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Costs of water pollution, a global scourge, 'underestimated and underappreciated'
A new World Bank report highlights the extensive damage to health, ecosystems, and economies due to water pollution.
Toxic waste could endanger drinking water if Santos CSG project goes ahead - report.
Up to 130 spills of toxic waste could occur if the Santos Narrabri coal seam gas project goes ahead, potentially endangering high-quality drinking and irrigation water, according to a leading academic.
Up to 130 spills of toxic waste could occur if the Santos Narrabri coal seam gas project goes ahead, potentially endangering high-quality drinking and irrigation water, according to a leading academic.
In a damning report obtained by Guardian Australia, RMIT hydrologist Matthew Currell said he found basic scientific gaps in the 7,000-page Narrabri gas project environmental impact statement (EIS).
Currell, a senior lecturer in environmental engineering, said the EIS was missing analysis of waste water from existing gas wells and contains conflicting information on whether the project area was part of the recharge zone for the Great Artesian Basin.
He said neither Santos nor the New South Wales government had enough monitoring wells to ensure groundwater was properly monitored.
“[The company and NSW government] don’t have enough monitoring wells in shallow aquifers or baseline chemistry data to get good picture of groundwater chemistry and levels of key CSG-related contaminants,” Currell said.
If the project goes ahead, 850 gas wells will be drilled through shallow aquifers – used by farmers and residents for drinking, stock water and irrigation – into a hard layer of aquitard to access the coal seams below. Santos says the project could provide more than 50% of the state’s gas needs.
Based on previous studies, including one by UNSW for the state’s chief scientist in 2014, Currell said CSG-produced water contaminants included high levels of sodium as well as trace elements of barium and boron, heavy metals, fluoride and ammonia. But he said Santos had not provided its own wastewater tests on samples already being accessed in test wells in the EIS.
Currell said the water in the shallow aquifers in the area produced particularly high quality water which would be at risk given the engineering challenges of large amounts of waste water combined with the 25-year span of the proposed project.
He said all CSG wells produced wastewater which needed to be managed and the track record to date in the Pilliga showed a number of contaminations with a small number of wells – a fraction of the 850 that are in the project.
“Using these [US] spill rates, which are based on tens of thousands of wells across the US, something on the order of 15 to 130 spills of wastewater could be expected to occur in association with the Narrabri gas project, if the planned 850 wells are drilled,” Currell writes.
His report was commissioned for the Northwest alliance, a group of landholders opposed to the gas project, to inform its submission to the NSW government on the EIS.
Submissions closed earlier this week and it has been estimated more than 15,000 contributions were received. The NSW Department of Planning has yet to collate the total number.
The project has some support in Narrabri but many farming communities who rely on underground water are opposed to it. The local NSW Nationals MP, Kevin Humphries, supports the project but last week, the NSW Country Women’s Association passed a motion calling for a ban on unconventional gas exploration in the state.
While the Narrabri shire council has been generally supportive, its submission, reported by Fairfax earlier this week, outlined a number of concerns over the environmental impacts and a lack of faith in the capacity of the NSW government to monitor its effects. By-products will include 37.5 gigalitres of water and 430,500 tonnes of salt over the life of the project.
By-products will include 37.5 gigalitres of water and 430,500 tonnes of salt over the life of the project.
Santos needs the approval of the planning assessment commission in the NSW government. It also needs federal government approval following an assessment by the independent expert scientific committee on coal seam gas under the so-called water trigger in the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
It is highly likely any decision by the NSW government would not be made until at least the second half of next year, potentially in the lead up to a federal government election and the NSW election in March 2019.
Currell said, as a scientist, it was not up to him to form a view on whether the project should go ahead but to provide the data to inform the decision. He likened the shallow aquifers under the Pilliga to the headwaters of a river which would also have effects down stream.
“The fact that to date the Pilliga is a relatively pristine area, with few existing land-use impacts threatening groundwater quality, means that the project area is one where particularly high-quality water can be ensured,” his report says.
“As such, a greater than normal level of protection (eg, restriction of potentially polluting land-use activities) may be warranted – as is standard practice for many drinking water catchments.”
Currell’s report contradicts former CSIRO hydrogeologist, Richard Cresswell, who told farmers in 2015 the project was no threat to the water resource because there was no linkage between the shallow aquifers and the coal seam gas below.
Cresswell was employed by Jacobs Engineering who provide services to Santos.
Currell’s report echoes submissions by other groups, such as the Maules Creek community council (MCCC), who said fundamental data was missing from the EIS, including infrastructure locations, well locations, the baseline data for soil, surface and ground water quality, and the air quality at those locations.
“Crucial location information required by landholders to assess the [project] has been deliberately held back, post approval, to be revealed in the field development protocol, which is of little use to landholders making decisions today,” the MCCC submission says.
“Baseline data at those locations, critical to hold the proponent to account is also not available, further impairing affected landholders ability to make plans to manage the impacts whether they are supportive or against the NGP. Given Santos’s sketchy track record in the Pilliga, this information is essential to protect landholders, the environment and the community.”
Anne Kennedy, president of the Artesian Bore Water Users Association and the Northwest Alliance, said without underground water, farmers like her and her husband would have to walk off their farm at Coonamble near the Pilliga. They have little rain water and due to soil type, they cannot store water in dams.
She said Currell’s report backs up previous reports such as soil scientist Robert Banks’ scientific review for the Great Artesian Basin Advisory Group.
“The single most vital important point when considering this project is that water is life,” Kennedy said. “Matthew Currell has pointed out how critical water is and the Great Artesian Basin is Australia’s greatest resource as we move towards a time when wars will be fought over water, not oil or gas.”
After the submissions are collated, Santos will provide responses to the issues raised.
“Santos welcomes the opportunity for the community to have their say on the Narrabri gas project and the EIS and we recognise the important role this part of the assessment process will play in ensuring a robust and thorough assessment,” a spokesperson said.
“The Department of Planning and Environment will highlight the submissions they feel contain issues that require further consideration or information. Santos will respond to those issues in due course as part of the assessment process.”
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Inside the Internet's War on Science.
Welcome to the corner of the internet that’s hell-bent on convincing you that GMOs are poisonous, vaccines cause autism, and climate change is a government-sponsored hoax. The message is traveling far and wide.
In January, Natural News shared a big story on Facebook: A federal scientist had affirmed Donald Trump’s belief that vaccines cause autism.
According to this researcher, the government had supposedly suppressed study data showing that African-American boys had a “340 percent increased risk for autism” after being vaccinated. “Despite being cast to the lunatic fringe by the mainstream media for his remarks,” the article said, the scientist “has confirmed Trump’s suspicions.”
The claim was false — but the story was an enduring hit. Since it was first published in November 2015, the link has popped up in alternative-health and anti-vaccine communities with names like “Vaccination Information Network” and “Healing ADHD & Asperger’s Without Hurting.” It’s been shared by Trump supporters, a fan account for the hacking group Anonymous, the conspiracy theory subreddit, and a former X Factor contestant on Twitter. All told, it’s garnered more than 141,000 likes, shares, and (overwhelmingly positive) comments on Facebook, according to the social media–tracking tool CrowdTangle. Meanwhile, a Time story that poked holes in the claim got 3,300.
Now anyone on Facebook can take their snake oil straight to the masses.
Welcome to the vast universe of self-built social media empires devoted to spreading false, misleading, and polarizing science and health news — sometimes further and wider than the real information. Here, climate change is a government-sponsored hoax, fluoridated water is poisonous, cannabis can cure cancer, and airplanes are constantly spraying pesticides and biological waste into the air. Genetically modified food is destroying humanity and the planet. Vaccines are experimental, autism-causing injections forced on innocent babies. We can’t trust anything that we eat, drink, breathe, or medicate with, nor rely on physicians and public health agencies to act in our best interests. Between the organic recipes and menacing stock images of syringes and pills, a clear theme emerges: Everything is rigged — by doctors, Big Pharma, Monsanto, the FDA — and the mainstream media isn’t telling us. (Also, there’s usually a link to buy vitamins.) This messaging reflects a new, uniquely conspiratorial strain of libertarianism that hijacks deeply intimate issues — your body, your health, your children’s health. It shares magnificently.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (center) is joined by Robert DeNiro (right) to discuss his $100,000 challenge. World Mercury Project / Youtube / Via youtube.com
Indeed, gone are the days when these types of stories would struggle for traction in a media landscape dominated by a few television networks, newspapers, and radio stations. Now anyone on Facebook can take their snake oil straight to the masses — and their message is reverberating in the highest levels of government. Vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who says he’s in touch with Trump about a “vaccine safety commission,” recently announced a $100,000 “challenge” to prove their safety. Andrew Wakefield, who helped start the anti-vaccine movement with a fraudulent 1998 study that linked vaccines to autism, showed up at an inaugural ball. The president has called climate change a “hoax” and appointed a skeptic to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Pseudoscience is closer than ever to the mainstream.
Perhaps the loudest voice in the anti-science news ecosystem is Mike Adams, a Texas software engineer turned media mogul who claims he cured himself of “chronic back pain, high cholesterol, depression, hypoglycemia, and borderline type-2 diabetes” through holistic medicine and a regimented diet. The transformation inspired him in 2003 to found the empire now known as Natural News (tagline: “The world’s top news source on natural health”).
Since then, Adams — who dubs himself “The Health Ranger” in keeping with his straight-talking, living-off-the-earth persona — has churned out every imaginable conspiracy theory about medicine, wellness, food, and the environment, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that refutes his claims. (Adams denied multiple interview requests through an assistant.) In addition to Natural News — which has a staff of 20, a built-in social network, and a blog network — Adams claims to run more than 100 websites, including a search engine that separates “independent” from “mainstream” news, holistic medicine and wellness sites, and “alternative news” sites. He runs an herbal supplement store (and peddles its products in Natural News articles), a newsletter, a podcast, a comic strip, and a nonprofit dedicated to sharing “lifesaving knowledge for enhanced nutrition and food self-reliance.”
Mike Adams, Natural News founder TheHealthRanger / Via youtube.com
He has a lab that conducts “forensic investigations” of food, which Natural News then covers; one claiming to have discovered low levels of heavy metals in organic food made it onto The Dr. Oz Show in 2014. He’s recorded rap songs about GMOs, written books and e-books (How to Halt Diabetes in 25 Days), and published an “independent, peer-reviewed” scientific journal that, aside from one article with his byline, consists of summaries of Natural News stories. He has more than 112,000 Twitter followers, 34,000 Pinterest followers, and 131,000 YouTube subscribers. He tells advertisers that NaturalNews.com has 6 million unique visitors a month, but according to the analytics firm comScore, the average is closer to 1.6 million.
Facebook, though, has been undeniably effective at getting the word out. Adams is involved with a handful of pages, including GMO Dangers (over 296,000 likes), but the most popular by far is Natural News, which went from about 22,000 Facebook fans in early 2010 to more than 2.1 million likes in March 2017. The account — which is peppered with charming photos of organic blackberries and cute farm animals alongside questions about Barack Obama’s “fake” birth certificate and “doubts” about the September 11 attacks — has enjoyed many blockbusters. “Global warming data FAKED by government to fit climate change fictions,” a story from 2014, garnered more than 114,000 likes, shares, and comments. There were 200,000 for the “five biggest lies about Ebola being pushed by government and mass media.” “Why flu shots are the greatest fraud in medical history”: 140,000. “EVERYTHING IS RIGGED,” a 36-item list that started with “the entire mainstream media” and ended with “the origin of the universe (the official narrative is a laughable fairy tale)”: 63,000. When Chipotle was struggling with E. coli contamination in 2015, Adams insisted that the biotech industry was orchestrating “bioterrorism attacks” on the fast-food chain in retaliation for using non-genetically modified ingredients. His theory was liked, commented on, and shared 127,000 times, including by comedian D.L. Hughley.
D.L. Hughley shares a Natural News article about Chipotle on Facebook in 2015. Facebook: RealDLHughley
And sometimes, Natural News travels further on Facebook than mainstream media outlets. As Ebola spread across West Africa in the summer and fall of 2014, health and law-enforcement agencies warned of companies selling unproven solutions and therapies. A USA Today story about the scams racked up only roughly 220 likes, comments, and shares, while The Guardian’s had just over 950. Natural News, meanwhile, wrote that health authorities were ignoring the so-called cure nanosilver because it “is an obvious threat to pharmaceutical interests,” and causing “thousands of needless deaths.” It got over 32,000.
“Maximally divisive, maximally paranoid, violent” — that’s how Steven Novella, an assistant professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine, describes Adams. “He tells readers, ‘Don’t tell anybody, trust me and my pseudoscience, it’s all a big giant conspiracy.’”
“He tells readers, ‘Don’t tell anybody, trust me and my pseudoscience, it’s all a big giant conspiracy.’”
In 2014, Adams ventured into particularly dangerous territory when he called for a website that named reporters and scientists who were “Monsanto collaborators,” and declared that the public was obligated “to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.” MonsantoCollaborators.org soon went live with a swastika logo; it shut down after the FBI was notified. (Adams denied being involved with the website.)
You could call Natural News the InfoWars of health. In fact, Adams frequently used to guest-host and appear on that show, where he ranted about everything from the pharmaceutical industry’s “secret global eugenics agenda” to how swine flu was a “hoax.”
But Adams sees himself less in InfoWars operator Alex Jones than in the president of the United States. “[I]ndividuals like Donald Trump and the Health Ranger (that’s me) have a reputation for kicking ass, speaking out and fighting for truth, even in the face of organized, systemic suppression of that truth,” he wrote in 2015 about the then-candidate. “That’s why I deeply understand why Donald Trump is so popular: He’s the warrior who’s willing to take on the establishment that everybody knows is crooked and corrupt.”
Mike Adams joins host Alex Jones on InfoWars. The Alex Jones Channel / Youtube / Via youtube.com
Natural News is far from the only source of anti-science “news.” Vani Hari, known as “The Food Babe,” has gotten more than a million shares, comments, and likes on a story — “Monsanto Is Scrambling To Bury This Breaking Story – Don’t Let This Go Unshared!” — that reported high levels of a supposedly cancer-causing herbicide in food items. (After BuzzFeed News asked Hari to respond to Snopes’ debunk, she published a rebuttal titled “Do You Trust Snopes? You Won’t After Reading This,” in which she argued that the site’s assessment was “manipulated” by the biotech industry.)
Healthy Holistic Living got 70,000 likes, comments, and shares on a (since deleted) list of studies “proving GM foods are destroying our health,” even though hundreds of studies have found no such evidence. And YourNewsWire racked up 645,000 likes, comments, and shares on a report that 30,000 scientists had signed a petition that declared man-made climate change a hoax. (Snopes deemed this “misleading.” Asked to comment, YourNewsWire’s editor-in-chief wrote: “Snopes, who like to embezzle money on prostitutes and hire pot smokers to try and trash anything right of socialism, are no more able to fact-check than Buzzfeed are able to produce a listicle outlining the 10 ways they don’t suck ass.”)
Via yournewswire.com
During the Zika crisis, Anonymous got more than 23,000 likes, comments, and shares on a false claim that a “Monsanto-linked pesticide” was causing the birth defects associated with the virus. The Huffington Post’s debunk got a fraction of that engagement across Facebook (8,400), as did one by the environmental news outlet Grist (7,200).
Erin Elizabeth is a self-described journalist and the creator of Health Nut News, which, at three years old, has over 447,000 followers on Facebook and regularly racks up likes on stories such as “Infant Twins Die Simultaneously After Vaccines, Medical Board Rules ‘Just a Coincidence’” and “Renowned Holistic Doctor Found Stabbed to Death in Her Palo Alto Home.” She thinks “fake news” is a problem, and considers stories about false celebrity deaths, for example, to be “hoaxes.” But it’s not always clear that the mainstream media is more accurate than alternative media, she told BuzzFeed News. What complicates matters is that there seem to be scientists on two sides of virtually every issue. “You’ll have one side that says pesticides are safe and the other side of scientists, that are experts in that field, who say they are or they aren’t,” she said. “When I see that, it’s difficult.”
Still, Elizabeth isn’t afraid to voice her opinion. With GMOs, she said, “if there’s people who are saying it’s safe, I think it’s more important to be on the cutting edge and show why it’s not safe and why I believe it should be labeled.”
She and Adams have found fans in people not unlike them: anti-establishment, self-styled crusaders who value “health freedom” above all and deeply distrust the mainstream.
Erin at Health Nut News / Facebook / Via Facebook: HealthNutNews
Among them is Amanda Provenzano, a Natural News reader, army veteran, and stay-at-home mother in Portland, Oregon, who says her daughter was diagnosed with autism and sensory processing disorder after getting vaccinated. The 33-year-old now believes that all vaccines are unsafe and have “never been studied long term on humans,” so she no longer vaccinates her two children. “We have become a more sicker nation because of it,” she said. The Republican voted for Trump because “he has an understanding that vaccines are not safe and wants to change that,” she said. “Why wouldn’t anyone want better for their kids? If safe ‘vaccines’ were created, then wonderful.”
“Everything about our culture is corrupted and I can’t trust nothing but what I see and experience.”
A 25-year-old bookkeeper in Reykjavík, Iceland, said over email that he’s “completely lost all trust in mainstream media.” In Iceland’s general election last year, he voted for the Pirate Party, which aims to redistribute wealth, crack down on corruption, and use online polls to form policies. It came in second.
Natural News and similar pages on Facebook, the man admitted, are “not a very credible source. But they are good for pointing out certain issues which you then have to google better.” For this reader, who requested to withhold his name, those issues include cancer-curing cannabis, a vitamin rumored to have cancer-curing properties, the banking system, GMOs, vaccines, and the theory that the earth is flat. Natural News and sites like it, he wrote, are “[o]pening my eyes to the reality that everything about our culture is corrupted and I can’t trust nothing but what I see and experience.”
The truth is, Adams, Elizabeth, and their readers have plenty of reasons to be suspicious of scientific authority. Tobacco industry scientists denied that nicotine was carcinogenic and addictive, and federal researchers let black men go decades untreated for syphilis. The herbicide Agent Orange, which the US military sprayed millions of gallons of during the Vietnam War, has since been linked to cancer and Parkinson’s. Doctors and scientists sometimes make mistakes, have conflicts of interest, and make discoveries that contradict older ones or can’t be replicated, despite appearing in prestigious journals.
What’s more, not all incorrect information is harmful. Guava leaves may not “stop your hair loss and make it grow like crazy,” as Daily Health Gen claims (more than 1 million likes, comments, and shares), but they’re probably not going to hurt you. Nor do mainstream journalists always get science right, as evidenced by splashy yet questionable headlines like “Research suggests being lazy is a sign of high intelligence” (The Independent, more than 437,000).
Social networks can reinforce and amplify the non-nuanced, non-reported, scariest-sounding fears that people already or want to believe.
But social networks can reinforce and amplify the non-nuanced, non-reported, scariest-sounding fears that people already or want to believe. People googling health information “might be distrustful of a website they just found on the internet,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political science professor at Dartmouth College who has studied why people reject vaccines. “But if a friend shares a story with you and says, ‘This is really important,’ you might be more likely to believe it.”
While 40% of Americans say they have a “great deal of confidence” in science in general, that trust seems to break down on specific issues. Surveys find that 88% believe vaccines’ benefits outweigh their risks. But about half dispute that human activity drives climate change, and 40% believe that genetically modified food is worse for your health than non-modified food.
Being Democrat or Republican doesn’t necessarily explain those differences, the same surveys show. Nor does education. The more science-literate people are, in fact, the more polarized they are in their climate change opinions.
Instead, studies suggest that people tend to hold beliefs that align with their cultural values. If you think your organic, gluten-free diet signals that you’re eco-friendly, you’re showing a desire to project an ideologically consistent personal brand, says Timothy Caulfield, research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. Other research suggests that people are likelier to reject science when they’re open to conspiracy theories of all stripes.
If you’re a die-hard free-market Republican, “climate science presents a real problem for you, because the only way you can deal with climate change is by changing what we’re doing now,” such as by taxing businesses, said Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol. “If you’re totally invested emotionally in the concept of a free market, then Jesus, that is very scary. And that’s why people then cannot accept that scientific fact and they’ll do anything to reject it.”
For more evidence that anti-science beliefs aren’t partisan, take a look at who spreads Natural News links. Of the Facebook pages that shared more than 60 popular, randomly selected Nature News posts over the last few years, some identified with the left (“Occupy Portland,” “Bernie Sanders for President 2016”). Others leaned right (“America’s Proud Deplorables,” “God Bless Trump USA”). Some didn’t fall squarely in either camp (“Anonymous,” “Independents for Bernie Sanders”). And still others weren’t about politics but health (“Healthy Food Home,” “CancerTruth”).
“It’s very interesting how you have this mix of ideologies associated with a website like Natural News,” Caulfield said. “A lot of people think of ‘organic, natural, anti-GMO’ as being very much a left, progressive viewpoint. But it’s complicated.”
Even in the deep corners of Facebook, there are some concerns that the war on science has had unintended consequences. Throughout 2016, the anti-GMO Organic Consumers Association attacked Hillary Clinton’s “troubling” and “deep” financial ties to Monsanto, both on its official Facebook page and its page for its social media campaign Millions Against Monsanto. More than 2 million people like them in total.
But after the election, the association posted a plea to “mobilize and regenerate.” “Just when the world needs all hands on deck to fight the war against runaway global warming,” international director Ronnie Cummins wrote, “Trump and his men (and women) are going AWOL.”
Many commenters, however, saw no crisis. “You are an ‘organic’ organization right?” wrote the author of the most-liked comment. “Yet you support a criminal who supports polluting the earth and our whole food supply??!!” (Cummins did not return a request for comment.)
Fighting misinformation isn’t easy, but is perhaps not impossible. Anti-vaccine parents usually aren’t swayed by cold, hard facts that vaccines save lives and don’t cause autism, Nyhan’s research suggests. But parents do consider physicians an important source of information about vaccines. “A doctor who can speak to parents in the context of an ongoing relationship, that has to be the starting point,” he said.
Caulfield urges scientists to avoid sitting on the sidelines. “It’s so important for individuals that are respected voices to get on social media, to have scientists be part of the conversation,” he said.
And tech companies can help by exposing people to information that challenges, not just confirms, their beliefs, Lewandowsky says. “In the same way Amazon can figure out what exactly it is that we like,” he said, “we can use the same information they already have to suggest something to us that we might not like that much.”
After drawing and initially dismissing heavy criticism for misinformation on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg now says he wants to present a spectrum of viewpoints and down-rank sensationalized news. Past News Feed tweaks have already led Adams to accuse the social network of censorship.
Still, Adams’ megaphone is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. After Google delisted 140,000 Natural News pages in late February, he launched a White House petition in protest and urged readers to boycott the company. Some 69,000 people (and counting) have signed it. (A Google spokesperson said at the time that the search engine may take action in general against sites that violate guidelines.) Last week, the site was restored.
The Natural News website with a banner petitioning against the delisting of 140,000 pages on Google. Via naturalnews.com
Good timing, since right now Adams has more to cheer than ever. On January 11, he told readers about an exciting development: Trump had named Kennedy to lead a commission to study vaccine safety (a claim that the president’s team later walked back).
The media would attack Kennedy’s character, Adams acknowledged, and vaccine makers and the CDC would insist that vaccines are harmless. “Yet in the end, the era of toxic vaccines will eventually crumble,” he wrote. “Perhaps not this year, or next year or even during the Trump administration at all. But sooner or later, the weight of the evidence linking vaccines to autism and other neurological defects in children will be so overwhelming that even the vaccine pushing ‘medical child molesters’ won’t be able to stop the avalanche of public outrage.”
It was a solid hit: 17,000 comments, likes, and shares in all. ●
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New climate-friendlier coolant has a catch: it's flammable.
Dr. Rajiv Singh, a scientist at Honeywell's lab in Buffalo, began running computer models of tens of thousands of molecular combinations. He was seeking a better refrigerant, one of the most vexing chemicals for the environment.
New Climate-Friendlier Coolant Has a Catch: It’s Flammable
By DANNY HAKIMOCT. 22, 2016
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Tubes used for testing at Honeywell’s lab in Buffalo. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times
LONDON — Rajiv Singh started thinking about how to do his part to fight global warming 15 years ago.
Dr. Singh, a scientist at Honeywell’s lab in Buffalo, began running computer models of tens of thousands of molecular combinations. He was seeking a better refrigerant, one of the most vexing chemicals for the environment.
Refrigerants cool homes, cars and buildings but also warm the planet at a far higher rate than carbon dioxide. Dr. Singh was searching for one stable enough to be useful but that degraded quickly so it did not linger to trap heat in the atmosphere.
“You have to hit the chemistry books,†he said in a recent interview.
As product names go, HFO-1234yf, the refrigerant he played a crucial role in developing, does not roll off the tongue. But it is one of the most important alternatives to hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which have long been used in air-conditioners and refrigerators and which contribute greatly to climate change. On Oct. 15, in Kigali, Rwanda, more than 170 countries reached an agreement as part of the Montreal Protocol to curb the use of HFCs.
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But Dr. Singh’s new coolant is also controversial, with critics questioning its safety and viewing it as the latest attempt by large chemical companies to play the regulatory system to their advantage. HFO-1234yf is already becoming standard in many new cars sold in the European Union and the United States by all the major automakers, in large part because its developers, Honeywell and Chemours, have automakers over a barrel. Their refrigerant is one of the few options that automakers have to comply with new regulations and the Kigali agreement.
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It has its detractors. The new refrigerant is at least 10 times as costly as the one it replaces.
A number of rival manufacturers have filed suits to challenge the patent. Officials in India, which has a fast-growing car market, are deliberating over whether to grant patent protection.
And then there is the safety issue.
Daimler began raising red flags in 2012. A video the company made public was stark. It showed a Mercedes-Benz hatchback catching fire under the hood after 1234yf refrigerant leaked during a company simulation.
Daimler eventually relented and went along with the rest of the industry, installing 1234yf in many of its new cars. But the company has developed an alternative using carbon dioxide that is being introduced in its S-class cars and some E-class models, with an eye toward further expansion.
In a statement, Sandra Gödde, a spokeswoman for Daimler, said 1234yf had “different flammability properties†than the HFC coolant it was replacing, which is considered to be nonflammable. The company has developed “specific measures in order to guarantee our high safety standards,†she added, including “a specially developed protective system.â€
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Rajiv Singh helped develop HFO-1234yf, a coolant that is less harmful to the climate than hydrofluorocarbons. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times
Some engineers and environmentalists, however, say 1234yf is not a good option.
“None of the people in the car industry I know want to use it,†said Axel Friedrich, the former head of the transportation and noise division at the Umweltbundesamt, the German equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. He added that he opposed having another “product in the front of the car which is flammable.â€
Dr. Friedrich, an engineer and a chemist, is also a member of the scientific advisory council of the International Council on Clean Transportation, the group that commissioned the tests that exposed Volkswagen’s cheating on diesel emissions. He collaborated on tests of 1234yf with Deutsche Umwelthilfe, a German environmental group, which also raised fire concerns. While cars, obviously, contain other flammable materials, he was specifically worried that at high temperatures 1234yf emitted hydrogen fluoride, which is dangerous if inhaled or touched.
“I wouldn’t like to use it as a car owner, because it gives me a higher risk and higher cost,†Dr. Friedrich said. “It’s a really unfair solution by the car industry. This is not what government and society should have accepted.â€
Honeywell and Chemours (which until last year was a unit of DuPont) have been adamant that the product is safe, and they are not alone. After the Daimler issue emerged, SAE International, an engineering consortium that includes all of the major automakers, said 1234yf was “highly unlikely to ignite,†though the issue led to a brief split with German automakers. The Joint Research Center of the European Union has also said there was “no evidence of a serious risk.†It is being used across the auto industry and has gained approval from regulators in the United States and Europe.
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“Daimler was the only manufacturer that cited an issue,†said Ken Gayer, vice president and general manager of Honeywell Fluorine Products.
“All other car manufacturers at the time had incorporated 1234yf, which is mildly flammable, into their designs, with modest design changes, and proven to themselves conclusively that they could safely use the product,†he said.
Daimler’s concerns led to a reassessment. “The entire industry stepped back and said, ‘Could we possibly have missed something?’†Mr. Gayer said. “We reviewed all the work we did, and we also ran new tests to try to understand better what Daimler’s issue was.â€
At the end of that process, automakers and regulators “proved to themselves conclusively once again that 1234yf was safe for use in cars, and then finally in 2015 Daimler announced publicly that they would use the product,†Mr. Gayer said.
Chemours said in a statement that the additional testing proved any “concerns to be unfounded.†It added, “Today, all major global automakers around the world are using HFO-1234yf.â€
One thing is not in dispute. The new coolant is superior to the HFC it is replacing in its impact on global warming. Hydrofluorocarbons have roughly 1,400 times the impact of carbon dioxide, the baseline used to measure such chemicals. By contrast, 1234yf has only four times the impact.
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Axel Friedrich, a chemist, opposes the new coolant because it is flammable. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
Because of that, perhaps no single chemical is better positioned to take advantage of the Kigali agreement. While Honeywell and Chemours, when it was part of DuPont, lobbied to weaken and stall HFC regulations in the past, this time they were poised to profit from a product that had fresh patent protection, and they largely embraced the agreement.
Though Honeywell would not give specific profit or revenue figures for 1234yf, sales of its HFC alternatives have helped the company raise annual revenue from its wider fluorine business by double-digit percentages in the last few years to more than $1 billion.
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The companies, which sell products under different brand names, have “almost a monopoly,†said Stephen O. Andersen, a former E.P.A. official who has been a representative to the Montreal Protocol and works for the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, an advocacy group.
“The price of the product is very high, about $80 a kilogram, and so that adds up to about $50 to $75 per car, which is a lot of money compared to the HFC they were using,†which he said was about $4 to $6 a car. “So it’s a big shock, and it’s been a lot of controversy.â€
David Doniger, director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, “The safety concern is bogus.â€
“The main concern is its high price,†Mr. Doniger said. “While a small part of the price of a car, this could be concerning when repairs are needed.†He said the price would decline after the patents expired, though that will take years.
The conundrums and controversies highlight the complexities of refrigerants and the trade-offs inherent in the fight to curb global warming. In the 1980s, the Montreal Protocol led to the ban on chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, because of hazards to the ozone layer. They were replaced by HFCs, which are being curbed because of their effects on the climate.
Will 1234yf be an equally transitory fix? “Nothing lasts forever,†Dr. Singh, the Honeywell chemist, said. “At least a couple generations.â€
Dorothee Saar, head of the transport and clean air team at Deutsche Umwelthilfe, the environmental group, said the new refrigerant presented considerable safety risks. She has her own solution. Ms. Saar, who lives in Berlin, has an old Volkswagen Golf without air-conditioning.
“I can always open a window,†she sa
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Alcoa sells NC river dams to Maryland clean-power company.
Alcoa Inc. is ending a century of ownership and its years-long relicensing fight over four North Carolina hydroelectric dams by selling them to a Maryland company that specializes in running clean-power projects.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Alcoa Inc. is ending a century of ownership and its years-long relicensing fight over four North Carolina hydroelectric dams by selling them to a Maryland company that specializes in running clean-power projects.
Spokeswomen for Alcoa and Cube Hydro Partners on Wednesday declined to disclose the purchase price for the dams, which were originally built to power an aluminum smelter on the Yadkin River. Alcoa said it sold the dams along with land in Ferndale, Washington, and a former Frederick, Maryland, smelter property to separate buyers for about $400 million.
Alcoa in 2007 closed the factory that once employed 1,000 people. The company has made about $200 million since then by selling the electricity to commercial customers.
“We are committed to being good stewards of these well-run hydropower plants that have a long history of generating reliable, carbon-free electricity,” Cube Hydro Partners CEO Kristina Johnson said in a prepared statement. Johnson is a former dean of Duke University’s engineering school and a former U.S. Energy Department undersecretary.
Alcoa in 2012 sold a similar hydroelectric dam complex at a former smelter site on the North Carolina-Tennessee border for about $600 million after receiving a new 40-year operating license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Alcoa’s Yadkin sale does not include some 15,000 acres of land surrounding the 40-mile-long string of dams, Alcoa spokeswoman Sonya Elam Harden said.
Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his Democratic predecessor Beverly Perdue have fought Alcoa’s efforts to renew its federal operating license for the Yadkin dams by 50 years. Inexpensive energy from the dams on the state’s second-largest river system could generate thousands of jobs in an otherwise underdeveloped region, both governors said, while the water is an important supply for North Carolina’s 10 million residents.
“We should be able to use it for North Carolina water needs and to create North Carolina jobs. The benefits of the Yadkin River belong to North Carolina’s people,” McCrory said in 2013 when the state filed a federal lawsuit.
The litigation challenged Alcoa’s ownership of the riverbed on which the dams were built beginning in 1917. Alcoa won its case after a trial last year and the state is appealing.
McCrory spokesmen didn’t respond when asked how Alcoa’s sale would affect the state’s relicensing fight.
The state isn’t clear how the sale will affect the riverbed ownership lawsuit, but expects to win its case, said Christopher Mears, a spokesman for the state Administration Department, which manages state property.
Cube Hydro Partners said it would upgrade the plants and increase electricity output by about 50 percent over what Alcoa reported last year. The aluminum smelter has left a legacy of pollutants including cyanide, fluoride, PCBs and trichloroethylene — which the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention links to certain kinds of cancer.
Alcoa had said it would not upgrade the dams until its new license was in hand. Alcoa’s relicensing case submitted to FERC in 2007 will likely transfer to Cube Hydro, agency spokeswoman Celeste Miller said.
“We hope the new ownership will be willing to make those investments to improve water quality and to make improvements to how the project is managed,” said Yadkin Riverkeeper Will Scott, whose environmental group has opposed Alcoa’s relicensing efforts.
The North Carolina purchase doubles the electricity now generated by the hydro projects in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia owned and operated by Bethesda, Maryland-based Cube Hydro.
Alcoa announced Tuesday its second-quarter profit slipped nearly 4 percent, but earnings and revenue beat Wall Street expectations.
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Follow Emery P. Dalesio at https://twitter.com/emerydalesio. His work can be found at https://bigstory.ap.org/content/emery-p-dalesio.
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