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Climate Change Takes a Back Seat to the Benjamins

Two months later, the years of preparation have been forgotten, the bickering continues and the buzz has worn off.

After numerous drafts, countless resolutions and two weeks of all-day talks between 115 or so world “leaders,” the United-Nations sponsored Copenhagen conference produced the Copenhagen Accord — 12 toothless paragraphs about how the world needs to respond to the climate-change threat.

P.H. Liotta, Ph.D., the executive director of Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, arrived in Copenhagen — via a commercial flight — for the start of the conference’s second week. He used the city’s efficient and popular transit system to get around.

“I was very excited about going,” said Liotta, a member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shared in the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. “It was years in the making.”

His disappointment in what transpired there was obvious, even if he didn’t exactly come out and say it.

While there, Liotta saw lots of private jets and limousines, and witnessed plenty of protests. He said he saw people “being beaten and arrested.” He called the scene a “zoo,” and noted that Denmark wasn’t prepared for the event.

As for the climate conference, he said it was “disappointing, but not a failure.” He may have been being polite. Several times during his nearly hour-long presentation to a packed Salve Regina lecture hall last month he apologized for being so negative.

There was no need for an apology. His presentation was informative, intelligent, compassionate and, most importantly, honest.

Take his answer to a question a gentleman in the audience posed about what we, the United States, can do to combat climate change. Liotta hesitated before answering.

“The dollar drives everything in the U.S.,” he said. “How are we going to break that circle? We’re heading for a serious problem, unless that circle is broken.”

After answering, he apologized, again for being honest.

Climate change is all about the benjamins — at least to those in power.

December’s much-ballyhooed conference was nothing more than a stage from which world leaders offered sound bites and posed for photo ops. It did, however, leave a lasting mark on the planet — in the form of a “colossal carbon footprint,” as Liotta so aptly put it during his talk entitled “What Happened at Copenhagen?”

Not much, at least when it came to producing a meaningful mandatory agreement to curb greenhouse gases. Otherwise, it was a rocking good time.

Most world leaders — from the powerful to the obscure — and their entourages arrived in private jets, so many, in fact, that there was no room at Copenhagen Airport to accommodate them all, Liotta observed. The excess aircraft, after dropping of their environmentally astute passengers — had to fly off to regional airports — or to Sweden — to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg — who often lectures his fellow Norwegians about all things green — took a private jet from Oslo to Copenhagen rather than one of the 17 shuttles that daily make the hour-long run between the two Scandinavian capitals.

From the airport, our ecologically conscience world leaders were driven to their five-star hotels in limousines, carpooling or using public transportation to go the last 5 miles or so was too inconvenient.

About 120 world leaders — and a handful of other climate-change experts, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen and Prince Charles — reportedly attended the 12-day conference, yet Denmark’s fleet of 5,000 limos wasn’t enough to accommodate the conference’s transportation needs. Limos from Sweden and Germany had to be driven into Copenhagen, so they could join the lines of idling gas-guzzlers waiting to shuttle delegates — and self-important celebrities — between their hotels, the conference center and Starbucks.

It’s been estimated that the Twelve Days of Squawking was responsible for about 46,000 tons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere — the equivalent to the annual output of half a million Ethiopians.

And don’t forget about all that other unaccounted for hot air that was spewed into the atmosphere.

Britain accuses China, Sudan, Bolivia and other Latin American countries of trying to hijack the U.N. climate summit and “hold the world ransom” to prevent a deal from being reached.

China claims the world’s rich nations used the conference to further their “conspiracy to divide the developing world,” while Canada “connived” and the European Union acted “to please the United States.”

The United States — or, more specifically, Congress — is more concerned about keeping Big Oil’s bank accounts flush — and thus its own campaign coffers lush — and less about protecting the planet on which we live. Besides, China and India pollute as much as we do.

OPEC wants assurances it will be compensated if oil prices drop.

As for those 12 paragraphs of voluntary commitments that the bickering blowhards produced — it features no legal obligations; notes that “climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time”; doesn’t contain commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions; and is filled with profound observations such as “adaptation to the adverse effects of climate change and the potential impacts of response measures is a challenge faced by all countries.”

This past week, some of our Congressional “leaders” faced this challenge head-on. They seized upon D.C.’s record snowfall as proof that global warming is a hoax. They used the white stuff as a prop they hoped would kill legislation to curb carbon emissions.

Apparently, to these self-absorbed politicians the sun revolves around Washington.

“It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle,’” Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, wrote on Twitter.

Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a leading climate-change skeptic, joined his family in building an igloo on Capitol Hill and then posted signs reading, “Al Gore’s new home” and “Honk if you love global warming.”

With leadership like this, there’s no way the circle will be broken.

Frank Carini is the executive director of ecoRI. He can be reached at 401-678-0206 or via e-mail at frank@ecoRI.org.

Copenhagen Summit Should Address

More Than Climate Change

We can squabble about some recently leaked e-mails that may or may not alter the global-warming debate, but it’s indisputable that we have been poisoning the land we live on, the water we drink and the air we breath for more than a century.

Next week’s Copenhagen Climate Summit is focused on cutting global greenhouse-gas emissions, but the two-week conference needs to remove the word “climate” from its title and broaden its scope, because the world’s problems aren’t limited to rising sea levels and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Eliminating climate change as the summit’s focal point also would help hush those who bark incessantly about the exaggeration of global warming, such as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe who has called it the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

It would be more difficult for the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to attend the conference as a “one-man truth squad” if other concerns beyond climate change were on the agenda, such as unsustainable development, the nonchalant use of toxic chemicals and the rapid depletion of the planet’s natural resources.

Oil and gas industries are Inhofe’s biggest campaign contributors, according to OpenSecrets.org, so the senator’s top five contributors since 2005 — Kansas-based Koch Industries Inc., which deals in petroleum, chemicals, polymers, minerals and fertilizers; Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp., one of the largest independent operators of coal mines in the United States; Texas-based Contran Corp., which produces titanium dioxide pigments; Oklahoma-based Devon Energy Corp., which is the largest U.S.-based independent natural gas and oil producer; and Oklahoma-based OGE Energy Corp., a provider of electricity and natural gas — would expect their leading man to continue to defend the industrialized world’s right to exploit and destroy the planet for power and money.

He has bragged — and lied — to whatever media outlet would listen that the “United States will not support a global warming treaty that will significantly damage the American economy, cost American jobs and impose the largest tax increase in American history.”

He also pompously proclaimed that Americans “will not be a part of a binding climate agreement (that favors) developing nations.”

Inhofe should be the mouthpiece for industrial narcissism. This longtime elected official and one of the more powerful lawmakers in Washington, D.C., stands proudly for everything that is destroying the planet, and, sadly, he’s just one of many worldwide.

Acquiring wealth and hording power trumps everything else, from clean drinking water to protecting animal habitat.

It’s no surprise then that the U.S. government regulation of fisheries is determined by commercial, not environmental, interests, as the National Marine Fisheries Service functions as part of the Department of Commerce and not the Department of the Interior.

But our lives, heck, even our unsustainable culture, depends on the health of the planet’s land, water, air and natural resources, such as the fish we eat. Unfortunately, 90 percent of large oceanic fish are gone, devoured largely by overfishing.

Laws are made to protect the biggest polluters and the worst natural resource abusers; the court system rigged to favor their well-paid teams of lawyers.

Look no farther than the Bay Street neighborhood in North Tiverton, where it took homeowners years to get contaminated soil they had on part in polluting removed from their properties.

For nearly a decade, those responsible for the pollution and those responsible for its clean up played legal games while homeowners were forbidden from planting vegetables or flowers.

This rotten soil, which is contaminated with arsenic, cyanide, lead and petroleum wastes left behind by the former Fall River Gas Co., now will be used to cap the state landfill in Johnston.

Labeling contaminated soil as “clean fill” and dumping it across America is hardly a new practice when it comes to disposing of this culture’s toxic waste.

The Allendale Elementary School in Pittsfield, Mass., sits on a former swamp that was filled with PCB-laden material provided by General Electric. There’s also a 45-foot-high mound made up of PCB-contaminated landfill that looms over the school. Contaminated landfill is still added to the monstrosity, which is draped in blue tarps that are held down by old tires.

In Providence, officials used their wisdom to build Alvarez High School on the site of a former silver manufacturing company and the Delsesto Middle School and the West Broadway Elementary School on land that once served as the city dump.

In Texas, contaminated sediments from a river are being dumped in a landfill that already houses nuclear waste. Environmentalists fear this dump is dangerously close to the Ogallala Aquifer, which is one of the world’s largest.

Regrettably, it’s easier and more profitable to treat the planet as one big landfill.

Wealthy transnational companies, often with the blessing of local, state or federal agencies, have for generations been dumping their unwanted waste on the poor, uneducated and desperate.

Thanks to this continued practice of shortsightedness, and the routine pumping of other contaminants into our lakes, streams, rivers and oceans, we now have a toxic alphabet soup boiling in waterways and collecting in sediment.

Global warming or no global warming, the acronyms DDT, PCB, PVC, PBDE, BPA, SEX and PAX already have and will continue to harm life — human and nonhuman.

By the 1930s, the dangers of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were well documented, but these highly toxic industrial compounds weren’t banned until 1977.

Unfortunately, the same properties that made PCBs ideal for industrial use make them slow to break down in the environment, so chemical anthropologists will be finding them thousands of years from now in riverbeds, lake bottoms and coastal sediments.

They’re still in the tissues of the fish we eat.

That’s because we’re slow to enact or enforce laws that may negatively impact the bottom line of wealthy developers, campaign-supporting corporations or powerful conglomerates.

In Inhofe’s home state of Oklahoma, for example, water polluters are seldom fined, according to a recent New York Times story.

We make it a regular practice to release large amounts of chemicals into the environment without first fully understanding their effects on ecology or human health. We don’t bother to take the time or spend the money to find out how all these different chemicals have or will interact with each other.

No big corporation will make a huge profit doing such work and, thus, no politician will receive a campaign donation. Instead, we’ll let future generations study our Frankenstein experiment.

Our great-great-great grandchildren will probably wonder why we allowed mountaintop mining and why the mining industry in general was allowed to use such poisonous concoctions.

The industry uses cyanide, sodium ethyl xanthate (SEX) and potassium amyl xanthate (PAX) to extract gold, other metals and coal from ore. SEX decomposes to the toxic and flammable gas, carbon disulphide, which is easily absorbed through the skin and is even more toxic in water. PAX is highly toxic to trout, a food source we unwisely endanger.

Nearly 180,000 tons of cyanide is used annually to extract about 90 percent of the gold mined each year. A solution that contains cyanide is legally sprayed onto piles of extracted ore, which also contains arsenic and lead, among other things, so it chemically bonds with microscopic bits of gold that we turn into jewelry, caps for teeth and bars that we stack in bailed-out Wall Street banks.

These gold-dusted mounds are then billed as “clean fill” and dumped anywhere a transnational mining company can get a permit — Oklahoma is a good bet. We may even be building a new school on one of these nicely spread piles of toxic waste.

When we’re not tearing down mountains to quench our thirst for coal and gold or yelling “drill, baby, drill” in our voracious search for oil, we’re generating about 6 billion pounds of bisphenol A (BPA) annually. It’s a hormone-disrupting chemical considered to be potentially harmful to human health and the environment. Some scientists believe scratched and worn polycarbonate baby bottles leach this chemical into liquids.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, relying on two studies paid for by BPA-makers, ruled last year that the chemical is safe for all uses. The chemical is used in thousands of household products, and has been linked to developmental and behavioral problems in studies not conducted by its manufacturers.

Not to be outdone, the Environmental Protection Agency, in the 1990s, signed off on a plan that allowed the polyvinylchloride (PVC) industry to be the sole supplier of information about dioxin emissions from arguably the most toxic form of plastic.

We’re more vigilant when it comes to parking enforcement.

The Copenhagen Climate Summit needs to be about more than curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, planting flowers on top of office buildings and painting rooftops white. We also need to address our culture of plastic that is poisoning the world and deal with the flood of manmade dioxins, which are some of the most toxic substances imaginable, that we unleashed on the planet.

Frank Carini is the executive director of ecoRI. He can be reached at 401-678-0206 or via e-mail at frank@ecoRI.org.

America is Addicted to an Unsustainable

Way of Life

Hi. My name is America, and I am addicted to wastefulness and unsustainability. I am a habitual offender of crimes against nature.

I need help desperately, but I don’t know where to turn.

Uncle Sam continues to enable me for the benefit of special interests, powerful lobbyists and big industry.

He looks the other way when Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Pepsi indiscriminately pump vast amounts of water from aquifers, pour it into petroleum-based plastic bottles and advertise the liquid as the nectar of gods. He doesn’t mind that his friends sell my water back to me at a considerable profit so I can continue to feed my addictions.

He smiles when his buddy Tom Brennan, one of 11 natural resource managers for Nestlé Waters North America, recently issues a press release that reads: “Our natural spring water is special. It’s a gift from nature. We work really hard to find it, and really hard to manage it. We’re proud to help bring it to the public to drink.”

He nods in agreement when another of his water-bottling buddies blames dam-building beavers for diminishing water supplies. He tells me to stop watering my lawn.

He won’t let me marry whom I want, makes me take off my shoes before boarding a plane and watches what books I check out of the library. But he so trusts his water-bottling buddies and their lobbyist pals that only one FDA babysitter is required to regulate the nearly 30 billion bottles of water I buy annually.

He leaves it up to me, though, to fund the collection of these plastic bottles, because his friends don’t want to pay the penny or two per bottle it would cost to better keep the water vessels they mass-produce out of landfills and waterways.

Crotchety Uncle Sam blames gay and lesbian couples for ruining the fabric of society, and makes it illegal for many of them to get married and virtually impossible for them to adopt one of my kids.

In fact, he’s so concerned about my kids’ health that some of his bailed-out Wall Street buddies — Goldman Sachs, Citigroup — were among the first to get doses of the swine flu vaccine, even as a shortage of doses has led to lengthy lines at clinics and hospitals.

He shows little concern about coal-fired power plants owned by his fossil-fuel friends that emit 48 tons of mercury a year. For decades he has allowed a small circle of corporate connections to pillage Appalachia with mountaintop removal mining.

He employs scare tactics when I consider making life changes, such as sending minion Tom Price, a Republican representative from Georgia, to deliver a passionate plea for the House to rise in a moment of silence to recognize those who will lose their jobs if the American Clean Energy and Security Act (Waxman-Markey Bill) passes.

How can I treat my addictions when Uncle Sam exploits them to make his friends rich, and to get himself elected ?

Help. My name is America, and I am an addict.

Frank Carini is the executive director of ecoRI. He can be reached at 401-678-0206 or via e-mail at frank@ecoRI.org.

Routine Chemical Exposure is Slowly Killing Us

Everyday people — even Joe the Plumber — are regularly exposed to 200-plus chemicals. They’re percolating in our bodies, and likely compromising our health.

The acronyms DDT, PCB, PVC, PBDE and BPA are the foundations of a toxic alphabet soup that is boiling in our waterways and collecting in our tissue.

Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974 to protect public health by regulating the nation’s public drinking water and its sources — rivers, lakes, reservoirs, springs and groundwater wells. It regulates 91 contaminants, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

In fact, more than 80,000 new chemicals have been developed since World War II, but fewer than 20 percent have been tested for toxicity to children, according to the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

We make it a routine practice to release large amounts of chemicals into the environment or add hard-to-pronounce synthesized substances to our food without first fully understanding their effects on ecology or human health and usually without strenuous testing

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released its latest assessment of the chemicals we’re carrying around in our bodies. The results are sickening.

Studying the blood and urine of 8,000 Americans, the CDC determined 212 chemicals likely would be found in your body.

Unfortunately, the CDC’s comprehensive testing regimen accounts for less than 1 percent of the chemicals most Americans are exposed to regularly. The EPA identifies at least 6,000 chemicals that we are exposed to routinely.

The CDC highlighted several chemicals found in its most-recent study because they are both widespread — found in all or most of the 8,000 people tested — and potentially harmful.

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers. Better known as “flame retardants,” PBDEs are used widely in a variety of items — from foam furniture to electronics to children’s pajamas — to reduce fire risk. They also accumulate in human fat, and some studies suggest they may harm the liver and kidneys.

The safety of PBDEs has been questioned since the 1990s, yet most states, including Rhode Island, haven’t banned the sale of products containing these dangerous compounds.

Rainer Lohmann, a University of Rhode Island professor, is studying the concentration of PBDEs in the Narragansett Bay watershed.

“There’s no reason why certain chemicals are still being used today,” he said. “The compounds in flame-retardants can potentially mess up hormonal systems. Fertility rates are down across most industrialized countries and there is a link to compounds of widespread use.”

Brown University professor Phil Brown is conducting research related to flame-retardant chemicals, specially a study of social responses to environmental contaminants. Let’s hope he finds plenty of outrage.

Bisphenol A. BPA, is a hormone-disrupting chemical considered to be potentially harmful to human health and the environment, was found in more than 90 percent of those tested. It can be found in many plastics, including those used to make baby bottles, pacifiers, water bottles and sippy cups.

The chemical has been suspected of being hazardous to humans since the 1930s.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, ruled more than a year ago that the chemical is safe for all uses. To come to that conclusion, the federal agency relied on two studies funded by BPA manufacturers.

Perfluorooctanoic acid. PFOA and other perfluorinated chemicals are synthetic and do not occur naturally in the environment. However, they are indefinitely persistent in nature, and are a toxicant and carcinogen in animals.

They often are used to create heat-resistant and non-stick coatings on cookware, and are used in stain-resistant clothing. Studies have linked these chemicals to a range of health problems, including infertility in women, and to liver, immune system, and developmental and reproductive problems in lab animals.

Methyl tert-butyl ether. MTBE is a gasoline additive has been phased out of use in the United States, in favor of ethanol, but it still can be detected widely in our bodies. It has contaminated many drinking water supplies, and studies have linked it to several health problems, including neurological and reproductive damage.

Now that they have been widely introduced into the environment, scientists are now looking to see if micro-amounts of these compounds and others that humans are exposed to will stay in our bodies, or have lasting effects.

One of the chemical compounds they are watching closely are phthalates, which are used to soften plastics and have been linked in some studies to reproductive problems. They’re found in toys, shower curtains, flooring and medical equipment.

A recent study in the journal Toxicology also has shown that the weed killer Roundup, sprayed on crops at the allowable levels, could cause DNA damage, endocrine disruption and cell death. The study, conducted by French researchers, also shows glyphosate-based herbicides are toxic to human reproductive cells.

Glyphosate, mostly in the form of Roundup products manufactured by the Missouri-based Monsanto Co. — one of the largest producers of Agent Orange — has been widely used in the United States since the 1970s. Today, we annually spray more than 100 million pounds on our yards, gardens and farms.

Monsanto officials, however, continue to assure us Roundup is safe. “It’s used to protect schools,” a Monsanto spokesman told Scientific American. From the vicious Venus flytrap in “The Little Shop of Horrors” no doubt.

A Monsanto spokeswoman said the French report used inaccurate methodology. “It is inaccurate and misleading in its assessment of biotech herbicide tolerant traits, as it fails to acknowledge several key benefits that U.S. farmers and citizens have derived from using the technology,” she told reporters.

They’re good. They’ve got the U.S. government and plenty of backyard gardeners and farmers fooled that the chemicals they’ve designed to kill cells only harm poison ivy and other dastardly weeds and are harmless to Kentucky bluegrass, wildlife and our health.

Of course, the U.S. government and the chemical companies such as Monsanto that produced Agent Orange continue to say there is not sufficient proof linking the dioxin-laden defoliant to the severe health problems suffered by those exposed to it.

Frank Carini is the executive director of ecoRI. He can be reached at 401-678-0206 or via e-mail at frank@ecoRI.org.