85 year old Liz Moore is nobody’s fool. The minute she laid eyes on Syncrude’s Canadian Oil Sands operation in Alberta, Canada, she knew some terrible things were happening to the ecology of that area. While touring the company’s site, she took pictures of land not reclaimed, a few snapshots in the visitors center, and came home to Colorado bound to tell a story. She set up a website, The Oil (Tar) Sands of Alberta The Canada/U.S. Connection, and published her pictures along with some interesting facts about the operation.

Almost immediately, Syncrude’s legal staff wrote her and demanded she remove the pictures she had taken. Shortly thereafter, the company’s publishing firm did the same, as did the Alberta provincial government concerning pictures of the Oil Sands Discovery Center which they helped fund.

Liz also maintains another website: Energy Smart

Here is her story….

What’s riding the rails in your hometown? A few hobos maybe, but also potentially deadly chemicals rumble through America’s communities daily. My hometown paper, The Galesburg Register-Mail, printed a series of articles on the dangers nearly every train brings to a community. And in Galesburg, IL, this is particularly important: approximately 1,000 cars travel through the city daily on two major railroads that cross town, the Burlington Northern and the Santa Fe, now known as BNSF, since the two merged.

How dangerous are some of those cars? Well, they carry some nasty stuff:

• Anhydrous Ammonia: This colorless gas may be fatal if inhaled, ingested or absorbed through the skin. It could explode if exposed to heat, or burn, but it doesn’t ignite readily.
• Chlorine: It, too, can be fatal if inhaled or absorbed through the skin. If a spill occurs during the daytime, people within at 1.5 mile radius must be evacuated; at night, more that 4.5 miles need to be evacuated.
• Diesel Fuel: Yep, it’s dangerous too: explosive when vapors are mixed with air, and it can burn eyes and skin.
• Hydrochloric Acid: If a container is heated or contaminated with water, an explosion could occur. Inhalation of vapors can kill, cause burns or severe injury.
• Methanol: Nasty stuff that’s flammable and explosive. Again, inhalation, ingestion or absorption by the skin can be fatal.
• Sodium Chlorate: Same thing: possibly fatal if inhaled or ingested. It can accelerate burning if involved with a fire, or it can explode.
• Sodium Hydroxide: It’s explosive but will not flame. The usual warnings about inhalation, ingestion or being absorbed by the skin.
• Sulfuric Acid: It, too, is explosive, and will burn (but not ignite). It can inflict severe burns on the skin, and is deadly to inhale or ingest.
• Uranium: The article doesn’t cover uranium, but it too is being carried by railroads around the world in various forms, from the newly mined to spent rods. Always dangerous, I just wanted to add it to the mix.

Any of these chemicals could, if spilled during a derailment, spread a fatal cloud over a community. The chance of that happening, according to the article, is about the same as winning the lottery. A spokesman for BNSF railway, Steve Forsberg, is quoted as saying that "less than three-tenths of 1 percent of all rail shipments are materials that could be turned into a toxic cloud."

Do railroads have to carry these materials? Yes, they are required by federal law to move them by the federal common carrier obligation. Would they rather not? Yes, the article says: it’s a "bet the business" public service. But then, the rails are safer than transportation by truck, where the accident rate is many times more common.

Research is underway to make tank cars more reliable in case of an accident, such as staying upright and intact in case of derailment. But don’t expect any progress soon as research has been delayed until the first of the year.

The solution, of course, is to "go green" by producing safer chemicals, but that appears a long way off. Possibly the most dangerous chemicals are chlorine, which is still used to disinfect water, and anhydrous ammonia, a fertilizer base.

Accidents have occurred and will continue to do so. One of the scarier happened a short time ago when a tank car filled with chlorine rolled 20 miles through Las Vegas, past hotels and resorts on the Strip until it was safely stopped. I recall a tank car explosion in Kingman, AZ, back in the 70s that resulted in fatalities. According to Patricia Abbatte, executive director of Citizens for Rail Safety, "The doomsday scenario is that one tank car of chlorine could kill up to 100,000 people in 30 minutes."

Until something better comes along, your friendly railroad will whistle it’s way through your community, past schools and homes carrying a deadly cargo.

Just recently I received an email from a senior, Mr. John Lane, who’s become very interested in a group called “PETH,” but he failed to say what it was all about. So, being the curious one, I called him and had the most “interesting” conversation. Look out, PETA — here comes the People for the Ethical Treatment of Hops.

The podcast is here.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

She’s the mother of eight, the grandmother of 15 and a great-grandmother to seven, she enjoys crossword and jigsaw puzzles, and quilting. Marjorie lives in Nicholson Township, Pennsylvania and, like many people enjoys an occasional walk along the road in her rural area. There’s nothing unusual about that, but Marjorie makes that walk a study in environmental consciousness.

That’s Marjorie on the right, out on the road with her trash bag and a long, jaw-like grab stick to help in snagging discarded objects. And who wouldn’t like to be greeted with that smile? Marjorie’s story was told in the Scranton, PA Times-Tribune, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with her.

Back on August 2, 2007, I did a podcast featuring three women — two Chileans and a Canadian — who had run afoul of the law in their respective countries. The Canadian is Betty Krawczyk, and I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing her by phone from her prison cell.

She’s intelligent, charming, and an outspoken proponent for environmental and civil rights issues. Our interview touches on Betty’s evaluation of the Canadian court system, her first eyewitness account of discrimination and cruelty, and the events that led to leaving her native Louisiana with a husband and six children to settle in Canada.

Links:

Betty’s Early Edition

Books of Betty K.

The Raging Grannies, pursuers of activist causes since 1986 are still going strong. From humble beginnings as a peace group in Canada, to The Today Show, magazine articles, newspaper and tv coverage, the grannies have a rich history. They’ve been arrested, investigated, cheered and jeered, but still they go out and rage for change.

Join me in a look at the history and accomplishments of this group of seniors who are as much at home making brownies for their grandchildren as they are in front of a military recruiters office, trying to dissuade young men and women from joining the military. Shrinking violets they aren’t, and that makes their story even more interesting.

The small (25,000 pop) South-Central Nebraska city of Hastings, recently captured the title of "America’s Greenest City". Hastings was one of more than 300 communities across the country competing in Yahoo’s "Be A Better Planet", Greenest Cities in America" challenge.

The city received a grand prize of $250,000, and Mayor Matt Rossen told me the community is now planning how to best use the money. Here is that interview.

Thirteen women from around the globe meet and resolve to promote change. If there were ever active seniors, you'll meet them here.

The International Council of Indigenous Grandmothers

For the Next 7 Generations: The Grandmothers Speak

When I was a kid on the farm, tiptoeing through a barnyard was a way of life. It was something like playing hopscotch with cow pies. When spring came, it was time to clean out the barn, transfer the winter’s supply of manure, one pitchfork at a time, into a “honey wagon” and take it to the fields to be used as fertilizer. It amazed me how much there was, and until I researched this project, I had no idea how much manure and gasses cattle produce each day, or the effect they have on the environment. No, this isn’t fart science.

Cow manure has been discovered as an energy source: it has power and it’s being used to make electricity and ethanol. Take for example the E3 BioFuels Genesis plant in Mead, Nebraska. The $80 million facility began operation this summer, turning out some 25 million gallons of ethanol a year (a rather small amount, compared to other ethanol plants around the country). What makes this facility unique is it’s patented closed-loop system, the first of its kind in America, and quite possibly in the world.

The plant is old news, really, but here’s how it works. A nearby beef cattle feedlot provides 150,000 pounds of manure every day, which is processed through an anaerobic digester, and that produces methane. The methane is used to fire the plant’s boilers, replacing expensive natural gas, resulting in a large reduction in operating expenses. Company officials say the Genesis plant produces 46 units of energy for every unit of fossil fuel energy required, a 46:1 efficiency ratio. Conventional ethanol plants are rated at a ratio of 3:1.

A byproduct of ethanol production, wet distiller’s grain, is fed to the cattle in the feedlot and the process begins all over again. Now this is a very brief explanation of what’s happening at the Genesis plant. Their website explains it very well..

So why am I writing about this? Well, there’s more to cow manure, as you probably know. Millions of tons are produced every day by the estimated 1.5 billion cattle populating our planet. Let’s put this into some sort of perspective. The University of Wisconsin at Green Bay estimates the average dairy cow drops 148 pounds of manure each day. Do the math: that’s a lot of BS! And you thought it was all in Washington!

Dairy Farms

Haubenschild FarmSeveral dairy farms in America use the output of their cattle in much the same way as the Nebraska plant, with one exception. The Haubenschild Dairy Farm in Princeton, Minnesota, is a shining example. Instead of using the methane to create heat for boilers, it’s used to run generators that provide electric power for the operation, and supply electricity to surrounding homes as well. Anaerobic digester systems are expensive though, ranging from $200,000 to $1,000,000 depending on the size of the herd, so farmers with smaller herds have been reluctant to make that kind of investment. The USDA has free software for download that will determine digester size and cost based on the size of a farm’s herd. I found it fun, and very informative.

Hopefully, as the science of digesters improves, the process will become less costly, and more farmers and commercial operations will be able to take advantage of poop power. I was surprised to learn from The AgSTAR Program website that several pig farms are using digesters, and there’s even a duck farm in Wisconsin using a digester.

Belching

Here’s the capper: while manure provides greenhouse gasses, a cow’s breath introduces far more methane and other gasses into the air. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the six million tons of methane burped by cattle in the US each year is equivalent to 36 million tons of carbon dioxide. If you add the output of sheep, goats and other ruminants, they all account for more than 18% of the greenhouse gasses that cause global warming, and that, according to the IPCC, is more than cars, planes and all other forms of transportation.

So, is the world’s cattle population contributing to global warming? It would seem so with all the belching and pooping, and the IPCC makes a strong case.

While we’re beginning to discover applications for animal manure, what about the burping? I doubt gas masks would work well on cows, and there’s no way we’ll be decreasing herd sizes anytime soon. Diet seems the best way to reduce production of greenhouse gasses produced by livestock, along with more efficient and productive methods of dealing with manure.

I’m so proud of myself; I didn’t once say “shit."

Biosphere2 - Citizen PhotoArizona’s much maligned, highly controversial Biosphere 2 is on it’s way to becoming a world-class ecological research facility, according to an article in the Tucson Daily Citizen newspaper. The University of Arizona announced today it would take control of the facility July 1st, and promises to have world-class researchers on site by year’s end.

The university has formed B2 Earthscience to operate a think tank, and conduct ecological research at the property, 35 miles north of Tucson near Oracle. The main thrust is expected to be a study of Earth’s ecological processes and global climate change, claiming the research will be relevant into the next century.

The property was developed in 1984 by billionaire Edward P Bass at a cost of $200 million, and enjoyed a not-so favorable reputation. The biosphere was originally designed as a for-profit venture, to help researchers determine ways to explore and settle other planets, and as a tourist attraction. In both cases, the facility failed to live up to its investor’s expectations.

In 1991, four men and four women entered the 2.5-acre, sealed terrarium for a two-year experiment, complete with plants, animals and insects. It also contains climatic regions meant to mimic that of Earth, including a rain forest, an ocean and a desert. Their experiment reportedly fell short of expectations nearly two years later when oxygen was pumped into the biosphere. Crewmembers were said to be fatigued, and had difficulty sleeping because the environment wasn’t supplying enough oxygen. They ended their stay shortly afterward.

To make a really long story short, a second crew entered the facility in 1994 when seven people, five men and two women, tried living in the biosphere to conduct ecological experiments over a period of 120 days to one year. That lasted less than a month when someone sabotaged the biosphere by opening doors and breaking the atmospheric seal.

In 1996, Columbia University began management of Biosphere 2, conducting research until 2003, when they vacated the property. Since then the facility has remained a tourist attraction to this day. The U of A will continue to court tourists

On June 5th of this year, a Texas home builder purchased Biosphere 2 and 1,700 surrounding acres for development of a 1,550 home development with a 200-room resort. Construction isn’t expected to begin for another two years.

The U of A will lease the terrarium and some neighboring buildings for from the developer for $100 annually. According to UA President Robert N Shelton, the university has $30 million set aside to launch management of the biosphere and sustain annual operating costs for 10 years.

First project on the list, according to the university, will be a study of how water interacts with flora typical of deserts, grasslands and savannahs. Researchers hope to learn more on how water is lost, how the area will be affected years from now and what vegetation will survive.

UA officials are quick to say failure is no longer an option at Biosphere2. One spokesman said, “We’ll be chugging along with the Biosphere for decades.”