It's not just some romantic fancy that leads us to classify these environmental-news briefs by the four ancient elements: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Modern physicists say four states of matter exist -- solid, liquid, gas and plasma and four layers of the planet (geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and magnetosphere). Whatever terms you use, that's four basic ways we can foul our environment ... or fix it.
Hiking on the fringes of developed areas in our mountains, you'll find many a lost lake and silted-up stream. Here's why: Storms pour rain on ground made barren by human activity (think construction sites and parking lots). Without plants and porous soils to absorb the water, it runs into adjacent lakes and streams, filling them with sediment and toxic runoff. The problem has grown so severe that the EPA has ordered state environmental regulators nationwide to institute stormwater-management programs by March 8, 2003. The top priority in those programs will be educating contractors, farmers, homeowners and others about environmentally sound ways to control stormwater runoff.
To that end, a broad coalition of local builders, environmentalists, and state and city officials is sponsoring a stormwater conference on Friday, May 31, at the N.C. Arboretum. The workshop will help builders and residents comply with the new regulations by introducing participants to available technologies for controlling stormwater and protecting water quality.
In the event's "Industry Track," experts will discuss subjects such as how to minimize impervious surfaces -- large expanses of asphalt and concrete that may keep an SUV from spinning its wheels in the mud, but which also cause destructive flooding in streams and rivers by preventing the ground from absorbing rainwater. (Permeable pavement is one innovation that satisfies both needs.) Other topics will include how to control stormwater erosion by encouraging wetlands, stabilizing stream banks and limiting land clearing.
In the "Homeowners' Track," participants will learn how to control erosion and runoff in their own backyard habitats. If you live alongside a stream or river, for example, experts advise you to stop mowing your lawn all the way to the edge of the stream bank. Shrubs and trees planted or allowed to grow there will prevent the bank from being continually washed away. You may lose some of your view, but at least you'll keep your yard.
Asheville Mayor Charles Worley will kick off the conference, which runs 8:15 a.m.-4:30 p.m. For more information or to register ($65 before May 1, $80 after), call 252-8474 ext. 114, or visit www.riverlink.org.
As long as you're doing stream-friendly landscaping around that dream retirement home, why not take the next step and make the house itself environmentally sustainable, too?
The newly published 2002-03 WNC Green Building Directory tells how to heat your home with passive solar energy or run your appliances off hydrogen fuel cells. The directory also lists local contractors and architects who'll build you an energy-efficient, feng-shui-conscious house, office building or church, using recycled materials. Or, if you'd rather do it yourself, the guide also includes suppliers of everything from triple-glazed windows to solvent-free caulking compound to wood beams salvaged from turn-of-the-century tobacco warehouses. A score of educational articles on green building methods, as well as case studies of local green-built residences, round out the directory's contents.
The WNC Green Building Directory (printed with soy-based ink) can be ordered from the WNC Green Building Council (P.O Box 8427, Asheville, NC 28814) or downloaded as a .pdf file at www.wncgbc.org.
When Fox News reporters Jane Akres and Steve Wilson tried to expose potential health threats connected with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) -- manufactured by the Monsanto Corporation and injected into cows on nearly every dairy farm in Florida, even though it's been linked to cancer and banned throughout Europe -- Monsanto successfully pressured Fox to pull the story. After the two Tampa reporters refused to include a statement about the safety of rBGH milk which they knew to be false in a rewritten version of the story, the manager of station WTVT fired them for insubordination. Nearly three years later, in August 2000, the husband-and-wife team won $425,000 in damages in a whistle-blower suit against Fox.
On Saturday April 27, Akres and Wilson will give the keynote address at "Our Food Our Future: Essential Facts About Genetic Engineering," a public forum hosted by Carolina Partners for Pure Food at UNCA's Owen Conference Center. The free event runs 1:30-5 p.m. and will also feature booths and educational displays by other nonprofits.
Other speakers at the forum will discuss associated issues affecting farmers, such as cross-contamination from GE crops, the potential for "super pests and weeds" to develop, lawsuits from corporations, the inability to sell contaminated crops, and the attempt by major chemical and biotech companies to monopolize the seed market.
A strategy session for activists will be held on Sunday, April 28.
For more information about the forum or to register for the strategy session, call (828) 656-2517 or e-mail salamandersprings@angelfire.com. To find out more about Akres and Wilson's censorship struggle with Fox, visit www.foxbghsuit.com.
Despite enthusiastic public support and strenuous efforts by WNC's representatives, the Clean Smokestacks Bill (S1078) foundered in committee during last year's state legislative session. Even though environmental advocates and coal-burning electric utilities had reached an agreement that would have brought about substantial reductions of the chemical emissions that cause haze, ozone and acid rain, the bill was stymied by opposition from businesses that would have to pay the higher utility rates such a cleanup would entail.
The bill's sponsors are determined to try again this session. To show the N.C. General Assembly and Gov. Mike Easley how widespread support for the bill actually is, the Canary Coalition -- a locally based clean-air advocacy organization -- has launched a statewide petition. The introduction reads:
"We the Undersigned, as citizens and voters of North Carolina, respectfully request that you, our Representatives in Raleigh, truly represent us and Pass S1078, The Healthy Air bill (also known as The Clean Smokestacks bill), with the emission control standards intact. Utility cost sharing, reducing implementation periods and clarification of the ban on trading of pollution credits, are the only acceptable changes to this bill. The emission control standards have already been compromised to the lowest acceptable levels."
"The petition signatures will be broken down by district and sent to legislators so they will know they're hearing from people within their own constituency," notes Avram Friedman, the Coalition's Executive Director. It's one part of what Friedman terms an "extensive and intensive effort," including public demonstrations, to get the message through to North Carolina legislators.
To obtain copies of the petition, call the Canary Coalition toll free at 866-4CANARY, e-mail canarycoalition@earthlink.net or go to www.canarycoalition.org.
Ecologists are discovering that every part of our environment truly is related to every other, and that a piecemeal approach to pollution and development issues only creates more problems. In the spirit of holism, then, we categorize these environmental-news briefs by the traditional element to which they correspond: fire, air, water or earth.
A controversial bill now pending in the N.C. General Assembly has already been rejected by our local air-quality agency. At its Oct. 8 meeting, the board of the independent WNC Regional Air Quality Agency voted to maintain its own stricter standards even if the bill becomes state law.
The proposed law would enable companies to build new plants without having the required air-pollution permits in hand. Instead, companies could wait to apply for the permits until the new plants were already operational. But environmentalists predict that the measure would put too much pressure on regulatory agencies to approve facilities in which companies had already invested large amounts of money.
"Owners will inevitably scream bloody murder to the press and legislators that failure to approve their requested permits will bankrupt them, since they will have already invested up to the full cost of constructing the facility," predicts Clean Water Fund director Hope Taylor, even though the companies would supposedly be building potentially polluting facilities at their own risk.
"Public hearings would still be held on air permits, but facilities could already be constructed before the hearings, effectively rendering public comment on the permits meaningless," reports a press release issued by state Sierra Club director Molly Diggins. The bill, introduced by Sen. David Hoyle (D-Cleveland, Gaston, Lincoln), would overturn a recent opinion by N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper ordering state air-quality regulators to more strictly and consistently apply the current law requiring companies to obtain their permits before starting construction.
But even if the measure, which has passed the N.C. Senate and is now in a House environmental committee, becomes state law, it won't apply to Buncombe County industries, which will still need to obtain an air-pollution permit before starting new construction and a separate operating permit once construction is complete.
"That's the beauty of this agency," remarked board attorney Jim Siemens just before the local Air Quality Agency's Oct. 8 vote. (The agency's charter allows it either to accept the state's air-quality rules or to adopt its own rules, which must be at least as strict as the state's).
The proposed state law would not apply to projects requiring federal permits, either. Federal law requires that an air permit be obtained before starting construction.
The North Carolina Medical Society has passed a resolution urging state government to reduce air pollution by investing in alternative-fuel vehicles for state use, funding effective mass-transit systems, and pursuing bicycle- and pedestrian-based transportation policies. The resolution, adopted earlier this month, was written by Alan McKenzie, the chair of both the Buncombe County Medical Society and the WNC Regional Air Quality Agency.
At the air agency's Nov. 13 meeting, McKenzie told board members that the resolution "is now official policy of the state Medical Society and will enable the state society to become much more active and supportive of legislative and regional efforts to improve our air quality here." The N.C. Medical Society represents and oversees the state's doctors.
The resolution urges elected officials both to pursue regional cooperation with other states whose pollution migrates to North Carolina and to curb our own air pollution by implementing the "most effective" programs. Citing the role of auto exhaust as well as coal-fired power-plant emissions in raising the state's rates of childhood asthma and death from lung disease, the document encourages the state Department of Transportation to begin incorporating and giving priority to air-pollution-abatement principles in its planning and design processes.
Local environmentalists staged a demonstration outside the Staples store in downtown Hendersonville on Nov. 13 as part of a national campaign to persuade the world's largest office-supply retailer to stop selling paper made from public forests.
"Currently, one of every three trees cut on the public's national forests needlessly wind up as pulp and paper," according to Tom Weis of the National Forest Protection Alliance.
Local NFPA member Andrew George told Mountain Xpress that the demonstration was peaceful.
"The police were mellow. ... Staples let us stand outside" without harassment, said George.
College students from UNCA's Active Students for a Healthy Environment joined the protest, which involved some 30 activists from groups including the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, Dogwood Alliance, Katuah Earth First! and American Lands Alliance.
"We have discovered that the recycled-paper industry needs more business in order to be a viable market with cost-effective products," asserted Candice Carr of ASHE. "Staples needs to support the switch to more sustainable forms of paper to protect our Southern forests."
The general manager of the Hendersonville store, Kevin Varbel, would not comment about the demonstration to the press. But Tom Nutile, Staples Inc.'s vice president of public relations, told Mountain Xpress from the corporation's office in Massachusetts: "Each store now carries nearly 400 recycled products, from paper towels to file folders to post-it notes. We're working to increase the number and quantity of our recycled-paper products." Nutile cited several brands of low-cost, recycled paper the store now carries, including "Eureka" 50-percent post-consumer-content paper made by Georgia-Pacific.
The activists, however, say (and Nutile confirmed) that these products represent only 12 percent of the store's thousands of paper products.
The campaign, whose national spokespersons include actor/activist Woody Harrelson and U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (lead sponsor of the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act), is demanding that Staples immediately phase out all wood and paper products made from old-growth fiber, and make available both 100-percent post-consumer paper and "tree-free" paper.
"We're now developing a policy that would formalize our commitment to the environment" by giving purchasing preference to products made from wood coming from certified sustainably managed forests, said Nutile -- "forestry that pays heed to biodiversity." The store now stocks alternative paper made from 100-percent post-consumer cotton fiber, Nutile noted, adding, "Our merchandisers are looking into alternative fibers, including hemp and kenaf, but have not yet struck a deal" with suppliers.
"Stocking recycled products and being environmentally friendly has always been a part of Staples' policy," stated Nutile.
We like to do it our own way here in the mountains, not necessarily the way they do it over there in Raleigh. For nearly 30 years, we policed air polluters in our coves and hollers through Buncombe and Haywood Counties' own Air Pollution Control Agency, entirely separate from North Carolina's Division of Air Quality. Now, in the week before the Fourth of July, that independence from the state is responsible for a major courtroom victory for the Clean Air Community Trust Fund, the nonprofit fund for air-pollution education and mitigation that the APCA's successor, the WNC Regional Air Quality Agency, has been striving for nearly a year to create from the $850,000 fund balance left over after the APCA's dissolution.
Until June 25, the clean-air trust fund -- which would help provide grants for educational projects and for state-of-the-art cleanup equipment for local industries -- was stymied by a lawsuit brought against Buncombe County, the City of Asheville and the APCA by Betty Donoho, a Council for Independent Business Owners (CIBO) activist. Donoho -- later joined by the Buncombe County School Board -- claimed in the suit that the fund balance should instead be diverted to local public schools, on the grounds that Article IX, Section 7 of the North Carolina Constitution required that "the clear proceeds of all penalties and forfeitures and of all fines collected in the several counties for any breach of penal laws of the state shall belong to and remain in the several counties and shall be faithfully appropriated and used exclusively for maintaining free public schools." The fund balance was mostly accumulated from fines and penalties levied by the APCA against area air polluters.
Attorneys for the city, county and agency countered that the surplus funds were not subject to this state law, because the APCA was not a state agency, and its fines and penalties were not assessed for any breach of the penal laws of the state. The local air agency has always enforced its own regulations, which are usually -- though not always -- the same as the state's. On June 25, Superior Court Judge J. Marlene Hyatt agreed, and ruled in favor of the defendants.
The judge's dismissal of the suit frees up for the clean-air fund the more than $400,000 that still remained at issue after May 15, when she released to the defendants the $385,000 portion of the fund balance that had been collected from violators of federal "Title V" air-pollution laws. Unless Donoho and the School Board appeal the ruling within 30 days, the Clean Air Community Trust Fund is free to begin its work.
There's been a surprising gust of activity recently by elected and appointed officials -- including several who generally oppose environmental initiatives -- to promote measures that, if passed, could significantly reduce air pollution in our mountains. Some of the legislation, however, is based on the unproven theory that most of our urban-area pollution is blown in from other states, especially from aging power plants operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
On May 29, the Bush administration unexpectedly agreed to move forward on the Regional Haze Rule, a plan proposed in the last days of the Clinton administration that would reduce emissions from older coal-fired power plants -- the grandfathered plants, built between 1962 and 1977, that until now have been exempt from the strict limits on emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxide (NOx) and particulates imposed on newer coal-burning facilities under the Clean Air Act. The plan would require states to order these older plants, as well as refineries and other industrial polluters, to install the "best available control technology" for removing pollutants from their emissions by the year 2013.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said the administration wants to demonstrate President Bush's concern for national parks by inviting public comment on the proposed rule, according to a May 30 report in the Washington Post. But environmentalists interviewed by the Post expressed skepticism, saying they expect the White House Office of Management and Budget to try to weaken the rule before publishing it in the Federal Register.
North Carolina's legislature is already a step ahead of the federal government. In early April, WNC legislators Sen. Steve Metcalf and Rep. Martin Nesbitt introduced the N.C. Clean Smokestacks Act (SB 1078/HB 1015) in the General Assembly, co-sponsored by 17 other legislators (including two Republicans). A press release from the WNC Alliance and the N.C. Clean Air Coalition says the law "would be the strongest clean-air legislation passed by any state in the country to reduce pollution from coal-fired plants."
The proposed law would require North Carolina's 14 grandfathered coal-burning power plants -- which, according to the coalition, create more than 45 percent of the NOx emissions, 82 percent of the SO2 emissions and 65 percent of the mercury emissions throughout our state -- to phase in a 78 percent reduction in NOx emissions by 2009 and a 73 percent reduction in SO2 levels by 2013. (The reductions are measured from 1998 levels.) It would also direct state officials to evaluate annually the need for further reductions in these pollutants and to study setting additional standards for mercury and carbon-dioxide emissions. The state's two largest utilities, CP&L and Duke, have announced their willingness to meet the mandated reductions -- as long as they don't have to pay for them.
According to Michael Shore of Environmental Defense in Raleigh, the bill recently passed the state Senate 43-5, but it faces a nail-bitingly close vote in the House. It is now being hotly debated in the House Public Utilities Committee and will go through the Agricultural & Environmental Committee before reaching the House floor.
"The good news," Shore reports, "is that everyone seems to agree that the reductions called for in the bill are needed. The debate surrounding the bill is to determine the fairest way to distribute costs."
As it stands, the bill would allow the utilities to pass on to consumers the full cost of compliance for reductions that pertain solely to the bill.
But according to Division of Air Quality staffer Crystal Pace, representatives of the two utilities told the utilities committee at a June 5 hearing that the bill would cost them a combined total of $2.5 billion over the next 13 years. Noting that this was $300 million more than the figure utility representatives had presented just five days earlier, committee members instructed their staff to work with the utilities to determine the true cost.
Another controversial provision in the Clean Smokestacks Act directs the state to use its resources to compel other states to make similar reductions -- presumably through lawsuits or, as Lou Zeller of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League suggests, through filing a Clean Air Act petition with the EPA. In a June 7 presentation to the WNC Regional Air Quality Agency's Technical Advisory Committee, Zeller pointed out that section 126 of the Clean Air Act "gives any state or local government the authority to ask EPA to set limits on pollution sources in other states."
Stanching the TVA-generated emissions that many people blame for polluting WNC is the stated purpose of U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor's Great Smoky Mountains Clean Air Act, which he reintroduced in the House of Representatives on June 7. The bill would require the TVA to reduce its power-plant emissions according to a strict schedule.
"My legislation is not a magic-wand, quick solution to our air-quality problems in WNC," announced Taylor. "It does, however, address a major portion of the problem that is caused by a quasi-federal, government-created utility -- the TVA."
Two weeks earlier, at a news conference in Asheville, Taylor released the results of a General Accounting Office report he had commissioned, Air Pollution: Air Quality and Respiratory Problems in and Near the Great Smoky Mountains. The study contained one frightening finding that received widespread publicity -- that throughout the 1990s, death rates from two respiratory illnesses, chronic lung disease and pneumonia/influenza, were consistently higher in North Carolina and Tennessee than the comparable national rates, and higher yet in WNC and eastern Tennessee, even though these regions had substantially lower-than-average overall death rates. (The report cautions, however, that its figures are not controlled for rates of tobacco smoking or for socioeconomic levels.)
But the GAO report didn't find that TVA is responsible for all or even most of the air pollution afflicting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Instead, citing air-flow studies recently conducted by the National Park Service, it maintains that "the predominant majority of the [polluted] air masses started over the industrial Midwest, or spent considerable time there." Many of the nation's oldest and dirtiest coal-fired power plants are in the Ohio Valley, north of the Great Smokies.
Jim Renfro, one of the Park Service researchers who conducted the air-mass study cited by the GAO, cautioned Mountain Xpress that even the GAO report's conclusions "were probably a little bit more specific ... than they should have been."
The researchers studied the directions from which air masses enter the park on low-smog vs. high-smog days. High pollution levels in the park were associated mainly with days when air masses came from the north and northwest, and somewhat less with those from the west. Air masses coming in from the south, east or northeast tended to correlate with days when pollution levels were low.
At first glance, these findings seem to suggest that the TVA power plants, which lie west and south of the park, are actually less responsible for its pollution than the Ohio Valley plants, and the plants east of the park, in North Carolina, are least responsible of all.
But Renfro says no. The researchers were able to follow the paths of the air masses back only three days. "So [the pollution] could be either from the Tennessee Valley [or] all the way back to Minnesota. It's not source attribution."
The truth, say Renfro and other regional air-pollution researchers, is that we really can't be certain whose power plants -- Tennessee's, the Ohio Valley's or even North Carolina's -- bear the burden of blame for polluting the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Air currents can wander widely, and the sulfur-dioxide derivatives that cause haze and acid rain are light and can travel many miles on upper-atmosphere winds.
Air-quality experts consulted by Mountain Xpress -- including meteorologist Grant Goodge, regional Division of Air Quality Director Paul Muller, Regional Air Quality Agency Director Bob Camby, U.S. Forest Service air-quality specialist Bill Jackson and others -- say no one will know for sure who's most at fault for our deteriorating air until SAMI, the multistate Southern Appalachian Mountains Initiative, completes its extensive chemical analyses and computer modeling of emissions transport later this year.
In the meantime, however, the consensus among these experts is that much, if not most, of the smog we're stewing in here in the mountain valleys where most WNC residents live is of our own making. Unlike the ridge tops (above roughly 4,000 feet), which are buffeted by long-distance winds and their sulfurous hitchhikers, the cities and towns of the French Broad River Valley -- including Asheville, Waynesville and Hendersonville -- are frequently socked in on hot May-through-October days by atmospheric-inversion layers that trap the tailpipe emissions from our ever-growing numbers of cars, trucks and lawn mowers under a blanket of cooler air. In the presence of sunlight, the NOx in petroleum exhaust combines with volatile organic compounds to create ground-level ozone. VOCs are emitted by our abundant trees, it's true, but also by human-created products such as paint and varnish. (More than half of North Carolina's air pollution comes from mobile sources, according to the state Division of Air Quality.)
Those inversions also trap the NOx emitted from the smokestacks of WNC's largest air polluter, CP&L's coal-fired power plant in Skyland, along with any NOx that might have been transported here from out of state -- say, from the Tennessee side of the mountains, whence our prevailing westerly winds blow. But compared to the high-flying SO2 and its chemical derivatives, NOx is relatively heavy and tends to stick close to ground level.
NOx's sluggish tendencies, and the fact that most of WNC's yellow, orange and (luckily still rare) red ozone days occur when inversion layers are present, suggest to experts that most of our ozone is locally generated, not transported from elsewhere. There are exceptions, of course: Clear days with winds from the east or south may bring noxious plumes from the traffic-choked metropolises of Charlotte or Atlanta.
Overall, however, most state and local air-quality experts believe that cracking down on TVA and other out-of-state utilities would greatly benefit WNC's ridge tops but bring relatively little improvement to the air in our populated valleys. That, they believe, is going to have to come through stiffer controls on emissions not just from local power plants but especially from cars, trucks and lawn equipment. And since much of our mobile-source pollution is due to interstate-highway traffic, even cleaning up Bubba's pickup and the Joneses' mower may still leave our lungs at the mercy of federal regulators, the trucking lobby and the state Department of Transportation.
The Southeast Center for Renewable Energy can be reached at (828) 689-4190. To view the GAO report on the Smokies' air quality commissioned by Rep. Taylor, go to http://www.gao.gov, then select: GAO reports; Today's Reports; May 25; Item #7 GAO-01-658. To find out more about SAMI, including its 2001 interim report, go to http://www.saminet.org.
Ecologists are discovering that every part of our environment truly is related to every other, and that a piecemeal approach to pollution and development issues only creates more problems. In the spirit of holism, then, we categorize these environmental-news briefs by the traditional Element to which they correspond: Fire, Air, Water or Earth.
For every 365 days that politicians in Washington argue over whether to limit carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, your gasoline-powered car is putting 21,900 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere -- about seven times its own weight. That's in addition to the 29 pounds of hydrocarbons, 34 pounds of nitrogen oxides, 195 pounds of carbon monoxide and 3.4 pounds of soot an average car driven 15,000 miles a year generates from its tailpipe exhaust or from the production of fuel to run it. Add an extra 40 percent to those figures if you drive a light truck or SUV.
"Cars and trucks equal air pollution. They are the most significant thing you do in your life that causes air pollution," was how Gary Davis of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's Center for Clean Products summed up these statistics in his talk on "Green Cars and Clean Car Technologies" at the Clean Air Car Fair, held April 26 at Asheville's Civic Center. The fair showcased alternative-fuel vehicles -- cars and trucks that run on fuels other than gasoline or oil, such as electricity, natural gas, ethanol, methanol, bio-diesel and the fuel that's generating the most excitement right now among AFV enthusiasts: hydrogen.
Davis drives a hybrid electric Toyota Prius, an intermediate step on the evolutionary ladder between traditional gas power and all-electric cars (which are still hampered by relatively heavy batteries and short driving range). A sky-blue Prius joined a hybrid electric Honda Insight in the Civic Center lobby as the centerpieces of the Car Fair. The new cars -- both now available from local dealers for around $20,000 -- don't need to be plugged into a wall socket to charge their nickel-metal-hydride batteries. Instead, during normal driving or acceleration, a hybrid electric car's gasoline engine runs the generator that powers the electric motor, which primarily drives the wheels. During deceleration or braking, the wheels themselves spin the electric motor, causing it to act as a generator that charges the car's battery.
Davis said his car goes up to 100 mph, averages 44.3 miles per gallon and saves him about $500 a year in gas, compared to a traditional car. After having been available in Japan for about three years, the hybrids are just now beginning to be sold in the United States at the rate of a couple thousand a month, and demand is already outstripping supply. Still, Davis reminded fairgoers, the best way to save on fuel and reduce pollution is to trade in your gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicle.
"The difference in fuel economy between a sedan and an SUV is greater than that between a hybrid and a conventional car," he pointed out.
(One small irony found parked in a far corner of the Clean Air Car Fair was an electric-powered meter-maid vehicle provided by the Henderson County Sheriff's Department. On the side, it bore the legend, "This vehicle purchased with confiscated money from a Henderson County drug dealer," next to a logo of a red circle and slash through a green marijuana leaf. But this message doesn't distinguish between marijuana and hemp, a nonpsychoactive form of cannabis that WNC activists such as Community of Compassion's Jason Klein want to see legalized in North Carolina. According to Klein, alternative-energy researchers have found that fast-growing hemp is one of the best sources of biomass for fermentation into ethanol, as well as of biodiesel oil extracted from its seeds.)
Mindful that at least 30 percent of our air pollution is generated by local vehicle exhaust, the city of Asheville is preparing to switch its fleets of garbage trucks, buses and other city vehicles from diesel, gas and kerosene to natural gas. The state Department of Environment and Natural Resources has awarded the city a $400,000 matching-funds grant to build a "fast-fill" liquefied/compressed-natural-gas station, where both city workers and members of the public will be able to fill the tanks of their AFVs with clean-burning compressed natural gas (CNG). The station will be operated in conjunction with Public Service of North Carolina.
With the Asheville station joining existing CNG fueling stations in Gastonia and Hickory, "You would be able to drive your CNG Toyota Camry or Honda across the state from the coast to Tennessee on the I-40 corridor," says Public Works Director Mark Combs, who's leading the fleet-conversion project -- along with Vice Mayor Chuck Cloninger and Transit Director Bruce Black.
"Wouldn't it be nice to know that your trash truck that's picking your garbage up is 97-percent pollution free? It's going up and down your street, making all its diesel noises, but its emissions are less than a lawnmower," says Combs. Black looks forward to the day when city buses will run not on kerosene, as they do now, but on CNG or even biodiesel -- made from vegetable fats and oils. Public-transit fleets in Lexington, Ky., Cincinnati, Ohio, and other cities are already using the biodiesel fuel, according to the National Biodiesel Board's Web site.
In contrast to the no-frills "slow-fill" natural-gas station PSNC now operates in Asheville, which takes eight hours to fill an average-size CNG fuel tank, the city's proposed "fast-fill" station will allow the tanks to be filled as quickly as conventional gasoline tanks, explains Combs. Fast-fill technology, however, is far more complex, because it requires the gas to be kept at extremely low temperatures and under very high pressure.
"The city's intent," says Combs, "is to have its staff and its maintenance staff learn this technology and how to deal with it. This is a commitment that the City Council made [in a resolution] last year that is really far-reaching and will affect our lives in the future. It's a matter of me teaching my staff how to work with cryogenics, how to work with CNG, what the challenges are, so that we can expand our knowledge base."
But it's the prospect of hydrogen fuel that really excites Combs, who has learned a lot about alternative fuels himself. Natural gas, Combs believes, is just an interim step.
"We think that the whole CNG/LNG alternative-fuels [phenomenon] is probably something that is not long-term -- I'm talking about decades plus -- [but] we think that probably [auto manufacturers are] going to be looking more at a fuel-cell technology," he reveals. Hydrogen fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen atoms to create H2O (water), then generate an electric current by pulling them back apart. The cells could generate electricity in homes as well as cars.
Ford Motor Company has recently begun advertising its prototype hydrogen vehicles, though none are in production yet. The main technical obstacle to be overcome, says Combs, is that current fuel cells rely on a rare-metal catalyst, which is far too expensive and scarce to produce in large quantity.
Combs is well aware that his vision of the pollution-free city fleet of the future faces a much more treacherous obstacle as well. "If you think about it, this is real scary [to some], because I think about three or four [hundred] of the top Fortune 500 [companies] are oil-based. So if we were to go to hydrogen plants for both our electricity and our homes, all of which are zero emissions, what's that do to the oil industry? ... Oil would become a specialty product."
Unfortunately, the state's budget crunch has prevented the fast-fill station's grant funds from being released yet, delaying the timetable for building it.
Budget woes have also stalled another local agency's plans to purchase AFVs. The WNC Regional Air Quality Agency voted earlier this year to replace two aging conventional-fuel staff vehicles with CNG-fueled Honda Civics, to be purchased with funds from Title V permits. But faced with uncertainty about how much of the agency's assets Haywood County is entitled to in the wake of its pullout from the regional agency last year -- as well as about how much money may be siphoned off from the AQA's fund balance by the Donoho lawsuit (which contends that the agency failed to follow a former state law diverting fines collected by regulatory agencies to the public schools) -- Buncombe County Manager Wanda Greene nixed the plan for now.
Earlier this year, John Massey, director of the state Motor Fleet Management Division, announced that North Carolina now has more than 900 AFVs in its fleet. Seven cars and trucks run on CNG, and five on propane. The majority, however, burn ethanol, a type of alcohol produced from the fermentation of natural products such as corn, wheat and sweet potatoes -- all plentiful crops in North Carolina. According to Massey, the fuel used -- a mixture of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline called E85 -- is similar in price to gasoline, but burns cleaner and emits fewer harmful emissions than gasoline. And because E85 burns at a cooler temperature, it can prolong the life of spark plugs and other car parts.
For more information about the Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies, visit www.cleanproducts.org. For a good overview of alternative-fuel vehicles, Mark Combs recommends www.greenercars.org.
Ecologists are discovering that every part of our environment truly is related to every other, and that a piecemeal approach to pollution and development issues only creates more problems. In the spirit of holism, then, we categorize these environmental-news briefs by the traditional Element to which they correspond: Fire, Air, Water or Earth.
Western North Carolina could be vulnerable to the fallout from a Cold War blast from the past if the federal government goes ahead with a plan to use plutonium from decommissioned warheads to fuel four nuclear reactors in the Piedmont area. That's the concern expressed by Asheville activists Dr. Lew Patrie of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, who warn that MOX -- mixed-oxide fuel, which combines enriched uranium with surplus plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons -- is more unstable and poisonous than conventional uranium fuel. Moreover, they say, the safeguards these plants would use to protect against meltdown and radioactive release are flimsy and unreliable.
The U.S. Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Duke Energy Corporation plan to fabricate the fuel -- shiny pellets of compressed oxide powders -- at a Savannah River site in Aiken, S.C., and to use it in four reactors at the company's two power plants in the Charlotte area (McGuire and Catawba). An international coalition of 142 environmental, social-justice and nuclear-weapons groups has petitioned the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to hold a formal licensing review of the Savannah River factory plan but has so far received no response, say coalition spokespersons. The DOE defends MOX fuel as a way to dispose of plutonium from warheads being dismantled under post-Cold War treaty agreements and keep it out of the hands of terrorists and rogue governments.
"For all practical purposes, [MOX] will make the surplus plutonium unusable for weapons," states a DOE fact sheet published under the auspices of the Amarillo National Research Center.
But Olson sees a financial benefit for Duke Power behind the deal.
"Duke will not only have their expenses paid for this program [because plutonium is more expensive to use than uranium], it will also have to have a subsidy that will keep those reactors open for the 20-year span of the program," alleges Olson. This would help protect Duke's profits if North Carolina opens its electric-utility market to private competition. "We're also subsidizing the [financially] failing nuke industry in France," she adds, pointing out that the French national reactor agency, Cogema, is another partner in the plan.
"Weapons-grade plutonium has never been used anywhere in the world as a reactor fuel," says Olson. "So this is a complete experiment." Worse yet, she says, "If you went throughout the U.S., you could not find four worse reactors to put a highly explosive fuel into." The McGuire and Catawba reactors were built by Westinghouse during a period when it was competing with General Electric to build cheaper systems for containing the explosive steam pressure created during a core meltdown.
"They decided they were going to suppress the pressure ... by channeling the steam to these big ice beds," explains Olson. "These reactors [there are seven in the U.S.] are called the 'ice-bucket' plants." Instead of the reinforced-concrete containment structure that Westinghouse's earlier and sturdier reactors used, "These have simply a metal building around the reactor core," according to Olson. If an earthquake or a California-style rolling blackout caused one of the reactors to lose its off-site power for two hours, and if the backup diesel generators failed to operate -- a common problem with these generators, says Olson -- the core would overheat and the reactor would melt down.
The resulting release of radioactive pollution could cause 25 percent more fatal cancers than an identical incident at a uranium-fueled reactor, according to Dr. Patrie, because of the much higher toxicity of the plutonium in the MOX fuel.
What's the likelihood that that fallout would blow our way? Fortunately for us -- if not for our Piedmont neighbors -- our prevailing wind direction is northwest to southeast, according to meteorologist Grant Goodge. Consulting his air-movement charts at Xpress' request, Goodge reported, "For all months of the year, our winds are blowing southeast to northwest [that is, from the Charlotte area] about 7 percent of the time." September and October bring the highest percentage of winds from that direction, around 10-15 percent.
Olson urges citizens to lobby the governor and the N.C. legislature to cut state funding for the MOX project.
For more information, visit the Nuclear Information and Resource Service Web site www.nirs.org.
Several months ago, Mountain Xpress reported on the highly critical audit report the Environmental Protection Agency released after investigating the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources' water-quality enforcement program ("EPA audit blasts state water-quality agency," Jan. 10, 2001). The audit confirmed many of the criticisms citizens' groups such as the Clean Water Fund of North Carolina have long aimed at DENR -- such as failing to levy large enough fines against chronic repeat polluters to make it unprofitable to break the law; negotiating "Special Order of Consent" settlements that don't set any deadlines for polluters to clean up their act; and neglecting to monitor polluters' daily and weekly discharge reports to catch excessive pollutant discharges swiftly.
Now, according to a letter that EPA Divisional Inspector General for Audit John Walsh sent to the Clean Water Fund's Hope Taylor, DENR has committed itself to making changes the EPA auditors recommended, starting July 1. DENR will begin "incorporating the economic benefit gained by violators from noncompliance into penalties for egregious violations and chronic repeat violations." It will also "establish compliance deadlines for violators without negotiating Special Orders by Consent," and it will "implement recommendations related to ... timely identification of exceedances of daily and weekly permit limits."
The promises were the outcome of several months of meetings between DENR officials and the EPA's regional administrator -- and, possibly, of the letters DENR officials received from state environmental groups and citizens angry about DENR's reported lapses.
"Parents are justifiably concerned about protecting their children from gun violence at schools, but they are unaware that toxic chemicals kill," said Denise Lee of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in a March 21 press release announcing the launch of a statewide campaign to protect the state's schoolchildren from exposure to toxic chemicals. The routine use of pesticides and caustic cleaning agents in public schools has raised concerns in recent weeks among parents of students in the Buncombe County Schools.
BREDL released a new national report, "Poisoned Schools: Invisible Threats, Visible Actions," published by the Center for Health, Environment and Justice in Falls Church, Va. The report, which BREDL sent to Buncombe County Board of Commissioners Chair Nathan Ramsey, recommends that decisions about siting new schools should involve not just school officials but also parents, students, teachers and community members. Citing health experts' growing belief that soaring rates of childhood cancer and learning disabilities such as attention-deficit disorder and autism are linked to children's increasing exposure to environmental chemicals, the report points out that new schools are frequently built atop or close to old landfills and agricultural and factory sites, where land costs are relatively low, but the risk of exposure to toxic chemicals is very high.
"Under no circumstances should a school be built on top of a hazardous waste dump, garbage dump, or other landfilled property," states the report. "No source of contamination, such as a landfill or containment facility, should be built or established within 1,000 feet of a school. ... Industrial or other facilities releasing chemicals should never be built or located within two miles of a school."
Within the school, "if pesticides are used, they should be the least toxic available and their use strictly limited," the report recommends, and parents and students should be notified in advance about what kinds of pesticides will be used, the health effects of exposure, and parents' right to request alternatives.
North Carolina law forbids aerial pesticide spraying within a 300-foot buffer zone around schools, to protect against pesticide drift. But it does not require posting or prior notification of pesticide application, according to the report.
McDowell County resident Elizabeth O'Nan, the mother of a chemically sensitive child, is the director of PACE (Protect All Children's Environment). She discovered two years ago how hard it can sometimes be for parents to find out just what pesticides and cleaning materials are being used in their children's schools.
"I called the maintenance man -- he couldn't even pronounce the names of the chemicals he was using," she relates. The chemicals turned out to include growth-hormone regulators.
"He refused to provide the MSD sheets, which are required by law to be made available to anyone who asks," says O'Nan. Material Safety Data sheets detail the contents and known health hazards of toxic chemicals. Many common pesticides and herbicides, she has learned, contain recycled hazardous wastes.
O'Nan only recently obtained the information she had requested, and only after filing a request under the state's open-records laws. Her daughter is now attending an alternative school.
"Poisoned Schools: Invisible Threats, Visible Actions" is available in pdf format on the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League Web site (www.bredl.org). PACE can be reached at pace@mcdowell.main.nc.us.
Here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where fresh air, pure water and unspoiled mountain vistas are cherished by natives and newcomers alike, pollution is an increasingly hot topic. In this new monthly feature, we'll report on air, water, land and energy issues of local interest -- and explore what governments, businesses and citizens are doing about them.
In the spirit of wholism, we'll categorize these news items by the traditional element to which they correspond: fire, air, water or earth.
"There is a plan under way regarding our nuclear-power industry that has not received much public attention, yet it presents serious public-health concerns," Dr. Lew Patrie, local chairman of Physicians for Social Responsibility, warned his fellow board members at the January meeting of the WNC Air Quality Agency. The U.S. Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Duke Energy Corporation want to begin fueling commercial nuclear reactors in North and South Carolina with mixed-oxide fuel (MOX), which combines enriched uranium with surplus plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons. The fuel -- shiny pellets of compressed oxide powders -- will be fabricated at the Savannah River site in Aiken, S.C., and be used in four reactors at Duke's two power plants in the Charlotte area (McGuire and Catawba).
According to the Nuclear Control Institute, an independent, Washington, D.C.-based research-and-advocacy center specializing in problems of nuclear proliferation, the end of the Cold War has left the U.S. and Russia with a massive disposal problem: what to do about 100 tons of surplus plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads. For 20 years, the American government's policy has been to keep weapons-grade plutonium out of nuclear reactors and dispose of it by burial, to prevent it from getting into the hands of terrorists and unfriendly governments.
But with the advent of MOX, "the nuclear bureaucracies and industries of both countries, along with those of Britain, France and Japan, are seizing the opportunity to turn this plutonium into commercial fuel rather than dispose of it as waste," according to the NCI.
The Department of Energy defends MOX fuel on the grounds that "for all practical purposes, it will make the surplus plutonium unusable for weapons," according to a fact sheet published jointly by the Department of Energy and the state of Texas under the auspices of the Amarillo National Research Center (formed in 1994 to conduct scientific and technical research, advise decision-makers, and provide information on nuclear-weapons materials and related environmental, safety, health and nonproliferation issues). "Using surplus weapons plutonium in mixed-oxide fuel ... in the opinion of many of the world's most renowned scientists, will be the most environmentally correct way of disposing of the surplus plutonium," states the fact sheet.
But Patrie, citing the NCI, told the local air-quality board that MOX fuel creates a much higher risk of a serious nuclear accident. MOX generates more high-energy neutrons, which will accelerate the rate of damage to key reactor components such as the containment vessel (which surrounds the reactor to contain radioactive leaks). These neutrons also speed up the nuclear reaction and make it more difficult to control, he said.
If an accident did occur at one of the Charlotte-area plants, the radioactive pollution it would spread through our area could cause 25 percent more fatal cancers than an identical incident at a uranium-fueled reactor, says Patrie, because MOX fuel will create more of the dangerous transuranic elements than conventional uranium fuel would.
Despite the government's claim that using MOX will eliminate surplus plutonium, there's nearly as much plutonium present at the end of the process as at the beginning, noted Patrie.
"Although it will take several years for the use of MOX to be operational, I bring it before the board now so that we may be aware of this potential hazard," Patrie concluded.
The NCI and a coalition of more than a dozen other environmental and arms-control organizations are urging that the surplus plutonium be encased in glass logs (a process called vitrification), sealed in stainless-steel cylinders, and stored for eventual deep burial.
Although board members determined that the agency has no regulatory authority or jurisdiction over this subject, they encouraged Patrie to look into it further. For more information, see the NCI Web site, nci.org/nci-wpu.htm, and the ANRC Web site, www.pu.org.)
If the new environmental policy-makers in Washington, D.C., follow through on their promises to implement self-auditing, much of the responsibility for policing pollution violations, now borne by the federal and state governments, would be put in the hands of the polluting industries themselves. But around the nation -- including here in North Carolina -- an opposite kind of privatization has been taking place, as citizens frustrated by what they perceive as overly lenient and underfunded government pollution enforcement have begun monitoring their communities' air and water themselves.
When the Chevron Oil Refinery in Richmond, Calif., caught fire two years ago -- sending 1,000 area residents to the hospital with headaches, nausea, dizziness, throat and skin irritation, respiratory problems and other complaints -- members of the Richmond/San Pablo Bucket Brigade swung into action. Wielding homemade sampling devices developed by Denny Larson of Communities for a Better Environment, the volunteers captured samples of the smoky air and sent them to a state-approved laboratory for analysis. Although Chevron officials had claimed that the fire would have no serious community-health impacts, the lab results showed significant levels of toxic chemicals known to cause respiratory and skin irritation, as well as reproductive and nervous-system problems.
Closer to home, in Salisbury, N.C., a citizens' group concerned about emissions from a liquid-asphalt transfer terminal in their neighborhood spurred their City Council last December to order city staff to begin monitoring the plant's emissions, after members of the group told Council they were prepared to start doing it themselves. Rowan [County] Citizens Against Pollution learned how to sample their air at a workshop given by the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League.
According to Janet Zeller, BREDL has already conducted more than a dozen workshops in WNC and has received numerous requests to schedule more. The do-it-yourself "grab-sampling" process uses a plastic bag attached to a large canister, both of which are promptly sealed after a sample is taken. And samples must be sent through a legally secure chain of custody to a California laboratory within 24 hours, to prevent degradation.
"The buckets perform exactly like the [professional] Suma Canister grab-sampling device, which usually costs $2,000 to $3,000," says Zeller. "We can produce them, using citizen labor, for $150-$200." Both the procedure and the analytical results stand up in court, she says.
To learn about future workshops, call BREDL at (336) 982-2691 or visit www.bredl.org.
For 11 years, members of North Carolina's oldest and largest citizen water-quality monitoring program -- the Volunteer Water Information Network -- have been taking monthly water samples from their neighborhood rivers, lakes and streams, says Executive Director Karen Cragnolin of RiverLink, a regional organization promoting the economic and environmental revitalization of the French Broad River and its tributaries.
"[Volunteers] go to the same place at the same time, month after month. Then we use the water samples to develop a base line" against which pollutants can be measured, Cragnolin explains. VWIN contracts with Steve Patch at UNCA to test the samples, which come from 180 sites in Buncombe, Henderson, Haywood, Transylvania and several other WNC counties. VWIN produces a technical report for each county and a bimonthly newsletter, High Water Mark, that provides information about issues affecting the French Broad watershed.
Cragnolin is especially excited about a feature that the Mountain Area Information Network is helping to develop -- with the aid of a $10,000 software grant -- on VWIN's Web site (www.riverlink.org).
"On the map of the watershed, you'll be able to type in the name of a sampling site -- say, Reems Creek -- and a window will pop up with the current [sampling] information about that site," she explains. The new feature is expected to be up and running with the next few months.
County budget cutbacks have prevented the last three months' worth of samples from being tested. But a separate grant is enabling VWIN, in partnership with Warren Wilson College, to test the Swannanoa River for fecal coliform, bacteria and other contaminating "bugs," Cragnolin says, allowing an overlay of both chemical and biological data on the river.
To find out how to participate in VWIN, call 252-8474.
The North Carolina Division of Water Quality is offering WNC residents and businesses a chance not only to learn what to do about water quality where they live and work, but also to express their ideas and views to the people who regulate it.
"Basinwide water quality planning is a nonregulatory, watershed-based approach to restoring and protecting the quality of North Carolina's surface waters," announces the DWQ, which will hold three free workshops in the Little Tennessee River Basin:
No pre-registration is necessary. For more information, visit www.h2o.enr.state.nc.us/basinwide/meetings_by_month.htm#LittleTennessee, or contact Callie Dobson at DWQ Planning (e-mail: Callie.Dobson@ncmail.net; telephone: (919) 733-5083, ext. 583).