Richard J. Trzupek is a chemist who has been employed as an environmental consultant to industry for more than 25 years. He specializes in air quality issues, has worked for several Fortune 500 companies, has participated in the development of environmental legislation and regulation and is currently principal consultant at Mostardi Platt Environmental, a consulting and engineering firm based in Oak Brook, Illinois.
Trzupek’s commentaries have appeared in a variety of regional and national publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business and Reuters. He blogs at frontpagemag.com, threedonia.com and at Andrew Breitbart’s “Big” sites.
He is the author of Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA Is Ruining American Industry (Encounter Books, 2011).
Dr. Peter Gleick - No Arrogance There At All...
As a fellow trained in the sciences (chemistry) and who reveres the scientific method, I followed Dr. Peter Gleick’s pathetic, mean-spirited attempt to demean and degrade the Heartland Institute with a mixed sense of disgust and sadness. The former because I have nothing but contempt for a man trained in the sciences who stoops to such underhanded, dishonorable tactics as part of a continuing effort to silence people with whom he disagrees. Sadness, because – like so many others who share my particular views – the work that Heartland does is so important to maintaining scientific integrity in a world rushing to embrace the 21st century version of Lysenkoism.
Heartland is an oasis of independent thinking in a desert of close-mindedness. Where else is a fellow like me – someone who understands the theories behind so-called “climate change”, but who has serious questions about the data that purports to prove the hypothesis – to turn? The mainstream media isn’t interested in my views or my questions, nor are the large, powerful environmental organizations who keep their tame stable of journalists toeing the party line. Even my erstwhile professional organization, the American Chemical Society, feels obliged to abandon the scientific method when it comes to climate issues, officially quashing any dissenting opinions or research that do not fall in line with global warming goodthink. My brother Larry and I both resigned from the ACS over this policy, just as many other scientists have resigned from their particular professional organizations for the same reason.
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The EPA is currently working on new regulations that will likely reduce the amount of sulfur in gasoline from what we scientist-types refer to as “itty-bitty” to “teensy-weensy” levels instead. If taken, this action will be hugely expensive and raise gas prices by as much as 25 cents per gallon, with virtually no environmental benefit to offset the expenditures.
Gasoline used to contain up to 300 part per million (ppm) of sulfur. New regulations promulgated under the Clinton administration reduced that to 30 ppm, the current standard that went into full effect in 2007. Now, Lisa Jackson’s anti-fossil-fuel, anti-reality USEPA is considering reducing the standard to as low as 10 ppm. If implemented, this new standard would require refineries to retrofit with new technology at an estimated initial capital cost of $17 billion and would lead to an increase in annual operating costs of $13 billion. That would translate into increased gas prices of around 15 to 25 cents per gallon for consumers.
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I had the pleasure of appearing on the Butler on Business radio show yesterday to chat with Alan Butler and Jason Riddle about the EPA and the effect that particular agency has on our economy. It’s always gratifying to talk with people who get it, particularly when we have a President who so clearly doesn’t.
You can also find your truly in the Washington Times today, discussing an issue that is going to be more and more important as time goes on: continuing to develop America’s vast reserve of shale gas and the radical environmentalists desire to bring the industry to its needs. Having effectively killed coal in the US already, natural gas is the next target of the zealots and we need to stop them if the nation is to have any chance of prospering once more.
Map by PennWell MAPSearch
In an attempt to justify his awful decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama is relying on the public swallowing a couple of myths: 1) the perception that the Ogallala aquifer that Keystone XL would cross is virgin territory which has never seen the likes of a pipeline before, and 2) that the administration doesn’t have enough information to make a decision. If one scratches beneath the surface just a little bit, neither idea holds up to a little scrutiny.
The Ogallala is the massive aquifer that runs from South Dakota to Texas. It’s particularly important to agricultural production in Nebraska and Kansas, so it’s entirely reasonable for people to be concerned about contamination. However, the fact is that we’ve been building and operating thousands of miles of pipelines throughout the Ogallala for decades. A picture is indeed worth a thousand words, so you can see the proof for yourself. Here’s a map showing the Ogallala (the shaded area) and the myriad of pipelines that cross it today.
What this map clearly illustrates is how disingenuous the Obama administration and the environmental fringe have been when expressing their “concerns” about Keystone XL.
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Last week the EPA released an interactive map which allows the public to track the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the United States. Naturally, the EPA trumpeted the virtues of this achievement as though the world had never seen the like of it before.
“Thanks to strong collaboration and feedback from industry, states and other organizations, today we have a transparent, powerful data resource available to the public,” USEPA Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation Gina McCarthy said in a prepared statement,
From the EPA’s statements and the mainstream media’s gushing reaction one would be tempted to think that there’s something remarkable and new about this data. There isn’t. The EPA has been tracking greenhouse gas emissions for over two decades now, both issuing detailed annual reports and making the data available on their website.
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The USEPA has a problem: the air in the United States keeps getting cleaner and cleaner. Obviously the Agency can’t justify its current level of funding if they say the air is clean enough, no matter how clean it is. The game that the Agency has played on a regular basis is to use its authority under the Clean Air Act to effectively redefine what clean air is. Thus, while the vast majority of the nation has long since met the ambient air quality standards set forth in the original Clean Air Act, the EPA has kept itself in business by continually moving the goalposts farther and farther back.
This behavior isn’t limited to the Obama administration. They did the same thing under Clinton and under Bush II. (The difference being that environmental groups applauded reductions in standards under Clinton, but when Dubya lowered a standard even lower, he was condemned for not going far enough). Under Obama, the EPA has reduced the ambient air quality standards for two common air pollutants: nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide. The former is generated by any form of combustion (cars, trucks, fireplaces, power plants, water heaters, etc.). The latter is primarily generated by coal combustion.
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I’m currently planning my next book in which I intend to discuss how shockingly anti-science the MSM has become when it comes to pet policy issues that involve science, technology and the environment. My proposition is that MSM journalists are so bad at reporting on these issues not so much because of their left-leaning biases, but because they are largely ignorant and lazy when it comes to covering these complex concepts. Thanks to guys like Paul Krugman at The New York Times I’m sure that I’ll never have any shortage of material to illustrate the point.
Jim Rust handily deconstructed Krugman’s arguments regarding mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants in his excellent post of January 5. Admittedly, Rust had an unfair advantage in that discussion: he used actual data. Somehow I think that the average Joe would find actually data showing that mercury emissions from coal fired power plants represent of a pittance compared to natural and overseas sources a bit more persuasive than Krugman’s approach which was essentially “mercury bad – EPA good”. Perhaps that’s nice messaging, but it leaves a lot to be desired from the scientist’s point of view.
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Excuse the Britishism here, but it’s appropriate: Steve Jones’ column in the Daily Telegraph yesterday is Exhibit A in showing how bloody thick journalists are when they write about environmental issues. You can waste two minutes of your life by reading the whole thing, but in summary Jones’ muddled theory is this: because nitrous oxide is so much stronger a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide we ought to be doing something to reduce nitrous oxide emissions, but – idiots that we are – we’re not. And Jones presents this theory with the smug satisfaction of a person who has long ago convinced himself that he is of vastly superior intelligence compared to the mundane rest of the human race.
Where Jones’ theory falls apart is in failing to address a little something we at the Heartland Institute call “facts”. For, the fact is that everybody has been aware that nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas and everybody has been keeping track of nitrous oxide emissions for quite some time. As a matter of fact, everyone keeps track of all of the other trace greenhouse gas emissions too, like methane, HFCs, PFCs and sulfur hexafluoride. The world has gone so global warming crazy that we know how much of each and every greenhouse gas is emitted and where it comes from. Don’t believe me? Check out the latest US Greenhouse Gas Inventory for all the remarkable detail – your tax dollars at work folks.
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Look like a wetland to you?
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the sadly representative case of an Idaho couple dragged through the ringer by our aggressive, money-hungry, bullying. out of control EPA. It’s essentially a due process case, intended to settle the narrow question of whether or not individuals should have immediate access to the judicial system when the EPA takes action against them. But there’s more here, because the saga of Mike and Chantell Sackett is a harrowing tale that illustrates just how out of control this agency is.
You can read all about the Sacketts’ fight at the Pacific Legal Foundation website. In brief, the story is this: Six years ago, the couple bought a 0.63 acre parcel along-side a lake, intending to build a house. The started construction, and – like any number of individuals (as opposed to developers) building homes – they didn’t do a formal wetlands delineation before starting to move earth and dump gravel. (A “wetlands delineation” is the investigative process by which experts decide whether there is a wetland on site on not).
At this point, I need to veer off of the main story for a moment to describe what a wetland is as far as regulators are concerned. Not surprisingly, the regulatory definition of a wetland has little to do with the common sense definition.
First of all, a wetland need not actually be wet. It is rather primarily defined by hydrography (i.e.; water flow patterns), soil classification and the type of vegetation present. In my career, I have seen determinations that a couple of tire ruts with a few cattails growing in them are “wetlands”.
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The USEPA recently released its General Permit for Discharges of Pesticides, under the NPDES (National Pollution Discharge Elimination System) program. If you’re suffering from insomnia, you can download a copy here. It is hard to overstate the ridiculousness contained therein. Every time you think that Obama’s EPA has pushed the envelope of bureaucratic nonsense as far as it can go, they manage to do something even dopier.
A little background first. The NPDES program was designed to regulate discharge of wastewater streams into bodies of water like rivers and lakes. That’s reasonable. People figured out that silt run off that occurred during construction projects could also affect bodies of water, so the NPDES program roped in construction activities as well. (This is why you now see silt fences around construction sites). OK. That’s a little more intrusive, but doable. Now, as the result of some court decisions made over the last few years, the NPDES program has been expanded to include pesticide runoff from – well – just about everything. Under the new regulation, both the people applying pesticide and the “decision makers” (the land owner in most cases) get roped into the NPDES program if pesticide run off can makes its way to waters of the United States.
The numbers are staggering. Estimates vary, but at least 350,000 farmers, forestland owners and public land managers are now subject to compliance with the program. What does compliance mean for these folks? That brings us back to the afore-mentioned General Permit. Issuance of General Permits is a common tool used under the NPDES program. It’s essentially a generic permit that spells out the standards and requirements for a particular activity or industry. If you qualify, you don’t have to go through the (painful and lengthy) process of getting a site-specific permit. Instead, you notify EPA about what you are going to do and agree to comply with the applicable General Permit. General Permits are meant to be simple and easy to understand – they’re usually no more than a dozen pages or so, including attachments. Care to guess how many pages are in the General Permit for Discharges of Pesticides that this EPA came up with? Go ahead and guess – I dare ya.
The answer awaits – below the fold.
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