After Hurricane, Some Begin To Question Wisdom of Rockaway Pipeline Project

Monday, December 03, 2012  | by Sarah Crean

Gotham Gazette

NEW YORK — Now that the construction of a new chain of natural gas pipelines running from the Rockaway peninsula to Brooklyn has been delayed following Superstorm Sandy, residents and elected officials are beginning to question whether the project is safe to build at all.

The exceedingly complex project would be constructed in separate phases — under the regulation of federal, state and local authorities — adjacent to coastal communities that were among the hardest hit during the storm.

U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, who represents central Brooklyn, told Gotham Gazette in an emailed statement that the destruction caused by Sandy had raised concerns among residents who live near the proposed gas pipeline project.

"Our need for independent energy cannot precede the safety of our community and environment," she said.

State Sen. Joseph Addabbo, whose new district includes the Rockaways, said he would organize a town hall meeting where residents could ask their questions about the project.

"Doing this simultaneously with Sandy becomes a daunting task," he said of the project. "People are trying to get their lives back."

He added that residents have come to him with some hard questions about the project. “This is a major endeavor," he continued. "What is the protection from a gas leak? What are the precautions? What is the time frame?”

National Grid spokeswoman Karen Young told Gotham Gazette that the storm had not affected phase one of the project — the utility’s plans to construct two gas pipelines underneath Jamaica Bay’s Rockaway Inlet. She added that they were "still meeting with all of the officials and agencies to determine the best time.”

A Nov. 21 project report filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Oklahoma-based Williams Companies, which is also constructing sections of the pipeline, stated: “Construction originally planned for December 2012 is currently scheduled to begin in February 2013.”

Williams spokesman Chris Stockton said on Friday: “We’re still moving forward with our project. The hurricane has not changed our plans, nor has it changed the need for this project and the gas for the city." But, referring to the fact that Williams’ portion of the project had not yet received the necessary approvals, he added that there was "still a long way to go.”

Asked whether additional precautions needed to be taken during pipeline construction, Young said: “We had a robust plan in place, and the measures that we are planning to implement are above and beyond industry standards”.

She added that the pipeline had been designed to withstand flooding, would be buried underneath the seabed of Jamaica Bay and regularly monitored and inspected, especially during severe weather events.

Young stated that National Grid felt it had designed a "very safe” pipeline. She noted that the pipeline would have isolation valves that could be activated remotely in the event of an emergency.

The Rockaway pipeline is a key part of the energy initiatives outlined in PlaNYC, Mayor Bloomberg’s far-reaching sustainability plan.

The mayor’s office did not respond to questions regarding whether construction or ongoing maintenance of the Rockaway pipeline would need to be re-thought in light of the area’s vulnerability to future catastrophic storms.

SANDY'S ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

A full month after Sandy made landfall, the profound impact of the storm on both the residents and natural environment of the Rockaways is grimly evident.

Major arteries in the Rockaways were jammed with emergency and utility trucks on Saturday, and construction on damaged homes was visible throughout. In Breezy Point, the community closest to where pipeline construction will begin shortly, it was possible to see homes that had been torn off their foundations, and a car that had been incinerated almost beyond recognition by the fires that engulfed the area.

Much of the construction on the pipeline will take place in Gateway National Recreation Area, a 26,000-acre National Park, which includes ocean-facing Jacob Riis Park and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. The Bay’s wildlife refuge is the only such refuge in the National Park System, according to the New York Harbor Conservancy.

Other sections of the park — which will eventually be adjacent to pipeline construction — are now serving as sites for hurricane clean-up and reconstruction efforts.

“The Bay has taken a big hit,” said Dan Mundy, vice-president of Jamaica Bay Eco-Watchers. He added that “tremendous amounts” of fuel oil and debris had entered Jamaica Bay as a result of the storm, and that two freshwater ponds had breached “in a very dramatic fashion." Mundy explained that tides had flushed out much of the oil, but he added that the post-storm period was a “critical time for mitigation”.

Just across the Bay, the scope of the tragedy of the storm is visible in the parking lots of Jacob Riis Park, which have been turned into a massive dumping ground for the remains of destroyed homes and other refuse. From the dumping ground, one can see the fences and other beach infrastructure torn apart by the reported 14-foot coastal storm surge that entered the area on the night of Oct. 29.

Because of its vulnerable position, areas around the Rockaway peninsula are now considered possible locations for storm barriers.

A key section of the Rockaway pipeline, to be constructed by Williams, will run directly underneath Jacob Riis Park, delivering gas from an off-shore pipeline to National Grid’s new mains underneath Jamaica Bay. The 10,000-mile Transco natural gas pipeline, which runs parallel to the Rockaway coast, is managed by Williams.

In a later phase of construction, National Grid will connect its cross-Bay lines to customers in Brooklyn and Queens, via a new gas meter and regulating station to be housed within a historic hangar at Floyd Bennett Field, and by eventually linking with an existing gas main on Flatbush Avenue.

The 60,000-square-foot meter station will be constructed by Williams. Parking lots behind the hangars at Floyd Bennett Field are currently a massive staging area for FEMA, the Red Cross, construction companies and scores of fuel tanker trucks.

The National Grid portion of the Rockaway pipeline project has been approved by the city and did not require a public review process or full-scale environmental review. Williams’ off-shore pipeline and meter station proposal, however, is still working its way through a federal environmental review process.

Chris Stockton said that Williams planned to submit a final proposal to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by late 2012 or early 2013. He said that based on the company’s experience with previous applications to FERC, the agency’s review of the proposal could take another eight months.

President Obama signed legislation Nov. 27 bringing the Rockaway pipeline project one step closer to reality. The New York City Natural Gas Enhancement Act authorizes the National Park Service to permit the pipeline and related infrastructure within the boundaries of Gateway National Recreation Area.

In a statement on the signing, Mayor Bloomberg said: “Given the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, this law could not come at a more critical time for New York City. This pipeline will help us build a stable, clean-energy future for New Yorkers and will ensure the reliability of the City’s future energy needs.” The mayor specifically thanked the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Charles Schumer and Congressmen Michael Grimm of Brooklyn and Staten Island, and Gregory Meeks of Queens.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS

The Rockaway pipeline project has spurred protests from some local residents and environmental groups, who have raised questions about possible impacts to coastal marine life, and whether a gas pipeline is an appropriate use for an urban park. The city’s commitment to natural gas — a fossil fuel — as an ongoing energy source has also proved controversial.

“This bill puts a pipeline under a popular beach and introduces private industrial use of a federal park, and it does so with no public input,” said Karen Orlando, a local resident and Floyd Bennett Garden Association member.

Local groups like Jamaica Bay Eco-Watchers are watching the federal review process closely, and believe that they may be able to impact decisions that are yet to be made. They also say that the Rockaway Pipeline speaks to public policy questions relevant to the entire city.

Mundy argued that if the Williams section of the pipeline project is to go forward, there must be a commitment to off-set some of the ecological damage that he said he believes will inevitably be inflicted by construction of a 2.79-mile pipeline on the ocean floor.

Another federal agency has raised questions similar to Mundy’s. In October, the Army Corps of Engineers wrote to FERC, requesting that Williams provide more specifics on the ocean floor trenching and dredging techniques it will use, and how the aquatic ecosystem off the Rockaways could be affected.

Stockton said that questions on the project raised by the Army Corps and other agencies would be addressed in the company’s final proposal to FERC.

Mundy said he believes that any possible damage to the ocean floor habitat should be offset by a focus on restoring Jamaica Bay’s saltwater marshes.

Marshes throughout the city have attracted new attention because they can help to blunt the impact of coastal storm surges. “The wetlands will be a big topic of discussion,” said Mundy. He added that not only are they a form of “soft infrastructure”, but they also help to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

At the same time, Orlando argued that the placement of what she describes as “industrial infrastructure” within Floyd Bennett Field, “a couple hundred of feet from a community garden used by four to five-hundred members and their families” has broader implications for both private use of public space and government transparency.

She said the city "couldn’t do that in Prospect Park or Central Park.”

http://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/topics/environment/2167-after-hurricane-some-begin-to-question-wisdom-of-rockaway-pipeline-project

Fiscal Woes, Long-Held Fears Spur Waste-to-Energy Debate

New York is thinking about diverting garbage from out-of-state landfills and using it to generate electricity locally. The plan pits concerns about city spending and carbon emissions against fears of environmental injustice.

By Bill Hughes | Wednesday, Oct 10, 2012

CityLimits.org

In the years since a tugboat nosed the last barge full of garbage into the massive Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island when it was officially closed back in March of 2001, the tax burden and environmental impact of dealing with New York City's trash have increased dramatically. City officials estimate that in a single year, tractor-trailers log 40 million miles to haul 3 million tons of trash from the five boroughs to out-of-state landfills, mostly in Pennsylvania and Virginia. The flat cost of shipping trash to landfills has risen from $62 per ton in 2001 to $92 per ton last year. A recent report by the Citizen's Budget Commission concluded that, "The waste that New York City sends to landfills generates about 679,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases per year – the equivalent of adding more than 133,000 cars to the roads."

To address the growing problem, Mayor Michael Bloomberg included a partial solution in his 30-year master plan for the city, PlaNYC, which calls for the construction of a new Waste-to-Energy (WTE) facility to process trash that cannot be recycled. A Request for Proposals (RFP) was issued in March of 2012 to the private sector to build a facility, "…using reliable, cost-effective, sustainable and environmentally sound waste to clean energy technology."

Among the requirements in the RFP was a mandate that the pilot facility be located either in the five boroughs or within an 80-mile radius of the city. It would have to begin by processing 450 tons per day, with the city making no capital investment but paying a tipping fee once it starts sending trash. The 450-ton per day capacity would have to double if the pilot is successful. The bid went out in March, applications were due by June 5th and the award was supposed to be announced in early September. A Bloomberg spokesman last week said the proposals were still under review and an announcement might be made in November. The administration estimates that over 30 years if expanded facilities could accommodate two million tons of trash annually, the city would save about $119 million dollars per year and combined greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 240,000 metric tons per year.

Almost immediately, environmental justice advocates began protesting, saying the writing on the wall leaned toward a WTE process called thermal processing, which many feel is a fancy code for incineration. The New York Public Interest Research Group reacted to the RFP's announcement by organizing protests and labeling thermal processing as unsafe, unproven and inequitable to communities of color.

Worries about impact on recycling, neighborhoods

The advocates also feel strongly that devoting resources to WTE technology will take away from recycling efforts, where New York lags, ranking 16th out of 27 major U.S. cities in a recent survey. San Francisco, which recycles 77 percent of its household waste, ranked first in the nation, while New York recycled only 15.4 percent in 2011.

"That's just disgraceful," said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance. "How can it be that with all the wealth and technology available to this city that we can't manage to do better than we're doing today?"

Bautista also worries about who'll be affected most if the city locates a thermal processing facility within the five boroughs: "There are only so many neighborhoods zoned for this type of activity. They're typically located in low-income communities and they're already over-burdened with industrial polluters."

Bautista took part in a protest back in April when city officials took prospective bidders on a tour of potential sites, including the Fresh Kills landfill. And he was not alone.

"We've suffered enough out here and we've suffered disproportionately," said City Councilman Vincent Ignizio of Staten Island at a September meeting of the council's Solid Waste and Sanitation Committee. "When Robert Moses opened Fresh Kills in 1948 it was only supposed to be for three years. It took 50-plus years for us to finally get it closed, and toward the end we were the only dumping ground for all the city's garbage." Ignizio added that he grew up within smelling distance of Fresh Kills and remembers many nights sleeping in his parents' bedroom because they had the only air conditioner which could mask the odor of the dump.

The outcry from residents and Staten Island elected officials was loud enough that the Bloomberg administration removed the entire borough of Staten Island from consideration in the RFP. But the other boroughs are still in the mix.

Technology has defenders

Proponents of WTE technology argue that thermal processing is a form of recycling and that new technologies and EPA regulations have eliminated the odor and air pollution many people connect with the process of incinerating trash. Professor Nickolas J. Themelis, director of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University, said he thinks that much of the opposition to creating WTE plants in the city stems from people's memories of the bad old days.

"At one point New York had 30 municipal incinerators and about 15,000 residential incinerators with no regulation at all. It was a mess," said Themelis. "There is this kind of animus among people who have been exposed to incinerators in the past. They associate them with black smoke and horrific pollution. But the truth is, those are all gone now. The pollution generated by trucking waste to landfills can't compare to how little a modern WTE facility produces. The people who oppose these technologies are like the Flat Earth Society, they are holding back progress."

Themelis recently completed work on a large collaborative study for the Inter-American Development Bank to recommend the best WTE technology for waste management in Latin America. "Regrettably, we came to the conclusion that the technology we use now is the best to use. Over the past decades roughly 125 plants have been built around the world using thermal combustion … with increasingly strict emissions standards. The data we have collected is, I think, unassailable. These systems produce far less emissions than landfilling."

There are currently 10 WTE facilities statewide licensed by the Department of Environmental Conservation to burn municipal waste and convert it into steam and electricity. One is located in Peekskill, about 50 miles up the Hudson River. The facility is owned by Wheelabrator, a subsidiary of Waste Management, the country's largest waste processor, which serves more than 20 million residential, commercial and municipal customers nationwide.

The Peekskill facility processes approximately 700,000 tons of waste per year, or about 95 percent of the household trash generated by Westchester County, according to Operations Manager Brett Baker. Three, nine-story tall boilers burn about 2,250 tons of pre-recycled trash per day, using the trash as fuel. The heat (over 2,000-degrees Fahrenheit) drives a turbine which generates electricity—60 megawatts of electricity per hour.—which is sold to Con Edison via a direct feed to its grid. The ash is cooled and sifted for recyclable metal and the remains, about 10 percent of the initial volume, are sent to landfills. The emissions are forced through a series of filtering systems until they are below state and federal guidelines for pollutants, then released through one large stack.

"We have about a 90 percent reduction rate in the waste stream," Baker told a reporter in September. "And as you can tell when you drove up here, we burn clean. There's virtually no odor at all coming out of the stack and everything is well within EPA guidelines." Waste Management officials claim they operate enough WTE facilities across the U.S. to power 1 million homes and they expect to double that output by 2020.

Of course, not everyone shares a rosy outlook on the plant. A December 2010 report by the Peekskill Environmental Justice Council identified the facility as, "A major source of air pollution." A state permit issued in March 2012 listed the wide ranges of toxic pollutants the plant is permitted to release, including up to 10 tons per year each of dioxins, mercury, arsenic, lead and cadmium.

Newer technologies and emissions controls were recently approved at a facility run by one of the likely bidders for the NYC contract, Covanta Energy, which currently burns some of New York's trash for $66 per ton at its facility in Newark. Environmental activists believe those changes would not have been made without public pressure. Industry analysts point out that waste processors are trying to find an economic "sweet spot," where new technology implementation costs don't swallow up potential profits.

Searching for viable options

New York's RFP identified several different WTE technologies that companies could propose besides thermal incineration—like plasma gasification, hydrolysis and anaerobic digestion.

In early September The New York Times profiled a non-profit company with a plasma gasification facility in Florida, one that burns municipal waste at more than 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit then electrifies it. The promoters of the technology claim the process breaks down the chemical bonds of carcinogenic material like PCB's, asbestos and medical waste, rendering them harmless without creating dioxin or other harmful byproducts. But opponents point out that pushing such technology will hinder recycling and the development of ecologically friendly products and policies. Others point out that the plasma gasification consumes roughly half the energy it creates to feed its own power requirements. 

The other technologies in the city's RFP, anaerobic digestion and hydrolysis, deal mainly with organic materials and would only handle a small percentage of the city's waste, meaning thermal processing might be the most effective alternative to landfilling.

Proponents of the technology point to several European cities like Vienna, Paris and Copenhagen which have built thermal processing WTE facilities inside their city limits and incorporated them into the cityscape.

But critics like the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives say the higher a country's incineration rate, the lower its recycling rate. The group released a report tracking waste treatment strategies across the 27-member European Union. According to the report, while Denmark had the highest rate of WTE incineration at 54 percent of the country's total waste stream, it only recycled 23 percent. "It is necessary to implement a system that reduces waste generation, reuses and recycles waste, and phases out both incineration and landfilling," the report concluded.

On Oct. 5 San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee announced that the city had reached an 80 percent landfill diversion rate through aggressive recycling, reuse and composting initiatives making it the "greenest" city in North America and moving it closer to the goal of "zero waste"—a target of which Themelis is skeptical.

"There are people who talk about ‘zero waste,' but zero waste is not a reality, it's a fantasy. True, we should recycle as much as is practical, but you cannot neglect that you must do something with what can't be recycled."Themelis added that America's comfort level with landfill arises partially from an excess of open space that few other countries enjoy. "New York City sends 100,000 truckloads of landfill out of state every year, but sooner or later the state borders will be closed, that's not going away."

According to recent EPA data, there are currently 87 facilities in the U.S. burning trash to generate electricity. The combined output of these facilities amounts to approximately 2,500 megawatts, or 0.3 of total national power generation. The agency cites the high construction cost of such facilities as one reason that the public will and financing to build them has been lacking.

It's unclear if the city's fiscal challenge and growing concern about its carbon footprint will create the political support necessary for WTE in New York. Councilwoman Letitia James, who chairs the Sanitation and Solid Waste Committee, said she supports the RFP initiative, but under the conditions that minority communities are not disproportionately impacted and the economics make good sense. "I'm open to examining it," said James during a recent interview. "Not necessarily supporting it, but examining it. Because there's just no way we can continue to afford to ship millions of tons of garbage out of the state." 

http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4638/fiscal-woes-long-held-fears-spur-waste-to-energy-debate

How Natural Gas Kept Some Spots Bright and Warm as Sandy Blasted New York City

Andy Revkin
New York Times
11/5/12

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/how-natural-gas-kept-some-spots-bright-and-warm-as-sandy-blasted-new-york/

A pipeline bringing natural gas produced by 'hydraulic fracturing' into New York City creates a new focus for environmental protest

A pipeline bringing natural gas produced by 'hydraulic fracturing' into New York City creates a new focus for environmental protest

Naomi Wolf

The Guardian

October 12, 2012

I saw an odd sight on a quiet, West Village street in New York City on Saturday 6 October. A group of about 30 young women and men – all naked or topless – were dancing about, with their flesh painted green.

Patrick Robbins, a 26-year-old native of Brooklyn who works on sustainable development at Cooper Union, is the spokesperson for the group, Occupy the Pipeline. He explained the purpose of the protest-art show hybrid:

"[We're] protesting the pipeline's construction on New York City's West Side Highway and Gansevoort, which is soon to be completed. The pipeline … is slated to bring hydrofracked gas from the marcellus shale – a bed that lies under Pennsylvania and New York State – into New York City's gas infrastructure."

While the health hazards at the point of fracking are well-known, I was not aware of hazards on the consuming end of using fracked gas. According to Occupy the Pipeline, the fracked gas threatens New Yorkers because gas produced from Marcellus shale has 70 times the average radioactivity of natural gas and very high radon content. The trouble with the noble gas (meaning that it is an inert gas) is that it was not one of the issues looked into by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission when it analyzed the pipeline project. The commission asserted that radon risk assessment was "outside their purview", said Robbins. But the element has been linked to increases in the risk of lung cancer among non-smokers, claims Occupy the Pipeline, and poses a special risk to New Yorkers with immuno-compromised systems the moment the gas is burned – dispersing the radon.

Other health and safety concerns with fracking are linked to precedent, such as the undrinkable groundwater at Dimock, Pennsylvania, or the explosion from a pipeline of similar size and pressure in San Bruno, California in 2010 that claimed the lives of eight people.

The activists of Occupy the Pipeline assert that the pipeline's construction was part of an anti-democratic process. A moratorium on fracking in New York state has expired; now, Governor Andrew Cuomo is discussing a pilot program for fracking in the five counties of the southern tier in New York state. He refuses to say he will ban fracking altogether, a goal of the activists. As for Councilwoman Christine Quinn, a contender in the New York City mayoral race, she has also kept mum on the pipeline; she did not even send a representative to listen in on the hearings, says Robbins.

"Occupy the Pipeline and the Sane Energy Project have approached her office countless times … NYH20 sent her a petition letter requesting hearings on the Radon issue; representatives from Food and Water Watch, United for Action and multiple enviro groups met with her a month ago to remind her of the request … why is Christine Quinn ignoring calls to protect public health?"

There is a government-mandated legal buffer zone between the area to be fracked and the watershed for drinking and household use – but it is one that Department of Environmental Protection scientists have called inadequate. Fracking involves pumping underground a chemical cocktail that, according to a New York City government report (pdf) about the chemicals, comprises 58% known immune system suppressants and other toxins:

"Significant percentages contain one or more chemicals that are associated with negative health effects: cancer (33% of products contain one or more chemicals associated with cancer), endocrine disruption (41%), reproductive problems (34%), immune suppression (58%), genetic mutation (43%), and other adverse health impacts."

As for the rest, we don't really know what it may contain since that information is protected by "the Halliburton Loophole" – a Bush administration rollback of environmental regulation under the Clean Water Act. Comments Robbins:

"So they can pump carcinogens into our land and they don't they don't have to tell us what is in it because they say it is 'proprietary information'."

Given all these data, how can New York officials keep silent?

Well, the energy companies, and the major banks that finance them, all donate to the Quinn, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Cuomo campaigns. Occupy the Pipeline claims that the entities profiting from fracking are "the same old cast of characters", namely: Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America. Economists Jeanette Barth, president of JM Barth and Associates, an environmental and economic consulting group, and Deborah Rogers, another energy consultant formerly of Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch, both spoke at a lecture this past April entitled "Frackonomics". They pointed out that in times of crisis, such as we have at present, new growth industries are hyped. Investment companies are parroting the hype around natural gas, claiming that investors will make enormous profits from hydrofracking – despite the fact that these wells are almost certainly not going to live up to economic promises now being made. The economists' message was:

"We have a word for this, and it is a bubble."

In light of all this – with politicians turning a deaf ear to their people's concerns, and companies blinded from the dangers by their greed – I asked Robbins, "What do you say to people who say Occupy is dead?"

"Occupy has given birth to a thousand more extremely important projects that are all still doing the work of transforming society. The environmental working group, from which Occupy the Pipeline sprung, have participated in all aspects of democratic process – from NVDA [nonviolent direct action] to attending hearings and submitting testimony."

As I write, natural gas companies are scouting upstate counties, trying to build, for instance, an expansion to a storage facility for natural gas in a salt cavern that sits on the edge of the Finger Lakes area, in New York. But that plan, too, has met with resistance. The Seneca Three are residents of Seneca County who were arrested for blockading a compressor station this past September by chaining themselves to its gates. On 15 October, Occupy the Pipeline will stage a protest event in solidarity with those arrested for protesting the tar sands pipeline (one notable arrestee being actress Daryl Hannah) and other pipeline activists.

"Occupy can no longer be considered outliers. Occupy groups are what democracy looks like!"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/12/occupy-pipeline-battles-fracking-threat-new-york 

To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

New York Times

Published: September 29, 2012

ONE spectacular Sunday in Paris last month, I decided to skip museums and shopping to partake of something even more captivating for an environment reporter: Vélib, arguably the most successful bike-sharing program in the world. In their short lives, Europe’s bike-sharing systems have delivered myriad benefits, notably reducing traffic and its carbon emissions. A number of American cities — including New York, where a bike-sharing program is to open next year — want to replicate that success.

So I bought a day pass online for about $2, entered my login information at one of the hundreds of docking stations that are scattered every few blocks around the city and selected one of Vélib’s nearly 20,000 stodgy gray bikes, with their basic gears, upright handlebars and practical baskets.

Then I did something extraordinary, something I’ve not done in a quarter-century of regular bike riding in the United States: I rode off without a helmet.

I rode all day at a modest clip, on both sides of the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, past the Louvre and along the Champs-Élysées, feeling exhilarated, not fearful. And I had tons of bareheaded bicycling company amid the Parisian traffic. One common denominator of successful bike programs around the world — from Paris to Barcelona to Guangzhou — is that almost no one wears a helmet, and there is no pressure to do so.

In the United States the notion that bike helmets promote health and safety by preventing head injuries is taken as pretty near God’s truth. Un-helmeted cyclists are regarded as irresponsible, like people who smoke. Cities are aggressive in helmet promotion.

But many European health experts have taken a very different view: Yes, there are studies that show that if you fall off a bicycle at a certain speed and hit your head, a helmet can reduce your risk of serious head injury. But such falls off bikes are rare — exceedingly so in mature urban cycling systems.

On the other hand, many researchers say, if you force or pressure people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles. That means more obesity, heart disease and diabetes. And — Catch-22 — a result is fewer ordinary cyclists on the road, which makes it harder to develop a safe bicycling network. The safest biking cities are places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where middle-aged commuters are mainstay riders and the fraction of adults in helmets is minuscule.

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,” says Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He studied the issue with mathematical modeling, and concludes that the benefits may outweigh the risks by 20 to 1.

He adds: “Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.” The European Cyclists’ Federation says that bicyclists in its domain have the same risk of serious injury as pedestrians per mile traveled.

Yet the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommends that “all cyclists wear helmets, no matter where they ride,” said Dr. Jeffrey Michael, an agency official.

Recent experience suggests that if a city wants bike-sharing to really take off, it may have to allow and accept helmet-free riding. A two-year-old bike-sharing program in Melbourne, Australia — where helmet use in mandatory — has only about 150 rides a day, despite the fact that Melbourne is flat, with broad roads and a temperate climate. On the other hand, helmet-lax Dublin — cold, cobbled and hilly — has more than 5,000 daily rides in its young bike-sharing scheme. Mexico City recently repealed a mandatory helmet law to get a bike-sharing scheme off the ground. But here in the United States, the politics are tricky.

SHAUN MURPHY, the bicycling coordinator of Minneapolis-St. Paul — which inaugurated its “Nice Ride” bike-sharing program this year — has been pilloried for riding about without a helmet. “I just want it to be seen as something that a normal person can do,” Mr. Murphy explained to the local press this past summer. “You don’t need special gear. You just get on a bike and you just go.”

In New York, where there were 21 cyclist fatalities last year, the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, is always photographed on a bike and wearing a helmet. The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has nonetheless rejected calls by Comptroller John C. Liu for a mandatory helmet law when New York’s 10,000-cycle bike-share program rolls out next year, for fear it would keep people from riding. Still, the mayor says helmets are a “good idea,” and the city promotes helmet use through education and with giveaway programs.

In the United States, cities are struggling to overcome the significant practical problems of melding helmet use with bike-sharing programs — such as providing sanitized helmet dispensers at bike docking stations, says Susan Shaheen, director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

But bicycling advocates say that the problem with pushing helmets isn’t practicality but that helmets make a basically safe activity seem really dangerous.

“The real benefits of bike-sharing in terms of health, transport and emissions derive from getting ordinary people to use it,” said Ceri Woolsgrove, safety officer at the European Cyclists’ Federation. “And if you say this is wonderful, but you have to wear armor, they won’t. These are normal human beings, not urban warriors.”

In fact, many European researchers say the test of a mature bike-sharing program is when women outnumber men. In the Netherlands, 52 percent of riders are women. Instead of promoting helmet use, European cycling advocates say, cities should be setting up safer bike lanes to slow traffic or divert it entirely from downtown areas. “Riding in New York or Australia is like running with the bulls — it’s all young males,” says Julian Ferguson, a spokesman for the European Cyclists’ Federation. And that’s in part what makes it dangerous. (Many European countries do require helmet use for children.)

In London, where use of a new bike-share program is exceeding all expectations, the number of riders in suits and dresses is growing, Mr. Woolsgrove says. And more Londoners seem to be leaving helmets at home.

We may follow a similar pattern. In her study of nascent bike-sharing programs in North America — including Montreal, Washington and Minneapolis — Dr. Shaheen found that the accident rate was “really low.” A large majority of participants strongly agreed that they got more exercise since the program started. And helmet use in bike programs tended to be far lower than among the general public.

Another study this summer found that only 30 percent of local riders using Washington’s Capital Bikeshare program wore helmets, compared with 70 percent of people on their own bikes, said John Kraemer of Georgetown University, the study’s author, who supports helmet use.

Before you hit the comment button and tell me that you know someone whose life was probably saved by a bike helmet, I know someone, too. I also know someone who believes his life was saved by getting a blood test for prostate specific antigen, detecting prostate cancer. But is that sense of salvation actually justified, for the individual or society? Back in New York I strapped on my helmet for a weekend bike ride in Central Park. But I’m not sure I’ll do the same two years from now if I’m commuting to work on a mature Citi Bike system.

Mr. De Jong, who grew up in the Netherlands, observes of Amsterdam: “Nobody wears helmets, and bicycling is regarded as a completely normal, safe activity. You never hear that ‘helmet saved my life’ thing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/sunday-review/to-encourage-biking-cities-forget-about-helmets.html?hp

Plasma Gasification Raises Hopes of Clean Energy From Garbage

By RANDY LEONARD

NY Times

September 11, 2012

David Robau tours the country promoting a system that sounds too good to be true: It devours municipal garbage, recycles metals, blasts toxic contaminants and produces electricity and usable byproducts — all with drastic reductions in emissions.

Mr. Robau, an environmental scientist for the Air Force, has been promoting a method that was developed with the Air Force to dispose of garbage with neither the harmful byproducts of conventional incineration nor the environmental impact of transporting and burying waste. It is one of several innovative techniques that the United States military has been researching to provide alternatives to the open-pit burns that some veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars say have made them ill.

Already some waste companies and cities like New York have shown an interest in technology similar to what Mr. Robau has been promoting, known as plasma arc gasification. Proponents say the process can break chemical bonds and destroy medical waste, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), asbestos and hydrocarbons, some of which can be hazardous if disposed of in landfills or traditional mass-burn incinerators.

Still, some environmentalists are leery. They say the ability to fully dispose of waste will discourage recycling and the development of renewable products, and the gasification will still result in toxic substances like dioxins.

Mr. Robau maintains that the process is earth-friendly. “This is not incineration,” he said. “This is gasification, so it’s a lot cleaner, a lot better for the environment.”

Mr. Robau, who also heads a nonprofit organization based in Gulf Breeze, Fla., has overseen testing of the small-scale plasma arc gasification system, which cracks complex molecules into simple elements using energy as intense as the sun’s surface, making fuel for about 350 kilowatts of electricity from about 10 tons of garbage each day, enough to run the system.

The system has been hard at work in a 6,400-square-foot building at Hurlburt Field Air Force base in Florida’s panhandle. A mechanical shredder cuts household garbage into pieces no bigger than two inches. An airtight auger feeds the waste into an oxygen-poor gasification chamber, where temperatures reach more than 9,000 degrees.

In an instant, wood disintegrates, plastics turn to gas. Bits of metal and glass fall into a molten pool.

From two graphite electrodes, an arc of electricity leaps about a foot to the molten slag, producing a cloud of ionized particles known as plasma, which heats the chamber. Most heavier metals settle to the bottom of the pool, below a layer of liquid silica and other oxides. The metals are removed, cooled and used for steel or other products.

“Effectively, 100 percent of all the metals on the base are being recycled,” Mr. Robau said.

The liquid oxides are removed and form a glassy solid when cooled. The slag traps contaminants like errant lead molecules and other heavy metals in a vitreous matrix that takes up 1 percent of the volume of the original waste, Mr. Robau said, a tenth of the volume left over after traditional incineration.

The vitrified component meets standards for disposal and may even be suitable for use as a construction aggregate, according to Mr. Robau and other industry professionals.

In the chamber, organic gases break down into hydrogen and carbon monoxide — the components of a fuel called synthesis gas, or syngas — which exits the furnace.

The gas passes through a plasma torch polisher, which breaks down remaining complex molecules and soot.

Injected water cools the syngas to less than 200 degrees. The extreme temperature of the plasma followed by quick cooling inhibits the formation of dioxins and furans (another organic compound), according to Mr. Robau and other industry experts.

The lack of dioxin creation would be a benefit over traditional incinerators and other types of gasifiers, in which lower temperatures and incomplete burning result in toxic compounds.

Emissions rules forced a 99 percent cut in dioxin and furan emissions and a 96 percent reduction in mercury from traditional incinerators between 1990 and 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. However, companies have to dispose of the toxic ash filtered from mass-burn facilities.

After water quenches the gas in the Hurlburt system, stripping processes produce sodium bisulfate and hydrochloric acid, which can be sold, Mr. Robau said.

The gas passes through three types of filters to catch remaining impurities. The resulting syngas is as clean or cleaner than natural gas, and the system produces less than half the nitrogen oxides and 5 percent of the sulfur oxides and mercury of a traditional incinerator, Mr. Robau said. The Air Force uses the syngas to produce enough electricity to power the system.

Companies have used plasma arc technology in steel refining for more than a century. Some small-scale plasma gasifiers are specialized to process materials like asbestos or medical waste.

In Japan, a plasma facility originally designed to zap residue from automobile shredding now handles up to 150 tons of municipal solid waste each day in the city of Utashinai. And construction on a plant of similar size, designed to process industrial waste and wood chips, wrapped up this summer in Morcenx, in southern France.

Companies have been eying plasma gasification of municipal waste with eager hopes, but until recently financing has lagged. Plasma facilities are expensive, and the energy-hungry arcs and torches can consume half of the generated electricity. On the other hand, the systems can also handle medical and hazardous waste, which can command two to four times the fees associated with municipal waste.

“The problem has been over the years trying to find that economic sweet spot,” said Joe Vaillancourt, who evaluates newer technologies for Waste Management, a $15.4 billion company with headquarters in Texas.

In the past five years, with increased interest in energy independence and sustainability, venture capitalists and companies have financed testing of small-scale systems, including a 25-ton system built and run by InEnTec in Arlington, Ore., Mr. Vaillancourt said. Waste Management now holds an equity stake in InEnTec.

Last month the Agriculture Department announced a conditional $105 million loan guarantee for Fulcrum BioEnergy to build a much larger system outside Reno, Nev. It will use three InEnTec plasma melters to process 400 tons of garbage a day, an unprecedented scale for a plasma municipal waste facility, said Mr. Vaillancourt and others in the industry. Fulcrum plans to create ethanol from the syngas, and expects the Reno plant to be running in 2014.

New York City, too, is looking for innovative technology to deal with some of the city’s waste. In March, the Bloomberg administration requested proposals to build a facility that would use newer techniques like plasma gasification or anaerobic digestion to process as much as 900 tons of garbage a day.

“New Yorkers want their trash to be handled in an environmentally friendly way,” said Caswell F. Holloway, deputy mayor for operations. “Anything would be better than putting it in the ground.” The city is reviewing the proposals.

Still, some environmental groups, like the Sierra Club and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, lump these techniques in with traditional incinerators, claiming that they still produce dioxin. They also oppose renewable energy credits for these facilities.

Allen Hershkowitz, a scientist with the National Resources Defense Council, said he believed there was a place for waste-to-energy operations, but only after recycling and composting programs had been maximized.

He said he still believed that communities could reach recycling rates of 60 to 70 percent. In his view it is premature for a city like New York, with a recycling rate of about 15 percent, to be considering setting up a new waste facility. “They’re not even at the point where they should be thinking about waste-to-energy,” Mr. Hershkowitz said

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/science/plasma-gasification-raises-hopes-of-clean-energy-from-garbage.html?pagewanted=all

Life Without Indian Point, Redux

By MATTHEW L. WALD

NY Times

9/7/12

The consequences of running the Indian Point nuclear reactors or shutting them down run from easy-to-spot to hard-to-calculate.

Is a serious accident plausible? Would retiring the reactors open the way for alternative sources of electricity that pose a lower safety risk? Or simply ensure an economic blow?

Two Westchester County business groups have sponsored a study, released on Friday, that takes the latter view — a counterpoint a 2011 study by opponentsthat argued that there was nothing indispensable about the reactors.

The new report, by Howard J. Axelrod, a longtime economics consultant, predicts payroll and tax payment losses (which seem pretty certain) and takes a stab at predicting electricity rate increases and a general decline in economic activity. The study was sponsored by the Business Council of Westchester (of which Entergy, Indian Point’s owner, is a member), and the Westchester Business Alliance

The report updates a version commissioned by Westchester business interests four years ago.

Some of the numbers are straightforward. Indian Point has 1,200 employees and uses another 200 contractors. The employee payroll is $130 million, and the plant pays $75 million in property taxes plus additional taxes to New York State.

The study quotes an earlier estimate that the plant contributes $363 million to local purchases. (Some fraction of the payroll and property taxes would continue during the decommissioning of the plant’s reactors.) A high-efficiency natural gas plant of the same capacity might employ only 20 workers, the study said.

It’s a little harder to estimate the effect on electric rates.

New York State’s electricity system relies on a complicated auction method whereby utilities like Con Edison say how much electricity they think they will need and generating companies say what price they need to produce electricity.

A computer tallies up the demand and ranks the suppliers by price, from lowest to highest. It then decides which generators will run, beginning with the lowest-priced and continuing until demand is met, with the last megawatt-hour being the priciest. Yet all generators get paid the price demanded by the last supplier.

Indian Point is a relatively low-cost supplier. If it disappears, the computer will have to reach higher into the stack of generation offers to match supply to demand, and that last megawatt-hour will be more expensive. So all generators will receive more income, and all consumers will pay more.

Mr. Axelrod’s study puts Indian Point’s energy costs at $44 to $53 per megawatt-hour. He says that the least costly alternative would be a plant burning natural gas at high efficiency, which would cost $76 to $109 per megawatt-hour. He estimates an increase in electricity rates of 6.3 percent, or $374 million a year.

Of the two functioning Indian Point reactors (Unit 1 closed down in 1974), Unit 2’s license expires in 2013, and Unit 3’s in 2015. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has yet to turn down a request for a license extension, although it wants some steps to be taken on safety at the plant.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants the plant retired, and while the state has no jurisdiction over safety, it is trying to deny a vital water-use permit. Under the commission’s rules, the plant’s existing licenses are valid beyond their expiration dates if an application for a renewal is still under consideration.

The debate over the effects of shutting down the plant will surely drag on.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/life-without-indian-point-redux/

Projects to Add Wind Power for City Gain Momentum

By MIREYA NAVARRO

New York Times

February 28, 2012

Despite Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s long-expressed dream of putting wind turbines on skyscrapers and bridges, the constraints of an urban landscape have so far proved too challenging for reliable wind power in the city, energy experts said. As a result, New York City has been largely inactive — and behind the national curve — in embracing wind power.

But that is about to change. This spring, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection will solicit plans for the first major wind project, the installation of turbines atop the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. And city planners are working on zoning changes, now under review by the City Planning Commission, to allow turbines up to 55 feet high on the rooftops of buildings taller than 100 feet, and even taller turbines on commercial and industrial sites along the waterfront.

But the biggest potential for supplying wind power to the city lies offshore, where the Bloomberg administration is supporting an application filed last September by a coalition led by the New York Power Authority to lease a swath of the ocean floor for a wind farm 13 miles off the coast of the Rockaways in Queens.

City officials say they are ready to take advantage of their coastal proximity to seek bigger renewable-energy projects and quicken the pace toward cleaner air and the jobs and economic benefits that would accompany those projects. A study commissioned by the city last year said wind farms could play a major role in replacing power now generated by the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County. The plant supplies up to 25 percent of consumption in Consolidated Edison’s service area, including New York City.

“When you’re talking about huge wind, offshore is really a unique opportunity,” said Farrell Sklerov, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The proposal for the offshore wind farm, which is scheduled for a public hearing before the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management next month, is considered a game changer in that it would start at 350 megawatts but have the potential to double its capacity — eventually generating enough electricity to power a half-million homes in New York City and Long Island.

The plans are in the initial stages, but they are part of a push by states along the Eastern Seaboard to make wind power a significant staple of their energy mix. The region lags behind the West and Midwest, where flat, open spaces are plentiful and wind turbines already supply up to 20 percent of electric power in some states.

“We certainly have an ocean in our backyard that can host these turbines,” said Katherine Kennedy, clean-energy counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If we can develop wind and solar, all of a sudden we look like a European city.”

Through most of the last decade, turbines have been springing up all over the country, including in dairy farms in upstate New York. As a result, New York State, which has set a goal of deriving 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2015, now ranks 12th among the states in wind power installations, with 1,400 megawatts, or enough to meet 2 percent of the state’s electricity demand, says the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group.

Some states got a lift this month when federal officials from the Department of the Interior cleared the way for companies to seek federal leases in wind-energy areas off New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, speeding the process to approve wind projects.

Environmental groups say New York has been less focused on tapping into wind than some of these neighboring states but this year the New York Department of State is expected to identify the most viable locations for offshore wind farms with an eye toward protecting shipping, commercial fishing and ocean habitats — an approach that experts say should save time and red tape and help attract developers looking to begin such a project.

Long processes to win approvals and the higher cost of wind compared with less sustainable sources of electricity are not the only obstacles to developing wind installations. The projects must also withstand public scrutiny. Despite support from environmental groups, the only federally approved offshore wind project to date, Cape Wind in Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod, has been stalled, in part by opposition over aesthetics and the impact on American Indian artifacts and burial grounds, among other issues.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, opposed a proposed wind farm three-and-a-half to five miles off Jones Beach in Long Island over concerns about the potential harm to fish. The project was ultimately derailed in 2007 by high costs. Ms. Brady said the proposal off the Rockaways, while farther offshore, was still worrisome. It calls for at least 70 wind turbines that could each soar 430 feet above the water.

“The biggest problem we have is that there’s really no science to either support or negate wind power as something that wouldn’t affect the fish negatively,” she said. “If there’s a problem, once you’ve done the damage, who’s responsible?”

While more expensive to produce than wind power, solar energy is more suited to cities, energy experts said, because it can be harnessed more discreetly from thousands of rooftops. New York City has so far grown its solar production to seven megawatts, a modest amount but well over its practically nonexistent wind production. This runs counter to what is occurring in the rest of the state and the country, where wind installed capacity, 46,000 megawatts, vastly outpaces the 3,800 megawatts of solar.

Some New York buildings are already experimenting with private wind production, like the Eltona apartments in the Melrose section of the Bronx. But they have found that they do not get enough wind to make turbines a reliable source of power. City planners are revising zoning regulations to allow more private turbines, but still concede that wind turbines may not thrive here unless they are on or near the shore.

City officials say the former environmental wasteland known as Fresh Kills is an ideal location. The Department of Environmental Protection will, in the next two months, ask for wind and solar proposals to develop 75 acres of the landfill, with the goal of adding 15 megawatts of energy, enough to power 3,300 homes. Officials said at least a third of the production would be wind power.

The Fresh Kills plan could double the city’s solar output, but it is the wind turbines that excite the Staten Island borough president, James P. Molinaro, who has lobbied for a wind farm for years, and persuaded the state to finance a study that showed the site could support seven 400-foot turbines.

City officials say it has taken them this long to evaluate the challenges of installing wind turbines on the landfill’s unique subsurface.

Fresh Kills closed as a landfill handling the city’s residential garbage more than a decade ago and is now undergoing a transformation into a 2,200-acre park.

“It’d change the biggest tragedy that ever happened to Staten Island and convert it to something wonderful,” Mr. Molinaro said. “Windmills that would give us clean energy in a beautiful park. It’d be a model for the rest of the world to look at.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/nyregion/new-york-to-renew-push-for-wind-power.html?pagewanted=print