Parish The Thought
(Energy • Medical)
Extra chunks of goo in my nose lately so just for fun I wade through the obfuscation over at the Texas Commission on So-Called Environmental Quality to find the database of air pollution permit violations. I select “Fort Bend County” and search for all violations over the last approximate month, Jan. 15 through Feb. 15.
Huh. What a surprise:
→ Jan. 16 – WA PARISH ELECTRIC GENERATING STATION
→ Jan. 19 – DUKE ENERGY FIELD SERVICES PIPELINE
→ Jan. 24 – WA PARISH ELECTRIC GENERATING STATION
→ Jan. 25 – WA PARISH ELECTRIC GENERATING STATION
→ Feb. 7 – WA PARISH ELECTRIC GENERATING STATION
→ Feb. 8 – WA PARISH ELECTRIC GENERATING STATION
WA PARISH ELECTRIC GENERATING STATION, which looks like this and operates some 14 miles from my back yard, happens to be the 10th-largest single source of mercury air pollution in the United States.
The fact my family experiences runny noses and symptoms of upper respiratory unease in approximate synchronization to this plant’s air pollution equipment malfunctions probably is sheerest coincidence, don’t you ‘spec?
Owned by NRG of New Jersey, the Parish plant is off to a bang-up start this year, violating its pollution permit on an average of almost one day out of every five, or so it would seem. How much “extra” mercury, I wonder, wafts through the air during what the TC So-Called EQ quaintly refers to as an “air emission event?”
Can’t find out. TC So-Called EQ officials allow plant officials to identify all stuff going up and out of its stacks as generic “opacity.” The Parish permit says it is OK to emit 10% opacity – meaning generic particles plus mercury plus whatever in sufficient quantity to block the view of the blue sky by 10%. Kind of like wearing dirty sun glasses.
During this year’s permit violations, mostly Unit 6 but sometimes Unit 5 puffed crap into the sky determined at opacities above 70% on two occasion and 90% on another. Kind of like breathing in crap while wearing seven or eight pairs of dirty sunglasses on top of each other.
But only right there at the plant. Probably the extra-strength mercury and all was greatly diluted by the time it blew past Richmond. Or more likely, Sugar Land, Missouri City and Houston, since the winds more commonly blow from out of the west.
As an aside, four of the five permit violations by Parish came as the result of “ongoing Baghouse control logic system” failures that keep opening one of the unit’s Baghouse bypass dampers. The baghouse is basically a giant bag that acts as a filter to keep particles from being released into the atmosphere. When it works.
Bottom line? Look for 2010 to be a big year for Kimberly-Clark stock (you know, the makers of Kleenex). That’s it for today’s snot report.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 18, 2010, 08 15 am
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Phlegm Per Kilowatt
(Energy • Medical)
I didn’t sign a formal contract, but it looks to me as if I have agreed to get sick two to four times each year in exchange for cheap electricity.
I came to this conclusion after two recent events. First, I noticed today that the U.S. EPA apparently intends to enforce the Clean Air Act even in Texas. Second, I had to obtain copies of my own medical records because my doctor moved her practice and her old practice chose to hold patients’ records hostage (albeit for a lot less money if you recite certain choice HIPAA regulations).
It is entirely possible there is no relationship whatsoever between my medical records and the past serial lax enforcement of clean air regulations in Texas. I can’t prove jack.
Nevertheless, while perusing my medical records, I noticed the following: “Upper Respiratory Infection Exam, Date: 8-26-07,” “Upper Respiratory Infection Exam, Date: 10-11-07,” “Upper Respiratory Infection Exam, Date: 1-24-08,” “Upper Respiratory Infection Exam, Date: 9-30-08,” “Upper Respiratory Infection Exam, Date: 11-4-08…”
See a pattern? I hadn’t realized it, but for the past several years I’ve been seeing a doctor at least two or three times per year for the same thing. And that doesn’t count the times when I had something similar but got over it before I got around to going to the doctor – like now, when I’m recovering from an unpleasant upper respiratory malady that began during the Christmas holidays. (And keep in mind, the only thing I smoke is meat, and I don’t inhale.)
One other constant in my life for the past several years is that I began living within 15 miles of the huge and mostly coal-driven W.A. Parish power plant near beautiful downtown Thompsons, Texas. When current owner NRG bought the plant, their spokespersons began referring to it as one of the nation’s cleanest coal-fired plants. In a previous lifetime as a news reporter, I once expressed skepticism of this claim, but found it conceivably could be true if one is talking about “cleanest per megawatt-hour of electricity produced.”
Frankly, however, that means squat to people living within, say, 40 miles of Parish, because despite apparent considerable spending by NRG to improve the plant, it remains one of the biggest single sources of air pollution in the country, regardless of how clean it is “per megawatt.”
The most recently available comparative data I can find still shows Parish farting out 20 million tons of CO2 each year (that’s millions with an “m” and tons with a “t”). In 2007, the Parish plant ranked No. 5 on a list of the worst CO2 polluters in the U.S. Perhaps more to the point, especially for those who continue to question the validity of terming carbon as a pollutant, the plant ranked No. 10 on a list of the nation’s worst mercury polluters.
Despite this, I am not calling for the dismantling of the Parish plant. I am working on becoming a realist. I like electricity that comes from a socket in my walls. I would like it better if it were generated from sun shining on my roof’s solar panels, but solar still is much more expensive than the grid, plus I’d still have to eat Parish’s dust even if my personal electricity were clean as the proverbial whistle.
Plus I’m in the footprint of the Houston megalopolis, for Christ’s sake. One way or another, we’re all here for a little trickle-down from the Fossil Fuel Giants. The bulk of my income used to derive from services provided to one of the world’s largest oil producers, for instance. And now, almost all our money comes from, yes, a power plant operator. We started this dance with our eyes open.
So I’m not asking to get out of my disease-for-cheap-electricity contract. But is it too much to ask that the polluters surrounding me live up to the same clean-air standards already enforced in other parts of the country? How about if I only have to get sick once a year because of air pollution instead of three or four times? In exchange, you can raise my bill $30 a month to recoup the cost of your new pollution control devices. Is that a fair deal?
→ B.Dunn, Jan 06, 2010, 10 07 am
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Why Your Kids Missed Those Flu Shots
(Medical • Government)
The other day, the mayor of the upscale Houston suburb of Sugar Land found himself a dose of flu vaccine, had it administered in front of the cameras and turned the event into a tone-deaf press release, urging his fellow citizens to follow his example and in fact get two vaccines from their doctors right away – one for the seasonal flu and one for the swine flu.
As noted here at the time, neither vaccine was available to most of his fellows – thanks in great part to government ineptitude and free-market forces gone awry.
But it’s nice to know that, while many of the 25 million residents of Texas have already contracted swine flu while waiting for the vaccine cavalry that never arrived, at least some high-risk citizens have found inoculation against the Pig Plague:
Employees of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Time Warner and several other big New York companies. Cross my heart. You just can’t make up stuff like this.
Even though it sounds like something out of the Black Helicopters Subscription Service, the same Centers for Disease Control that couldn’t get any swine flu vaccine into the Lone Star state before every cowboy caught the pandemic nonetheless managed to help get the vaccine into the veins of elite private employers – many of them, coincidentally, the same ones we bailed out with billions of our tax dollars after they blew up the financial system.
Obviously, then, if you’re Johnny Nobody out in the sticks, or if you’re unemployed anywhere – or even if you have an OK job right there in Emerald City – you’re just not quite as good as the citizens at JPGoldmanCiti, riding First Class and disease-free with Jesus, on the backs of the New American Peasantry.
Bitter? Who’s bitter?
→ B.Dunn, Nov 08, 2009, 05 01 am
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Betting On The Pandemic Vaccine Futures Market
(Medical • )
The New York Times finally discovers there’s a shortage of seasonal flu vaccine, and while that’s old news around here, these informational nuggets buried deep in the story are of some interest:
Vaccines, which involve living viruses, are much harder to make than most drugs. Profits are lower and unused flu vaccine expires after a few months. Also, vaccines are primarily intended for children, and Americans frequently sue when a child is injured…In 2004, only two companies were licensed to sell flu vaccine in the United States; now there are five, but only one, Sanofi-Pasteur, has a domestic plant. The others — GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, CSL Ltd. and Medimmune — use plants in England, Germany and Australia.
The drawback of relying on foreign plants was made clear recently when the Australian government pressured CSL to keep its vaccine at home instead of fulfilling its contract for 36 million doses of swine flu vaccine for the United States.
When forced to rely on an alleged “free market” to provide for world needs, here is one bottom line, also culled from the Times piece: “Even optimistic predictions say the world’s poorest countries will get only 10 percent of the vaccine they need by winter’s end.”
Which points to a moment of truth the hardcore Free-Market-Is-God proponents don’t usually like to focus on for more than a millisecond. Under pure capitalism, one group’s exciting wealth and power is dependent upon another group’s appalling poverty and powerlessness. In other words, it’s a great system as long as you’re not one of the slaves.
Extra credit assignment: Write a brief essay on whether it is appropriate to leave the manufacture of medicine vital to a society’s physical well being in the hands of for-profit ventures. If not, name a potential alternative.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 05, 2009, 03 18 am
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