Sunday, November 06, 2022
The PFAS scare again
This is an old Greenie scare but there is still no clear evidence that PFAS compounds are harmful to humans in the concentrations normally encountered
That the chemical concerned gets into people and animals one way or another has been known for decades. But the concentrations found are extremely minute -- measured in a few parts per billion. So how toxic is it? It certainly seems to be seriously toxic to a range of animals but evidence of toxicity to people is slight. And don't forget that this has been under investigation for a long time.
Additionally, it has been estimated that there is by now some of it in every American, so bad effects should be very evident by now. But they are not.
Toxic 'forever chemicals' linked [controversially] to a slew of diseases and disorders have been discovered in every baby product sampled in a new study.
Laboratory tests commissioned by the Washington DC based Environmental Working Group (EWG) found per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) on toys, clothing, bibs and bedding.
PFAS are a common ingredient in clothing and other household items because they are durable and can repel grease, water, stains and heat.
But the scientists warned sometimes they can wear off as dust and are then inhaled by youngsters. They are also durable, and can stay in the environment for long periods of time.
The chemicals have been linked [controversially] to an increased risk of cancer, birth defects, autism and infertility.
Sydney Evans, an analyst at EWG and author of the study, told DailyMail.com the risks from them 'far outweighs any sort of stain proofing'.
The EWG, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization commissioned a series of independent lab tests on the products.
The research initially looked at levels of fluorine in the items, a chemical element used to make plastics which can cause teeth decay, osteoporosis and harm to kidneys, bones, nerves and muscles.
Researchers then tested the 10 items with the highest levels of fluorine for PFAS.
The 10 products were all children products that included Sealy and Graco bedding, bibs manufactured by Bumkins and Hudson, UGG boots, a Columbia jacket, a bucket hat and pajamas made by Carters and a snack bag also made by Bumkin.
There is no limit on PFAS chemicals in toys at a federal level, but limits have been put in place on its amounts in drinking water.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended in guidance issued in July that its levels should not exceed 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) in drinking water.
Several states — including Maine — have also moved to ban its use in products including clothing and bedding.
In the study, the biggest offender was Hudson's Baby Unisex Baby Waterproof Bib, which had 191.985 parts per billion (ppb) of the substance.
The other products ranged from 1ppt to 52ppt, with researchers warning that any contamination is dangerous.
Researchers warn that exposure to 'forever chemicals' in youth can affect a child's social and physical development, and impact behavior as they get older.
A University of Texas study last year found that children exposed to PFAS in the womb were more likely to develop autism.
Long term exposure can [allegedly] also leave a person at higher risk of kidney, testicular, ovarian, prostate, thyroid and bone marrow cancer when they reach adulthood.
The EPA limits PFAS to 0.004ppt for drinking water. The metric measures the prevalence of particle within a swab sample.
EWG researchers found that fluorine on all 34 baby and infant products that they tested (left). The top ten products in fluorine concentration were also tested for PFAS.
What ARE 'forever chemicals'?
'Forever chemicals' are a class of common industrial compounds that don't break down when they're released into the environment.
Humans are exposed to these chemicals after they've come in contact with food, soil or water reservoirs.
These chemicals — known more properly as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — are added to cookware, carpets, textiles and other items to make them more water- and stain-repellant.
PFAS contamination has been detected in water near manufacturing facilities, as well as at military bases and firefighting training facilities where flame-retardant foam is used.
The chemicals have been linked [controversially] to an increased risk of kidney and testicular cancer, and damage to the immune system, as well as birth defects, smaller birth weights, and decreased vaccine response in children.
Ms Evans explained that the high levels of PFAS in these products add to the overall exposure in the household, spreading via dust particles that can be inhaled or ingested.
She warns that children in particular are at risk, because they are more likely to put their hands both on the floor and in their mouth — consuming pollutants.
Another bib, the Bumkins waterproof SuperBib, was also found to have the toxic chemical - with 3.482ppb.
The Sealy Baby – Waterproof Fitted Toddler and Baby Crib Mattress Pad Cover has 0.258ppb of PFAS, while the Sealy Baby – Stain Protection Waterproof Fitted Toddler & Baby Crib Mattress Pad Cover Protector had 5.71ppb.
Another bedding product, Graco's Quick Connect Waterproof Play yard Sheets, with 6.255ppb.
Clothing products were vulnerable to contamination as well.
UGG Unisex's Child T Mini Bailey Bow Fashion Boot was found to have 52.207ppb, was the most contaminated of any clothing good tested.
Other contaminated items included Columbia Boys Glennaker Rain Jacket (1.608ppb detected), Carters Reversible Bucket Hat (24,029ppb) and Carter's Baby Boys' 1–Piece Dinosaur Snug Fit Cotton PJs (1.016ppb).
A snack bag the researchers tested, Bumkins' reusable fabric, food safe, snack back, had PFAS contamination as well (7.159ppb).
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Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron: Prioritizing ESG Investments ‘Inconsistent’ With Law
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron previously warned that the state pension funds cannot legally make environmental, social, and governance considerations when investing the dollars of public employees.
This week, Cameron and state Treasurer Allison Ball, both elected Republicans, asked two state pension systems to provide proof that pension funds are primarily focused on return on investment in decisions on where state employee money goes.
“Recently, Treasurer Ball asked the Office of the Attorney General whether environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment practices, which introduce mixed motivations to investment decisions, are consistent with Kentucky law governing fiduciary duties owed by investment managers to Kentucky’s public pensions,” the Oct. 31 letter from Cameron and Ball says. “The Attorney General opined that such practices violate statutory and contractual fiduciary duties.”
The letter was sent to David L. Eager, executive director of the Kentucky Public Pensions Authority that manages $38.07 billion in retirement funds, and Gary L. Harbin, executive secretary of the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System, which manages $28 billion.
“We write today to request that you, as the executive directors of the Commonwealth’s major public pension systems, advise our Offices about your systems’ efforts to ensure that ESG considerations are not being implemented in your systems’ investment decisions, consistent with Kentucky law,” the letter continues.
The letter gave the pension directors a deadline of Nov. 23 to respond. However, that has been extended to early December after the respective boards of trustees for the pensions meet, Eager told The Daily Signal.
“That is a decision the board will make, not the executive director,” Eager told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
Eager said the teachers pension board will meet on Dec. 1 and the public pension board will meet on Dec. 5.
In a more definitive way, a top official with the state’s Teachers’ Retirement System told The Daily Signal that it is not engaged in ESG investing.
“TRS is happy to respond to the recent letter from the AG and Treasurer as requested,” Beau Barnes, deputy executive secretary and general counsel to the teachers pension system, said in an email. “TRS is not an ESG investor. TRS investment policy makes enhancing and protecting asset value the goal of all investing, which is consistent with TRS’s fiduciary duty under law. This fiduciary responsibility is to achieve the best returns within acceptable levels of risk for its members.”
In a public statement this week, Cameron said: “Rising inflation has made protecting the retirement security of Kentucky’s public employees even more essential. Prioritizing ESG-related investments above the financial interests of investors is inconsistent with Kentucky law, and we’ve sent this letter to ensure these practices are not at work in the Commonwealth.”
Consumers’ Research, a national organization advocating against ESG investing in both the public and private sector, praised Ball and Cameron for taking this stand.
“The joint action of Treasurer Ball and Attorney General Cameron sends a clear message to Kentucky’s pension fund investment managers: their obligations are to work for the pensioners, not the Democratic Party, international climate groups, or megalomaniacs like Larry Fink,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, said in a public statement. “We applaud both officials in standing up for the citizens of Kentucky, who are being crushed due to reckless, illegal actions by companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street that put progressive politics above their legal and moral duties.”
The Kentucky attorney general’s office issued an opinion in May that pension managers must make investment decisions based on the interest of members and beneficiaries, under state law.
“In sum, politics has no place in Kentucky’s public pensions. Therefore, it is the opinion of this Office that ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and ‘environmental, social, and governance’ investment practices that introduce mixed motivations to investment decisions are inconsistent with Kentucky law governing fiduciary duties owed by investment management firms to Kentucky’s public pension plans,” the opinion says.
The opinion says investment managers “must be single-minded in their motivation and actions and their decisions must be solely in the interest of the members and beneficiaries [and for] the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to members and beneficiaries.’”
Ball initially requested the attorney general’s opinion on the matter.
“Kentuckians worked hard for decades to earn their pensions and rely on them for livelihood in retirement. It is important their investments are maximized, not politicized,” Ball said in a public statement. “As the watchdog of taxpayer dollars, I remain committed to ensuring funds are invested and spent consistent with the law.”
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Annual parade of hypocrisy is set to descend at summit
Every year, global climate summits feature a parade of hypocrisy, as the world’s elite arrive on private jets to lecture humanity on cutting carbon emissions.
This November’s climate summit in Egypt will offer more breathtaking hypocrisy than usual, because the world’s rich will zealously lecture poor countries about the dangers of fossil fuels – after devouring massive amounts of new gas, coal, and oil.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up energy prices even further, wealthy countries have been scouring the world for new sources of energy.
Britain vehemently denounced fossil fuels at the Glasgow climate summit just last year, but now plans to keep coal-fired plants available this winter instead of shutting almost all of them as previously planned. Thermal coal imports by the EU from Australia, South Africa and Indonesia increased more than 11-fold.
Meanwhile, a new trans-Saharan gas pipeline will allow Europe to tap directly into gas from Niger, Algeria and Nigeria; Germany is reopening shuttered coal power plants; and Italy is planning to import 40 per cent more gas from northern Africa. And the US is going cap-in-hand to Saudi Arabia to grovel for more oil production.
At the climate summit in Egypt, the leaders from these countries will all somehow declare with straight faces that poor countries must avoid fossil fuel exploitation, for fear of worsening climate change.
These very same rich countries will encourage the world’s poorest to focus instead on green energy alternatives like off-grid solar and wind energy.
They’re already making the case. In a speech widely interpreted as being about Africa, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said it would be “delusional” for countries to invest more in gas and oil exploration.
The hypocrisy is simply breathtaking. Every single rich country today became wealthy thanks to exploitation of fossil fuels. The world’s major development organisations – at the behest of wealthy countries – refuse to fund fossil fuel exploitation that poor countries could use to lift themselves out of poverty. What’s more, the elite prescription for the world’s poor – green energy – is incapable of transforming lives.
That’s because sun and wind power are useless when it is cloudy, night-time, or there is no wind. Off-grid solar power can provide a nice solar light, but typically can’t even power a family’s fridge or oven, let alone provide the power that communities need to run everything from farms to factories, the ultimate engines of growth.
A study in Tanzania found almost 90 per cent of households given off-grid electricity just want to be hooked up to the national grid to receive fossil fuel access. The first rigorous test published on the impact of solar panels on the lives of poor people found they got a little bit more electricity – the ability to power a lamp during the day – but there was no measurable impact on their lives: they did not increase savings or spending, did not work more or start more businesses, and their children did not study more.
Moreover, solar panels and wind turbines are useless at tackling one of the main energy problems of the world’s poor. Nearly 2.5 billion people continue to suffer from indoor air pollution, burning dirty fuels like wood and dung to cook and keep warm. Solar panels don’t solve that problem because they are too weak to power clean stoves and heaters.
In contrast, grid electrification – which nearly everywhere means mostly fossil fuels – has significant positive impacts on household income, expenditure, and education. A study in Bangladesh showed that electrified households experienced a 21 per cent average jump in income and a 1.5 per cent reduction in poverty every year.
The biggest swindle of all is that rich world leaders have somehow managed to portray themselves as green evangelists, while more than three-quarters of their enormous primary energy production comes from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Less than 12 per cent of their energy comes from renewables, with most from wood and hydro. Just 2.4 per cent is solar and wind.
Compare this to Africa, which is the most renewable continent in the world, with half of its energy produced by renewables. But these renewables are almost entirely wood, straws, and dung, and they are really a testament to how little energy the continent has access to. Despite all the hype, the continent gets just 0.3 per cent of its energy from solar and wind.
To solve global warming, rich countries must invest much more in research and development on better green technologies, from fusion, fission and second-generation biofuels to solar and wind with massive batteries. The crucial insight is to innovate their real cost down below fossil fuels. That way everyone will eventually switch. But telling the world’s poor to live with unreliable, expensive, weak power is an insult.
There is already pushback from the world’s developing countries, who see the hypocrisy for what it is: Egypt’s Finance Minister recently said that poor countries must not be “punished”, and warned that climate policy should not add to their suffering. That warning needs to be listened to. Europe is scouring the world for more fossil fuels because the continent needs them for its growth and prosperity. That same opportunity should not be withheld from the world’s poorest.
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Australia: Price caps on natural gas a cure worse than the disease
When a good becomes scarcer, the logical response is to reduce its demand and increase its supply.
The “solutions” that are being floated to the recent surge in gas prices would do the exact opposite. Were the price spikes merely transient, the resulting damage might be acceptable. There is, however, no reason to believe they are a passing phenomenon.
It is true that the higher prices reflect the war in Ukraine, with the sanctions on Russia unleashing a worldwide scramble for alternative sources of natural gas.
But the sanctions are not about to be lifted; and even if they were, the supply disruptions will have a lasting impact in making relatively stable producers, such as Australia, more attractive to global buyers.
As those buyers switch from less to more reliable sources, demand for our exports will increase, placing added pressure on domestic gas availability and further raising prices.
The Albanese government will therefore face mounting calls to intervene on consumers’ behalf. The question is whether it can do so in ways that facilitate, rather than impede, Australia’s adjustment to the gas market’s new realities.
The strongest case for intervention is in respect of households. While welfare payments are indexed (and hence will adjust automatically as rising energy prices push up the consumer price index), most residential consumers remain fully exposed to price hikes. The Ukraine war and its consequences for energy bills are hardly events they could have insured themselves against; it can make sense for the government to step in as an insurer of last resort, smoothing the cost of wars, like that of pandemics and natural disasters, over time.
Providing low and middle-income earners with cash transfers that offset the war-related component of the price increases would be the best way of fulfilling that role. As consumers would still face the higher prices, their incentives to economise on energy would be undiminished, particularly if the transfers were clearly time-limited. Overall, the adjustment process would be neither slowed nor blunted.
In contrast, the approach many European countries have adopted of subsidising and/or capping power bills is administratively simpler but – unless the subsidies apply only to a basic level of energy use – has the perverse effect of boosting energy demand, aggravating the underlying problem.
The case for assisting commercial and industrial users is much weaker. Unlike residential consumers, whose incomes are largely fixed in the short term, businesses can raise their prices – and when cost increases affect entire industries, they typically do.
To that extent, their viability is determined through changes in the level and structure of prices. Moreover, because it is the firms that make the greatest use of gas that will have to raise their prices most, allowing the price mechanism to work will shift demand from energy guzzlers to more energy-efficient firms and products, curbing gas consumption and dampening the price spikes.
A hands-off approach consequently has compelling merits. But that is not going to quell the calls for a mandatory code that forces the major gas exporters to supply part of their output to the domestic market at a low, administratively determined, price.
Viewed in historical perspective, those proposals are a throwback to the days before the Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments progressively dismantled the byzantine regulations that kept the prices domestic oil and gas producers received below world levels. Unfortunately, in a far more globalised market, the current proposals could prove even more harmful than their unlamented predecessors.
To begin with, even assuming the schemes were workable, the assistance they provide would be completely untargeted. Far from rewarding firms that had economised on the use of gas, the largest benefits would flow to the firms that had cut back least; as those firms used the subsidies to displace more efficient rivals, overall productivity levels would fall, and living standards with them.
Nor is that effect likely to be trivial: in his classic study of broadly similar schemes, Yale’s Paul MacAvoy found those misallocations meant that each dollar in mandated sales cost the economy two.
Compounding the damage, artificially low, capped, prices would encourage gas to be used instead of other energy sources, whose prices would remain more volatile. Domestic demand for gas would therefore rise, slashing national income both by forcing gas producers to forgo higher-priced export sales and by promoting a use of resources that took no account of relative costs.
And as firms locked in gas-intensive methods of production, repealing the scheme would become ever harder, perpetuating the damage.
Last but not least, retrospectively imposing the proposed mandates on the gas exporters would deter new investment by directly reducing their profits and increasing sovereign risk.
The proponents of these schemes strenuously deny that investment would be chilled. But as far back as 1980-81, assessments by Treasury, the Industries Assistance Commission and the OECD all concluded that the two-price schemes had (in the words of the OECD) helped precipitate the “sharp decline in exploration activity throughout the 1970s”. To believe reinstating them in new form would not undermine the development of desperately needed supplies is as inconsistent with decades of careful analysis as it is with common sense.
As a result, were the proposals adopted, we would find ourselves in the worst of all possible worlds: greater demand, lower supply and pervasive inefficiency.
Despite that, the government may eventually feel obliged to increase the domestic availability of gas, particularly to the major industrial users.
In that event, it should purchase the gas at world prices and then require those users to bid for it in a competitive auction. That would ensure the gas went to the firms that expected to extract the greatest value from its use – and unlike the proposed schemes, whose economic costs are completely opaque, the difference between the amount taxpayers had paid for the gas and the receipts from its sale would transparently indicate the subsidy that was being provided.
In the end, if the current crisis is as deep as it is, and the prospects so alarming, it is because our gas market has been comprehensively distorted by ill-conceived policies.
Governments have stymied gas supply by prohibiting onshore development – while greatly increasing gas demand, both by encouraging the massive deployment of renewables (which, being highly intermittent, had to be matched by quick-start, gas-fuelled capacity) and by accelerating the decommissioning of coal-fired plants.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the lights are now flickering – nor that when they’re on, they are scarcely affordable. With year after year of failed interventions finally coming home to roost, squaring the error would be the greatest folly of all.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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