Mississippi Katrina victims get okay to sue polluters over rising sea level

A group of Mississippi landowners can pursue their lawsuit against more than 30 major oil, electric and coal companies they say have created global-warming pollutants that contributed to rising sea levels and increased Hurricane Katrina's destruction, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports.

The central question before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was whether the plaintiffs could demonstrate that their injuries were “fairly traceable” to the actions of the oil, electric and coal companies. A lower court had ruled they could not, but the Fifth Circuit disagreed.

In its ruling, the three-judge panel cited the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, since that opinion “accepted as plausible the link between man-made greenhouse gas emissions and global warming” along with the fact that “rising ocean temperatures may contribute to the ferocity of hurricanes.”

Gerald Maples, lead attorney for the landowners in the class-action lawsuit, said he filed the suit 22 days after Katrina to get the attention of energy officials about greenhouse gas emissions. The case still has a long way to go, however. 

The Wall Street Journal talked to a legal expert who predicted that the ruling will invite more climate-change litigation in the future.“With this decision,” he says, “you are now pretty well assured of seeing others file these kinds of claims.”

The ruling is the second time in recent weeks an appeals court has allowed a similar lawsuit to move forward, notes the Times-Picayune. In September, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals allowed Connecticut and other states to proceed with a suit aimed at forcing American Electric Power and other utilities to reduce greenhouse emissions.

Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer

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Study: Hidden health costs from energy consumption top $120 billion

The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies of Science, released a report today that attempts to estimate the hidden costs of energy production and the use of coal, oil and other sources, such as the impact of air pollution, on human health.

The estimate: $120 billion in 2005.

And that's just a partial estimate, the council notes. The number "reflects primarily health damages from air pollution associated with electricity generation and motor vehicle transportation," a news release on the study says. "The figure does not include damages from climate change, harm to ecosystems, effects of some air pollutants such as mercury, and risks to national security. ..."

Here's the breakdown:  

"Coal accounts for about half the electricity produced in the U.S.," the release notes. "In 2005 the total annual external damages from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter created by burning coal at 406 coal-fired power plants, which produce 95 percent of the nation's coal-generated electricity, were about $62 billion."

And then there are all the cars and trucks on the highway spewing pollution from their tailpipes. In 2005, motor vehicles produced $56 billion in damage to human health, the study found.

The committee that wrote the report tried to figure out the hidden costs in terms of climate change impact too, but it ran into lots of problems quantifying an amount for those impacts. Nevertheless, it found that "coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., emitting on average about a ton of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced. ...Climate-related monetary damages range from 0.1 cents to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour."

Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer

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G-20 ready to pull the plug on fossil fuel subsidies

The Group of 20, meeting in Pittsburgh this week, has a draft agreement ready to phase out government subsidies for oil and other fossil fuels in the "medium term,"reports Reuters today.

Countries such as China, Russia and India subsidize coal and oil to keep prices artificially low, which boosts demand for hydrocarbons.

The G-20 draft says the subsidies "encourage wasteful consumption, distort markets, impede investment in clean energy sources and undermine efforts to deal with climate change.” According to the Wall Street Journal, cutting those subsidies could cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 10% by 2050.

You may recall that President Obama promised to work toward that goal during his speech to the U.N. earlier this week. Reuters says that getting agreement approved by the G-20 meeting is a victory for his administration.

But the WSJ notes that removing those subsidies could have an unintended side effect: "Consumption subsidies distort demand; in the Middle East and Asia, demand for oil kept rising even when crude hit $140, because many consumers didn’t pay market prices." Getting rid of the subsidies would raise prices in those places, and thus cut demand and "smooth out the violent price swings that have characterized the oil markets in recent years—and which helped galvanize public attention and appetite for alternative energy."

--Craig Pittman

Forged letters --- now totaling 12 -- sent by lobbyist working for pro-coal group

Remember those three letters from minority groups opposing the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and how they turned out last week to be phony? There have been some further developments, to say the least.

"A total of 12 forged letters -- all appearing to come from local groups unhappy with a climate-change bill -- were sent to three congressional offices this summer by a Washington lobbying firm, according to the pro-coal group the firm was working for," the Washington Post is reporting.

The lobbying firm that sent the forged letters, Bonner & Associates, has now been denounced by its own client, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, for sending letters opposing the Waxman-Markey bill signed by non-existent people.

The Post describes the growing scandal as a saga of modern Washington " in which an 'American coalition' claiming 200,000 supporters still relies on a subcontractor to gin up favorable letters."

It's already sparked a bit of naked protesting (see YouTube clip below) and, of course, congressional hearings. Meanwhile, the Post adds, "a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice said she could not comment about whether that department was investigating, or about whether forging letters to Congress violates federal law."

--Craig Pittman

Smog lowers children's IQ, beginning in the womb, new study says

Air pollution lowers children's IQs, a process that starts even before they're born, according to a new study of New York moms and their babies published today. It marks "have linked air pollution exposure before birth with lower IQ scores in childhood," the Associated Press reports.

"The five-year-old children of city mothers who regularly breathed in car- and truck-polluted air when they were pregnant scored significantly lower on IQ tests than kids with less exposure," the New York Daily News reported.

The study, by the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at Columbia University, tracked 249 children of New York City women who wore backpack air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy. "The moms lived in mostly low-income neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx," the AP reports. "They had varying levels of exposure to typical kinds of urban air pollution, mostly from car, bus and truck exhaust."

Then, when the kids were 5, they were given IQ tests, and those exposed to the most pollution before birth scored lower than the children with less exposure.

The center has previously done studies suggesting that babies whose moms are exposed to smog while pregnant are more likely to develop asthma, and that the closure of a coal-fired power plant in China helped boost cognitive abilities among children who lived nearby. In short, as center director Frederica P. Perera wrote last year, "Children are likely to suffer most from our fossil fuel addiction."

[AP photo: Smog blankets New York]

--Craig Pittman

Climate change is good for you, says new report from global warming skeptics

The Heartland Institute has put out a new report on one of its favorite topics, climate change. As we've noted before here on the Fueling Station blog, the Heartland Institute has long been on the side of the skeptics, questioning whether global warming was real.

But this hefty (850+ pages) new report takes a somewhat different tack. It argues that global warming hasn't been so bad, and actually benefits humans and plant life -- contrary to what the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and every other government agency says.

The authors of this tome are Siegfried "Fred" Singer and Craig Idso. Singer is described on the report's website as "one of the most distinguished scientists in the U.S.," although serving chief scientist for the U.S. Department of Transportation (1989) is not generally seen as a path to Nobel honors. He was also founding dean of the University of Miami's School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences in 1964.

The 84-year-old Singer has been dubbed the grandfather of global warming skeptics. Singer has in the past challenged government studies on the harm caused by second-hand smoke  in a study that turned out to be paid for by the Tobacco Institute.

In a 1993 deposition, Singer admitted under oath to taking money from oil companies, such as Exxon, Texaco, Arco, Shell and the American Gas Association. (It's page 228 in the depo, which you can read here: Download S-F-Singer_Deposition). ExxonMobil, which has long funneled money to organizations that question climate change science, has handed over tens of thousands of dollars to Singer and his affiliated organizations.

Idso's think tank is the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. He and his brother have taken money from the Western Fuels Association which supplies 17 million tons of coal a year to utilities to burn in their power plants. Idso previously worked for Peabody Energy, the world's largest private-sector coal company.

By contrast, the heads of the National Academies of Science of all of the G-8 nations (plus five more) -- including the head of the one in the United States -- recently signed a letter urging their countries' leaders to get cracking on cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions because they all agreed that climate change is a major global crisis.

[Photo of Siegfried "Fred" Singer: Heartland Institute]

--Craig Pittman

China building more efficient coal-fired power plants, helping reduce growth of emissions.

China's coal-fired power industry is turning increasingly to more efficient plants with lower greenhouse gas emissions thanks to technology that turns coal into gas before burning it, The New York Times reports.
China gets 80% of its electricity from coal, making China that fastest growing polluter on the planet. But this switch to lower emissions technology has provided some hope of lessening the impact of Chinese emissions on climate change. The new coal technology has helped China cut its forecast for annual increase in emissions from 3.2% to 3%, as monitored by the International Energy Agency.
“China already has most of the technologies the world has to offer. It just needs to use them more effectively and more widely”, said Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director of the IEA, speaking at the launch last month of a new study, titled 'Cleaner Coal in China.'

This "gasification" technology has been tried in the US, but is currently not being encouraged. As a result China's coal plants are gaining in efficiency over the US, though the US average is still higher as China relies heavily on a lot of older plants built without the gas technology.
The energy industry is also looking at expensive, new "clean coal" technology, which can capture emissions before entering the atmosphere.

- David Adams, Times staff writer

EPA proposes first national reporting of greenhouse gas emissions

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced today that it's proposing the first comprehensive national system for reporting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by major sources in the United States. 

“Our efforts to confront climate change must be guided by the best possible information,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson in a news release. “Through this new reporting, we will have comprehensive and accurate data about the production of greenhouse gases. This is a critical step toward helping us better protect our health and environment –- all without placing an onerous burden on our nation’s small businesses.”

The new reporting requirements would apply to suppliers of fossil fuel and industrial chemicals, manufacturers of motor vehicles and engines, as well as large direct emitters of greenhouse gases with emissions equal to or greater than a threshold of 25,000 metric tons per year. This threshold is roughly equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from just over 4,500 passenger vehicles. The vast majority of small businesses would not be required to report their emissions because their emissions fall well below the threshold. The requirements instead would be aimed at utility companies and other large emitters.

The first annual report would be submitted to EPA in 2011 for the calendar year 2010.

Given the recent push by businesses ranging from Disney to Google to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the reporting requirement is likely to give the nation a good picture of who is failing to slash the carbon output.

Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer

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'Clean coal' spokesman ducks question on greenhouse gas emissions

The coal industry is doing its best to convince lawmakers that clean coal is a way to keep energy costs down and still avoid pollution. But the industry does itself no favors when Joe Lucas, the spokesman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, ducks a question about greenhouse gas production while being interviewed on CNN.

Just FYI Joe: Carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired electricity have increased by nearly 23 percent since 1990 and now constitute about 30 percent of total U.S. emissions, according to the EPA.

Needless to say, the folks opposed to clean coal are having a field day with this clip. However, as the Wall Street Journal points out, despite the Obama Administration's "eagerness to pass legislation this year that would for the first time cap U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions," the prospects for passing anything "hinge on the Senate, where Democrats from manufacturing states and rural, coal-rich regions wield enormous influence."

Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer

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Chu speaks on role of science in alternative energy revolution

The new Energy Secretary Steven Chu has given his first major interview (to the New York Times) in which he lays out his thinking about the role of science in alternative energy production.

He highlights three major areas of needed scientific advances: production of commercial scale cellulosic biofuels, the size and cost of electric car batteries, and reduction in cost of solar power. He also mentions the need for improved clean-coal technology to reduce emissions.

Interestingly, he doesn't say much about wind, suggesting that he believes this technology is already on a strong commercial footing. He also warns that progress on carbon trading may be held back by the economic recession.

David Adams, Times Staff Writer