Indiana Allows BP To Pollute Lake Michigan 490
An anonymous reader writes "Indiana regulators exempted BP from state environmental laws to clear the way for a $3.8 billion expansion that will allow the company to refine heavier Canadian crude oil. They justified the move in part by noting the project will create 80 new jobs. The company will now be allowed to dump an average of 1,584 pounds of ammonia and 4,925 pounds of sludge into Lake Michigan every day."
Proper disposal? (Score:1, Interesting)
Ohhhh, my bad, they probably don't pay any taxes already...
There goes the beach vacation. (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact is that I don't think I want to boat, or have my kids play, in the water there.
Sure, maybe it'll only be so many thousand tons of crud in a bazillion gallons of water. But if anyone in my family ever came down with any disease in the next 40 years, I'd certainly feel a bit guilty.
Why Dump Ammonia? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about the other states? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing new (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's an interesting little essay on "The Myth of the Rational Voter". WARNING!!!! Intelligence and open-mindedness required! http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/06/bryan-capl
Re:If it's good for the canadians (Score:2, Interesting)
Ironically this deal and others like it have gotten an enormous amount of bad press in Alberta - you'd think we'd be happy to export this crap, but the local media can only see the $$$ lost in not refining it ourselves.
learn to read hippies (Score:3, Interesting)
they aren't exempt from anything, they merely got permision to use the maximum level allowed.
i don't see the issue unless you are planning on swimming right beside the outlet pipe. http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0209/featu re2/online_extra.html [nationalgeographic.com]
people USE 2.4 billion gallons a DAY and it doesn't even make a dent in the lake, so you can imagine the bullshit tiny % of pollution a few thousand pounds makes. I'd bet money animals and humans contribute more pollution to the river in the form of urine per day.
so why don't you all try and have some perspective for once and not jump on the "omgz the evil corperation is killing the world" bandwagon.
Re:Why Dump Ammonia? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Why mess with the goo? http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Re:Lake Michigan (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not trying to defend the practice of polluting lakes, but I'd like to point out that this particular refinery was apparently already polluting the lake and it hasn't wrecked your fishing, tourism, and health. I'm surprised they got permission to pollute more, but at the same time, please, let's not exaggerate. The pollution will apparently still meet federal guidelines. If that's not strict enough, start hounding your representative/senators to spend more of their "environmental time" worrying about real environmental issues such as this rather than wasting time on CO2/global warming.
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:5, Interesting)
The lake is over 1,000 cubic miles of water, so even if the water was stagnant it would take a long time to raise the PPM of the discharge to a harmful level, assuming good mixing (yes, yes, assumptions make an ass out of you and me, blah blah blah).
If the flow rate through the lake is several million gallons a day then this discharge could be diluted to the point of irrelevance, and it probably is.
Now you'd want to take into account other man made discharges into the lake, but these are the questions you ask to determine if this actually causes any harm. What I described is pretty much what the state and national EPA does for these sorts of things.
The fact is that human activity has an impact on the environment. Given that, the pragmatic question is how much can mother nature "take for the team." The answer? some, definately, without causing any harm.
It's an old maxim- the dose makes the poison. You can put bad stuff into something you want to preserve without causing harm.
Now I will admit I don't know enough about ocean and freshwater chemistry to know where to even start figuring out the ultimate disposition of the dumped products. I am guessing, however, that somebody who works for the EPA and is involved in the permiting process has a decent idea of how that all works.
The power plant I work at frequently discharges water with various chemical adultrents into the atlantic ocean at up to 100 gallons per minute. That discharge, however, is diluted by 420,000 gpm of straight sea water used for cooling, and then mixed in well below the surface a mile offshore.
What could you safely drink if it was diluted to 1 part per 4,200 parts? sulfuric acid? Antifreeze? Drano? All of the above?
(pardon the shitty writing, I'm tired & about to go to bed)
Re:can nuclear power replace petroleum? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ammonia is a plant fertilizer - and nitrogen is expensive these days. It'll up the algae level unless some bright spak can find a way to sell it to farmers.
Re:Free trade and multinationals (Score:3, Interesting)
You speak as if lowering one's standards to compete was the obvious choice. If third world countries want certain jobs bad enough that they are willing to poison their children with heavy metals and dioxins to get them then I say let them. If that is what it takes to keep those jobs in the United States then let them go where there are people willing to do them. The standard of living here in the United States is high enough now that we should be willing to sacrifice some potentially less desiriable jobs for the sake of more environmental quality. The thing about environmental quality, and the reason why we here in the United States care about it and can afford it, is that it is a luxury good. What do I mean by that you say? Well, environmental quality is a luxury good insofar as people are willing to pay more for it (i.e. sacrifice a few low desirability jobs) the better off they are. There are millions of people in the third world who are struggling to survive and therefore they cannot afford to be as picky. There is no way that you are going to win a race to the bottom to compete with a desparate Bangladeshi for that last sweatshop manufacturing job, nor should you even want to...just let it go.
The problem is that those 80-100 refinery jobs create a special interest group (i.e. those people who may want or need those refinery jobs) for which the enforcement of environment regulations is a voting issue (since it means either not getting or losing their jobs). It is this web of special interests (horse trading) that results in hundreds of thousands of people in Indiana all paying a small price (somewhat reduced environmental quality) so that 80-100 people can have jobs. There are millions of such horse trades per year at both the federal and state levels, each of them too small to get worked up about individually when the costs are aggregated over all of the rest of us, but which hurt us collectively all the same (i.e. death by a thousand cuts). The best way to counter the BP deal would be for enough Indiana citizens to lobby their state and local governments for better environmental enforcement. The only question now is how bad do you want it? Lobbying is hard work and you can bet that those job seekers want those refinery jobs so it boils down to a question of who wants it more...I am bettting that in Indiana it is probably the potential refinery workers and not the environmental lobbyists.
I live here... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:can nuclear power replace petroleum? (Score:1, Interesting)
The way to fix that is to confront Bush with his "but the country we signed the treaty with doesn't exist anymore" position and have him cancel the treaties banning us from building the breeder reactors that "might" cause "nuclear proliferation". People can start building Integral Fast Reactors, which are not only far safer than any of our current designs (liquid metal coolant to avoid the "china syndrome" of hot steam in event of a breach, metal-packed fuel cells that expand when heated, eventually reaching a point where the radioactive elements are too far apart to react, gravity-powered cooling systems, etc.) and most of all, produces waste that is radioactive for decades rather than centuries, and has medical uses, to boot.
Not only that, the fears of "proliferation" are unfounded, the fuel is essentially a soup of a dozen different transuranic elements when it goes in, and when it comes out, contains no Plutonium. Terrists would have to climb down into a live reactor to remove the fuel while it's reacting in order to obtain Plutonium, and the waste products are no less secure than the tanks of waste from our existing reactors, only there'd be less of it to worry about.
Re:I live here... (Score:3, Interesting)
Being in Milwaukee, myself, I can relate. I only live a few blocks from the lake (about a mile south of the port) and when the wind blows just right, you definitely don't want to be outside for long.
I wouldn't even think of using Bradford Beach (which could be a really nice beach). The only time I've ever actually ventured into the Lake Michigan (aside from some parks up north) has been for polar bearing on New Year's. I just hope that the various diseases don't survive cold ;)
On a more related note... Indiana, specifically Gary, seems to have such a disregard for the lake that I'm not so sure this deal with BP will really make it that much worse.