Private property owners may sell their rights to allow natural gas companies to practice hydraulic fracking on their land to a certain degree, but private property owners shouldn’t be allowed to maintain a nuisance that impairs their neighbors’ properties and their health merely to make a few dollars.
Despite the unprecedented environmental disaster that the BP Oil Spill is, the U.S. Congress is no closer to passing clean energy legislation that transitions the United States from depending on oil, which is a nonrenewable and dirty energy resource, mostly derived from hostile foreign sources, to cleaner domestic forms of energy sources that aren’t carbon intensive.
Furthermore, if we’re to continue to evolve as a modern democratic society, then we’ll need to find cleaner forms of energy that are renewable. Additionally, we must balance environmental interests with development goals, since our future well-being is intimately bound up with the availability of natural resources and an access to clean environments.
On the Net:
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Via io9
And more on this video via the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology
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Image via numbphoto – Color mad on Flickr
Acid rain is an environmental problem, because it destroys forests and aquatic ecosystems. More from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:
Acid rain causes acidification of lakes and streams and contributes to the damage of trees at high elevations (for example, red spruce trees above 2,000 feet) and many sensitive forest soils. In addition, acid rain accelerates the decay of building materials and paints, including irreplaceable buildings, statues, and sculptures that are part of our nation’s cultural heritage. Prior to falling to the earth, sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) gases and their particulate matter derivatives—sulfates and nitrates—contribute to visibility degradation and harm public health.
Emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from utilities contribute to the problem of acid rain. However, emissions trading or cap and trade, a market-based regulatory program, which is also “a program within the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments,” was successful in reducing these pollutants. As a result, the Acid Rain Program was successful in reducing acid rain. However, an increase in other types of anthropogenic activities is contributing to the problem of acid rain. For example, industrial agriculture operations, such as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, also contribute to acid rain. Other factors for the return of acid rain include agricultural nitrogen runoff and more vehicles, which are displacing the gains made from the introduction of the catalytic converter. More from Scientific American:
The acid rain scourge of the ’70s and ’80s that killed trees and fish and even dissolved parts of statues on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall is back. But unlike the first round, in which sulfur emissions from power plants mixed with rain to create sulfuric acid, the current problem stems primarily from nitrogen emissions mixed with rain to create nitric acid.
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Sulfur emissions from power plants were one of the primary motivations for the U.S.’s Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which set reduction targets for both sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). However, whereas sulfur dioxide emissions decreased almost 70 percent from 1990 to 2008, emissions of one NOx—nitrogen dioxide (NO2)—went down only 35 percent for that same period, and amendment targets have yet to be made, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “This comes as scientists have grown increasingly aware of the consequences of the remaining nitric acid deposition,” Schlesinger says.
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Nitric acid rain is derived primarily from power plant, car and truck emissions as well as from gases released by fertilizer use. Part of the problem dates back to WWI, when two German scientists invented the Haber–Bosch process, which took nonreactive nitrogen from the air (N2) and converted it into reactive, usable ammonia (NH3). Most of the nitrogen harvested via this process has been used in fertilizers, and the runoff from farms has created dead zones in Chesapeake Bay and at the mouths of the Columbia and Mississippi rivers. Some efforts have been made to regulate the agricultural nitrogen runoff, but atmospheric emissions of agricultural ammonia remain virtually unrestricted.
Agri-ammonia vapors also derive from concentrated animal feeding operations in the U.S. South. The gas rises into the air and is deposited dry or in rainfall where in the ground bacteria breaks it into nitrogen and nitric acid, which can kill fish and plants. “Agriculture is increasingly functioning as an intensively managed industrial operation, and that is creating serious water, soil, and air problems,” says Viney Aneja, a professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Aneja says that state’s concentrated animal feeding operations may also emit particulate matter from swine and chicken manure into the atmosphere, which can carry diseases.
NOx escapes from power plants as a by-product of coal combustion, whereas vehicular engines run at high enough pressures and temperatures to combine nitrogen and oxygen in the air. “Though catalytic converters have decreased the amount of pollution per vehicle, there are more vehicles on the road and more miles driven,” Schlesinger says. Emissions from fertilizers are the chief source of atmospheric nitric oxide, but motor vehicles have now overtaken coal power plants as the secondary most critical source of this problem.
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