(Note: I wrote this diary a little while ago and then thought better of publishing it. Yuppie car culture apologists are a very sensitive - and whiny - bunch and I certainly didn't want to offend them. I am, afterall, very considerate of the refined feelings of people who couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels. I kept the diary lying around though, although I lost the amusing poll I first wrote to an editing mistake. A second report in the scientific literature beyond the report that informed the original diary prompts me to edit and publish this diary now.)
We live in the age of oxymorons. One hears, or at least heard, for instance, of something called a "War on Terrorism," as if a war itself can be anything other than terrorism. I mean, really, imagine the lives of two different law abiding city cab drivers whose houses are hit by high explosives, one in New York and one in Bagdad. If, in the second case, the explosive is dropped from an F-14, I'm not sure it feels any different to the victim than a bomb full of dangerous diesel fuel and fertilizer like the one that destroyed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
I don't work the war and terrorism beat either here nor in my professional life. I work the energy and environmental beat here and somewhere else professionally. In working that the environmental beat, I've had a chance to hear some real whoppers, as oxymorons go. I hear all about "clean coal" for instance, which as oxymoronic as a "war on terror." Another good one you hear from time to time is about "green cars."
Green cars? Oooh boy!
Sometimes people who want to tell me about "green cars" talk about stuff like the Tesla Roadster or the hydrogen hypercar, neither of which are commercially available as of today. The hydrogen hypercar according to Amory Lovins - or at least the investors he bilked - will be in showrooms by 2005, which must mean that my calendar is wrong, because Amory Lovins is a genius, and just like the genius George W. Bush, he is never wrong about anything, even if nothing he says remotely resembles the truth. As for the Tesla Roadster, 500 guys who have too much money can expect the delivery of the first Tesla Roasters by 2008, or at least that's what the people who've been collecting money for the thing say.
Another "green car" thing people talk about all the time - when they're not talking about the hydrogen hypercar or the Tesla Roadster - is ethanol, which is supposed to be a green fuel because, um well, corn is "green" even if the nitrogen fertilizers that make it grow are made from dangerous fossil fuels, like dangerous natural gas, but sometimes dangerous coal.
Ethanol, people will tell you, especially those who are oblivious to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, is supposed to be a "renewable fuel." In this case the word "renewable" is represented by people who actually know nothing at all about sustainability (and also nothing about risk analysis) to mean "harmless, infinite and without risk or consequence."
In discussions of ethanol, as opposed to say, discussions of wind power and solar power, it is now an ancient American tradition to state something along the lines that it is "better to fund our midwestern farmers" - most of whom are named Archie or Danny, short for Archer Daniels Midlands - "than some god-damned mideastern shieks."
When I, curmudgeon that I am, point out the that number of dangerous fossil fuels that have been replaced by pet renewable energy fantasies like ethanol is exactly zero, here and there someone will chime in some sort of nonsense about how 70% of the cars in Brazil are fueled by ethanol.
We'll leave aside for a moment the question of whether replacing 70% of something is the same as replacing all of it and ask ourselves the question of whether it is good either for Brazil - or for the rest of the planet - to grow sugarcane, because that's how Brazil makes ethanol, from vast monocultures of that plant, surgarcane. The reason Brazil makes ethanol is to fuel cars.
One may ask if this makes Brazilians a happy and fulfilled people, knowing that they can fill their car's fuel tanks, at least 70% of the time.
Well there certainly was - not "is," but "was" - one Brazilian who didn't think so. I am not here to applaud his action in any sense, but the Brazilian environmentalist protestor Francisco Anselmo de Barros apparently didn't think much of his country's biofuels program. His concern was to save the world's largest wetland, the Pantanal, from sugarcane plantations, and so depressed was he by the reality that he had no chance of saving it - people need cars more than they need forests and wet lands - that he took extreme action.
From the link above, page 24:
Another threatened region is the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, covering over 140,000 km2 , mostly in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul but straddling the borders of Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. The Pantanal is made up of tropical forest and savannah, together with rivers, lakes and swamps fed by the Paraguay River. The biodiversity of this region is extremely rich, and includes at least 260 species of fish and 650 species of birds, including the hyacinth macaw. The spectacled cayman, rhea, giant river otters, tapirs and jaguars can also be found in the Pantanal.
Ethanol refineries now being constructed in Mato Grosso will require massive areas for feedstock supply and will inevitably lead to large scale deforestation and drainage of the Pantanal.114 Two years ago, in despair, Brazilian conservation activist Francisco Anselmo de Barros set himself on fire in protest, and subsequently died.115
No one can accuse Francisco Anselmo de Barros of not caring less. In fact - much as the Vietnamese Buddhist monks, who also practiced self immolation, calling to the world's attention a somewhat more complex picture of the Vietnamese struggles in the early sixties than suggested by comic book type "freedom" vs. "commies" rhetoric - Francisco Anselmo de Barros's actions have called attention to the Pantanal. I, for instance, had no idea about the Pantanal until I heard that Francisco Anselmo de Barros doused himself with ethanol and set himself afire.
By contrast, the most I'm willing to endure for my environmental views - and I get sulky even about that - is a few troll rates on DKos from yuppie car culture brats who couldn't care less how many Ukranians, Russians, Mexicans, Chinese, and South Africans get killed in dangerous coal mine collapses.
Oh. By the way. Did you know that your Bush inspired "renewable portfolio standard," for your car (don't worry it's actually decades off) like that of the Netherlands and probably 25 or 30 other countries, depends on plans for importing ethanol from Brazil?
You didn't?
Oh.
Don't worry yourself about it. It's one of those "feel good" things that is supposed to happen when kids who are born five years from now would be supposed to go to college - if there is college then. Never mind the question of whether Brazil will have any water with which to grow and ferment ethanol if the Pantanal is destroyed.
Never mind that Brazil doesn't ship it's ethanol in biodiesel or ethanol fueled tankers, and in fact, does not used ethanol fired trucks and tractors to harvest sugarcane either.
How does Brazil collect it's wonderful ethanol product that the world is planning to use to keep the car culture going?
Um. Well. Um...
There's something called sugarcane field hands.
Sugarcane growing - one of the drivers for the invention of African slavery in the New World in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries - is one of the most widely practiced - still - forms of "slash and burn" agriculture in the world.
If you don't know what slash and burn agriculture feels like (on the lungs), you might want to try what I did one time, driving from Mexico City to Cuernavaca on the night when the fields are burning. I promise you that you will never forget it, assuming you don't choke to death. Actually I didn't drive. I was driven by a chauffeur. When he picked me up at the airport - he didn't speak a word of my native tongue - he pointed to a cooler in the back seat that was filled with, he said, "cerveza." Just as everyone on the planet knows what the English word "OK" means, everyone on the planet knows what the Spanish word "cerveza" means. I drank a lot of beer that night, mostly because it was a liquid, and when your throat feels like my throat felt in all that smoke, any cool liquid seems appealing.
Anyway. About sugarcane...
As it happens, until very recently, citation to follow, no one has bothered to look at the health impact of sugarcane slash and burn practices on field workers. Afterall, the poverty of such workers is such that it once required the uninterrupted labors of the poorest of the poor, people who owned nothing, not even their own flesh. It is probably the case that the condition of modern sugarcane field workers is just a notch above slavery, and let's face it, if you're driving a flex fuel Chevy Tahoe, chances are you couldn't care less about the conditions of the poorest of the poor in Brazil. It's not like GM is going to fund a cancer study for sugarcane workers with 1/50th the amount of money that is used to market Tahoes, or that Richard Branson would ever consider such a study worthy of diverting money from his publicity stunt involving fueling a Virgin Atlantic jet with biodiesel.
That ain't gonna happen.
But somehow, somewhere, someone - if not Richard Branson - funded such a study.
I've taken to adding a new scientific journal to my reading list. It's called Science of the Total Environment and the focus of the journal is to build cross disciplinary approaches, chemists, biologists, epidemiologists, to look, in concert, at particular environmental problems and issues. The journal in question is Science of the Total Environment.
I became acquainted with this journal because of a recent note in the "A-pages" of the ACS scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology, a journal I regularly read. The "A-pages" are "news" pages which refer to scientific papers in Environ. Sci. Tech. and other journals. The A-pages are available to the public; journal papers require a subscription.
From the A-pages we have this news item:
Burning sugarcane releases ozone-producing nitrogen.
Each year, some 250,000 migrant workers flood into the state of São Paulo to cut sugarcane, most of them from poorer states in northeastern Brazil. Before chopping the cane with large machetes called facão, they burn huge swaths of cane fields to remove dry leaves and drive off snakes and other creatures. The cleared fields are easier to cut by hand, but the massive burns create choking clouds of smoke and ash...
..."My investigations show that the useful life of a worker is 15 years," de Moraes Silva adds. Medical studies have associated burning with high levels of cancer-causing hydrocarbons called PAHs in cane workers' urine as well as increased risk for respiratory cancers and other illnesses, she notes...
I suspect that the yuppie brat car culture religion, aka Greenpeace, is all over the case.
Yeah right...
I was, at one time, writing a series here on nitrogen fixation and pollution on the planet from the Haber process. But then I decided not to do so, because more and more I have come to the conclusion that even if IGNORANCE KILLS, Ignorance, more or less, has won the day. It's probably not worth the time. It's not like the Greenpeace religion is going to stop killing people no matter what I say.
On the subject of nitrogen, as shown in the paper referenced in the news item (which I have read) Atmospheric Emission of Reactive Nitrogen during Biofuel Ethanol Production about 35% of the nitrogen in sugarcane burning ends up in the atmosphere.
In my abandoned series I was explaining how a part of this fixed atmospheric nitrogen accumulates in the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, which, after carbon dioxide and methane, is the third most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas.
But I abandoned the series...
Sometimes though, I nonetheless feel inclined to howl into the wind. I'm writing, I note, a diary now.
The A-pages news item contains a link to a paper in Science of the Total Environment that is entitled, "
Effects of genetic polymorphisms CYP1A1, GSTM1, GSTT1 and GSTP1 on urinary 1-hydroxypyrene levels in sugarcane workers"
I have accessed, downloaded and read the bulk of the article.
Some choice excepts:
Brazil is the largest sugarcane producer in the world with about 4.5 ×106 ha of sugarcane fields and 320 ethanol production plants (http://www.portalunica.com.br/index.jsp). A common procedure in this country is to burn the leaves before harvesting the sugarcane. The burning leads to production of soot, suspected to increase respiratory problems in the exposed workers (Zamperlini et al., 1997). Sugarcane workers are exposed to various genotoxic compounds, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) derived from an incomplete organic combustion process (Zamperlini et al., 1997). PAHs undergo metabolic activation by phase I enzymes, mainly cytochrome P4501A1 (CYP1A1), to diol epoxides which are capable of binding covalently to DNA, potentially
initiating a carcinogenic process (Hall and Grover, 1990)...
The article goes on:
The study was performed on nonsmoking and healthy sugarcane workers who were resident in the northwest of the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil. They were recruited from three different companies located at a distance of about 30kmfromeach other. The individuals lived in small nonpolluted towns close to rural areas and all of them were transported to work by bus. Urine samples of the same workers, except 5, were collected twice: during harvest time (July to September 2001, months that include winter and spring), classified as exposed group (n=39, mean age 33.73±1.68 years), and during non-harvest time (January to March 2002, summer), classified as non-exposed group (n=34, mean age 35.21± 1.89 years). During harvest time, these workers used to go to the field few hours after the burning of the sugarcane foliages, therefore being exposed to fume and particulate matter deposited on the ground and vegetation.
In between there's a whole bunch of blah, blah, blah "sciency" stuff for which I am sometimes criticized for applying to my arguments. And yes, I take the word "sciency" directly from the comment of a fundamentalist anti-nuke on this website in the comments section of one of my diaries.
Let's just cut to the chase:
Although some PAHs that are human carcinogens have been found in the sugarcane soot (Zamperlini et al., 1997), there are no data about cancer incidence among sugarcane workers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of an evaluation of internal exposure, comparing the harvesting (when the sugarcane fields are burnt) and nonharvesting periods in sugarcane workers, with regard to polymorphisms of xenobiotic-metabolizing enzymes. Our study indicates that during the harvest period the sugarcane workers underwent intense exposure to genotoxic and mutagenic compounds. It also shows that sugarcane workers are significantly more exposed to PAH and genotoxic compounds during the harvesting time than during the non-harvesting time and than the control groups, although the difference between the urinary levels of 1-OHP was not significant in the exposed subjects bearing polymorphisms CYP1A1⁎2A, ⁎2B, ⁎4 and GSTP1. These findings indicate a potential risk for these workers, associated with respiratory diseases and/or lung cancer.
It makes you want to rush out and buy a "flex fuel" Chevy Tahoe, doesn't it?
For full disclosure purposes, I should note that I have a significant and direct financial interest in cancer biomarkers, including some that are aromatic diols. But I have no direct financial link, as yet, to PAH biomarkers however.
Of course, if I did have a financial interest in PAH biomarkers, my expert status would preclude me from discussing them on DKos, because I would be an expert.
In general, though, this exercise shows something that should be pretty obvious to anyone who has carefully reviewed the history of human use of industrial energy. That is this: All forms of energy sound great until humanity tries to scale them up in a meaningful way. It is only after scale up that we can appreciate the external cost of different forms of energy. In fact, at one time in history, coal was thought to be absolutely the greatest discovery of all time because it finally - around the dawn of the 19th century - once and for all freed humanity from the inherent limitations of biofuels.
It is also clear that no form of energy is risk free, although some are relatively risk minimized. Of all the forms of so called "renewable" energy, it is almost certainly the case that biofuels have the highest external cost.
In the meantime, with humanity facing the greatest challenge possibly in post literate times, people are gambling with the future, doing things like opposing the world's largest, by far, form of climate change gas free energy, nuclear energy - even though it has extraordinarily low external costs - and gambling the future on systems that have yet to produce a single exajoule of the 488 exajoules of energy humanity (at last compilation) consumes in a year. Since time's up on the climate change matter, there's probably no point in happy talk about what could happen in 2050.
The generation that will inhabit this planet in 2050 is screwed, no matter how many sugarcane field workers we kill in 2007 to make ourselves feel better about our gas tanks. And if you want to know who screwed those babies, the generation of 2050, I suggest you walk into any bathroom and check out the mirror.
All bold and italics in the excerpts above are mine.