Posts

Motor Club members have reported no problems with E15

Four years after the EPA approved E15 for use in cars and light trucks model 2001 and newer, members of the Travelers Motor Club and Association Motor Club Marketing have reported no problems as a result of using E15, said Gene Hammond and Mark Muncey, co-owners of these organizations. In a press conference hosted by the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE) this morning, Hammond and Muncey said that they support E-15 (15 percent ethanol and 85 percent petroleum in motor gasoline).

Read more at: Farm Industry News

Image property of: Wikimedia

Opponents of Keystone XL encouraged by oil’s decline

Bloomberg has a story on how environmentalists and other opponents of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have new momentum because oil has now dropped to around $80 a barrel. When the Canada-to-Gulf of Mexico pipeline was first floated in 2008, oil prices were around $100 a barrel.

“At $75, a government analysis said producers may be discouraged from developing Canada’s oil sands without pipelines like Keystone.”

The pipeline remains a contentious issue, and the U.S. government has repeatedly delayed action. Opponents are hoping that if Republicans take control of the Senate in next month’s elections, the two-month window between Election Day and the swearing-in of the next Congress will allow them a final chance to kill the project.

There’s also the issue of whether the pipeline will be good, bad or indifferent for consumers.

Federal court orders DOT to respond to Sierra Club’s unsafe tank-car lawsuit

A Federal court has ordered the Department of Transportation to respond to a lawsuit filed by three environmental organizations — Earthjustice, the Sierra Club and ForestEthics — in which the parties asked the court to order DOT to respond to the organizations’ request for an emergency order banning the use of DOT-111 tanks cars for the shipment of crude oil by rail. Read more at: Breaking Energy

Politico lets environmentalist respond to BP op-ed

Earlier this week Politico, the online politics magazine, allowed an environmentalist with extensive knowledge of the British Petroleum/Deepwater Horizon disaster respond to BP’s widely criticized op-ed published on the magazine last week. Kara Lankford of Ocean Conservancy says: “The full effects of 210 million gallons of oil on the Gulf cannot be easily dismissed …”

Read the full story on Politico.

Yet more evidence that air pollution harms health

Research announced this week at the University of Pittsburgh is only the latest to suggest a link between air pollution and a higher risk of children developing autism.

Motor vehicles – cars, trucks and SUVs – account for about half the air pollution in the United States, the EPA says, with much of the rest coming from industrial sources and coal-fired power plants.

Smog levels are much worse in urban areas than rural ones: According to the American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2014 report, 47 percent of the nation — 147.6 million people — live in places where pollution levels make it dangerous to breathe.

Air toxics, as they’re called, can contribute to asthma and other respiratory problems; heart disease. Experts think that these toxics can have a particularly devastating impact on babies when they’re in the womb, and when the children are very young.

Although much of the science on these effects has only been conducted in the past decade, a 2008 report at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability says: “Recently this research has begun to focus on one specific source of modern-day air pollution – traffic exhaust.”

The study, led by Dr. Beate Ritz, goes on:

“These studies largely focused on potential mortality impacts of airborne particulate matter small enough to penetrate into the human respiratory tract, referred to as PM10 (particulate matter less than 10 microns in aerodynamic diameter) and more recently have examined PM2.5, even smaller size particles which can penetrate deep into the lung. Most findings from this research indicated infants living in areas with high levels of these types of particulate matter had a greater risk of mortality during the first year of life, particularly from respiratory causes.”

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), a neurological disorder whose symptoms can range from having trouble fitting in with peers to repetitive behaviors to a complete lack of communication and even seizures, now affects an estimated 1 in every 68 U.S. children, a 30 percent increase since 2012. Little is still known about the causes, but many experts believe genetics or environmental exposures, or a combination, are to blame.

The University of Pittsburgh report, led by a health professor of epidemiology named Evelyn Talbott, found that children who were somewhere on the autism spectrum were 1.4 to 2 times as likely to have been exposed to air pollution during their mothers’ pregnancies, compared with children who did not have an ASD. The affected children showed higher levels of styrene, cyanide and chromium.

Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a UC Davis researcher not affiliated with the Pitt study, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that this and other studies like it “do suggest some kind of a link where a family who has children with autism were living usually closer to areas with higher [air toxic] measurements.”

In Utah, where some regions have very poor air quality in wintertime, the incidence of autism is 1 in 47 children, far higher than the national average. Earlier this year, a Harvard study showed that “exposure in the womb to diesel, lead, manganese, mercury, methylene chloride and an overall measure of metals was ‘significantly associated with autism spectrum disorder,’ with the highest association from exposure to diesel exhaust,” according to a story in the Provo Herald Extra.

Given the significant adverse health effects that result from gasoline when it’s combusted inside engines, it makes sense to incorporate cleaner-burning fuels into the nation’s fleet of vehicles. The EPA says as much, saying replacement fuels, including “natural gas, propane, methanol, ethanol, electricity, and biodiesel” can be ” cleaner than gasoline or diesel and can reduce emissions of harmful pollutants.”

(Photo: Los Angeles air, via Shutterstock)

1 out of 3 people in Los Angeles lives within a mile of an oil well

Forget those iconic palm trees. Oil rigs have become just as much a part of the Los Angeles landscape as the towering trees that line the city’s sun-drenched boulevards. Los Angeles County is home to 6,065 oil and gas wells, and one in three Angelenos lives within a mile of a drilling rig, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council released Wednesday.

Read more at: Take Part

(Photo: Long Beach oil well at Alamitos Bay, posted to Flickr by BSYC LongBeach)

Court upholds EPA’s E15 waiver

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has again ruled that outside groups don’t have legal standing to file a lawsuit against the EPA’s waiver allowing E15 into the marketplace.

E15 — a blend of up to 15 percent ethanol — was allowed by the EPA waiver four years ago, for all vehicles made in model year 2001 or newer.

The waiver had been challenged by the American Petroleum Institute and the Engine Products Group.

The court had previously ruled against a similar lawsuit filed by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, deciding the group also didn’t have standing.

Read more in Domestic Fuel magazine.

NYT editorial: Keep up search for energy alternatives

The New York Times editorial board has a reasonable take on the falling price of oil, enumerating several winners and losers.

Low prices, obviously, are good for consumers. But they’re bad for countries that don’t have diverse economies, and for people promoting alternative forms of transportation fuel.

“It’s bad for the environment because cheaper oil means fewer incentives to develop alternative and less carbon-intensive sources of energy,” the editorial states.

“… it is imperative that the United States and all other beneficiaries resist the temptation to use what could be a fleeting drop in prices to slow the search for alternative sources of energy. The planet, alas, does not have the resilience of oil prices.”

The Price of Hybrid and Electric Cars Is Plummeting. Here’s Why

USA Today just reported that Ford is cutting the sticker price of the fully battery-powered plug-in Focus Electric by a flat $6,000. That’s on top of a $4,000 price reduction on the same vehicle a year ago. The new sticker price is $29,995 including shipping—but not including federal tax credits of up to $7,500 and state incentives that might effectively knock another $2,500 off the amount buyers pay.

Read more in TIME.

Exec: North American rail network could be headed for gridlock

Calgary-based Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd., has dropped merger talks with CSX Corp. of Jacksonville, Fla., and remarks this week by the always-blunt Canadian Pacific CEO E. Hunter Harrison are very telling about the future of oil traveling by rail.

The volume of oil, including that produced in the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota and southern Canada, is soaring, and yet many communities are concerned about the increased rail traffic to carry the oil to refineries. In 2013 a derailment and resulting inferno in Quebec killed 47 people, and since then the issue has been on the minds of activists, local politicians and the U.S. government, which is considering stronger tank-car hulls and other safety improvements.

Harrison said mergers are needed to prevent gridlock in the North American rail system.

“There’s a desire to put more tonnage on the rail,” Harrison said during a conference call Tuesday, according to Toronto’s Globe and Mail. At the same time, governments are saying that we want to slow you down because of [hazardous materials] and crude. There’s no more infrastructure [being built]. No one wants the railroad to run through their backyard, or their city.”

E&E Publishing’s Blake Sobczak has much more from Harrison on that subject. Here are quotes from Harrison in a story Wednesday on E&E’s Energy Wire page (subscription required):

“We even have issues on our network now where there’s city councils and groups of citizens banded together who say, ‘We don’t want you to run trains at night.’ … In my view, at least, we are quickly approaching a time where none of this works.”

In New York state, a coalition of environmental groups led by Earthjustice filed a petition with the state urging a ban on allowing older DOT-111 tank cars going through the Port of Albany. Charlene Benton, president of the Ezra Prentice Homes Tenants Association, said in an Earthjustice statement that many families live “within a few feet of these bomb trains. Our families deserve to live free of the daily fear that one of these trains will blow up in our backyard. The time to act is now, before it is too late.”