construction hard hats, even a traffic drum. Every bit of trash we saw as we walked the shoreline was the ugly side of our reliance on plastics. The bigger problem is some of these larger plastic objects will break down here in the hot sun. Some of the trash will end up back in the bay to be torn apart by tides, forming microplastics.

The tiny specks of plastic — some invisible to the naked eye — pose a significant risk to a host of juvenile finfish found in the Chesapeake Bay. There are concerns that oysters and clams may be trying to filter microplastics and cannot. Microplastic contamination is not just a concern for the environment. A 2016 study showed the commercial seafood industry in Virginia and Maryland contributed $1.4 billion in sales and 30,000 jobs to the local economy.

Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, Texas in August 2017

From an Article by Emma Newburger, CNBC, May 18, 2020

PHOTO in Article — People make their way out of a flooded neighborhood after it was inundated with rain water, remnants of Hurricane Harvey, on August 28, 2017 in Houston, Texas

Climate change is hindering progress on cancer prevention and increasing people’s exposure to deadly carcinogens, according to a new report from scientists at the American Cancer Society and Harvard University.

Hotter temperatures worldwide have fueled more frequent weather disasters like hurricanes and wildfires that release vast amounts of carcinogens into communities and delay access to cancer treatment.

“The prospects for further progress in cancer prevention and control in this century are bright but face an easily overlooked threat from climate change,” scientists wrote in a new report in the journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

For instance, when Hurricane Harvey made landfall on Texas and Louisiana in August 2017, it caused catastrophic flooding that inundated chemical plants and oil refineries and released deadly carcinogens into neighborhoods in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city.

The half-life of some of the carcinogens detected after Harvey is up to 50 years, researchers said. Some areas in Houston have experienced higher levels of childhood leukemia driven by a high concentration of chemicals in the air.

Climate change has also triggered longer and more destructive wildfire seasons in the U.S., releasing pollutants that remain in the air for months after the flames dissipate.

In 2018, California experienced the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season on record with a total of 8,527 blazes burning nearly 2 million acres. The smoke traveled all the way to New England, while air pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area was among the worst levels in the world.

PHOTO in Article — Irma Maldanado stands with Sussury her parrot and her dog in what is left of her home that was destroyed when Hurricane Maria passed through on September 27, 2017 in Corozal, Puerto Rico.

Extreme weather disasters also lower cancer survival rates. One study shows that cancer patients were 19% more likely to die when hurricane declarations were made during their therapy because of treatment interruptions compared with patients who had regular access to care.

“For patients with cancer, the effects of hurricanes on access to cancer care can mean the difference between life and death,” the authors wrote.

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2018 it shut down several factories that provided live-saving IV fluid bags to U.S. hospitals, causing shortages in cancer facilities nationwide.

Cancer is the No. 2 cause of death globally. Nearly 10 million people worldwide will die from cancer this year, according to researchers.

Some cancer treatment centers have tried to adapt to climate threats by implementing plans to provide resilience to future flooding events.

Climate-change mitigation efforts in general can benefit cancer prevention by lowering harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists urged interventions like increased use of renewable energy, sustainable manufacturing and reduced intake of red and processed meat.

“Climate change is not a future threat. It is impacting cancer outcomes today and there are things we can do to respond,” said Leticia Nogueira, a scientist at the American Cancer Society and an author of the report.

PHOTO in Article — Fire fighters attack the Thomas Fire’s north flank with backfires as they continue to fight a massive wildfire north of Los Angeles, near Ojai, California, December 9, 2017.

Enough is Enough! Tell WVDEP: Don’t Allow More Toxins in WV’s Water

From the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, May 5, 2020

Right now, in the midst of a public health crisis, the WVDEP is proposing to allow even more dangerous toxins in our water. Act Now! Tell WVDEP to respect your water and your health, don’t allow more toxins in West Virginia’s water!

WVDEP’s proposal is related to a critical portion of West Virginia’s water quality standards called human health criteria. Human health criteria determines how much of a dangerous toxin can be in our water before it harms our health.

West Virginia’s current human health criteria is based on data that is nearly 40-years old and citizen advocates have long fought for more protective criteria. Sadly, WVDEP’s proposal exposes us to higher amounts of certain toxic chemicals and known carcinogens. It also leaves out updated protections for several toxins the EPA has recommended WV to adopt since 2015.

Enough is enough! Demand WVDEP respect your water and your health, tell them not to allow more toxins in West Virginia’s water.

You Can Act Now, You Should Act Now, You Need to Act Now

It’s hard to believe that WVDEP is even considering such a proposal at a time when public health is a global priority. Rather than heeding the advice of public health experts, like Dr. McCawley, WVDEP’s proposal enables chemical manufacturers to release more toxic pollution into our waters. Speak up for clean water and public health! Tell WVDEP not to allow more toxins in our water!

You can submit comments on the proposed rule through May 19.

West Virginia Rivers Coalition
3501 MacCorkle Ave SE #129
Charleston, West Virginia 25304

304-637-7201 | wvrivers@wvrivers.org

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See also: New EPA Navigable Waters Rule Challenged in Court

From the Allegheny Blue Ridge Alliance, ABRA Update # 275, May 7, 2020

A group of conservation organizations on April 29 filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of South Carolina, Charleston District, challenging the Trump Administration’s Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which was published as a final rule on April 21. The rule would redefine what wetlands and streams qualify for protection under the Clean Water Act. It is estimated that half of the nation’s wetlands and nearly 1/5th of its streams would lose Clean Water Act protection. The rule, which was jointly issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is to become effective June 22, 2020.

The suit was filed by the Southern Environmental law Center (SELC) on behalf of a coalition of conservation groups that includes the James River Association, an ABRA member. A similar lawsuit challenging the new law was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by another coalition of conservation organizations that includes the Natural Resources Defense Council, also an ABRA member.

The lawsuit contends that the agencies’ wholesale stripping of protections was an unlawful departure from decades of bipartisan practice. Among other things, the agencies failed to explain or evaluate the impact of their actions on the nation’s water quality or give Americans a meaningful opportunity to comment on the elimination of scientifically based protections for streams and wetlands. The suit further argues that the challenged rule ignores the intent of the Clean Water Act, which a bipartisan Congress passed in 1972 because state-by-state efforts to clean the nation’s waters failed.

A copy of the SELC filing with the court is available here. A SELC press release is here.

We are eating a nominal 5 grams of plastics each and every week, uugghh!

From an Article by Kevin Loria, Consumer Reports, April 30, 2020

The Menace of Microplastics

Any plastic item—bag or bottle, toy or chair—starts to come apart with use and time, breaking down into tinier and tinier fragments. Most of the plastic produced hasn’t been recycled (see “What’s Gone Wrong With Recycling”). But it’s not just old plastic that has disintegrated into particles that make their way into lakes, rivers, and oceans. Cracking open a brand-new plastic bottle or tearing a wrapper off a sandwich releases fragments of plastic that we might end up ingesting. Household dust can be full of microplastics—and it’s possible that you might kick this up into the air from your carpet and breathe it in. Plastic fibers even wash off clothes into our water supplies.

Fragments of plastic smaller than 5 millimeters in length are known as “microplastics,” and scientists have started to refer to even more microscopic fragments—generally smaller than 1,000 nanometers—as “nanoplastics.” In a 2019 report, the World Health Organization found that we’ve unknowingly ingested microplastics for decades without clear negative consequences, saying that research into potential health effects is needed. While there’s much we don’t yet know, we have learned that micro- and nanoplastics are everywhere. Snow in the Arctic carries substantial amounts of microplastic, according to a 2019 study in the journal Science Advances, and even more has been detected in the Alps. Microplastics can even be found in the seemingly pristine sand of Hawaiian beaches.

Given this, researchers are concerned that these plastics can make their way into the tissues of our bodies, according to Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., the recently retired director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program. “Nanoplastics can easily cross all kinds of barriers, whether it’s the blood-brain barrier or the placental barrier, and get into our tissues,” Birnbaum has said. Breathing in nanoplastics might introduce them into our cardiovascular system and bloodstream, for example.

It’s also possible that nanoplastic particles might create a systemic inflammatory response, according to Phoebe Stapleton, Ph.D., an assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Her research has previously shown that inhaled metal particles can harm the cardiovascular health of a developing fetus. And her animal research has also confirmed that when a mother breathes in nanoplastics, the particles can be found in many places inside the fetus. “We know that after exposure, the plastic particles are everywhere we look,” Stapleton says. “We don’t know yet what those particles are doing once they’re deposited there.” Other researchers, like Myers at Environmental Health Sciences, are concerned that nanoplastics could possibly release harmful chemicals (such as BPA) into our bodies.

Another area of inquiry focuses on the fact that microplastics act like magnets for additional toxins, picking up pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chemicals now banned from manufacture in the U.S. but still present in the environment. According to Linda Birnbaum, formerly at the NIEHS, if we later ingest or inhale contaminated microplastics, they may release these substances they’ve picked up into our blood or organs, along with whatever chemicals are also in the plastic itself.

See my finger, see these tiny plastics — some are very much smaller still ...

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See also: Environmental toxicologist wants to understand how microplastics affect human health,
Stephanie Wright, Chemical & Engineering News, Volume 98, Issue 15, April 19, 2020

We are studying air particles that are a so-called health-relevant size that can enter the central and distal parts of the human lung. We are also investigating whether we can detect microplastics in human lung tissue and whether we can find any links to health outcomes.

Additionally, we are doing some in vitro studies to examine the toxicology of these particles. The big question is the relative importance of microplastics. Humans are obviously exposed to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions, of particles in a cubic meter of air, so it’s vital to understand the relative proportion of microplastics within those particles and their relative potency.

Plastic credit cards represent 5 grams of pollutants

From the Cover Story of Consumer Reports Magazine, Volume 85, Number 6, June 2020, pp. 26 – 35.

The first company to ever sell fully synthetic plastic—the Bakelite Corp., established in 1922—advertised it as “The Material of a Thousand Uses.”

It had that right: Today, beyond the plates we eat from, the straws we drink through, the furniture we sit on, and the toys our kids play with, there is plastic in the clothes we wear, in the cars we drive, even in the lifesaving medical equipment in our hospitals. And—more than anywhere else—plastic is in our packaging, encasing everything from laundry detergent to prescription pills, from the food we eat to the beverages we drink.

In fact, the world has produced more than 10 billion tons of the stuff, mostly since the 1950s, and we just keep making more. In 2018, manufacturers created almost 400 million tons of new plastic, and production is expected to almost quadruple by 2050. The vast majority of that plastic eventually ends up piled up around the planet. Some of it may last for hundreds of years, and when it does break down, it can become small particles of plastic—microplastics—that spread farther across the planet, entering our water and food supply.

Why is this a problem? After all, manufacturers and certain regulatory agencies have long assured us that plastics are safe for human health. “In the U.S., we have a robust system that looks at materials that are in contact with food, and that includes plastics, managed by the [Food and Drug Administration],” says Karyn Schmidt, senior director of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council, an industry group that represents plastics and chemical manufacturers. “Consumers should feel very confident using any plastic coming into contact with food that they would buy in a grocery store.”

MORE ON ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH

And yet there’s growing concern. It’s not just the photos of whales, albatrosses, and sea turtles washing ashore, stomachs clogged with the stuff, or the stories about swirling ocean vortexes collecting litter from around the globe—although these are sobering. Reliable research now shows that tiny bits of plastic are in our food, drinking water, the air we breathe, and, yes, inside our bodies.

“This credit card here, this is how much plastic you are consuming every week,” Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., holding up a Visa card, said when announcing legislation meant to reduce plastic pollution this past February. He was referencing a preliminary estimate by some scientists that the plastic the average person may be eating and drinking totals as much as 5 grams per week. One research review published in 2019 calculated that the average American eats, drinks, and breathes in more than 74,000 microplastic particles every year.

Some scientists say it’s likely that ingesting these tiny bits of plastic could expose us to harmful chemicals. “There cannot be no effect,” says Pete Myers, Ph.D., founder and chief scientist of the nonprofit Environmental Health Sciences and an adjunct professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

“People have this idea that plastic is clean,” a sterile object that doesn’t come apart, says Sherri Mason, Ph.D., sustainability coordinator at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pa., and a chemist who has studied the presence of plastic in tap water, beer, sea salt, and bottled water.

But, in fact, the raw materials of plastic are created from fossil fuels including oil and natural gas. And thousands of chemicals, depending on the product, are used to make it harder, softer, or more flexible. These chemicals include bisphenols, such as bisphenol A (BPA), and phthalates, which can flow or leach into the foods touched by plastic, especially when that plastic is warmed.

“It’s ironic that as public attention to this issue is really growing, global plastic production is increasing,” says Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, now a visiting professor at Bennington College in Vermont and president of Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit focused on ending plastics pollution. And as more plastic is produced and discarded, contaminating our water, food, and air, exposure levels for the average person will continue to rise.

Shopping bags disintegrate into microplastics, potentially entering our food supply and, eventually, our bodies. (To be continued.)

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See also: Scientists Discover Highest Concentration of Deep-Sea Microplastics to Date, Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch.com, May 01, 2020

Scientists have discovered the highest concentration of microplastics ever recorded on the seafloor—1.9 million pieces in one square meter (approximately 11 square feet) of the Mediterranean.

But the finding, published in Science on Thursday, suggests a much broader problem as deep-sea currents carry plastics to microplastic “hotspots” that may well also be deep-sea ecosystems rich in biodiversity. For study coauthor professor Elda Miramontes of the University of Bremen, Germany, the results are alarming.

Health data with respect to Marcellus Shale development May 7

Network of Shale Water Researchers, Penn State University., May 1, 2018

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Brian Schwartz, professor at Johns Hopkins University and senior investigator in the Department of Epidemiology and Health Services Research at Geisinger, will speak at Penn State on health data related to Marcellus Shale development.

Schwartz will talk from 4 to 5 p.m. Monday, May 7, in 112 Walker Building. His presentation, titled “Does Unconventional Natural Gas Development Affect Human Health,” is free and open to the public. The event is part of the EarthTalks series, sponsored by Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems institute (EESI).

Schwartz is an environmental epidemiologist and a physician who specializes in occupational and environmental medicine. He serves as director of the Environmental Health Institute, a joint effort between Johns Hopkins and Geisinger to study how changes in land use, energy production, and food and water systems impact human health in central and northeast Pennsylvania.

His talk will review how epidemiologic studies are done; how unconventional natural gas development could affect human health and the possible pathways; the differences between individual-level and contextual exposures; findings from the research that has been completed from the Environmental Health Institute; and then a brief summary of ongoing work.

The Marcellus Shale boom began about a decade ago in Pennsylvania due in part to technological advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” More than 10,000 unconventional wells have been drilled since, but “fracking” has remained controversial due to concerns about potential environmental and health impacts.

Schwartz, a professor in the Department of Environmental health Sciences in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, examines health effects of chemicals through occupational, environmental and molecular epidemiology studies.

More recently, he has focused on global environmental sustainability, including how land use, energy choices, food production, and water quantity and quality are contributing to global climate change, ecosystem degradation, biodiversity and species losses – and ultimately how these factors pose health risks to humans.

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Associations between Unconventional Natural Gas Development and Nasal and Sinus, Migraine Headache, and Fatigue Symptoms in Pennsylvania

Mountain Valley Pipeline to use 42” diameter pipe

From an Article by Ken Ward Jr., Staff Writer, Charleston Gazette, April 27, 2018

This article was produced in partnership with the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. ProPublica is supporting seven local and regional newsrooms this year, including the Gazette-Mail, as they work on important investigative projects affecting their communities.

More than 26 years ago, I wrote a story about a woman named Dixie Woolum.

I had been at my paper barely six months. At the time, I thought it would be cool that I’d get a dateline from Woolum’s hometown, Cinderella, W.Va. Little did I know then how much that story’s headline — “Broken promises” — really meant in the long history of West Virginia’s relationship with coal.

Woolum’s husband, Jimmy, was a coal miner who had died years earlier.

“Dixie Woolum packed her husband’s dinner bucket every morning,” I wrote. “Jimmy left early to work in the mines outside Williamson, heart of the billion-dollar coalfield.”

I was hoping to illustrate the financial distress faced at the time by Woolum and by thousands of people like her because of the potential collapse of the United Mine Workers of America’s health care plan for retired miners and their families. Miners like Jimmy Woolum thought they were promised health care for life in a long-ago deal between President Harry Truman and legendary UMWA President John L. Lewis.

In reality, protecting that health care has been an almost constant fight, part of the root of the bitter strikes against Pittston Coal and A.T. Massey Coal, the first two in an avalanche of coal operators who tried to stop funding miner benefits and pensions the union had won in its national contract.

Coal miners and coal communities are pretty used to broken promises by now.

Congress promised in 1969 to eliminate black lung disease. But thousands of miners — including Jimmy Woolum — continued to die from it. Today, though the industry knows how to prevent black lung, there’s a resurgence of the disease among miners in Central Appalachia.

Coalfield residents were promised that strip mines would be reclaimed, but most states haven’t required companies to set aside nearly enough money for cleanups, setting the stage for a financial crisis as the industry’s decline puts more and more companies at risk of failing.

Most of all, coalfield communities were promised prosperity — and today some of the places that have produced the most coal are among the region’s poorest.

How can this be?

It’s a crucial question to ask, especially at this critical time in West Virginia, as the state rushes forward with its new relationship with the natural gas industry.

Coal has done a lot for West Virginia. Generations of miners earned a good living, especially after the state’s coalfields were unionized. As Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., likes to remind people in Washington, coal helped win two world wars and built our nation into a global superpower.

The industry’s downsides are, if not always acknowledged by political leaders, well-documented. The great Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams listed coal’s “repetitive cycle of boom and bust, its savage exploitation of men and nature, and its seemingly endless series of disasters,” in an often-cited passage from his seminal history of the state.

And now, in the face of a major decline in the coal industry, families and entire communities that depended on it are hurting.

What will coal leave behind? Many in West Virginia are starting to understand the painful answers to that question: Abandoned mine lands, abandoned pension plans, polluted streams, empty government coffers — giant challenges for local communities in supporting schools and other basic needs.

At the same time, political leaders and business boosters are pointing to natural gas as the way out of West Virginia’s downward spiral, as the answer to our state’s economic problems.

But others worry that the state is headed down the same road with natural gas that it’s been on with coal.

We’ve just published a story detailing those similarities. Earlier this year, for example, Gov. Jim Justice proposed and then quickly backed away from a natural gas tax earlier to help fund our state’s schools. Gov. William Marland did the same thing with a proposed coal tax in the 1950s.

And Marland was far from the first to offer warnings about West Virginia’s wealth being dug from the ground and hauled out of state.

As early as 1884, a state Tax Commission report said, “The question is whether this vast wealth shall belong to persons who live here and who are permanently identified with the future of West Virginia, or whether it shall pass into the hands of persons who do not live here and care nothing for our state except to pocket the treasures which lie buried in our hills.”

In this series of stories, with the help of ProPublica, I hope to bring readers here in West Virginia, and those around the country, a clearer view of how history could be repeating itself.

For example, as my first story illustrates, West Virginia lawmakers and regulators have moved quickly to give gas developers broad latitude to operate, weakening environmental and public safety rules that govern the industry. Over the course of the year, I plan to more fully illustrate the ways the gas boom and what it brings with it are changing our communities and our landscape.

I also plan to look at the impact on workers. Are the jobs from the Marcellus Shale gas boom really going to West Virginians, or are companies bringing in seasoned hands from Texas and Oklahoma? Unlike our experience with coal, is West Virginia using the wealth created during this boom to plan and prepare for some day in the future when the gas is gone and we need a more diverse economy?

Who is in the room when decisions about the gas industry are being made? Are our communities empowered, or are government officials and gas lobbyists working out deals behind closed doors?

Hopefully, the stories about this crossroads in our state will shine some light on how West Virginia can learn from our past and the experience of people like Dixie Woolum. Follow along, and please tell us your stories, about your experience with the coal or the natural gas industry in West Virginia.

You can email us at changingwv@wvgazettemail.com or call 304-348-1702. You can also send us regular mail to Ken Ward Jr., Charleston Gazette-Mail, 1001 Virginia Street, East., Charleston, W.Va., 25301 Plus, we’ll be giving you more information in the days to come about how to take part in this conversation.

Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702, or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.

Noise affects all ages of mankind!

‘Better and better and better and better’

From an Article by Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette-Mail, February 11, 2017

Commenting in his speech about the state’s natural gas industry, Justice said, “We need to do everything we can to exploit that to make it even better and better and better and better.” The governor also offered his support for some version of a controversial “forced pooling” bill that could make holdout mineral owners sign leases. 

As natural gas production in the Marcellus Shale region of North Central West Virginia and the state’s Northern Panhandle has increased over the last decade, so have complaints and concerns from residents in those communities about all manner of impacts on their lives.

When lawmakers and the Tomblin administration passed a new state law to try to better regulate modern horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, many concerns of local citizens were not addressed. Tomblin’s bill was weaker than one recommended by a legislative committee that spent months reviewing the issue. 

An earlier Tomblin executive order on the issue was also weakened after private discussions with oil and gas lobbyists, and the governor’s office later refused to make public correspondence with the industry about that order.

In the final legislation, action on some key issues for citizens — concerns about air quality, noise and excessive light, questions about whether jobs were going to local residents and about the safety of waste disposal practices — were put off while additional studies of those matters were conducted.

The DEP later fell behind on getting those studies finished, and, even after extensive briefings on the eventual findings, lawmakers have declined to take additional actions to address problems the studies identified. Instead, lawmakers have tried to push several bills that would erode permit requirements for drilling operations and take away the rights of citizens to file certain types of lawsuits against those activities. Those bills have so far failed, at least partly because of opposition from Huffman while he was DEP secretary.

When she returned as the DEP’s environmental advocate in June 2014, one of the issues Wendy Radcliff worked on was the flood of complaints the DEP was receiving from residents near various operations of the oil and gas industry. The advocate office worked with others in the DEP to schedule public meetings and to plan visits to the area so Huffman and other top agency officials could get a first-hand look at what residents were concerned about. 

Doddridge County resident Tom Bates attended some of those meetings to tell DEP officials about what it was like for his family when a large natural gas compressor station moved in across the road. Compressor stations use large engines — in the case of the one near Bates, 11 of them — to keep natural gas constantly pressurized while it is moved for many miles through various types of pipelines.

“We were trying to get them to do something about the noise,” Bates recalled last week. “At night it lights up our front yard, and we can hear the engines inside our house.”

Bates described watching a potted plant vibrate across a nightstand in his bedroom because of the shaking from the rumble of the engines. “We are for oil and gas as far as energy independence and local jobs,” Bates said. “We just think it needs to be done the right way.”

Bates was disappointed to hear the new DEP leadership had deleted the noise and light protections. “I wasn’t aware of that at all,” Bates said. “That’s very discouraging. I think there should be rules and regulations.”

‘This uncertainty is unacceptable’

While the legislatively mandated study of the issue did not find clear violations of noise or light standards, it did recommend the industry pay more attention to such matters.

So, in August 2015, the DEP proposed a change in one of the types of permits it issues for compressor stations and dewatering facilities associated with the natural gas industry.

Such facilities would normally have to obtain a standard DEP air pollution permit, one that is applied for and reviewed individually. But to save the industry time in getting approval, the DEP also offers companies the ability to have such facilities authorized under a general permit. The general permit spells out standard construction and operating restrictions, and if companies agree to them up front, they avoid the most time-consuming individual permit process.

The change the DEP proposed was to simply insert a line into the general permit — called G35 — that said any facilities authorized under that permit “shall not create a nuisance to the surrounding community by way of unreasonable noise and light during operations.”

When the DEP sought public comment on that proposal, local residents and citizen groups turned out to support it, and industry officials spoke up to oppose it. For example, Lyn Bordo described what it was like to live near a compressor station along the Doddridge-Ritchie county line.

“Most days, especially mornings, I feel like I am living on an airport runway,” Bordo told the DEP, according to an agency response to public comments.

On the other hand, Antero Resources Inc. complained that the DEP’s proposed language did not really provide a standard for what constitutes a nuisance.

“Absent a standard, the permittee and the agency have no tangible means of measuring compliance,” Antero said. “This uncertainty is unacceptable.”

On Dec. 18, 2015, the DEP finalized the changes to the general permit, which then became known as G35-C, because it was a revision of the original G35.

About a month later, on Jan. 15, 2016, Charleston lawyer David L. Yaussy, appealed the changes to the state Air Quality Board on behalf of the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association. Yaussy challenged a variety of changes the DEP had made to the general permit, including the addition of the language about noise and light.

Board members held a hearing in March 2016. Jerry Williams, a DEP air quality engineer who wrote the permit, testified that the noise and light language was added because, “Historically, we’ve had issues from citizens who live nearby these facilities, who have provided objections to these facilities based on those issues. If a citizen comments on things, we take those issues very seriously.”

On Aug. 26, 2016, the air board issued a 14-page final order. The board ordered the DEP to make some changes in other parts of the general permit, but upheld the noise and light language.

Board members noted gas companies didn’t have to use the general permit and could avoid the noise and light language by going through the process of seeking an individual permit for compressor stations or similar facilities.

Regarding the industry argument that the DEP’s air office did not have any legal authority to regulate noise or light, the board ruled language in state law giving the agency the authority to “impose any reasonable condition” as part of the general permit gave the DEP the authority it needed.

The oil and gas organization had the right to appeal the air board’s decision to Kanawha Circuit Court within 30 days, but it did not do so.

Source: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/20170211/dep-eliminates-protections-for-noise-light-from-natural-gas-facilities#sthash.vwRK3CSU.dpuf

(Part 3 of this Article to be posted here tomorrow).

E - Day, WV State Capitol, Feb. 27, 2017

It’s a Gas 3 – Conference on Marcellus Shale Gas Development

Compiled for FrackCheckWV by S. Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV

“It’s a Gas 3″ was a West Virginia Pipelines and Fracking Strategy session held at Jackson’s Mill on January 20-22, 2017. It was attended by representatives of most of the West Virginia groups questioning pipelines and fracking, along with representatives from Kentucky, Virginia and Maryland. Representatives from Pennsylvania participated via a video call.

The primary purpose was to plan and coordinate activities among the various groups so as to protect human health and the physical environment from the impacts of Marcellus shale gas development.

Opposition to natural gas development is widespread in the United States and in many countries overseas, due to the need to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the air and the damage to the surface and water of the earth where pipelines and fracking are put into place. Specific problems in various places were shared, and ways to get local people involved before they are hit with earthmovers.

Proximity to homes is a big problem. Homeowners are treated with contempt both in planning and execution. The needs of society in the future with the rising population and the need for clean water and space to grow food takes a back seat to a corporate view that doesn’t run beyond five to seven years.

Ethics and morality take first place when talking to people. The ethical and moral breaches involved in taking land, making people sick, and how their interests are ignored by companies and government agencies when dominated by the companies. It is necessary that concerned citizens get out and talk to real people and local governments about what has happened elsewhere and how they can expect the same if it comes to them. Science is on the side of protecting ourselves and our property in all respects. Health claims can no longer be dismissed as anecdotes. Contamination of land and water, sound and light, are being measured and recorded and published. All reasonable persons now know that human induced climate change is taking place at an accelerating rate.

Opponents of gas shale drilling & fracking need to cooperate with each other in state and out of state. They should share information and ideas, working for the good of people and the generations to come, against short thinking and those who would profit at the expense of others. In many places renewable energy is already cheaper than burning gas.

One of the problems with pipelines is that they will lock in fracking activities for decades, which does further damage. There is a need to deny 401 permits when there are stream damages involved. There is a need to encourage banks and investors to disinvest in pipelines and fracking, which leads to climate change. One of the worst things about pipelines is, once in the ground, they will be paid for by gas customers, even if they are not used to full capacity, because utilities are cost plus by law. The utilities make a profit whether the rates are low or high. There is a serious problem as to whether they are needed in the first place. Gas shipped overseas contributes to the carbon burning problem, too.

Most people take pride in the environment. They like to see natural forests, nice farms, clean water with fish and wildlife. Appeals to love of beauty have an important place. Fishermen and hunters are natural friends of environmentalists, because they don’t want barren streams or sick game.

Local governments present an opportunity. They are strongly influenced by local businessmen, but the entire populace elects them. They are never given the faintest idea of the safety equipment they will need to fight pipeline explosions and fires. (It is possible the pipeline builders have no idea either.) A 42 inch pipeline under 100 times the atmospheric pressure has a blast radius of a mile. Things ignite up to two miles. Several miles of contents between valves would have to come out into the atmosphere and burn even if they were automatically shut when the leak occurs. Although the pipes are a few feet underground they are an easy target for sabotage or enemy attack. What a terrible thing it is to put pipelines within a few hundred feet of a school or densely populated neighborhood.

As for jobs, construction only lasts for a few months, and then workers are gone, because most jobs are specialized and workers have to be brought in. Jobs in the drilling rigs average a little below $100,000 a year, but they are very hard, dangerous work. See the five minute video here. What happens if one of the chains in the video is out of place? Accidents are potentially disastrous. See this 45 minute video of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. What can happen on land is a smaller version of this.

Christian DeHaemer reports in Seeking Alpha the statistics of rig accidents and says since it is so dangerous and expensive a company called Robotic Drilling Systems is developing the world’s first fully autonomous robotic oil drilling rig in Norway. He recommends it as an investment. Can the U. S. be far behind? Another company is writing the computer code “to integrate all the robots needed, from drill floor robots to pipe-handlers, lift, robotic roughnecks, and everything else. This automatic rig will be out in the beta version in 2017.”

Another discussion of automation of drilling is this article from Bloomberg news:

“Rigs have gotten so much more efficient that the shale industry can use about half as many as it did at the height of the boom in 2014 to suck the same amount of oil out of the ground, says Angie Sedita, an analyst at UBS Corp. Nabors Industries, the world’s largest onshore driller, says it expects to cut the number of workers at each well site eventually to about five from 20 by deploying more automated drilling rigs.”

Less labor and far more investment! Take that labor! Take that, you local businessmen!

Fracking has been getting less rewarding to everyone. But, bad  laws keeps coming along to advance company interests at the expense of the public. In Montana, they can’t get a minimum setback from buildings. The Virginia legislature doesn’t want to have full information about contents of fracking fluids released even to doctors taking care of victims of fracking accidents. It is a common practice to continue taxation of land at the old rate even when there is a pipeline or fracking activity resulting in reduced value. Enforcement of existing laws has been minimal. It was recently discovered there had been 9442 complaints to the Pennsylvania DEP on 10,027 fracked wells drilled over 12 years. Some 44% of those were drinking water related. Many were ignored by the Pennsylvania DEP.

The “It’s a Gas 3” conference developed areas of importance in the form of a grid of topics for attention, what group(s) was taking responsibility for each, timelines and leaders. Connections to groups in other states were designated. Participants also received a list of all participants to facilitate communication.

See also:  West Virginia Environmental Council

The Lancet: Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us… Quitting Them Can Save Us

From an Article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

Comparing coal, oil, and gas addiction to the last generation’s effort to kick the tobacco habit, doctors say that quitting would be the best thing humanity can do for its long-term healing.

The bad news is very bad, indeed. But first, the good news: “Responding to climate change could be the biggest global health opportunity of this century.”

That message is the silver lining contained in a comprehensive newly published report by The Lancet, the UK-based medical journal, which explores the complex intersection between global human health and climate change.

“It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.” — Prof. Peng Gong, Tsinghua University

The wide-ranging and peer-reviewed report—titled Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health—declares that the negative impacts of human-caused global warming have put at risk some of the world’s most impressive health gains over the last half century. What’s more, it says, continued use of fossil fuels is leading humanity to a future in which infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition, involuntary migration, displacement, and violent conflict will all be made made worse.

“Climate change,” said commission co-chairman Dr. Anthony Costello, a pediatrician and director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London, “has the potential to reverse the health gains from economic development that have been made in recent decades – not just through the direct effects on health from a changing and more unstable climate, but through indirect means such as increased migration and reduced social stability. Our analysis clearly shows that by tackling climate change we can also benefit health. Tackling climate change represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come.”

The four key findings of the report include:

1. The effects of climate change threaten to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health. The impacts are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health.

2. Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.

3. Achieving a decarbonized global economy and securing the public health benefits it offers is no longer primarily a technological or economic question – it is now a political one.

4. Climate change is fundamentally an issue of human health, and health professionals have a vital role to play in accelerating progress on mitigation and adaptation policies.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’ politicians everywhere should listen.” —Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth“Climate Change is a medical emergency,” said Dr. Hugh Montgomery, commission co-chair and director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance. “It thus demands an emergency response.”

With rising global temperatures fueling increasing extreme weather events, crop failures, water scarcity, and other crises, Montgomery says the report is an attempt to make it clear that drastic and immediate actions should be taken. “Under such circumstances,” he said, “no doctor would consider a series of annual case discussions and aspirations adequate, yet this is exactly how the global response to climate change is proceeding.”

In a companion paper published alongside the larger report, commission members Helena Wang and Richard Horton explained why human health impacts are an important part of the larger argument regarding climate change:

When climate change is framed as a health issue, rather than purely as an environmental, economic, or technological challenge, it becomes clear that we are facing a predicament that strikes at the heart of humanity. Health puts a human face on what can sometimes seem to be a distant threat. By making the case for climate change as a health issue, we hope that the civilizational crisis we face will achieve greater public resonance. Public concerns about the health effects of climate change, such as undernutrition and food insecurity, have the potential to accelerate political action in ways that attention to carbon dioxide emissions alone do not.

Responding to the findings and warnings contained in the report, Mike Childs, the head of policy for the Friends of the Earth-UK, said the message from one of the world’s foremost institutions on public health has given powerful new evidence to the argument that “radical action is urgently required” to avoid further climate catastrophe.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’,” Childs said, “politicians everywhere should listen.”

Going from diagnosis to prescribing a remedy, the doctors and scientists involved with the report—who equated the human health emergency of climate change with previous physician-led fights against tobacco use and HIV/AIDS—argue the crisis of anthropogenic climate change demands—as a matter of “medical necessity”—the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels (with special emphasis on coal) from the global energy mix. In addition, the authors say their data on global human health support a recommendation for an international carbon price.

“The health community has responded to many grave threats to health in the past,” said another commission co-chair, Professor Peng Gong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. “It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.”

The Commission argues that human health would vastly improve in a less-polluted world free from fossil fuels. “Virtually everything that you want to do to tackle climate change has health benefits,” said Dr. Costello. “We’re going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes.”

A video, produced by the Commission and released alongside the report, also explains:

As Wang and Horton conclude in their remarks, “Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Health professionals must mobilize now to address this challenge and protect the health and well-being of future generations.”

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Not ‘If’ But ‘How’: New Study Shows Why All Extreme Weather Is Climate Related

From an Article by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

New research explains why people debating whether or not specific events are caused by climate change have it all wrong

The debate over climate change has long focused on determining attribution—whether rising greenhouse gases and global warming caused a particular storm, drought, flood, or blizzard. Now, a new study in Nature Climate Change published Monday seeks to shift the underlying question from “if” to “how.”

“The climate is changing,” wrote National Center for Atmospheric Research scientists Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo and University of Reading physicist Theodore Shepherd in their study, Attribution of Climate Extreme Events. “The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be. All storms, without exception, are different. Even if most of them look just like the ones we used to have, they are not the same.”