Khalilah Jones's Blog

The Earth is full of natural resources such as gases, oils and metals. Since the Industrial Revolution ushered in the development of the world we know it, human demand for energy and power has intensified. Only in recent decades have we realized that many of our processes for obtaining energy are not sustainable and have a negative impact on our environment. One damaging practice is hydraulic fracking or fracturing. It is the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at very high pressures in order to break up shale rocks to release natural gas inside.

This natural gas is a prime source of energy and the US has a huge demand for it. This demand is met through fracking, which comes at a high cost. Each day 300,000 barrels of natural gas are produced per day. In each fracturing job, up to eight million gallons of water are used and 600 chemicals such as mercury, uranium and formaldehyde are released into the environment. Some of the chemicals are known carcinogens and toxins, impacting the people involved in the process and the environment. This chemical infused fluid is pressure injected 10,000 feet into the Earth through a drilled pipeline, where it causes the shale rocks to crack and releases natural gas into the well. Since the fluid is pushed so deep beneath the Earth, methane gas and other chemicals contaminate groundwater. Despite these outcomes, it is standard practice to leave up to 50% of fracturing fluid in the ground, some studies estimate up to 90% of the fluid being left in the ground. When it is recovered it is often disposed of incorrectly rather than treated as toxic waster. This releases harmful chemicals into the atmosphere, contaminating air and creating acid rain.

The profits of hydraulic fracking are substantial, yet the environmental and human costs are steep. The amount of water consumed in the process of fracking is not sustainable and it is estimated that the industry uses up to 140 billion gallons of water. This is enough water in a year for 2,500,000 people to consume. The transportation of this water releases greenhouse gases since thousands of trucks are required for multiple trips back and forth from fracturing sites. There has also been evidence that suggests fracking causes increased seismic activity because unknown faults are caused by the drilling and chemical formations deep beneath the Earth. Not only is the environment being damages beyond repair, but the process is altered the Earth, resulting in more seismic activity.

Concentrations of methane near fracturing sites are 17 times higher than normal wells. There have been over 1,000 cases in the US of contamination of water resulting in numerous medical cases that impact sensory-motor, respiratory, and neurological systems of the human body.

There are shockingly high rates of skin, eye and sensory organs, respiratory, and gastrointestinal problems highlighting the dangers that these pose when the population is exposed to such chemicals. Those who work directly with such chemicals in the process of fracking, like workers, spill responders or health care professionals are especially at risk. The long term effects of exposure can be very dramatic. Those who live near fracking sites are also particularly vulnerable due to the frequent water contamination, air contamination from vapors, and likelihood of improper disposal of the waste. Those who live near these sites also tend to be poor groups, with low access to health care and less political protection than wealthier groups. The long term public health implications should be enough to decrease fracking or raise awareness of its implications. However powerful lobby groups fight to continue the process of fracking and push back against allegations of the damages caused by chemicals used. Much like DuPont, who downplayed the negative impact that these practices have on the environment. Perhaps in the future, practices will change and reparations will be sought by those whose lives have been impacted by fracking. I am doubtful that this will happen any time soon just as it took DuPont nearly half a century to admit wrongdoing. The overall cost of fracking greatly outweigh, the benefits. However, modern society demands energy sources at increasing amounts. As more parts of the world industrialize, this demand grows and costs increase.

Sources

http://www.dangersoffracking.com/

http://www.earthworksaction.org/issues/detail/hydraulic_fracturing_101

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing

This issues began when a West Virginian farmer, Tenant, contacted Bilott to help him discover whether a company called Dupont’s chemicals were causing his livestock to die, not knowing that Bilott was a corporate lawyer adept at defending such companies. In the 80s Tennant’s family sold some of their land to DuPont where they started a landfill. Tennant’s cows began to exhibit a host of medical issues, from discolorations, hair loss, behavioral changes, organ damage, deformations, and 153 of the cows died. Tennant speculated that this was a result of ingestion of chemicals from DuPont’s landfill. Bilott decided to take on the case despite his firm’s usual practice of defending corporations rather than plaintiffs.

The article describes Bilott’s background as not being a typical corporate lawyer since he was raised as a military brat, attended a small liberal arts college instead of an Ivy League school, and was progressively-inclined. At Taft Law firm, he honed his skills as an environmental law expert. In 1999, Bilott filed the lawsuit against Dupont and immediately corruption was apparent as vets from chosen by the EPA and DuPont conducted a study that found DuPont was not responsible, rather that the Tennants were at fault. As Billot continued to dig, it became more difficult to determine the cause of the cattle’s illnesses yet came across a term in an EPA report called, PFOA, that stumped him. It was short for perfluorooctanoic acid. Billot the requested more information about DuPont’s finding about PFOA and received boxes and boxes of papers about it through a court order. After deep digging through paper piles, he began to see a trend that PFOA had some hazardous effects and DuPont had known for a long time. In the 1950s DuPont bought recently invented PFOA to make Teflon, it was supposed to be disposed of through chemical waste treatment or incineration however, Dupont instead dumped PFOA into the Ohio River and it eventually entered the local water supply in West Virginia. There was evidence that it caused organ damage, tumors, cancer, harming factory workers and causing birth defects. They found that local drinking water contains three times the amount of PFOA considered safe. Yet DuPont did not report any of the findings to the EPA because of the dependence on PFOA for profit. By the 90s, DuPont was dumping the dangerous PFOA toxic waste to the landfill near the Tennant’s farm, knowing that this caused the water in the creek on the farm contained high levels of PFOA. Once again, DuPont did not disclose this information.

In 2000 after learning all of this, Tennant contacted DuPonts lawyers and received a settlement. Bilott continued to pursue DuPont due to their blatant corporate greed and disregard for public safety. Eventually he wrote an extensive public brief and sent it to the EPA. DuPont tried to prevent this from happening by sending a failed gag order, blatantly admitting that they knew they had done wrong. The entire case highlighted the dependence of the public on regulatory agencies to protect them from dangerous chemicals, yet a 1976 law only allows the EPA to ban chemicals when it has evidence which companies are reluctant to provide. Eventually DuPont made a 16.5 million dollar settlement with the EPA, which only represented a small percent of the revenue DuPont had coming in based on PFOA. There was then a class action suit against DuPont in which many people affected by the chemical such a factory workers, scientists, researcher, local citizens came forward. However, it was hard to challenge the EPA, if PFOA was not labelled as a toxin, eventually the West Virginia EPA decided the toxic level in water was 150 parts per billion, while Bilott’s team had deemed 0.2 ppb as toxic. The law became victim focused, so if a they were exposed to a toxin they are able to sue retroactively. The DuPont panel was appointed to investigate the blood samples of many West Virginia residents to determine whether they would pay for the law mandated reparations, yet this process took years.

The pressure of this drawn out case stressed Bilott a great deal, he had intense physiological stress symptoms. In 2011, the panel finally identified that there was a link between PFOA and cancer among other diseases, then the plaintiffs were able to filed their lawsuits against DuPont.

The whole case highlights the need for regulation of toxic chemicals, transparency among manufacturing companies and saddens me to know that how widespread these chemicals have reached. So many lives have been impacted by this corporate greed, failure to accept consequences, and the lack of oversight from regulatory agencies. It makes me wonder if I’ve been exposed to anything, better yet, WHAT I’ve been exposed to. In the future, I will avoid using Teflon cookware due to my awareness of the harmful impacts that PFOA has had on thousands of people during the DuPont case.

The Lego Mindstorm car gives the user an introduction to basic programming and robotics, technologies that are essential to advancements today. Most people don’t have a chance to interact with this type of software, yet familiarity with it can help provide understanding of the importance of technologies in a search for efficient energy and our ecological footprints.

The first experiment involved building the car and learning how the motors worked. My partner and I were given a box full of parts that were to be assembled using a long list of instructions. My partner and I had some difficulties as we were missing some of the parts we needed and had to substitute them with other pieces. This added some time to the process of assembling the robot, which took around 25-30 minutes, but we were able to complete it successfully. Before we even connected the robot to the software used to control it, we already began our lesson in sustainability and ingenuity. We did not give up on the robot, simply because we did not have all the parts we needed to make it function, with the help of Professor Shatz we got creative and replaced the parts with similar pieces! The Lego Mindstorm car looks like this after it was initially assembled.

With a few modifications, including a USB wire to connect the car with the software used to control it, and 2 wires that connect the battery with each of the ports.

After the car was assembled and connected to LabView, we began to experiment with the software. The interface was quite confusing for my partner and I, since neither of us had any experience doing this type of experiment. As we followed some basic instructions to program the car, we learned a few of the basics of what it could do. To make the car go straight, we set the power level to 50, added a command to “go forward”, and selected this to run on All Ports. To make the car go backwards, we did the same process except we changed the command to “go backward”.

Here is our very first program! Exciting.

Slowly, we became more comfortable and acquainted with LabView, programming to increase and decrease the speed of the car, make musical noises, and to drive itself over the table. The next step in the experiment was to program the car to makes left and right turns then drive in a circle. This process was difficult for us to figure out and took much longer to program than it had to program the car to make simple maneuvers.

Our next experiment was to understand the difference between human measures and computer based measures. Human measurements are subject to more error than computer based measures, yet it is important to note that computers are not error-free either. We measured the the wheel rotations, the time it took, and the distance the car travelled, compared our measurements with the measurements provided by the computer. Using those comparisons, we calculated the amount of error between our results and the results provided by LabView.

First we calculated the circumference of the wheel: 5.5cm x π = 1.727 cm = 0.1727 m

Below are the comparisons of the amounts we recorded, compared to the amounts the computer recorded (if the computer provided such data)

Wheel Rotation

	Our Measure	Computer Measure
Rotations Measured	2	1.24
Degrees Measured (degrees)	721	462

Time

	Our Measure
Seconds	1.35
Milliseconds	1350

 

Distance

	Our Measure	Computer Measure
Distance (meters)	0.24	0.22

We then calculated the percentage of  error between the distance we measured the car going, and the distance that the computer measured for the three power levels we programmed.

Power Level	Percentage Error
50	7%
75	11.5%
100	2.8%

Overall, we found that the percentage of error was not extremely high, meaning that human measurements can be somewhat reliable as estimates. However when we consider sustainability and energy usage, human measures or estimates are not precise enough to provide the answers that are essential to us. Use of computers and software gives us precise answers that can help us understand and predict what actions we need to take in order to conserve energy and be more sustainable in our actions.

The Flint water crisis began a long time ago, for years there have been concerns over the safety of the water in the city. The crisis was intensified beginning in 2014 and has come to public attention in late 2014 and earlier this year. In April 2014, city and state officials were involved in heated debates of how to save money and balance the budget of economically depressed, Flint, Michigan. The decision was made to change the city’s water source to the Flint River, rather than continuing to pay more to tap into the Detroit, Michigan water system. Emergency managers had the political sway to override local policies in order to make the “best” fiscal choices for the state, which in this case was not the best choice for the population of Flint. In the summer of 2014, residents began to alert officials of poor tasting, foul water and health problems resulting from the consumption of this water such as rashes. In August 2014, the water from in Flint tested positive to containing E.coli and coliform bacteria. Rather than changing the water source back to the Detroit water, city officials insisted that the water was safe to drink, but for citizens to boil it before drinking and using it. In October 2014, General Motors announced that it would no longer use the Flint water in its manufacturing plants as it caused engine parts the company used to corrode, city officials still only advised people to boil water and took no other measures. As a coercion to keep GM happy, Governor Snyder spent half a million dollars to connect them to fresh Detroit water, while the children of Flint continued to drink toxic water.

Throughout early 2015, Flint began issuing advisories that the water contained high levels of chemicals that may put sick and elderly people at risk, but still stated that the water is safe to consume. Around the same time, state government buildings in Flint start to bring in coolers of non-Flint River water so that government officials had a choice of which water to drink, while average citizens were not offered such a choice. Shortly after, Detroit offered to have Flint rejoin its water system for free, and the emergency manager at that time rejected this and was fired the next day.

The EPA then began to take note as citizens complained of symptoms caused by water levels and demanded that the water in their homes be tested. The threshold for intervention from the EPA currently stands at lead levels of 15 ppb (parts per billion), while some households were tested to have lead levels of 104 ppb and up to 400 ppb. This is up to 27 times more than the threshold for EPA intervention. Investigators found that before lead testing occurred, city officials were flushing out the water in the homes, giving false results. Without this method, some homes showed levels of 13,200 ppb, which is double the amount that the EPA considers hazardous waste. An EPA director suggested that this report was false and that these measurements were an isolated incident, hinting at further corruption within the system.

By September, a researcher and doctor found that the amount of children under 5 with high blood lead levels had tripled since the water source change, and the state pushed back by denying her data and the Governor stated that water was safe to drink but some homes had lead plumbing issues, then a week later decides to change the water source back to Detroit. In November, a class-action lawsuit is filed against the state and city for Flint residents and a task force is assembled by the governor to shift blame.

This January, the governor declares a state of emergency, and the residents are finally explicitly told to only consume bottled or filtered water. The National guard is deployed to distribute water, celebrities such as Celine Dion and Meek Mill make donations, President Obama declares Flint to be in a state of emergency, awarding $5 million in federal relief money. Presidential candidates use this as a campaigning pitch and proclaim the inhumanity and catastrophe of the situation. Currently, lawsuits against the city and in federal courts are moving forward and water supplies are still being divided up.

My Take:

The main issues that arise within this situation are the competency of state officials, the ethical behavior of those who are entrusted with citizens’ well-being, the importance of financial bottom lines as opposed to health. This one “cost-saving” action has resulted in staggering negative outcomes for the state and its people that is estimated at $1.5 billion dollars to remedy the situation. Michael Moore, who is originally from Flint, MI, stated in his article that the water source switch only saved $100 per day for 3 months, the impact of this blunder will be felt in the Michigan economy for decades to come. Additionally property values in Flint and the surrounding areas have shot down to zero, because who would really want to live in Flint right now? The residents of Flint are now stuck there with there as they are unable to sell their homes, and businesses will be fleeing the already depressed town.

Would this have occurs if the demographics of Flint were different, if it were a more white, more middle-class, more “glitzy” city? Studies show that people of color, particularly Black and Latino populations and the poor are more likely to be exposed to toxic chemicals, waste, and fumes than any other group in the country. This disparate in exposure lies in representation of disadvantaged groups in the government, segregation by race and class through processes such as red-lining, and biases that run deep within this country, allowing people to be “othered” and have their health and well-being overlooked. If Flint, were a wealthier, suburban town, there is no way upwards of 10,000 children would have been exposed to poison and actively told by their government that nothing was wrong for 2 years. Sadly, this crisis speaks not only to lack of ethics present in our current political system, but also to inequalities present in our nation in terms of race and class. As public awareness of the Flint water crisis grows, public outcry is growing and pressure on the Michigan government to own up to their mistakes is growing.

The long-term effects of allowing a population that already faces extreme poverty, low life expectancy, dramatic economic depression, high murder rate are going to be imaginably more dire and exponentiated by the water crisis. Not only was lead present in the water, but the other chemicals that were ingested at toxic amounts by the population, particularly vulnerable groups such as children, elders and those with chronic illness have been hit the hardest. Doctors say that in children serious developmental problems and delays can occur due to exposure, and this prolonged exposure only intensifies these issues. Therapies and medicine can aid the recovery process, but the damage that has been done is irreversible. The people of Flint will likely strongly distrust the government and emergency institutions set in places to protect them, and this distrust of both the local and state government will last for generations. The government officials failed these people who were already struggling in the name of the bottom line. A crime was committed against the people of Flint, and was continually perpetrated by leadership who continues to admit their mistakes in hopes of re-election and campaign dollars, and consistently made poor choices for the people they were responsible for protecting.

Sources

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/us/a-question-of-environmental-racism-in-flint.html?mabReward=A4&moduleDetail=recommendations-0&action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/01/flint-lead-water-crisis-timeline

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/10-things-about-flint-water-tragedy_b_9132150.html

What stood out most to me in the article were the different levels of mistrust coupled with mis-information. The citizens distrusted the corporations, who typically put profit before ethics, the citizens distrusted the scientists, who may or may not have been paid off why the corporations to endorse GMOS, the scientists distrusted the politicians, who did not acknowledge the empirical evidence about the safety of GMOs, and the circle goes on. This distrust of government, science and corporations is present throughout American society, from pharmaceuticals, to health care acts, it was only natural that people distrusted GMOs. Despite scientists demonstrating the evidence, public opinion often seems to outweigh this.

If a person is firm and unwavering in their beliefs, even if the belief lacks logic or solid evidence, it is extremely impossible to shake this person of this belief, even if you spell out every possible piece of evidence.

One commenter on the article said, “Science is pure. Scientists are not.” (See: Guatemalans Infected by STDs, Tuskegee Experiments, Stanford Prison Experiment)

Throughout recent times as technology has developed, ethical problems have arised alongside it. For example, scientists may know that a medicine may pose some threat to consumers, however it is often in the interest of pharmaceutical companies to downplay this in order to make profits. These scientists face an ethical dilemma as they must chose between alerting the public to this health risk or to stay in the good graces of the pharmaceutical industry. These types of situations influence public hesitance to support scientists that fought for GMOs because it is impossible to know which scientists were being paid off by GMO stakeholders. Additionally, other powerful industries benefitted from bans of GMOs, such as the organic industry.

The amount of stakeholders on each side further made the public confused as to whether groups were pro- or anti-GMO due to the opportunity of monetary gains or competition in the industry.

With GMOs, this public opinion played an integral role in the ban attempts, pushes for companies to label products with GMOs, and the now negative connotation that GMOs has. Unfortunately this came at the cost of some positive things that GMO usage could have such as, growing food to prevent world hunger or stabilizing food systems in countries in need.

Practices within the food system in the US are highly questionable, with massive animal feed lots, high usage of dangerous pesticides and little longitudinal research done to determine the long-term impact of these practices. Unfortunately in the GMO debate, the lack of awareness of the presences of long-term research further hurt the pro-GMO campaign. Additionally, the desires of consumers for non-GMO foods conflict with their demand for large amounts of all types of foods. These conflicting desires mean that GMOs may be necessary to produce reliable and near-constantly available amounts of produce, for example, the Hawaiian grown papayas would have died off without the use of GMOs to destabilize the crop population.

As American consumers, the system of capitalism is deeply ingrained in us.

We want the best quality products, at the lowest prices, available as soon as possible (hence the boom of Amazon Prime). Yet, there is always a cost to these demands, whether it be factory workers who labor in disgusting conditions to make our skinny jeans and leggings, or the miners who die daily to extract the earth metals in our iPhones, or the bananas that we NEED for our daily kale smoothies that had to be genetically modified to prevent mutations.

The fight over GMOs speaks to our capitalist culture, fears of science, distrust of corporations and big government, and realization that aspects of our food system are not ideal.