ValleyWatch

July 19, 2010-by Gitte Laasby, in the Post Tribune. According to an IDEM inspection report this spring, the pile is 900 feet long and 67 feet tall. It contains slag and 274,000 cubic yards of basic oxygen furnace sludge and rubble interspersed with burned lime. The pile sits a couple of hundred feet from Lake Michigan and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Nearby are tall piles of rubble.
ndiana Department of Environmental Management Commissioner Thomas Easterly is getting fed up with media reports and activists’ complaints about how his agency handles environmental issues in Northwest Indiana.

In a recent letter to IDEM employees, Easterly voiced his disgruntlement with activists’ challenges of BP Whiting’s air permit, and delays in issuing U.S. Steel Gary Works’ wastewater permit.

» Click to enlarge image

Thomas Easterly, IDEM Commissioner
(Post-Tribune file photo)

He also denied the existence of a pile of steelmaking waste that representatives at ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor named after him.

“Recent stories about recycling, materials management, and waste management at Arcelor Mittal Burns Harbor … have even named a non-existent feature after me,” Easterly wrote in the June 3 memo obtained by the Post-Tribune. “Recent observations by a State Legislator and IDEM staff, including Chief of Staff (Kent) Abernathy, confirm my recollection from 10 years ago that the area called a ‘pile’ by the press is actually a depression partially filled with stockpiled materials for recycling to make steel.”

Valparaiso lawyer Kim Ferraro, of the Legal Environmental Aid Foundation of Indiana, said the definition of the area is a matter of semantics.

“Whether it’s a depressed area or level ground doesn’t matter. It’s full of stockpiled materials. It doesn’t make a difference,” she said. “There are definitely wastes sitting out there next to Lake Michigan, and IDEM has documented it in their own inspection reports.” (MORE)
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Juy 18, 2010- National Academy of Science press release. Even if emissions held steady, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would increase, much like the water level in a bathtub when water is coming in faster than it is draining. Emissions reductions larger than about 80 percent, relative to whatever peak global emissions rate may be reached, would be required to approximately stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations for a century or so at any chosen target level.

WASHINGTON — Choices made now about carbon dioxide emissions reductions will affect climate change impacts experienced not just over the next few decades but also in coming centuries and millennia, says a new report from the National Research Council. Because CO2 in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe.

Policy choices about emissions can be informed by recent advances in climate research that quantify the relationships between atmospheric CO2 and warming levels, and between warming levels and future impacts. Drawing upon this research, the report estimates changes in precipitation, streamflow, wildfires, crop yields, and sea level rise that can be expected with different degrees of warming. It also estimates the average temperature increases that would be likely if CO2 were stabilized in the atmosphere at various target levels. However, the report does not recommend any particular stabilization target, noting that choosing among different targets is a policy choice rather than strictly a scientific one because of questions of values regarding how much risk or damage to people or to nature might be considered too much.

Increased Confidence About Future Impacts

Although some important future effects of climate change are difficult to quantify, there is now increased confidence in how global warming of various levels would relate to several key impacts, says the report. It lists some of these impacts per degree Celsius (or per 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming, for example (these apply for 1 C to 4 C of warming):

• 5 percent to 10 percent less total rain in southwest North America, the Mediterranean, and southern Africa per degree Celsius of warming.
• 5 percent to 10 percent less streamflow in some river basins, including the Arkansas and Rio Grande, per degree Celsius of warming.
• 5 percent to 15 percent lower yields of some crops, including U.S. and African corn and Indian wheat, per degree Celsius of warming.

While total rain is expected to decrease in some areas, more of the rain that does occur is expected to occur in heavy falls in most land areas (3 percent to 10 percent more heavy rain per degree Celsius). In addition, warming of 1C to 2 C (1.8 F to 3.6 F) could be expected to lead to a twofold to fourfold increase per degree in the area burned by wildfire in parts of western North America, the report says. Warming of 3 C (5.4 F) would put many millions more people at risk of coastal flooding and lead to the loss of about 250,000 square km of wetlands and drylands. And warming of 4 C (7.2 F) would lead to far warmer summers; about nine out of 10 summers would be warmer than the warmest ever experienced during the last decades of the 20th century over nearly all land areas.

Stabilizing Atmospheric CO2 Requires Deep Emissions Cuts

Currently the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 390 parts per million volume (ppmv), the highest level in at least 800,000 years. Depending on emissions rates, that level could double or nearly triple by the end of the century, greatly amplifying future human impacts on climate, the report says. (MORE)

You may read the entire report online or download an excellent summary by clicking then link below.
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July 16, 2010-Yesterday John Blair, Valley Watch president appeared on the right wing radio program Live with Les on AM 1280 WGBF in Evansville. Photo © 2010 Will Blair
You can listen to the exchange in its entirety by clicking the link below.
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July 15, 2010-By John Blair, valleywatch.net editor. Photo©2010 John Blair
Although I have been recovering from some serious neck surgery for about four weeks now and have not had time to tend to the Valley Watch Garden as I should, there is still lots of activity going on with flowers blooming and dying off etc.

In this picture two bugs of unknown species, at least to me were enjoying and “afternoon delight” as they attempted to propagate their species on a zinnia leaf in front of the office.

The colorful bugs had an interesting way of doing that as they used their back ends propped up against on another.

I was mot impressed with their brilliant turquoise, orange and yellow colors.

July 11, 2010-By Michael Hawthorne in the Chicago Tribune. “By the time construction began on the Prairie State plant in 2007, Peabody had raised the price tag to $2.9 billion. Since then, the estimated cost has risen to $4.4 billion, forcing municipal investors throughout the Midwest to borrow more to cover the overruns.”
Editor’s Note: We take little solace in the fact that Valley Watch was the first organization in the nation to make the arguments this story outlines. We wrote letters to City Councils and Town Boards warning them of this exact scenario while they were being sold a pig in a poke by a greedy Peabody Energy.

Now, communities across Indiana and much of the midwest will face significant financial hardships because they chose to listen to snake oil salesmen instead of reasoned economic and environmental arguments.

First, it was Peabody’s greed but that greed was passed to those small, ignorant communities that allowed themselves to be taken in and will now forever pay a price in their own economic and environmental demise.

Truly sad but very predictable even in 2001 when we first began making those arguments.

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Sold on a promise of cheap, clean electricity, dozens of communities in Illinois and eight other Midwest states instead are facing more expensive utility bills after bankrolling a new coal-fired power plant that will be one of the nation’s largest sources of climate-change pollution.

As the Prairie State Energy Campus rises out of a Downstate field, its price tag already has more than doubled to $4.4 billion — costs that will largely be borne by municipalities including the suburbs of Naperville, Batavia, Geneva, St. Charles and Winnetka.

The communities are locked into 28-year contracts that will require higher electricity rates to cover the construction overruns, documents and interviews show. Municipal officials told the Tribune they expect costs to soar even higher before the plant begins operating next year.

Then there are the environmental costs of the project, which was designed by St. Louis-based Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, to burn fossil fuel from one of its nearby coal mines. (MORE)
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July 11, 2010-By Michael Hawthorne in the Chicago Tribune. “By the time construction began on the Prairie State plant in 2007, Peabody had raised the price tag to $2.9 billion. Since then, the estimated cost has risen to $4.4 billion, forcing municipal investors throughout the Midwest to borrow more to cover the overruns.”
Editor’s Note: We take little solace in the fact that Valley Watch was the first organization in the nation to make the arguments this story outlines. We wrote letters to City Councils and Town Boards warning them of this exact scenario while they were being sold a pig in a poke by a greedy Peabody Energy.

Continue reading →

July 6, 2010-Peter Sinclair delves into the issue of whether we should concern ourselves with climate change strictly from a national security aspect.

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