Before China’s market reforms of ’78 and the consequent economic growth, Liukuaizhuang was a quiet, nondescript village 100 miles from Beijing.  But the expansion was wholly unregulated and now there is a price to pay.

Liukuaizhuang is circled by dozens of chemical, paint and rubber factories, all built in the last 30 years. Every one of them has poisoned the air and water ceaselessly since the day it opened.

One in fifty residents of Liukuaizhuang has been diagnosed with cancer in the last decade. That’s 10 times higher than the national rate.

“They asked in the hospital whether my family had a history of cancer. I said: ‘No, in the last three generations no one had it’,” one villager told Reuters, while pointing to x-rays of his metastatic disease.

Local Communist Party official Huo Junwei legitimizes the concern. “The factories were not far from homes and to a certain degree influenced the normal life of the villagers,” he conceded.

“(But) we think figures provided by individuals exaggerate pollution problems in our area. For several years we have been looking into whether there is a link between cancer and chemical production and have not yet got a scientific answer.”

That whitewash aside, things got so ugly in Liukuaizhuang that government officials quietly began a pollution crackdown in 2003.

It may be too late in that, “Pollutants including heavy metals like mercury and lead have already got into the food chain,” Gao Zhong, a water pollution expert, told Reuters.

Too late for many perhaps, so aspirations naturally turn to the children and grandchildren.

“Of course I am worried, but what is the use of being worried?” said a lung cancer patient. “We have to save our concern for the next generation.”

Two Mondays ago the Big O introduced his energy and environment squad. Then he warned that climate change and the nation’s dependence on foreign sources of energy are tough problems even in good economic times.

Acknowledging that previous administrations failed to make a dent in these areas, the president-elect said “this time must be different.”

“This will be a leading priority of my presidency and a defining test of our time,” he added. “We cannot accept complacency, nor accept any more broken promises.”

Obama has asked Carol Browner, his newly minted White House coordinator for energy and climate, to take the lead on policy development for global warming and energy security. Browner had been President Clinton’s chief at the EPA.

Until the US gets a grip on its fossil fuel emissions, developing countries will never take the matter seriously. This includes China and India.

The Big O also tapped Nobel laureate Steven Chu to head Energy and tasked him to execute on his campaign promises including a cap-and-trade scheme to curb greenhouse emissions and investment in energy technology innovation.

That investment is likely to be dwarfed by energy infrastructure projects ticketed for the Big O’s stimulus package, meaning that Chu must have been quite busy over the holidays.

A thousand people live in McCullom Lake Village and 14 of them have developed brain cancer. That’s between 2 and 20 times more than would be expected based on the reported incidence of brain cancer in the general population.

Just a case of bad luck?

“Absolutely not,” according to Aaron Freiwald an attorney who represents local residents in lawsuits against the multinational chemical company Rohm and Haas.

The billion dollar company has operated a production facility in McCollum Lake Village since 1963. The plant produces everything from pesticides to plastics, and byproducts of these processes cause cancer.

Rohm and Haas admits it dumped toxic byproducts into an 8 acre pit on its property for 20 years before ceasing the practice in 1979. There was nothing illegal about that practice at the time.

This May, the county tested 14 of the town’s water wells for contamination. They all came up clean.

To which the residents counter that no testing was done back when Rohm and Haas was dumping the chemicals. “They knew that there were chemicals in there – that they were dangerous,” Freiwald told CBS. 

And besides, there are more than 14 wells in town.

Meanwhile, it’s possible there’s a second brain cancer cluster at a Rohm and Haas plant in Philadelphia, where 12 research scientists died of the disease in the past 30 years. Five of them worked along the same hallway. 

“That could be a coincidence,” Dr. Phil Lewis told CBS.

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Geologists know that when carbon dioxide contacts the igneous rock peridotite, a spontaneous chemical reaction results. The reaction produces limestone and eliminates carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, so people thought why not grind up some peridotite, transport it to power plants and line smokestacks with the stuff to trap CO2 before it’s released into the atmosphere?

A good thought, but one that proved too costly and energy intensive.

Now, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that the miracle stone’s gas trapping abilities can be enhanced a million-fold by simple methods, and the whole CO2 sink idea suddenly has legs.

Peridotite normally resides in the Earth’s mantle 15 miles below the surface. Sometimes though, plate tectonic collisions push peridotite to the surface. That’s what happened eons ago in Oman which is now home to an exposed patch of peridotite the size of Massachusetts.

After 5 years of field work in the Omani desert, Peter Kelemen and Juerg Matter concluded that its peridotite patch is naturally absorbing 10,000 to 100,000 tons of carbon a year–far more than previously thought.

This means it may be feasible to pump CO2 from regional power plants to specially prepared peridotite fields resulting in “a low-cost, safe and permanent method to capture and store atmospheric CO2,” according to Kelemen.

The process would involve boring holes into the rock and injecting warm water containing pressurized CO2. Once started, the reaction would generate heat that would further accelerate the reaction. Fractures would form exposing new peridotite to the soda. The man-made gas trap would keep going as long as fresh CO2 was supplied.

The scientists assert that Omani peridotite alone can absorb some 4 billion tons of carbon a year—that’s 13% of the total spewed into the atmosphere each year.

Peridotite fields also exist in Papua New Guinea, Greece and Croatia. There are small deposits in the western United States as well.

And it turns out that ubiquitous basalt may have similar greenhouse gas gobbling characteristics. Scientists in Iceland are pursuing that lovely possibility right now.

Last week’s UN Environment Program Report concluded that Atmospheric Brown Clouds are darkening cities on several continents, destroying crops and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

The report also warned that brown clouds are enormously important climate changers and that poorly planned efforts to eliminate the clouds would accelerate global warming. 

In the Himalayan-Tibetan plateau, brown clouds enhance greenhouse warming and are thus accelerating the retreat of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers. These glaciers feed the four great rivers of Asia which provide water to 2.5 billion people. The matter carries “serious implications for the water and food security of Asia,” said Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, head of the UNEP scientific panel.

But warming of the Himalayas is an unfortunate regional anomaly. The UNEP scientific panel in fact concludes that brown clouds dampen the pace of global warming by 20-80% by reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface.

This means that tackling the pollution linked with brown cloud formation without simultaneously delivering big cuts in greenhouse gases may increase global temperatures 2 degrees Celsius, which is nearly three times the rise in world temperatures measured during the entire 20th century.

Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, head of the UNEP panel said, “Our preliminary assessment, published in 2002, triggered a great deal of awareness but also skepticism. That has often been the initial reaction to new, novel and far reaching, counter-intuitive scientific research.

“We believe today’s report brings ever more clarity to the ABC phenomena and in doing so must trigger an international response – one that tackles the twin threats of greenhouse gases and brown clouds and the unsustainable development that underpins both.”

Man-made Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs or simply, brown clouds) are darkening Asian megacities from Tehran to Shanghai, reducing crop yields and killing hundreds of thousands of people each year, according to a report released last week by the United Nations Environment Program.

The report was compiled by a scientific team with research bases in China, India, Europe and the US.

Brown clouds are 2-mile thick layers of soot, black carbon, sulfates, toxic aerosols and carcinogens that result from burning fossil fuels and biomass. Coal-stoked power plants are the single biggest contributor.

Half the world’s population resides under one or another of the world’s 5 major regional brown clouds blanketing:
- East Asia, including eastern China
- South Asia including Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar
- Southeast Asia including Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam
- Southern Africa from sub-Saharan Africa to Zimbabwe
- South America’s Amazon basin

Brown clouds reflect and absorb sunlight and have thus dimmed the skies over Tehran, Karachi, Beijing, Hanoi, Bangkok and hundreds of other major cities by 10-25% in just 30 years.

They also adversely affect food production, according to the UN report. In addition to the lost photosynthetic potential caused by dimming, brown clouds cut crop yields by 10-40% by trapping ground level ozone. Annual economic losses from crop damage exceed $5 billion in China, Japan and the Republic of Korea. 

In addition, the toxic components of brown clouds cause respiratory and cardiovascular disease. The UN report attributes 340,000 excess deaths per year in China and India to brown clouds, and estimates economic losses due to illness and disability at 3.6% of GDP in China and 2.2% in India.

And that’s not the half of it. It turns out that getting rid of the toxic clouds may accelerate global warming. Stay tuned for a post on this matter.

The northern bluefin tuna is native to the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The source of nearly all the tuna used in sushi, it is particularly revered in Japan where a large specimen can command $100,000 in Tokyo fish markets.

The fish live in deep ocean waters where no country has jurisdiction, and as a result they have been subject to decades of overfishing.

The problem is approaching crisis stage. Brian MacKenzie and colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark reported in particular that even if all bluefin fishing were halted immediately, bluefin populations in both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean will likely collapse within a decade.

Not that the current plan comes anywhere close to an outright ban. In theory, the organization that sets bluefin fishing policies is the Madrid-based International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). Its performance has prompted the Economist to propose that ICCAT actually stands for International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas.

ICCAT had set a quota of 30,000 metric tons per year even though scientists suggest this is 2-4 times the sustainable amount. In response to the outcry from the scientific community (which must have been tough to hear amid the din arising from sushi restaurants on 6 continents), ICCAT reduced its quota to 25,000 metric tons. Whoop-de-damn-do!

Let’s not even start on the fact that at least 50,000 metric tons are actually landed each year due to illegal fishing and non-existent monitoring.

Oh, and even if ICCAT set a properly aggressive limit and became empowered to enforce it, there’s the problem of how the 46 participating countries would divvy up the catch.

Oxygen depleted dead zones along ocean coastlines are probably more extensive than previously imagined.

This is the conclusion of a meta-analysis published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It found that marine species including crustaceans, bivalves, fishes and gastropods die off at oxygen levels nearly twice as high as the 1983 benchmark for lethal hypoxia, which is 2mg dissolved oxygen per liter of seawater.

Ocean dead zones are caused by fertilizer pollution, usually in river run-off. The nitrogen-rich fertilizer causes algae blooms in coastal ocean waters. When these algae die and decompose, it creates a fiesta of nutrients for oxygen consuming bacteria. The ensuing massive bacterial overgrowth deprives sea creatures of oxygen.

More than 400 ocean dead zones have been discovered in the past 50 years. The total affected area is the size of Oregon. This is tiny compared with the total surface area of Earth’s oceans, but the zones are in areas critical to commercial fishing, and their number has doubled every decade since 1980.

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The EPA will not set safety standards for perchlorate in drinking water after all.

White House and Pentagon officials have pressured the EPA for years to refrain from establishing safe allowable levels of the chemical in tap water. Recently, these officials deleted sections of a report by EPA scientists that underscored the dangers of perchlorate and advocated for its regulation.

The report estimates that 16 million Americans are exposed to unsafe levels of the chemical. Independent scientists using state and federal data suggest the number is twice as high.

Perchlorate is a rocket fuel additive that causes thyroid abnormalities in newborns and children. Redacted from the EPA report were results from research by UMass professor Robert Zoeller, who found that even tiny amounts of perchlorate can impair thyroid hormone production. This can cause irreversible loss of IQ and a host of perception and behavioral problems in children.

Nearly all perchlorate in drinking water results from lax disposal methods at chemical plants, rocket test sites and military installations. A national cleanup would cost several hundred million dollars.

The Bush administration has “distorted the science,” Zoeller said. “Infants and children will continue to be damaged, and that damage is significant.”

For years, the idea of adapting to climate change has been anathema to environmentalists. Adaptation is admitting defeat or at the least taking the eye off the ball, which is prevention.

Those attitudes may be changing for two reasons. First, climate change is happening a lot faster than most thought it would. According to Manish Bapna of the World Resources institute for example, it is too late to avoid “dangerous consequences, so we must… adapt.”

Second, it’s becoming clear that global warming disproportionately impacts the most destitute people on the planet. The poorest of the poor depend on arid climate agriculture, subsistence fishing and rain forests-things that are directly and immediately affected by climate change.  If any group needed to adapt it is this group, but the very poor cannot afford the irrigation systems, flood control systems and complex public health initiatives necessary to adapt.

Destitute people happen to have minute carbon footprints. The irony of this is not lost on UC Berkeley’s Kirk Smith who reminds us that climate change is “the world’s biggest regressive tax: the poorest pay for the behavior of the rich.”