Andrew Wetzler's Blog: Curbing Pollution

Minnesota Reviews Atrazine -- And Drops the Ball

2010-03-19T16:26:42Z

For those of you who have been following the growing concerns over the widespread use of the pesticide atrazine in the United States, you probably know that EPA recently announced it was going to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the chemical’s safety (for NRDC’s comments on the EPA review, click here).*

What you may not know, however, is that states can also initiate their own reviews—federal environmental law allows states to set standards that are more restrictive than those mandated by the EPA.

Minnesota recently took this much needed step when it decided to open its own review of atrazine to determine whether tighter standards were needed. So far so good. Two months ago, Minnesota released the results of its review and invited comment. On Wednesday, NRDC submitted its comments on the review, which starts with our recent report on atrazine contamination in the Midwest, Poisoning the Well. Unfortunately, the conclusions in Minnesota’s review fall far short of the mark. Here’s the top line results of our analysis:

Minnesota minimizes much of the recent science on atrazine’s effects. This includes studies that indicate that prenatal atrazine exposure may increase risk of poor birth outcomes and birth defects in infants, as well as studies that links atrazine urine levels in farm workers and rural men to reproductive effects, such as low sperm count and motility.
The report also ignores much of the experimental literature on atrazine’s endocrine disrupting effects, including a recent study reporting that 10 percent of male frogs that were born and raised in water contaminated with 2.5 parts per billion (ppb) of atrazine grew up with female sex characteristics, had reduced levels of male testosterone hormone, reduced sperm levels, and decreased fertility.
The report mischaracterizes the economic benefits of atrazine use. Minnesota fails to discuss (or mischaracterizes) studies that predict very small crop yield losses from phasing out atrazine, as well as one study that found that, despite a ban on the use of atrazine in Italy and Germany (both corn-producing nations) since 1991, neither country has recorded any economic effects.
The report relies on inadequate and probably faulty water monitoring data to reach its conclusions. Minnesota’s review relies on the results of 2,782 samples taken from the 544 community water systems. While that might sound like a lot, it averages to only about 5 samples taken per system. Moreover, these samples were taken over a period of 9 years. This averages out to fewer than one sample per system per year. Simply put: samples taken a few times a year, or once a year, or as little as once every three years (as was the case for some systems) should not be relied on. Dangerously high spikes of atrazine can occur in drinking water for just a few weeks out of the year. If a system samples only once a year or a few times a year, it is very likely that that sample will miss the spike entirely and give the false impression that there is little to no atrazine in the water.

Hopefully, Minnesota will take these comments to heart and revise its assessment. The North Star state could sure use it.

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*Quick atrazine primer: Atrazine is used mostly on corn, sugarcane and other crops to suppress weed growth. United States farmers apply an estimated 60 to 80 million pounds of atrazine active ingredient annually. Because it is typically used in the spring before crops are planted and when rains are frequent, atrazine is often transported in runoff from fields to nearby surface waters. As a result, atrazine is the most commonly detected pesticide in U.S. waters, present in more than 75% of stream samples and 40% of shallow groundwater samples in agriculture areas across the United States. It is an endocrine disrupting chemical, meaning that it can disrupt normal hormone function in a wide variety of organisms, including people.

Oh. Canada

2010-02-13T19:16:20Z

Sitting in bed last night and watching the Vancouver Olympics' opening ceremonies, I couldn’t help but feel a bit exasperated. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sucker for the Olympics' opening act, and it was a great show. The stagecraft was amazing. But discordant too. That’s because the second third of the ceremony (after all the athletes had entered and a forgettable musical number) was an homage to Canada’s natural wonders. Ice floes were recreated, three dimensional killer whales swam through the stadium, trees grew out of the stage and reached into the sky…all accompanied by nature-loving dancers and musical numbers. Sadly, there’s no video available, but you can see what I’m talking about here.

So, what’s the problem? Well, Canada. Despite its progressive image (the leaf helps, I think), Canada is more like a rapacious petro-State than a responsible environmental actor. Among the lowlights:

Canada continues to allow the widespread and often unsustainable hunting of its marine mammal including, most notably, polar bears. The country’s own Species at Risk Act is of little help, as its process is mired down in politics and often driven by economic considerations rather than sound science. Canada is the only commercial exporter of polar bear parts (rugs, boots, etc.) and is fiercely fighting efforts to end the bear trade.
And those beautiful trees in the opening ceremony? It doesn’t help much that Canada is destroying vast swaths of its boreal forests to extract tar sands oil—a form of heavy crude that’s going to be piped to the Midwest for refining (creating more pollution here). Extraction and processing of tar sands oil releases three times as much global warming gasses as conventional oil.
Speaking of global warming, Canada hasn’t exactly been a responsible actor on that stage, either. Just this month it submitted global warming pollution reduction targets to the international community and became the only developed country to date that has said it will increase its greenhouse gas pollution over 1990 levels.

So when you see that Maple Leaf flying, think twice. Canada has a lot of things to admire (not least among them Neil Young). But natural resource protection? Not so much.

From Pipes to Polar Bears

2010-02-01T17:51:07Z

Today’s Chicago Tribune features a long story by Michael Hawthorne about the metal plating industry and their ongoing practice of dumping pollutants such as perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) into the sewers of major cities like Chicago and Cleveland. The PFCs are then discharged, untreated, into nearby rivers, lakes and streams. PFCs are nasty stuff, and have been linked to a wide variety of health concerns, in both humans and animals. Ok, you’re probably thinking, sounds bad, but what does this have to do with polar bears?

Well, PFCs are one of several “persistent organic pollutants” or “POPs”--which also includes chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chlordanes (CHL), DDT and its metabolites, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs)--that don’t readily degrade in the natural environment. As Hawthorne notes, because POPs are so long lasting, once they are emitted into the air or the water they move around, and a lot of them end up in the Arctic. They also tend to bioaccumulate. That is, concentrations of POPs are higher in animals as one moves up the food chain from, for example, fish, to seals, to things that eat seals. And what eats seals? Polar bears.

A 2005 study showed that levels of one type of PFC--perfluoroalkyls, which are associated with fetal toxicity and other effects in mice and rats--have risen exponentially in polar bears from two disparate locations in the North American Arctic. A more recent study showed this same trend in East Greenlandic polar bears. If these current trends continue, scientists expect the lowest-adverse-effect level detected for rats and monkeys for these chemicals could be reached in East Greenland as soon as 2014.

And its not just polar bears at risk. Studies show that Inuit people in Nunavut, Canada, are exposed to PFC, largely from consumption of traditional food such as seals, beluga whales, and caribou. While exposure levels still appear to be low, these are not compounds that are produced or emitted anywhere near the Canadian Arctic. And, as pointed out above, their levels seem to be increasing.

All of which is a helpful, if chilling, reminder about the old environmental saw: think globally, act locally. When it comes to modern chemistry, what we throw into the sewers of Chicago can very well end up in the stomachs and breast milk of people and animals thousands of miles away.

Poisoning the Well: atrazine is scary, and it’s everywhere

2009-08-23T20:58:57Z

Years ago, when I first moved to the Midwest (Columbus, Ohio, to be more precise) from California one of the first things I noticed was the corn. Not corn fields, mind you, although there were plenty of those, but corn in the grocery store, in farmers’ markets, and along road-side stands. On the whole, Midwest produce doesn’t really hold a candle to California produce but, oh, the corn! Sweet, juicy, and luscious, it was a revelation to a city kid like me who never really went for corn-on-the-cob.

At the time, little did I realize what was being used to cultivate so much of that corn: atrazine, a truly nasty chemical. As detailed by Charles Duhigg in a New York Times article published today, atrazine is a herbicide, applied in the spring to kill weeds before crops begin to grow. It’s also an endocrine disrupter, meaning that it can interfere with normal hormone activity. When organisms are exposed to atrazine, particularly at sensitive periods in their development, bad things happen. Exposure as low as 0.1 parts per billion have been shown to cause the development of female sex characteristics in male frogs and the development of eggs in male frog testes. (As Stephen Colbert recently put it when interviewing Nicholas Kristof about endocrine disruptors, “you’re saying something is happening to fish junk?”)

There is also evidence that may link atrazine to low sperm counts in farm workers, cancer in laboratory animals, and human cancers, such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

In the United States alone, an estimated 60 to 80 million pounds of atrazine are applied to corn, sugarcane, and sorghum crops every year. Much of it in the Midwest. Atrazine ends up in our rivers, streams, creeks and lakes; even in our drinking water. Because of the inability to keep atrazine out of surface waters, the European Union completely banned the stuff in 2004.

NRDC’s report, Poisoning the Well, helped to inform the Times story and we will be briefing the press on its findings Monday. The report detail the shocking extent of atrazine contamination in surface waters and drinking water systems throughout the central United States. Our report brings together data from two different EPA monitoring programs, explains the ways in which the federal government has failed to properly regulate this chemical, and recommends solutions. We also have an interactive map available online. We’ll be briefing press about the report tomorrow. Check it out.

Bush Administration Considers the Possibility of Future Climate Regulation—As an Excuse for Not Protecting Wildlife

2009-01-06T16:53:41Z

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) recently made an interesting, and little noted, move that speaks volumes about this Administration's attitude towards climate change legislation. Last year the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned to list the ribbon seal, which like many marine mammals in the Arctic is imperiled by the continued loss of sea ice, as a threatened species. A threatened species is defined by the Endangered Species Act as "any species which is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range."

Now, as you can imagine, a lot can ride on what one considers the "foreseeable future" to be when assessing a petition to list a species as threatened. In the past, both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which also administers the Act, and NMFS have used a variety of approaches to define foreseeability. In some cases, the Services have used a "generational" approach, defining the foreseeable future as three or more generations of the species it was assessing. In other cases, they have used 100 year projections. But whatever the timeframe selected (and, as an aside, the generational approach is problematic) the Services have never to my knowledge truncated their view of what is foreseeable based on the uncertainty of future human action.

Until now, that is. In its decision to reject the ribbon seal petition, NMFS states (emphasis added):

For this status review, the foreseeable future was determined to be the year 2050 because past and current emissions of greenhouse gases have already largely set the course for changes in the atmosphere and climate until that time, and because of enormous uncertainty about future social and political decisions on emissions that will dominate projection of conditions farther into the future. Beyond the year 2050, projections of climate scenarios are too heavily dependent on socioeconomic assumptions and are therefore too divergent for reliable use in assessing threats to ribbon seals.

Translation: since we may regulate greenhouse gas pollution in the future and those regulations may be robust enough to reduce sea ice loss beyond 2050, any effects of global warming on ribbon seals beyond that time are not foreseeable.

There are a number of problems with this argument, but two deserve special mention.

First, and most fundamentally, this approach turns the precautionary nature of the Endangered Species Act on its head. The whole point of the Endangered Species Act is to protect species who we anticipate will slide into extinction if we do nothing. Using the fact that people may take action in the future to address threats to a species as an excuse not to protect that species thus upends the entire approach to wildlife protection the Endangered Species Act seeks to further.
Second, this approach is inconsistent with the Act itself. One of the factors that must be taken into account when determining if a species should be protected under the Endangered Species Act is "the inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms." The statute thus already takes into account the effect of regulation on a species and if existing regulations are not adequate to shield a species from extinction it must be protected. Had Congress wanted the Services to take into account possibility (or even probability) of future regulations on a species survival it would have said so. For example, the statute could have said that the "inadequacy of existing or future regulatory mechanisms" was a factor to be considered.

For eight years the Bush Administration did everything it could to deny, avoid, and then delay climate change regulation. To now use the possibility that we may actually take meaningful action to combat global warming as an excuse to do nothing for wildlife threatened by climate change is deeply cynical, even by the sorry standards I've grown accustomed to.

Global Warming--Now, With Mercury!

2008-03-01T17:16:50Z

For years, scientists have been concerned about the substantial increase of mercury concentrations in Arctic marine mammals such as polar bears, beluga whales, and seals. In some places in Canada, for example, levels of mercury in the tissue of marine mammals has quadrupled in the last twenty-five years. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that can result in a wide variety of health effects in animals and people, and pose a particular risk to pregnant women and young children. Most global mercury pollution comes from coal fired power plants, which release mercury into the air. Other significant sources are industrial processes such as chemical manufacturing, battery production, and gold mining.

Today's Winnipeg Free Press reports that changes to the Arctic's food web, such as melting sea ice caused by global warming, may be one of the primary causes of mercury contamination of marine mammals.

[R]esearchers now believe the increasing levels found in beluga whales are actually due to rising temperatures and disappearing sea ice, which have boosted the productivity of the northern seas by creating a warmer, brighter and more nutrient-rich environment for tiny plants and animals to grow.
According to the theory, new sources of food in an increasingly ice-free Arctic are forcing larger predators to change their feeding behavior, creating more links in the Arctic food chain.
That means more mercury gets concentrated at the top of the food chain, even though the overall amount of mercury in the ecosystem has not increased very much.

This research is intriguing and is consistent with predictions in other studies. Of course, the problem of mercury pollution and global warming goes hand-in-hand: ultimately, the best way to decrease global mercury pollution is to reduce our dependence on dirty sources of fuel like coal. If we did that, we would also be taking a big step toward controlling global warming, thus slowing down the very changes to the Arctic ecosystem that may be driving up mercury contamination of marine mammals. Another thing we can do here in the United States is to follow the example of the European Union and ban on the export of mercury. A bill to do just that has already passed the U.S. House of Representatives and companion legislation is awaiting action in the Senate.

Hooray for Westerville

2007-10-24T15:59:14Z

As I've talked about here before, NRDC's Midwest Office is fighting a proposal by the American Municipal Power company to build a 1,000 megawatt coal-fired power plant in Meigs County, Ohio. Before AMP can move forward with its plant, however, it must first secure 50-year purchase agreements from cities and towns across the state. Recently, some of those towns showed signs of beginning to doubt the wisdom of committing to buy power for the next half century from a plant that hasn't even been built yet--and may never been built.

A few weeks ago, Yellow Springs, Ohio, decided to put off making a final decision on purchasing power from the plant (cities have until March 1, 2008, to join up, although AMP has been pushing local governments to commit now). And last night, in a lopsided 5 -1 vote, the City of Westerville, Ohio, became the first town to forgo buying power from AMP's new plant entirely.

I was at the City Council meeting, and the care and thoughtfulness that the Council Members displayed was heartening. City Council Member Craig Treneff quickly identified the key issue for many local communities--the profound fiscal and environmental risks that the AMP contract poses. "I can't take a 50-year risk, not being able to predict that far ahead" he said.

Hopefully, Westerville's decision will prompt cities like Yellow Springs and Oberlin to think twice. The big question, though, is what will Cleveland do? While towns like Westerville and Yellows Springs are set to buy a significant, but relatively modest, amount of power (25 megawatts was proposed in the case of Westerville) the City of Cleveland is considering signing up with AMP for 100 megawatts of energy. If Cleveland were to decide to pursue cleaner, alternative, forms of energy instead, the future of the AMP plant would be very much in doubt. Tonight, the City Council's Public Utilities Committee will hold it's first public hearing on the proposal. With the Committee's chair already publicly stating that he supports the AMP contract, it's going to be an uphill battle, but NRDC will be there.

Ballast Badness

2007-10-05T15:31:24Z

One of the biggest threats to aquatic ecosystems in the United States--and to the Great Lake's in particular--is the introduction of foreign species (everything ranging from plants, to fish, to microscopic organisms) into our waters by transoceanic ships. These vessels take on huge quantities of water to adjust their trim and increase their stability in open ocean. When they get to a port in the United States, that water (and all the critters still living in it) is then flushed so the ship can take on cargo.

The result has been an explosion in the introduction of invasive species into the Great Lakes and other coastal regions. According to a report by the Environmental Protection Agency, the introduction of the zebra mussel alone has caused an estimated $5 billion dollars in damages to water pipes and other hard surfaces in the Great Lakes. And the San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem has been invaded by 230 non-native species. More than 10,000 species may be transported across the world's oceans in the ballast water of ships each day.

Which is why it was good news when the Congress started to seriously consider establishing tough national standard for the treatment of ballast water discharges in the United States. Unfortunately, like most things in Congress, there's a catch. Pressed hard by the shipping industry, committees in both the House and Senate have passed bills that not only establish a minimum treatment standard for ballast water, but would short circuit other efforts to regulate ballast water--specifically regulations just now being drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency as well as all state laws (California and Michigan have them on the books already) that also seek to deal with the problem of ballast water.

Luckily, Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, and other legislators have made clear that they're not going to stand idly by while the Clean Water Act and state law is gutted. We'll be supporting her efforts not only to establish strong minimum treatment standards, but also to protect our bedrock environmental laws in the process.