Health, Oil & Taxes
Household Detergents, Shampoos May Form Harmful Substance in Waste Water
ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2010) - Scientists are reporting evidence that certain ingredients in shampoo, detergents and other household cleaning agents may be a source of precursor materials for formation of a suspected cancer-causing contaminant in water supplies that receive water from sewage treatment plants. The study sheds new light on possible environmental sources of this poorly understood water contaminant, called NDMA, which is of ongoing concern to health officials.
Their study is in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology.
William Mitch and colleagues note that scientists have known that NDMA and other nitrosamines can form in small amounts during the disinfection of wastewater and water with chloramine. Although nitrosamines are found in a wide variety of sources -- including processed meats and tobacco smoke -- scientists know little about their precursors in water. Past studies with cosmetics have found that substances called quaternary amines, which are also ingredients in household cleaning agents, may play a role in the formation of nitrosamines.
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As Pharmaceutical Use Soars, Drugs Taint Water and Wildlife
With nearly $800 billion in drugs sold worldwide, pharmaceuticals are increasingly being released into the environment. The "green pharmacy" movement seeks to reduce the ecological impact of these drugs, which have caused mass bird die-offs and spawned antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
The standard that new drugs be safe for human consumption was first enshrined in U.S. regulations in 1938, after an antibacterial drug dissolved in a poisonous solvent killed 100 children. Now, armed with a range of evidence suggesting that wildlife and human health may be threatened by pharmaceutical residues that escape into waterways and elsewhere, a growing band of concerned ecotoxicologists and environmental chemists are calling for yet another standard for new medications: that they be designed to be safe for the environment.
The movement for "green pharmacy," as it has been dubbed, has grown as new technology has allowed scientists to discern the presence of chemicals in the environment at minute concentrations, revealing the wide dispersal of human and veterinary drugs across the planet. In recent years, scientists have detected trace amounts of more than 150 different human and veterinary medicines in environments as far afield as the Arctic. Eighty percent of the U.S.'s streams and nearly a quarter of the nation's groundwater sampled by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has been found to be contaminated with a variety of medications.
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Soy Report and Scorecard
The Cornucopia Institute's Organic Soy Report and accompanying Scorecard rates companies that market organic soy foods, such as soymilk, tofu and "veggie burgers," based on ten criteria that are important to organic consumers' showcasing companies that are truly committed to the spirit and letter of the organic law while exposing those that do not rate highly or were unwilling to share their sourcing and production practices in our survey.
The scorecard sheds light on questions such as:
- Do the soybeans come from American organic farmers, or are they imported from China, India or South America?
- Is the company devoted to supporting organic agriculture by sourcing only organic soybeans and marketing only organic products?
- Does the company use loopholes in the organic standards to source cheaper non-organic ingredients even when organic ones are available?
Part I of the comprehensive report explores the reasons for asking these questions, including why organic consumers should be wary of Chinese imports, given the lax oversight by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) over organic certifiers working in China.
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Taxpayer Dollars Subsidizing Destruction
Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown
One way to correct market failures is tax shifting-raising taxes on activities that harm the environment so that their prices begin to reflect their true cost and offsetting this with a reduction in income taxes. A complimentary way to achieve this goal is subsidy shifting. Each year the world's taxpayers provide at least $700 billion in subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing. As the Earth Council study Subsidizing Unsustainable Development observes, "There's something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction."
The perverse nature of harmful subsidies is especially apparent in the case of oceanic fisheries. Partly as a result of these subsidies, there are now so many fishing trawlers that their catch potential is nearly double the sustainable fish catch. Three fourths of ocean fisheries are now being fished at or beyond capacity or are recovering from over-exploitation. If we continue with business as usual, many of these fisheries will collapse. The cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada is a prime example of what can happen. Long one of the world's most productive fisheries, it collapsed in the early 1990s and may never recover.
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Wasteful Corporate Tax Subsidies Are Like 'Barnacles On The Code'
Last week, Forbes reported that many big corporations, including General Electric and Exxon Mobil, will pay no income taxes to the U.S. Treasury for 2009. (Exxon disputes this report, but refused to tell Forbes how much it will owe, and Forbes did not retract the statement.) At the same time, oil companies like Exxon are fighting to preserve billions of dollars in senseless corporate subsidies that they receive from the federal government, which the Obama administration has proposed abolishing.
These subsidies are part of a much wider problem with tax expenditures, or government spending that is administered through the tax code. Over the decades, a number of expenditures have cropped up in the tax code that senselessly subsidize corporations, huge farms, and the vacation homes for the wealthy. And anytime anyone tries to remove them, the interest involved throws a hissy fit and goes all out to protect the subsidy. Just look at the reaction of big corporations that, thanks to the recently passed health care reform bill, no longer get to both receive subsidies and write the subsidies off on their taxes.
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America's hidden power bill
Examining federal energy tax expenditures
The most important day of the year for the many energy companies that receive federal financial support isn't the day the president releases his proposed budget, or the day appropriations bills get passed, or even the day when government checks get sent out. It's tax day. Why? Because each tax day energy companies-electric utilities, oil refiners, renewable energy developers, coal miners, ethanol producers, and others-record billions of dollars worth of special tax credits and deductions.
Tax expenditures-government spending programs that deliver subsidies through the tax code via special tax credits, deductions, exclusions, exemptions, and preferential rates-are the dominant type of federal support for the U.S. energy industry. Altogether, these spending programs amount to 60 percent of the government's total support to the industry. These tax expenditures are functionally equivalent to direct spending, but they are often subject to less scrutiny.
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Global oil demand hits new high - threatening both economic and national security
The International Energy Agency (IEA) released new findings Tuesday April 13 that global oil demand will reach a record high level in 2010, as the world economy recovers and developing nations' demand for oil grows to new heights. IEA forecasts that average annual world oil demand will have rebounded 2% from 84.9 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2009 to 86.6 mb/d in 2010. Susan Lyon, Special Assistant on CAP's Energy Opportunity team, has the story.
In its April 13 Oil Market Report, a monthly update on world oil market trends, IEA forecasts world oil demand growth this year at 1.67 mb/d, up by 100,000 bpd from its previous forecast. Accordingly, the agency finds that "crude oil futures hit 18-month highs in early April, with expectations for an accelerating economic recovery." Since the last oil market report, global oil demand has been revised up by 30,000 barrels per day (b/d).
The report warns that rising oil prices may threaten continued economic recovery:
Ultimately, things might turn messy for producers if $80-$100 per barrel is merely seen as the new $60-$80, stunting economic recovery while prompting resurgent non-oil and non-OPEC supply investment.
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Pumping tax dollars to big oil
Getting priorities right on tax subsidies for oil companies
ExxonMobil paid no U.S. federal income tax in 2009. In fact, it was entitled to a $156 million tax refund. Why? CAP's Sima J. Gandhi, has the answer in this repost.
The answer is more boring than you think: It overpaid its 2008 taxes.
ExxonMobil was required to bolster its pension plan by $3 billion when the market went down in 2008. According to Alan Jeffers, Exxon's media relations manager, this overpayment reduced the amount of taxes owed in 2008, but the tax adjustment wasn't made until one year later, which led to an overpayment and the refund in 2009.
But what's more interesting about this story is Exxon's effective income tax rate. Exxon has over the past couple years paid a U.S. federal income tax that is about 10 percent lower than its non-U.S. effective tax rate. Other oil companies also pay less, and in some years this difference has approached 50 percentage points.*
Oil companies pay less in U.S. taxes in part because they receive generous tax subsidies. These subsidies will cost the U.S. government about $3 billion next year in lost revenue and nearly $20 billion over the next five years.
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Another Good Reason to Cut Oil Use
Another reason to end our dependence on oil? Not only is our thirst for oil helping fill Iran's coffers, but the US military this week signaled that it's growing more concerned that there simply won't be enough oil available in the near future, which could fuel conflict and instability around the world.
A report from the US Joint Forces Command projects significant oil shortages by 2015. Via The Guardian:
"By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day," says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.
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