Toxic Toddlers
The headline says it all: Fire retardant chemicals found in toddlers' blood.
Scientists are concerned that the chemicals cause brain damage in animals and may cause hyperactivity in children, says Jimmy Roberts, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' committee on environmental health, who was not involved with the study. Doctors also are concerned that the chemicals affect the reproductive organs and hormone systems. A Danish study in 2007 found that boys whose mothers had high levels of fire retardants in their breast milk were more likely to have undescended testicles.
These are the same chemicals that we found in high levels in the breastmilk of Northwestern moms. The worst forms have been banned in the US for several years, but one form is still in widespread use -- and apparently we may still be importing some of the worst kinds from overseas. Even more troubling, there's still tons of these persistent flame retardants in people's homes, particularly in furniture foams that are gradually degrading. And as they degrade, the flame retardants get into dust -- which toddlers & nursing moms then inhale. It's a contamination problem that will likely affect our homes and workplaces for years.
The whole episode is a cautionary tale: once you let a toxic genie out of the bottle, it's awfully hard to get it back in.
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The Price of Bad Predictions
At a glance, this San Francisco Chronicle article is a bit difficult to parse, but it points to exactly the reason why I've been ranting about lousy oil price forecasts churned out by federal US agencies (see here, here, and here). To wit:
The Environmental Protection Agency says another arm of the Bush administration may be lowballing the economic benefits of increasing fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.
...the EPA said in comments filed with the Transportation Department that the department would have been better off using higher estimates for future gasoline prices when it proposed increasing the average fuel economy of all vehicles to 31.6 miles per gallon by 2015.
The proposed fuel economy increase was based in part on estimates that gas would range from $2.04 a gallon to $3.37 a gallon, averaging $2.42 a gallon in 2016.
So, basically, when gasoline costs more than estimated, we end up with lowball savings from higher mileage standards. (Higher standards means burning less fuel and hence spending less money.) Those lowball estimates make it seem unimportant to upgrade the standards. And when we don't upgrade the standards, then we waste money -- and we send more carbon in the atmosphere too.
Needless to say, gasoline currently costs more than the Transportation Department is estimating, as it has for much of 2008. And sure, it's perfectly possible that prices will go back down over the next 8 years -- predicting prices is tricky -- but it's maybe worth noting that the futures market doesn't think so. In other words, folks who have some skin in the game -- who make or lose money based on what oil prices do -- think that prices are headed gradually up between now and 2016. It seems it's only the government analysts who think gasoline will drop to $2.42.
The really frustrating thing is that almost no one benefits from crappy price forecasts. Consumers lose, businesses lose, the environment loses -- and even oil companies lose.
Oh wait, check that. Oil companies don't lose at all: they make a killing when we burn more fuel than makes economic sense.
Just saying.
I Can See Clearcuts Now
Oh, Google, what would we ever do without you? Check out this Google Maps-generated image of the region near Cannon Beach, Oregon:
The strange patchwork of brown? Those are clearcuts in the Coast Range. And many of them appear to be recent.
What's really great is that you can zoom in so close that you can clearly see the bulldozed logging roads, a line of "leave trees," and a striated green that I'm guessing is first season re-growth of vegetation. See::
I'll bet some tech-savvy map-genius type could collate enough Googe Map images together to do a systematic analysis of clearcutting. I could imagine starting in just one region -- perhaps a single Oregon county -- or expanding the analysis to include a large swath of the Pacific Northwest or even North America.
Why am I so fascinated by this?
