Friday, December 23, 2016

Hidden costs of cars, how refineries kill

Center for Public Integrity : "There are 141 oil refineries in the United States. Where they are clustered — east and south of Houston, south of Los Angeles, northeast of San Francisco — they are prodigious sources of air pollution and inflict a sort of low-grade misery — rank odors, bright flares, loud noises — on their neighbors.

They also pose an existential threat, as evidenced by the more than 500 refinery accidents reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1994. The Anacortes disaster occurred five years after the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, blew up, killing 15 workers and injuring 180. It came two years before a fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, sent a plume of pungent, black smoke over the Bay Area, and five years before an explosion at the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance, California, nearly unleashed a ground-hugging cloud of deadly acid into a city of almost 150,000 people."

Saturday, December 17, 2016

Roads destroy nature by carving up the landscape

New map reveals shattering effect of roads on nature | Environment | The Guardian: "Rampant road building has shattered the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too tiny to support significant wildlife, a new study has revealed."
Another of the many example of the costs of the autosprawl system that are not paid for by those who profit from it. In other words, subsidy. In some cases, even money cannot fix the damage. We pay with a less secure biosphere.