Silicon, Hummers and the Environment

So, how’s the environment been doing lately? With which side of the war on the environment has the U.S. decided to cast its lot? Well, the new Hummer is out. It’s got a 6.0 V8 engine. What kind of fuel economy does it get? Well, that’s a good question. Here’s the answer found on the official Hummer site (emphasis added).

“Because it is a class 3 truck, a type of vehicle that is often classified as a work truck, the EPA does not rate the mileage.. Typically, work trucks site and idle while performing work, and their mileage varies greatly because heavy loads are hauled or pulled. What would the typical mileage be under which circumstances and what speed? AM General has done some of its own testing and has found that the turbo diesel V-8 gets about 13 mpg in the city and 17 mpg on the highway.”

How convenient that it’s classified in such a way that the EPA doesn’t rate it. I bet all of the people that have placed orders for it in 2002 and essentially sold it out are going to use them as work trucks. As the SF Gate details in First GM-Hummer dealerships to open Friday, even the new dealerships say “I look at it as an amusement park for adults…” and “We’re virtually sold out through the end of the year.”

Mark Morford, also of the SF Gate describes the potential need for a Hummer stateside in Hummer Stomps The Evildoers:

“Chest-thumping suburban warriors, … good upstanding Armageddon-fearing folk who’ve already had all of their basic needs so oversated and glutted that all that’s really left is to try and pretend they’re rugged renegade urban soldiers on badass recon missions to Starbucks…”

…while noting that the even the need globally was:

“It’s a bizarre urban assault vehicle for bizarre global assault times, a no-nonsense/ total-nonsense luxury truck derived from a monstrous military beast that patrolled the Middle East protecting our oil interests while sucking down so much diesel it virtually guaranteed demand would continue to outstrip supply.”

When moving up the industrial food chain to producing and consuming high-technology goods, remember that those disposable cell phones have to go somewhere. It seems that increasingly, the ‘recycling’ of our techonolical dross is falling to severely impoverished areas of Southeastern Asia. Once again, it’s the SF Gate that reports in TECH21 Group exposes America’s dirty tech secret about how U.S. tech-garbage is being handled:

“Chinese women, wearing no protective gear at all, tending coal-fired grills used to melt lead solder from circuit boards; others breaking open lead-laced CRTs with hammers; nitric and hydrochloric acids being heated, giving off huge clouds of acrid gases, and then used to extract bits of gold from computer chips, finally producing sludge that is dumped in rivers and irrigation ditches; villages covered in black ash from nightly fires, where cables covered with plastics and dangerous brominated flame retardants are burned so the copper wire inside can be recovered…”

The report on which the article is based has since been published and is available from the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. There a photos page and the entire report in either HTML or PDF. The PDF version has many more pictures and is a 51 page report.

If you live in a large city, you’re still not safe. While not as bad as the air in Guiyu, in China or Karachi, in Pakistan (see report above), you should know that recent studies show that breathing city air gives you the same chance of contracting lung cancer as constantly breathing second-hand smoke.

The New York Newsday covers a recent study in Study Says Air Pollution Potent as 2nd-Hand Smoke. Why is the air so bad? “The vast majority of the pollution is from fossil fuel combustion.” Keep driving those Hummers, folks.

“The analysis, almost two decades in the making, is the most comprehensive examination of its kind and may finally lay to rest lingering arguments about air pollution and serious disease. People living in the most polluted cities have a 16 percent higher risk of dying of lung cancer than those in less polluted regions.”

The Washington Post also published Study Ties Pollution, Risk of Lung Cancer, covering the same story. They note that the study comes at the same time that “the Bush administration is considering proposals for scaling back tough government legal action against dozens of aging coal-fired power plants and refineries that violated the law by expanding without installing state of the art anti-pollution equipment.”

Will corporations continue to have to be careful environmentally in the future? Not really. The New York Times article, Bush Proposing to Shift Burden… talks about Superfund sites. The Superfund was started in 1980 and derived its funds from a special corporate tax levied on environmental violators.

“Under pressure from the chemical and oil industries, Congress let the corporate taxes expire in 1995. Without them, the trust fund dwindled, from a high of $3.8 billion in 1996 to a projected $28 million next year. … President Bush did not reauthorize the taxes last year in his first budget, and his proposed budget for 2003 explicitly states that he will not do so.”

This should come as no surprise to anyone, as reauthorizing the tax would have been viewed as pro-environment and anti-corporate, two stances that Bush has shown time and again he decidedly is not interested in taking. The fact that the Superfund is out of money does not mean that sites will no longer be cleaned up. The almost carefully hidden point of Bush budget is simply that corporations will no longer have to pay to clean up. That will be our job, as loyal taxpayers.

No wonder this guy left the EPA after all of those years. The LA Times has Top EPA Enforcement Official Quits… covering Eric Schaeffer’s bombastic departure from the EPA. He’s worked there for 12 years, but lately had been “fighting a White House that seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce.” Companies that were in talks for settlement of their environmental violations “are now “hedging their bets,” refusing to sign the decrees until they see where the White House lands on reforming the Clean Air Act, Schaeffer said.”

All in all, a pretty rosy outlook, I’d say (as usual).