Environment Memo

North Carolina plans to become the second state to charge its employees more for health insurance if they smoke or are obese, according to the Charlotte Observer (link): State workers who don’t cut out the Marlboros and Big Macs will end up paying more for health insurance. Tobacco users get placed in a more expensive [...]

National Geographic has an article about giant sea blobs forming in the Med.  Apparently they have been around for years, but they are getting more and more frequent.  As they note, The blobs were first identified in 1729 in the Mediterranean, where they’re most often seen. The sea’s relative stillness and shallowness make the water [...]

A friend at the World Bank just sent out this link to a youtube video on helping provide latrines in Cambodia.  Worth a peek.

A couple of months ago, Time Magazine ran a good article detailing a cornucopia of environmental and health problems stemming from our lousy food system. As they summarize

Shaleshock.org has a link to a nicely targeted letter by Wilma Subra, on proposed Marcellus shale hydraulic fracturing activity, to the New York State Senate Standing Committee on Environmental Conservation.   (Here is an interview with Ms. Subra, which gets into a her background and methods.  She won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship about 10 years [...]

Photoshop Disasters is a pretty interesting web site.  It came to our attention after the imbroglio about the ultra-thin model came to light. Boing-boing has  weighed in with a rather scathing warning that attempts to silence criticism of such ridiculous images, which can have the effect of promoting anorexia, will not be tolerated, and that [...]

Keeping things in perspective can be important, as people wend their way through various environmental issues.  As our friends at Water.org point out Nearly one billion people lack access to safe water and 2.5 billion do not have improved sanitation. The health and economic impacts are staggering.

Following up on this series on what can be kept confidential, we have arrived at the conclusion that under the Clean Water Act all effluent data must be revealed to the public and cannot be kept confidential. Effluent data pertains to pollutants, and by reference to USC Title 33 § 1362 (6), a pollutant is [...]

Drilling involving hydrofracturing (in the Marcellus shale and elsewhere) is now exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, but to my knowledge the Clean Water Act still applies.  As noted in the previous post, NY State anticipates the possibility of having to write SPDES discharge permits for fluids injected into the subsurface, but which later [...]

There is an extremely important component of environmental regulations, which could well become significant as we unpack and dig into the Marcellus shale environmental issues, such as those under scrutiny by members of Shaleshock.org. The basic idea is that that effluent data (for discharges to aqueous environments), and emissions data (to air) usually cannot be [...]