Happy Earth Day 2009
Mercy Mercy Me.. things ain’t what they should be..
we highlight a few things we found tonite on the internet; that are all about What we are doing to our planet.. and a few that we need to consider.
Remember To Hug a Tree Today,
MapEcos Dishes the Dirt on Toxic Facilities [Maps]
MapsEco isn’t as fluffy as the yard sale treasure map or the movie time mashup map. It does however give you some interesting data about the chemicals being used around you.
Whether you’re searching with a passing curiosity or you’re using MapEcos to make sure your next home is as far from high emission factories as possible, the mashup of Google Maps and Evironmental Protection Agency data provides an interesting look at your neighborhood. Once you plug in your zipcode you can zoom around and check out your neighborhood or anywhere in the US.
Pushpins in the map indicate the presence of facility using or processing toxic chemicals. Degree of hazard is indicated by the color of the pin: red represents a high level of emission, purple is moderate, and blue indicates emissions on the lower end of the scale. Each pin has a red or green circle around the base. Red indicates the company has no publicly available policy for environmental hazard management and green indicates they do. Clicking on the push pin gives you a host of information about the site, the company operating there, which chemicals they use and how much as emitted into the surrounding environment and a comparison of the volume of chemicals emitted compared to EPA safety levels.
Lets Start Out with WATER, we’ll pick it back up a lil further down the storyline..
watch this, as you know it’s crucial;
NPR Special Report on the Array of Pharmaceuticals in US Water Supply pt.1
Array of Pharmaceuticals in US Water Supply – pt.2
this is the end of the program
Did You Know that 9 out of ten sharks are testing positive for the anti-depressant drug Zoloft. Fish showing signs of genetic changes due to drugs in effluent which ends up in oceans. and guess where the drugs then end up - in YOU.
check this out – Lightning
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An Australian man who describes himself as “a 50-something year old first year uni physics dropout” has an unusual hobby – he makes lightning in his shed. The image above is called The Modern Thinker – see how it was made here
Free Energy – Pentagon Conspiracy to Cover up
If we are in an energy crisis, why is the conspiracy more important than the planet and our existence ? this is quite alot to swallow, but just keep reading the stories and see if you make the connection; which by the end – no doubt you will, sadly.
and From China we get Smoke,,
China considers introducing carbon emission targets
The Chinese government could set targets for reducing carbon emissions starting from 2011, in a move that could spur an international consensus on combating climate change.
The news that China is considering a firm target for carbon emissions comes ahead of a United Nations conference later this year in Copenhagen which will attempt to come up with a successor to the Kyoto treaty.
Publicly, Beijing’s negotiation position on climate change is that China will not accept any carbon emission caps or reductions because the country is still in an early stage of development.
China is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, but only uses a fraction of the energy per head as the United States.
However, Su Wei, one of China’s senior negotiators on climate change, said officials could introduce a national target that would limit emissions relative to economic growth. The move could be implemented in the next five-year plan from 2011.
Mr Su told the Guardian newspaper: “It is an option. We can very easily translate our [existing] energy reduction targets to carbon dioxide limitation. China hasn’t reached the stage where we can reduce overall emissions, but we can reduce energy intensity and carbon intensity.”
Yang Ailun, a spokesman for Greenpeace in Beijing, also said the introduction of carbon emissions targets was “not unlikely”.
He added: “Targets are likely to be set on specific industries, like power and steel, rather than all the industries nationwide. China has been playing quite an active role in the negotiations as a big carbon emission country.”
However, he expressed doubts the government would move quickly enough to have an impact on the negotiations in Copenhagen.
“There has been a plan to reduce our energy use which has gone on for some time, but we only saw a notable effect last year because the economy slowed,” he said.
However, the debate within China on climate change is widening and last month the Chinese Academy of Science called for a 50 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions relative to GDP.
The Chinese State Council has also ordered all local governments to buy “more energy-efficient products”, including certified refrigerators, air conditioners, computers and televisions.
Trees and The Air..
The Dire Fate of Forests in a Warmer World
U.S. GOVT. TORCHES CALIFORNIA TO COVER-UP NEW LAW did you realize this was going on ? neither did most of us, however it is. we better start paying attention to the news, when we see these major fema productions, that ruin the lives of thousands. after we thought about it, we remembered there were no trees in pictures of internment camps or prisons. uh huh..
It’s not easy to kill a full-grown tree — especially one like the piñon pine. The hardy evergreen is adapted to life in the hot, parched American Southwest, so it takes more than a little dry spell to affect it. In fact, it requires a once-in-a-century event like the extended drought of the 1950s, which scientists now believe led to widespread tree mortality in the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.
So, when another drought hit the area around 2002, researchers were surprised to see up to 10% of the piñon pines die off, even though that dry spell was much milder than the one before. The difference in 2002 was the five decades of global warming that had transpired since the drought in the 1950s. That led terrestrial ecologists at the University of Arizona (UA) to pose the question, With temperatures set to rise sharply over the coming century if climate change goes unchecked, what impact will it have on the piñon pine? (See the top 10 green stories of 2008.)
Unsurprisingly, the outcome doesn’t look good. In a new study published April 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists at UA found that water-deprived piñon pines raised in temperatures about 7° Fahrenheit (4° Celsius) above current averages died 28% faster than pines raised in today’s climate. It’s the first study to isolate the specific impact of temperature on tree mortality during drought — and it indicates that in a warmer world trees are likely to be significantly more vulnerable to the threat of drought than they are today. “This raises some fundamental questions about how climate change is going to affect forests,” says David Breshears, a professor at UA’s School of Natural Resources and a co-author of the PNAS paper. “The potential for lots of forest die-off is really there.”
The PNAS study, led by Henry Adams, a doctoral student at UA’s ecology and evolutionary biology department, also confirms that hotter temperatures actually suffocate trees in dry times. Piñon pines respond to drought by closing the pores in their needle-like leaves to stop water loss. That keeps them from going thirsty, but it also prevents them from breathing in the carbon dioxide they need to live — and eventually, the drought-stressed trees simply suffocate. (See pictures of activists defending backcountry forests from logging.)
The higher levels of atmospheric CO2 that would likely be seen in a warmer future won’t make much of a difference either — if the pine needles’ pores are closed to prevent water loss, CO2 simply won’t get in. Even more worrisome, the PNAS study doesn’t take into account possible changes in precipitation patterns in a warmer future, which many climate models say could be drier, exacerbating the impacts of higher temperatures. “We can envision the landscape getting hammered over and over again,” says Breshears.
The study took advantage of the university’s unique Biosphere 2 research facility. The 7.2 million–cubic-foot dome — famous for an experiment in the early 1990s when eight people lived inside it for two years — allows scientists to recreate almost any climate on Earth. Adams and his collaborators kept two groups of piñon trees inside Biosphere 2 in nearly identical conditions. One key difference: for the experimental group, researchers ramped up the temperature 7° Fahrenheit (4° Celsius), the rough midpoint of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s business-as-usual predictions for warming in this century. “We thought temperature might play a big role, but that was speculation until we could conduct an experiment,” says Adams. “The great thing about Biosphere 2 is that it allowed us to test this out.”
Adams’ paper is the latest in a number of recent studies that paint a grim fate for the world’s forests if warming isn’t slowed. A major Science study published in January found widespread increase in tree mortality rates in the western U.S., thanks in part to regional warming trends and growing water scarcity. Another study published last month, also in Science, found that even the seemingly limitless Amazon rainforest could be highly vulnerable to drought. And since living trees suck up CO2 from the atmosphere, massive tree mortality due to warming could produce a feedback effect, further intensifying climate change. In the end, we might need a bigger Biosphere 2, because we’re on track to screw up Biosphere 1 — otherwise known as the Earth.
See pictures of a coal mine’s attempt to clean up its image.
See a graphic of the effects of climate change on the world by 2020.
And Global Warming ..
Progress on Global Warming Remains Elusive
Yvo de Boer spends most of his time on the move, so it makes sense that he has a predilection for running metaphors. The head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), De Boer was in Bonn, Germany, over the past two weeks, helping to run the latest round of international negotiations on global-warming action, which concluded April 8. (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)
More than 2,700 delegates from 180 countries met for the talks, which are intended to set the stage for the main event: the U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December, where nations are expected to hammer out a successor to the expiring Kyoto Protocol. “If this were a marathon, I think I’d say the runners were gathering their stamina for the final sprint,” De Boer told reporters on the closing day. (See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.)
But while the deadline may be getting nearer every day, the world seems to be largely running in place. The Bonn talks were the first international meeting to be attended by President Barack Obama’s climate negotiators — to the palpable relief of the rest of the world that former President George W. Bush’s much maligned team was gone — but on the big questions, including how to address carbon reduction in rich and poor countries, tangible progress remained elusive.
Developing countries like China pushed wealthier nations to accept tough short-term carbon emission targets, demanding cuts of at least 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. But developed nations demurred, refusing to commit to new cuts now, even though their existing commitments would lead to a reduction of only 4% to 14% below 1990 levels by 2020.
Obama’s team spread good feelings and good intentions, with chief climate negotiator Todd Stern telling delegates, “We want to make up for lost time.” But for the most part, the U.S. team remained passive observers. That can be chalked up to the fact that it has been on the job for mere weeks, but it’s a worrying sign of how hard-pressed the international community will be if it wants to meet its deadline of creating a new Kyoto by December. “There’s a lot of goodwill because [the U.S. is] back and everyone is tired of spending the last eight years in the dungeon,” says Jake Schmidt, the international-climate-policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But they need to start bringing real proposals to the table and show what they’re willing to do in Copenhagen.”
The Bonn meetings weren’t totally devoid of progress. One of the main questions facing global-climate negotiators is what should be done about tropical deforestation, since the logging and burning of trees is responsible for a fifth or more of global carbon emissions. The current Kyoto Protocol doesn’t address the issue, and many — though not all — environmentalists would like to add avoided deforestation to a new global climate deal, allowing rich countries to offset some of their carbon emissions by paying tropical nations to preserve their forests. Although the idea is a controversial one — Greenpeace released a report in Bonn claiming that avoided deforestation would essentially let rich nations use it as an excuse not to make costlier emission reductions at home — a broad coalition of countries at Bonn demanded that avoided deforestation be put high on the negotiating agenda in the lead-up to Copenhagen. “They stood up and said, ‘We want this,’ ” says Annie Petsonk, international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund. “That’s quite significant.”
But on the whole, delegates left Bonn stuck in the same standoff that has all but paralyzed global climate talks over the past several years. Poor nations want rich nations to accept deep, mandatory carbon cuts, and pay tens of billions of dollars in aid to help developing countries combat global warming. Rich nations are squeamish about committing to extreme measures without help from major developing nations like China and India, which will be responsible for the lion’s share of new carbon emissions in the decade ahead. And all leaders are feeling the squeeze of the economic downturn, which has shunted public attention from global warming and stalled investments in renewable-energy technologies — without which, countries won’t be able to meet any emissions-reduction targets they may agree to.
In the end, it will come back to the U.S. The change in rhetoric is heartening — delegates noticed when Obama told a public audience in Prague that the world needs to tackle global warming and that “the U.S. is now ready to lead.” But hopeful talk doesn’t necessarily translate to numbers or action. One of the biggest topics of debate at Bonn was the draft climate-change bill released in late March by Democratic Congressmen Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, which aims to cut U.S. carbon emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020. That goal is significantly less ambitious than what the E.U. has pledged, but getting that bill — or anything close to it — through Congress, especially by the Copenhagen summit, will be a legislative headache.
Other nations, however, need to believe that the U.S. negotiating team can deliver on Obama’s promises at home — otherwise we’ll just keeping running around in circles.
Ever wonder What’s In The Water You’re Drinking ?
Mood Stabilizers Found in Drinking water 2008
AP IMPACT: Tons of released drugs taint US water
By JEFF DONN MARTHA MENDOZA and JUSTIN PRITCHARD,Associated Press Writers AP – Monday, April 20
U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water _ contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation.
Hundreds of active pharmaceutical ingredients are used in a variety of manufacturing, including drugmaking: For example, lithium is used to make ceramics and treat bipolar disorder; nitroglycerin is a heart drug and also used in explosives; copper shows up in everything from pipes to contraceptives.
Federal and industry officials say they don’t know the extent to which pharmaceuticals are released by U.S. manufacturers because no one tracks them _ as drugs. But a close analysis of 20 years of federal records found that, in fact, the government unintentionally keeps data on a few, allowing a glimpse of the pharmaceuticals coming from factories.
As part of its ongoing PharmaWater investigation about trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals in drinking water, AP identified 22 compounds that show up on two lists: the EPA monitors them as industrial chemicals that are released into rivers, lakes and other bodies of water under federal pollution laws, while the Food and Drug Administration classifies them as active pharmaceutical ingredients.
The data don’t show precisely how much of the 271 million pounds comes from drugmakers versus other manufacturers; also, the figure is a massive undercount because of the limited federal government tracking.
To date, drugmakers have dismissed the suggestion that their manufacturing contributes significantly to what’s being found in water. Federal drug and water regulators agree.
But some researchers say the lack of required testing amounts to a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy about whether drugmakers are contributing to water pollution.
“It doesn’t pass the straight-face test to say pharmaceutical manufacturers are not emitting any of the compounds they’re creating,” said Kyla Bennett, who spent 10 years as an EPA enforcement officer before becoming an ecologist and environmental attorney.
Pilot studies in the U.S. and abroad are now confirming those doubts.
Last year, the AP reported that trace amounts of a wide range of pharmaceuticals _ including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones _ have been found in American drinking water supplies. Including recent findings in Dallas, Cleveland and Maryland’s Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, pharmaceuticals have been detected in the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans.
Most cities and water providers still do not test. Some scientists say that wherever researchers look, they will find pharma-tainted water.
Consumers are considered the biggest contributors to the contamination. We consume drugs, then excrete what our bodies don’t absorb. Other times, we flush unused drugs down toilets. The AP also found that an estimated 250 million pounds of pharmaceuticals and contaminated packaging are thrown away each year by hospitals and long-term care facilities.
Researchers have found that even extremely diluted concentrations of drugs harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species. Also, researchers report that human cells fail to grow normally in the laboratory when exposed to trace concentrations of certain drugs. Some scientists say they are increasingly concerned that the consumption of combinations of many drugs, even in small amounts, could harm humans over decades.
Utilities say the water is safe. Scientists, doctors and the EPA say there are no confirmed human risks associated with consuming minute concentrations of drugs. But those experts also agree that dangers cannot be ruled out, especially given the emerging research.
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Two common industrial chemicals that are also pharmaceuticals _ the antiseptics phenol and hydrogen peroxide _ account for 92 percent of the 271 million pounds identified as coming from drugmakers and other manufacturers. Both can be toxic and both are considered to be ubiquitous in the environment.
However, the list of 22 includes other troubling releases of chemicals that can be used to make drugs and other products: 8 million pounds of the skin bleaching cream hydroquinone, 3 million pounds of nicotine compounds that can be used in quit-smoking patches, 10,000 pounds of the antibiotic tetracycline hydrochloride. Others include treatments for head lice and worms.
Residues are often released into the environment when manufacturing equipment is cleaned.
A small fraction of pharmaceuticals also leach out of landfills where they are dumped. Pharmaceuticals released onto land include the chemo agent fluorouracil, the epilepsy medicine phenytoin and the sedative pentobarbital sodium. The overall amount may be considerable, given the volume of what has been buried _ 572 million pounds of the 22 monitored drugs since 1988.
In one case, government data shows that in Columbus, Ohio, pharmaceutical maker Boehringer Ingelheim Roxane Inc. discharged an estimated 2,285 pounds of lithium carbonate _ which is considered slightly toxic to aquatic invertebrates and freshwater fish _ to a local wastewater treatment plant between 1995 and 2006. Company spokeswoman Marybeth C. McGuire said the pharmaceutical plant, which uses lithium to make drugs for bipolar disorder, has violated no laws or regulations. McGuire said all the lithium discharged, an annual average of 190 pounds, was lost when residues stuck to mixing equipment were washed down the drain.
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Pharmaceutical company officials point out that active ingredients represent profits, so there’s a huge incentive not to let any escape. They also say extremely strict manufacturing regulations _ albeit aimed at other chemicals _ help prevent leakage, and that whatever traces may get away are handled by onsite wastewater treatment.
“Manufacturers have to be in compliance with all relevant environmental laws,” said Alan Goldhammer, a scientist and vice president at the industry trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
Goldhammer conceded some drug residues could be released in wastewater, but stressed “it would not cause any environmental issues because it was not a toxic substance at the level that it was being released at.”
Several big drugmakers were asked this simple question: Have you tested wastewater from your plants to find out whether any active pharmaceuticals are escaping, and if so what have you found?
No drugmaker answered directly.
“Based on research that we have reviewed from the past 20 years, pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities are not a significant source of pharmaceuticals that contribute to environmental risk,” GlaxoSmithKline said in a statement.
AstraZeneca spokeswoman Kate Klemas said the company’s manufacturing processes “are designed to avoid, or otherwise minimize the loss of product to the environment” and thus “ensure that any residual losses of pharmaceuticals to the environment that do occur are at levels that would be unlikely to pose a threat to human health or the environment.”
One major manufacturer, Pfizer Inc., acknowledged that it tested some of its wastewater _ but outside the United States.
The company’s director of hazard communication and environmental toxicology, Frank Mastrocco, said Pfizer has sampled effluent from some of its foreign drug factories. Without disclosing details, he said the results left Pfizer “confident that the current controls and processes in place at these facilities are adequately protective of human health and the environment.”
It’s not just the industry that isn’t testing.
FDA spokesman Christopher Kelly noted that his agency is not responsible for what comes out on the waste end of drug factories. At the EPA, acting assistant administrator for water Mike Shapiro _ whose agency’s Web site says pharmaceutical releases from manufacturing are “well defined and controlled” _ did not mention factories as a source of pharmaceutical pollution when asked by the AP how drugs get into drinking water.
“Pharmaceuticals get into water in many ways,” he said in a written statement. “It’s commonly believed the majority come from human and animal excretion. A portion also comes from flushing unused drugs down the toilet or drain; a practice EPA generally discourages.”
His position echoes that of a line of federal drug and water regulators as well as drugmakers, who concluded in the 1990s _ before highly sensitive tests now used had been developed _ that manufacturing is not a meaningful source of pharmaceuticals in the environment.
Pharmaceutical makers typically are excused from having to submit an environmental review for new products, and the FDA has never rejected a drug application based on potential environmental impact. Also at play are pressures not to delay potentially lifesaving drugs. What’s more, because the EPA hasn’t concluded at what level, if any, pharmaceuticals are bad for the environment or harmful to people, drugmakers almost never have to report the release of pharmaceuticals they produce.
“The government could get a national snapshot of the water if they chose to,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, “and it seems logical that we would want to find out what’s coming out of these plants.”
Ajit Ghorpade, an environmental engineer who worked for several major pharmaceutical companies before his current job helping run a wastewater treatment plant, said drugmakers have no impetus to take measurements that the government doesn’t require.
“Obviously nobody wants to spend the time or their dime to prove this,” he said. “It’s like asking me why I don’t drive a hybrid car? Why should I? It’s not required.”
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After contacting the nation’s leading drugmakers and filing public records requests, the AP found two federal agencies that have tested.
Both the EPA and the U.S. Geological Survey have studies under way comparing sewage at treatment plants that receive wastewater from drugmaking factories against sewage at treatment plants that do not.
Preliminary USGS results, slated for publication later this year, show that treated wastewater from sewage plants serving drug factories had significantly more medicine residues. Data from the EPA study show a disproportionate concentration in wastewater of an antibiotic that a major Michigan factory was producing at the time the samples were taken.
Meanwhile, other researchers recorded concentrations of codeine in the southern reaches of the Delaware River that were at least 10 times higher than the rest of the river.
The scientists from the Delaware River Basin Commission won’t have to look far when they try to track down potential sources later this year. One mile from the sampling site, just off shore of Pennsville, N.J., there’s a pipe that spits out treated wastewater from a municipal plant. The plant accepts sewage from a pharmaceutical factory owned by Siegfried Ltd. The factory makes codeine.
“We have implemented programs to not only reduce the volume of waste materials generated but to minimize the amount of pharmaceutical ingredients in the water,” said Siegfried spokeswoman Rita van Eck.
Another codeine plant, run by Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Noramco Inc., is about seven miles away. A Noramco spokesman acknowledged that the Wilmington, Del., factory had voluntarily tested its wastewater and found codeine in trace concentrations thousands of times greater than what was found in the Delaware River. “The amounts of codeine we measured in the wastewater, prior to releasing it to the City of Wilmington, are not considered to be hazardous to the environment,” said a company spokesman.
In another instance, equipment-cleaning water sent down the drain of an Upsher-Smith Laboratories, Inc. factory in Denver consistently contains traces of warfarin, a blood thinner, according to results obtained under a public records act request. Officials at the company and the Denver Metro Wastewater Reclamation District said they believe the concentrations are safe.
Warfarin, which also is a common rat poison and pesticide, is so effective at inhibiting growth of aquatic plants and animals it’s actually deliberately introduced to clean plants and tiny aquatic animals from ballast water of ships.
“With regard to wastewater management we are subject to a variety of federal, state and local regulation and oversight,” said Joel Green, Upsher-Smith’s vice president and general counsel. “And we work hard to maintain systems to promote compliance.”
Baylor University professor Bryan Brooks, who has published more than a dozen studies related to pharmaceuticals in the environment, said assurances that drugmakers run clean shops are not enough.
“I have no reason to believe them or not believe them,” he said. “We don’t have peer-reviewed studies to support or not support their claims.”
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Associated Press Writer Don Mitchell in Denver contributed to this report.
Thanks Alot Sweets !
and a Happy Earth Day to You Too
Well hello there! Very nice blog you've got here. Beautiful, in fact.
Happy Earth Day to you. It's great, isn't it?
Happy Earth Day to you too Liza !
Happy Earth Day!