Daily Quick Read - October 17, 2019

Airplane Food and Waste

If you’re an airline passenger, you’ve had a airline meal at some point in your travels.  Unless you’re in 1^st class, the first thing you will notice is that your meal immediately has generated more plastic waste than actual food.  As you look around, you’ll also notice that most of your fellow travelers are leaving more food on their trays than they are eating.  So, it’s no surprise that your less than satisfying airplane meal will generate more waste than nutrition.

Airline passengers generate 3 pounds of waste per person per flight, according to British research. This includes disposable cups and headphones, napkins, food packaging, uneaten food, and more. All of this goes to landfill or gets incinerated, depending on the requirements of the country in which the plane has landed; and none is recycled, as regular flights are not equipped to deal with separate waste streams.

… When the composition of airline trash created by 145 flights into Madrid was analyzed by the UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change, they found that "33 percent was food waste, 28 percent was cardboard and paper waste, and about 12 percent was plastic."

More Hot Air from the Petroleum Industry

The petrochemical industry is kicking a major PR campaign into gear to convince Americans that natural gas is the bridge between coal fired power plants and renewables.  Of course, many people are comfortable with the reality that the bridge between coal fired power plants and renewable power is renewable power.  However, that doesn’t do much for the petroleum companies bottom line, hence their PR effort.

The campaign is loaded with disinformation. The American Petroleum Institute (API) says it's pushing gas as a "foundation for the future" because it is "clean." Major fossil fuel companies including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell are API members. The Independent Petroleum Association of America is playing up outdated 2008 praise of gas by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to decry pledges by leading 2020

Democratic presidential candidates to ban hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for gas.

Dark money has also ramped up. A group called the Empowerment Alliance popped up last month to condemn the Green New Deal as "radical and unachievable." The Alliance claims: "Eliminating our natural gas advantage will destroy our economy, kill American jobs and lead to more income inequality."

It is no coincidence that the PR blitz comes amid an avalanche of unfavorable developments that should make us question whether natural gas should still be considered a natural choice for power generation.

Pollution in Maui and Craft Beer

A relatively obscure Supreme Court case concerning the method Maui’s Lahaina Wastewater Reclamation Facility disposes of its waste water has inspired a large number of US craft brewers to join the case against the Maui utility.  They are concerned that a victory by Maui will weaken the Clean Water act and potentially impact local water quality far beyond one Hawaiian island.

Even if it’s obvious, it’s still important, the brewers say. The quality and consistency of their water is the key to their $76.2 billion industry. And small changes matter.

Too many sulfates? The beer will taste acidic. Chlorine? The beer will taste like aspirin. Bacteria will spoil a whole batch, and smaller changes in the water can change the beer’s foam pattern and shelf life.

That medicine flavor, Bado said, is particularly hard to eliminate.

“It’s all about the water,” said Louis Jeroslow, head brewer at North Carolina brewery Angry Troll Brewing, which signed onto the Supreme Court brief. “What simplifies things for an industrial producer to put sludge in the ground and our waterways and not get a permit affects everyone else who deals with the water. It’s really just kicking the can down the road.”

The brewers have weighed in on the case because they believe a win for Maui could make it easier for big businesses to pollute the nation’s rivers and streams. While dirty water has an impact on many sectors, such as outdoor recreation and seafood, the brewers have stood up to argue that their slice of the economy could be particularly hard hit.

PG&E Dividends Before Maintenance

California’s largest electrical service provider is bankrupt after spending decades failing to do even the most basic maintenance on its facilities, pipelines and power transmission infrastructure.  While failing to maintain its business assets, the company was quite willing to spend hundreds of thousands on PR and billions on stock dividends.

The decision to shut off the electricity services, a precaution over concerns about high winds, raises the question of precisely how PG&E has been spending its rate-payers’ money. And the answer isn’t pretty: While neglecting safety upgrades and investments in its aging infrastructure, PG&E has instead been lavishly rewarding shareholders and buying political influence.

Over the last year, reporters have highlighted the large lobby spending and billions of dollars in dividend payments to investors by PG&E, while the company avoided necessary investments in its aging transmission towers — some of which are among the oldest in the world and were known to the company to be a potential fire hazard. The aging transmission lines caused the Camp Fire wildfires last November, the most destructive in California history, that left 86 dead, over a dozen injured, and caused at least $16 billion in damages.

Mandated Failure

In Wyoming, a new state law mandates that coal fired power plant operators attempt to find a new operator for any plant that the current owner intends to shut down.  The intent is to shelter communities from the impact of plant and often the attendant coal mine closings.  However, the recent situation with Blackjewel demonstrates what happens when this concept is put to the test in the real world.

Economics and politics are sometimes different matters, however, and Wyoming lawmakers still are under pressure to throw a lifeline to communities that have long relied on coal plants in the state.
Some worry that Wyoming lawmakers may be so eager to keep coal plants burning that they’ll inadvertently put Wyoming ratepayers and taxpayers at risk.

Connie Wilbert, director of Sierra Club Wyoming Chapter, draws a parallel to the bankruptcy crisis among coal mining companies in Wyoming. In some instances, mines have changed hands to companies without the financial wherewithal to meet long-term operational, cleanup and employee obligations, leaving workers and communities in a lurch when they escape responsibilities in bankruptcy.

“What’s happened there [in the coal mining industry] is these uneconomic facilities pass into ever more dubious hands,” Wilbert said. “That has not played out well, obviously, for the workers, for the communities, or for the state.”