Book Summary & Review: Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment – by Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. (Da Capo Press 1997, 2nd Ed. 2010)

I did this review in 2018. While I disagree pretty strongly with Steingraber’s activism against natural gas development, her advocacy for the Precautionary Principle, and some of her other proposed solutions, I also think her personal story is a compelling one and I respect her work in investigating links between synthetic chemicals and cancer.

 

This is an interesting account of the possible relationships between chemicals, particularly synthetic organic chemicals, and the incidence of cancer. By nature, it is difficult to discern the prime causes of cancer and what might just be influences. The environment a body encounters and imbibes is certainly a factor. She does a good job of stating evidence and trying to tease out relationships in light of both her scientific prowess and her very personal long and thus far successful battle with bladder cancer, diagnosed when she was 20. It is also good as a personal account of the anxieties, hopes and fears, of having cancer, quite touching at times. She is a veteran of over 70 cystoscopic exams where tubes were inserted into her bladder.

 

In the intro to the 2nd edition she notes that it has been thirty years since she was first diagnosed. When she was diagnosed she was asked by her urologist if she ever worked in a tire factory, the aluminum industry, or with textile dyes. She was asked because bladder cancer is the cancer most thought to be due to exposure to hazardous chemicals. Of all the chemicals used in our society very few have been specifically tested for carcinogenicity – about 2%, although that increases if we extrapolate and categorize by type. Many chemicals known to cause cancer in animals are used in food and consumer products. Genetic factors are extremely important in susceptibility to cancer so it makes sense that the genetically susceptible are very sensitive to exposure to carcinogens in the environment.

 

Steingraber’s information sources include the Harvard Medical School library where she did post-doctoral research, right-to-know laws, cancer registries, published studies, and reports about levels of environmental contaminants like pesticides and other chemicals and air pollution. She notes the 1986 federal right-to-know law which requires industrial interests to keep databases of the release of initially some 650 toxic substances into the environment. The database became the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). This allowed researchers to compare where those releases occurred with local cancer rates and patterns. From 2001 to 2008 the TRI was scaled back and thousands of facilities were no longer required to report.

 

Steingraber does acknowledge that cancer causation is complex and a recent analysis from Johns Hopkins University notes that most cancers to not have a discernable cause. She notes cancer causation used to be divided among three variables: genes, lifestyle, and environment. Newer analyses indicate that those variables often intermingle in complex ways. Genetic factors may involve epigenetic factors – genetic predisposition to cancer is too simplistic. Substances, natural and synthetic may alter gene expression and change gene behavior. She also mentions endocrine disruption, whereby certain chemicals disrupt our endocrine system which affects hormone production, metabolism, and reproduction. Basically, chemicals can interfere with and mimic hormones. She notes the old toxicology adage – “the dose makes the poison,” but also adds that in endocrine disruption the timing is often very important, particularly exposure early in life. Another complicating factor is chemical mixtures and how they interact with one another and with the body as a whole. Steingraber is an advocate of the Precautionary Principle, which is favored in Europe but has always been a hard sell in the U.S. I don’t agree with her on this – sometimes being overly cautious can cause more harm than good and I think each individual case should be evaluated separately rather than fall under a single regulatory principle. She favors ‘green chemistry’ but there is as of yet much to work out with it. She notes that petroleum and coal are often the sources of carcinogenic synthetic substances and so favors green energy. Of course, petroleum is also the source of many synthetic chemicals that improve health and make our lives safer and more convenient. The bigger part of toxic chemical releases comes from coal-burning power plants and emissions from vehicles. She notes that the death rate from cancer has actually fallen and this is due primarily to the success of smoking cessation programs. However, childhood cancer has slowly but steadily increased over the years. She notes that certain industrial chemicals have been proven to cause cancer among those who work with them so precautions are needed, including outright banning in some cases.

 

Steingraber recounts her childhood in Central Illinois prairieland/farmland where part of her family farmed. Illinois is 87% farmland. It has been farmed for a long time and pesticide use is abundant, including the use of atrazine. Atrazine in the environment is high during spring planting and lower in winter. It and its byproducts are found in surface water, air, and groundwater as well. A 1992 study found that one-quarter of private wells in Central Illinois contained agricultural chemicals, typically in trace amounts. How they get into groundwater and how much varies according to how much is used, how much runs off, and the local geology and groundwater configurations are important factors. Even long-banned DDT and PCBs are still found in the environment due to their chemical stability. She notes that:

 

“Atrazine remains the most frequently detected pesticide [as of publication 2010] in water throughout the United States, found in three of every four American streams and rivers and 40% of all groundwater samples.”

 

She gives some info/data and anecdotes about DDT, PCBs, and atrazine and introduces Rachel Carson, who succumbed to cancer and whose work led to DDT being banned. Through the book, it can be seen that Steingraber venerates Carson and follows in her footsteps. She recounts her visits to the library at Yale University that houses Carson’s papers. She reproduces some of Carson’s notes about her own cancer and impending death and through narrative stories about Steingraber’s friend Jeannie who had an aggressive form of cancer in her thirties and died from it. Carson’s famous 1962 book, Silent Spring, led to the banning or restricted use of several dangerous pesticides, although the chemical industry fought her. In a few isolated cases these pesticides can be useful according to many – such as in very specific applications to prevent malaria which kills many children around the world in tropical countries with abundant mosquitos. Many say DDT could prevent those deaths but there is no access since it is banned internationally. DDT, PCBs, and possibly atrazine (which is not banned in the U.S. but is in Europe) are in some ways associated with cancer although data and conclusions have been inconsistent. Thus, even with these powerful poisons it is difficult to get incontrovertible conclusions. This makes the much less powerful pesticides in use today like glyphosate much more benign by comparison. Steingraber also recounts Carson’s public appearances to fight the chemical/pesticide industry after Silent Spring was published and her struggling cancer patient appearance as she defended her work. Carson argued that pesticides and other chemicals caused cancer before it was generally ceded that that was the case. Steingraber notes Carson’s ode to citizen activists as helping her to speak out and sees herself in the same light – as an activist as well as a scientist – Steingraber has been vocal in recent years in opposition to oil and gas industry activity near Ithaca, NY where she lives – although I think her focus may be misplaced since the fracking revolution likely produces far more benefit than harm and the fears about water contamination are overblown.

 

She recounts the experience of having cancer throughout the book, the boredom, the anxiety, the fear, the frustration. She also notes cancer trends and trying to tease out trends from the data that is available. She pours through state and federal cancer registries and compares them to TRI data. She looks at cancer incidence rates = number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people per year. Tracking changes in cancer incidence can lead to discoveries that point to sources. Unfortunately, there are often multiple possible sources so that the availability of many of them may correlate with cancer incidence and yet not be related by cause. The adage “correlation does not equal causation” is often relevant to these statistical epidemiological approaches. Teasing out clear relationships from the data can be difficult. She acknowledges these problems.

 

Incidence rates can change when new detection technologies appear such as mammography for breast cancer. She explores the trends in breast cancer, noting that breast cancer has been dropping irregularly since it peaked in the 1990’s. There are several possible reasons: decline in women taking hormone-replacement drugs, decline in women getting mammograms, disproportional under-reporting, and declining exposure to causative agents. She notes that breast cancer kills 41,000 women in the U.S. yearly. Another reason cancer trends are hard to track is that it is a slow disease and people move to different localities making cancer by region difficult to calculate evenly. She notes that the overall cancer incidence rate is 463 per 100,000. This is more than twice the cancer mortality rate so more people are surviving cancer. Over 11 million people in the U.S. have cancer, are in remission, or are cured. The cancers that are rising are leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, soft tissue cancers, kidney cancer, and brain and nervous system tumors. Childhood cancers are rising as well, which suggests environmental factors. She notes that children do receive a higher proportion of any poisons in air and water due to body weight and they don’t have lifestyle factors as adults do. She notes that cigarette smoking causes 85-90% of lung cancer with a very high fatality rate and is thus the largest preventable form of cancer. 

 

Steingraber lauds calls to fund more cancer incidence research as well as research of more potential chemical carcinogens. She notes cancer studies that have grouped people by birth year, by racial/ethnic background, gender, or all of the above. She focuses in on the data about non-Hodgkin lymphomas and notes that people of certain occupations tend to get it such as farm workers and dry cleaning workers. Solvents, PCBs, and certain pesticides (phenoxy herbicides) are suspected sources or triggers. She studies cancer distributions across space and time. One might find cancer clusters and compare them to nearby potential sources of toxins, although one would have to prove that those toxins are there and know something about their toxicological effects. She notes throughout the book that cancer study results are often unclear and inconclusive and can only suggest where and what to study further. She thinks there is a general correlation between industrialization and rising cancer rates. She suggests that increased coal-burning in China and living near a Soviet petrochemical complex in Ajerbaijan correlate well to increasing cancer rates in those places. She implicates coal and petroleum in particular – many synthetic chemicals derive from petroleum. However, it is hard to know how much cancer or cancer influence is derived from petroleum chemicals. We also know that the UV light from the sun causes cancer in those susceptible and that plant substances can be carcinogenic. Lifestyle factors may also stack the deck for or against cancers. Household chemicals, cosmetics, cleaning chemicals, paints, and solvents may be factors. It is hard to know how much with each of these without large, long-lasting, and well-planned studies. More people die of heart disease than cancer (especially now as more and more cancers become treatable) and lifestyle is also a large factor in heart disease. Toxin exposure could be a contributing factor as well. She notes that increasing cancer rates among migrants to a new place certainly suggests an environmental influence.

 

She calls for a nationwide cancer registry. The National Cancer Institute keeps an atlas of cancer mortality but not incidence (cancer mortality has dropped due to better treatment and sooner detection). She notes a good correlation between cancer mortality and industrial areas. However, she also notes that quality of treatment is a factor and that cancer diagnoses do not seem to correlate as well to industrial activity. She does say that cancer rates seem to match industry more than any other health problems match it. She mentions a study in the UK that correlated leukemia very well to industrial facilities, particularly to those involving chemical solvents at high temperatures. Cancer rates among certain occupations have long been studied: farmers, chemists, dental workers, barbers, hairdressers, firefighters, painters, welders, asbestos workers, miners, printers, fabric and dye workers, certain electronics workers, and plastics manufacturers. Being somehow exposed to dumped chemicals and wastes is also considered, particularly the many Superfund sites. She does also consider methodology and the difficulty of getting from correlation to causation. Here she mentions ecological fallacy as a term meaning to falsely attribute causation to correlation. She complains that uncertainty has been used to delay corrective action for reducing environmental pollution. That can work both ways as those who favor strong regulation of potential toxins often use uncertainty to argue their position – the basis of the Precautionary Principle. It is basically a ‘prove it safe’ vs. a ‘prove it harmful’ debate. I would argue that since many of the toxins are or derive from substances that do much good in the world, including making people healthier and enabling many things – that the burden should be on those to ‘prove it harmful’ for most things – that usefulness to society, cost, and disruption also need to be taken into account.

 

She goes through a type of epidemiology known as “ecological studies,” which attempt to discern disease trends in large groups. One might study populations where exposure to toxins is likely vs. populations where it is unlikely. Investigation of cancer clusters can be tricky or legitimate requests for such studies can be dismissed by health workers. We are all exposed to various levels of ‘probable carcinogens’ such as metal degreaser trichlorethylene (TCE) as it is in most water supplies. In such cases it is difficult to find a comparison population with no exposure to the toxin. Cancer is more difficult to study because it may take a long time after exposure (to certain toxins) for cancer to develop. People move between exposure and onset. Also, cancer may have numerous causes so that pinpointing it to one cause is not easy. She notes that GIS (geographic information systems) can be very helpful. Environmental epidemiology is wrought with difficulties as well as being amenable to inconclusive results that may suggest causation that is not causation and vice versa.

 

Steingraber focuses on synthetic organic chemicals as potential sources of cancer although she does not mention that there are natural sources of cancer as well and that some of the synthesized chemicals also do occur in nature, although often in different forms. Crude oil is a natural substance that is toxic if ingested. She notes that:

 

“Synthetic organic molecules are chemically similar enough to substances naturally found in the bodies of living organisms that, as a group, they tend to be biologically active.”

 

This is problematic she says. Many organic chemicals are inert in their final forms but active in their intermediate forms during manufacture. If enough of some chemicals get in our systems they may mimic natural body chemicals as is thought to be the way endocrine disruptors act. She also mentions chloroform, considered a probable carcinogen. It is used in many chemical processes and appears in wastewater. It also appears as a byproduct of chlorinated water so removing it may be impossible. Later in the book she does mention favoring alternatives to chlorine use but water companies still prefer chlorine based on cost and feasibility. She laments the ineffectiveness of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) which does not require testing for the vast majority of new chemicals on the market. Of course, massive new studies on every new chemical would mean massive animal testing and such tests often involve giving animals massive lethal doses. She notes that barely a handful of chemicals have ever been taken off the market and none for the last nineteen years. Pesticides are regulated differently – Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) and Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). In 1986 the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) passed Congress over massive opposition by industry. It spurred the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) which requires companies to report the total amount of about 650 toxic chemicals released as waste, by-products, and spills every year. TRI was scaled back in 2008 and 2009 citing homeland security concerns since knowledge of where toxins were stored could be used by those wishing to unleash them for terroristic reasons. However, in order to explore whether environmental toxins are influencing cancer incidence one would need to know what is actual in the environment from day to day or at least on avg.

 

Toxics and pollutants may be concentrated at places like landfills, particularly at those that accept toxic waste such as heavy metals that have been implicated as carcinogens. Steingraber does her own investigative analysis of industrial toxics released into her childhood area of Tazewell County, Illinois.

 

She goes back again to endocrine disruptors, mainly those that mimic the hormone estrogen. While this is true of several industrial chemicals just today I read an article about naturally-occurring chemicals in the essential oils used in many soaps, shampoos, and lotions also doing the same thing. The substances in the oils are also known to bioaccumulate rather than fully metabolize. Apparently, there are several ways substances (both synthetic and natural) interfere with hormones. Phthalates used in PVC plastic and added to perfumes and lotions are known disruptors as are a rather toxic chemical group known as organochlorines which includes PCBs, TCE, DDT, dioxin, and several others. Organochlorines tend to persist in the environment. Burning plastic produces dioxin and other organochlorines. She mentions the UN Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) as inspiring since it seeks to eliminate the use of the most toxic POPs. Several of the worst organochlorines are on the list.

 

Steingraber favors so-called green chemistry over petroleum chemistry but it is quite difficult to compete with petroleum (or natural gas liquids and derivatives) as feedstocks. She mentions as one green chemistry success story – the development of a soy-based adhesive that replaces formaldehyde in plywood. She argues that green chemistry should be mandated like smoking cessation and exercise – as health-promoting. However, she doesn’t acknowledge that some of nature’s own chemicals, when concentrated and exposed to creatures can cause health problems too. I think she overly focuses on the synthetics. Too many wood ashes concentrated in one spot can contain carcinogenic heavy metals. Wood smoke is highly toxic. An USDA-organic approved fungicide like copper sulfate can be more toxic than commonly used pesticides as can other highly concentrated natural substances. She does acknowledge that pre-synthetic substances like celluloid and castor oil are also environmentally harmful and so does not advocate for banning all synthetic chemicals, only the most harmful ones. While that may seem reasonable some are difficult to replace. However, her activism to ban fracking and an underground propane storage facility suggest that she does advocate bans.

 

She goes through some case studies of possible relationships between certain pesticides and breast cancer. She also explains why assays – evaluations of biological or chemical substances – can be expensive, messy, and complex. In assays for potential carcinogens animal studies need to involve large amounts of animals who need to be evaluated for years as cancer often takes a long time to appear. For complete understanding such long complex assays would be needed for each potential chemical carcinogen, ideally. Some researchers have advocated for new chemical screening tools since the time constraints and inconclusiveness of animal assays keep a huge backlog of chemicals for which toxicity is unknown. Better knowledge of the interactions of networks of genes, proteins, and receptors has shown that certain chemicals and classes of chemicals disrupt the pathways of these cell functions.

 

She discovers that her own cancer, a type of bladder cancer called transitional cell carcinoma, also occurs among beluga whales from the St. Lawrence estuary in Canada. Many workers from a nearby aluminum smelting operation also got that particular type of cancer. PCBs, DDT, chlordane, and other toxins are found in the waters and sediment of the estuary. There is also benzo-[a]-pyrene, product of combustion classed as a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH). Liver cancer in fish has also been linked to toxics.

 

She laments the change from large numbers of small family farms to less farms but bigger more industrialized ones. Using pesticides reduced the need for crop rotation. She recounts her childhood farm experiences in Illinois. While Illinois corn and soybeans are sold for export, most goes to feed livestock. A significant amount also becomes snacks and corn sugar. She also advocates taxing foods of lower nutritional value, like soda to deal with the obesity epidemic. Obesity and weight gain are risk factors for cancer, probably related to hormones and inflammation. She sees the farm belt as overproducing the two – corn and soy – but they make the best animal feed, snacks, and best grain nutrition for export. Also, larger more industrialized farms are way more efficient and reduce overall land use quite significantly. Corn and soy also account for the largest share of herbicide use. Of course , there is also organic, which uses organically approved pesticides, not synthetic, but which may also have some ill effects. Weeds used to be removed by plowing, hoeing, and disking but these were time and labor intensive. They also released more carbon from soils. Modern no-till methods are better for soil health and retain more carbon. Herbicide-resistant varieties developed through genetic engineering. Though she laments that by 2004 a third of Illinois corn was GMO (probably much more now), this is now widely seen as a good thing since overall pesticide use is down. She does not mention this. She invokes herbicide-resistant weeds which can be problematic but have yet to be a huge problem, especially as herbicides are more targeted in place and time to reduce runoff. She laments the continued use of atrazine, banned in the EU, because of its water solubility and ability to spread all over the environment. She also laments the dead zones caused by nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer runoff overload. She notes that manure is way less used than it used to be (although she doesn’t mention that manure runoff also contributes significantly to the runoff that creates dead zones). Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are made from natural gas in fertilizer plants. Although she sees that as a problem it is really the basis for improved yields and preventing more global hunger as well as allowing farmers to make a profit and food to be plentiful and cheap. Fertilizer can also be targeted in place and time to reduce runoff, which also can save farmers money. She goes on to advocate organic farming and agroecology. These are of course good things but in terms of yields and reducing land use for agriculture they are still way behind modern mechanized agriculture utilizing synthetic fertilizer. She seems to think organic farming reduced carbon footprints but more recent analysis suggests it’s the other way around, mainly due to less land required for comparable yields = less deforestation/more reforestation. More modern scientific analysis suggests that organic “methods” combined with efficient and smart use of synthetic fertilizers, and genetic engineering will be the best overall solution. More recently there is CRISPR gene-editing that may make GMOs more versatile. Her call to go back to the old ways of farming on a large scale seems rather anachronistic and naive in light of the massive success of modern methods.

 

Next, she considers airborne toxins that follow the weather to distribute themselves across the globe, even in remote parts of the world such as the Arctic. She mentions that in 2007 one-third of toxins released into the environment were released into the air. However, much of it probably ends up not heavily concentrated. There are chemical reactions that can combine to make new air contaminants from combusted material like how nitrous oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) contribute to photochemical smog/ground-level ozone. This is a well-known pollutant in many urban areas and is considered to shorten life if one lives in an area of chronic smog. She thinks the increase of lung cancer among non-smokers may be attributed to particulates and smog. Oncologists and pathologists have also suggested that air pollutants like nitrogen dioxide may also help cancer spread from other areas to the lungs where it is difficult to treat.

 

Next, she considers water pollution, noting that it may be responsible for habitat destruction for many riverine species including water fowl. As in many place, she notes that water quality improved in the Illinois rivers due to the requirements of the 1972 Clean Air Act. The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act set limits of certain chemicals allowable in drinking water. She notes the concept of “enforceable limits” of a few parts per billion of some substances like benzene and TCE where any amount is considered dangerous but water can only be “cleaned” to those enforceable limits. Most limits are in single-digit parts per billion. She notes that as of 2009 there were only enforceable limits established for 90 contaminants. Any device that heats water (showers, dishwashers, washers) can also release VOCs from the water so that water can also contribute to airborne toxics. Some studies have suggested that showers can be more toxic than drinking toxins in water. Again she considers chlorinated water, noting that chlorine combines with contaminants in water to make toxic by-products, some of which are organo-chlorines. She notes that about 600 of those by-products have been discovered with few tested for carcinogenicity. A few are monitored and regulated – trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids – and chloroform being the most common.  She favors alternative water disinfection strategies although chlorine has proven to be quite effective and removing chlorine has proved deadly in a few cases. She favors activated charcoal and ozonation but it is unclear how they compare to chlorine in effectiveness and cost. Manure from farms (which she laments the loss of) is the most widely implicated source of water contamination – so protection of source water can be key to preventing contamination. She does mention that using activated charcoal, then aeration, then using chlorine as the final (rather than the first) stage can reduce trihalomethanes – although aeration can make them airborne.  She also considers groundwater contamination through time and in different parts of aquifers (groundwater moves slow in some aquifers, faster in others). She notes that contamination in groundwater recharge areas, typically upland is more problematic than in discharge areas, typically lowland. Thus, protection of recharge areas is emphasized. Contaminated groundwater is difficult to remedy.

 

Next, she considers the effects of garbage incinerators, mainly on airborne contamination. These waste-to-energy plants vary in effect based on how the waste-stream is sorted and how effective are the pollution control systems. In modern times some systems claim 99% of contaminants are removed (although the 1% remaining still worries nearby residents). Places like Sweden use their WTE plants as a source of pride in the use of renewable energy while places in the U.S. may consider them sources of industrial toxicity. Perhaps it depends on how they are marketed and the propaganda. There is a long-standing debate about whether landfilling or WTE plants are better for the environment. Her analysis here is a few decades old so I won’t dwell on it. The bottom line today is how much pollution-control is implemented or in the case of landfills how sophisticated are the leachate collection systems, the groundwater monitoring wells, and the methane collection and pumping systems. Each project should be evaluated separately. Dioxin is one major toxin produced and clearly those who live nearest are the most affected. She documents studies on dioxin and how it may work to lead to cancer but the jury is still out on its effects and what an acceptable level should be. Burning most things produces some dioxins, including burning wood. She favors recycling but that too has costs and it is difficult for recyclers to make money and to get people to do it on a large scale. Zero waste is a nice concept but in reality it is far from achievable without massive changes in social habits.

 

Next, she considers ‘body burden,’ the sum total of all the effects of ingesting, inhaling, and absorption through skin of contaminants to get an idea of ‘cumulative exposure.’ We can measure the amounts of different contaminants in different parts of the body. The highest amounts of DDT, PCBs, and chlordane were found when those chemicals were most in production and use. Measuring levels of pollutants in people is known as “biomonitoring.” When lead was phased out of gasoline, blood levels of lead in children began to decrease and they ended up decreasing more than the models predicted so we know that changing the levels of some chemicals in the environment can lead to less of them in our bodies in a reasonable amount of time. Biomonitoring has also shown that banning smoking in public places has resulted in less “smoke” in our bodies. In 1999, the CDC began monitoring a group of 5000 people in 15 geographic locations for up to 148 chemicals. One surprise was the amount of flame-retardants we have in our bodies – these are potentially dangerous endocrine-disrupting POPs that we have way more in our bodies than Europeans. She notes that advances in chemistry have made biomonitoring more effective and cheaper. California was the first state to embrace biomonitoring but most states have followed suit.

 

She knows how cancer works:

 

“Destroying healthy tissue and clogging vital passageways, metastases are what make cancer deadly”

 

“… tumors are not just homogenous balls of bad cells. Rather, they are composite tissues, with cancerous and normal cells coexisting in a complex society. But the malignant cells are the ones running the casino.”

 

“They are Cells Gone Wild. They are defiant, disobedient, unstable, chaotic, and in the view of many cancer biologists, almost purposeful in the ways they disrupt cellular biochemistry.”

 

She goes through the stages of cancer development in detail, noting the three overlapping stages: initiation, promotion, and progression and how contaminants may affect each stage. More recently two processes: chronic inflammation and abnormal epigenetic regulation have been implicated in transforming cells. Obesity can increase chronic inflammation. Genes affect one’s ability to get cancer and so too does the environment. It is not one or the other but how the two interact. Environmental epigenetics is a new avenue of research investigating how contaminants affect epigenetics, the switches that turn genes off and on or otherwise code them. Oddly, she notes that the Inuit people of Greenland, via their own food chain and the way airborne contaminants have fallen on their region due to weather patterns (called global distillation in terms of contaminant transport) have the highest levels/body burdens of POPs -persistent organic pollutants.

 

She mentions studies of adoptees and ‘epigenetic drift among twins (the notion that as twins separate geographically that their epigenetic factors change). She is an adoptee and wishes she had access to her genetic history. She thinks the reverse may happen among adoptees – that their epigenetic factors converge with non-adopted siblings due to similar environmental factors. One study among identical twins in Scandinavia suggested that the chance of developing the same cancer as one twin by the other was 11-18%, which shows that genetics is a factor but not as strong a factor as expected, A recent Johns Hopkins study has suggested that cancer is so complex that determining the primary “cause” of most cancers is simply not possible. While cancer may be initiated by accumulations of genetic errors it seems more recently that abnormal regulations of genes by epigenetic factors is the reason. She notes that the Human Genome Study has revealed that we have less genes than thought before the mapping was done but more of those genes are implicated in cancer development than previously thought. She cites the Swedish Family-Cancer Database – the largest dataset of that kind in the world, suggests that family history of cancer plays a modest role in cancer development. She talks about oncogenes and adductors and an enzyme-based chemical detoxification process called acetylation as being factors in the likelihood one would develop cancer – if exposed to carcinogens, particularly early in life. People that are “slow acetylators” are more susceptible and that includes more than half of Europeans and Americans.

 

She compares a U.S Dept of Health and Human Services brochure to a Genetics textbook regarding the environmental factors of cancer development. The textbook considers environmental factors including smoking, lifestyle habits, and obesity, to be responsible for most (as much as 90%) cancers. Is it mainly a problem of behavior or exposure? We now know that one dietary factor – eating more fruits and vegetables – deceases cancer incidence. She thinks focus on behavioral and lifestyle factors tends to hide the environmental roots of cancer. We do know that occupational exposures, typically more than exposures among the general population to certain contaminants has led to increased cancer rates. She asks whether the obesity factor is also related to greater retention of pollutants, presumably along with greater levels of chronic inflammation. Epidemiologists have cautioned against attributing cancers to single causes and biomonitoring studies and how toxins interact in the body do suggest that complex causes involving many factors could be at play in most cancers.

 

She calls for green chemistry and the Precautionary Principle but in several cases the Precationary Principle has proven more harmful than beneficial. For instance, in genetic engineering, biotech, and gene editing, the banning of such process in Europe has led to the banning of them in parts of Africa where people could directly benefit from them through less hunger, better nutrition, and more successful and cheaper farming and food. Synthetic chemicals have done a lot of good in the world. Green chemistry is a good idea but may only be marginally applicable. Natural chemicals can also lead to cancer. There are trade-offs and no easy answers. There are extreme costs to re-organizing society on greener principles and there are unknowns. Its easy to say let’s have green energy now but there are toxins associated with these sources as well and tremendous costs and logistical problems. She favors “alternatives assessments” and I can agree – that we should explore alternatives to toxic solutions when possible. She also favors “full-cost accounting” where the health costs of toxic solutions are added in. Apparently, judging from her recent activism, she favors the Precautionary Principle in banning fracking as well. Fracking has resulted in massive decreases of particulate pollution and carbon emissions and better air quality as well as cheaper energy – all due to replacing coal with natural gas in power plants. That would not have occurred if the Precautionary Principle would have reigned as it has in areas where the process is banned. Most things that involve risk also have benefit and these need to be evaluated intently. There is also what is called “risk perception” which among humans has a very strong emotional component due to our evolutionary neurological development. Perception of risk versus real statistical risk can vary considerably. Uncertainty is often exploited by those who favor avoiding risks and those who favor taking risks. Studies have shown, however, that people are more willing to exploit uncertainty and emotionality to promote avoiding risks. Heart disease is bigger problem than cancer and yet people worry more about cancer, seeing it as more of a risk, perhaps because it is thought that we can reverse heart disease with lifestyle changes more than we can reverse cancer the same way.

 

Overall, this is a very good book: detailed and honestly written. She has worked hard to understand the issue of the environmental factors in the development of cancers. She is no fool. While I disagree with her anti-fracking activism I do understand and agree with her advocacy for better evaluation of chemicals and her call for more studies of environmental factors in cancer as well as getting rid of the most dangerous of chemicals.

Household Sewage Treatment System Site Evaluation, Soil Evaluation, Installation Inspection, and Operation and Maintenance Checklists

 The following is how we did these evaluations in a county in Southern Ohio. There are specific rules for states as these septic systems are regulated by states and also must comply with county rules.

 

Site and Soil Evaluation

1)        Initial Contact: If it is a new build, make sure there is a property address, a copy of the land deed to scan for deed restrictions, and floor plans for the house, if applicable. Propose a site evaluation with a soil evaluation by the county health department registered sanitarian or a registered soil scientist.

2)        Visit site and determine areas to excavate the soil to evaluate it, either then and there with an excavator to dig, or a soil probe, or place flags for the soil evaluation to be done in the future. Evaluate site for the suitability of the soils for a soil absorption system with leaching trenches and chambers, which is the preferred system type due to both cost and low maintenance. If soil is unsuitable due to a high seasonal water table or some other restriction, another type of approved system should be considered. These include mound systems, sand-lined systems, peat pod systems, drip systems, spray systems, and Anua Aerocel systems. Soil evaluation includes determining for each soil layer its grain size: usually sand, silt, or clay, its clay content, its fragment content, its grade, whether it is friable or firm, and its color, (including colors of redoximorphic features) from the Munsell Color chart. It is also important to determine whether the soil has been disturbed and to what depth. Assuming a gravity leach system, continue as follows:

3)        Evaluate the site for footage along contour for the main leach field and the replacement area for a future leach field if the current one ever fails.

4)        Evaluate the site for isolation distances: > 50ft from a private water system well (all components), >50ft from a perennial stream, pond, or wetland (all components), distances from rights-of-way and easements can vary from about 10’ to 25’ or more, and >10ft from property lines, which often need to be determined or verified in the field.

 

System Design

5)        If there is room and there are good contours for the main and replacement areas, then proceed with septic system design. Doing this requires calculating several metrics based on the soil evaluation. The main means of this is using what is called a Tyler chart (developed by Jerry Tyler at the University of Wisconsin at Madison) where estimates of soil infiltration loading rate (ILR) and hydraulic linear loading rate (HLLR) are obtained from the soil characteristics. These loading rates estimate the movement of the sewage effluent through the soil pores and the biological oxygen demand that would be present in the soil. The first calculation is simply the Daily Design Flow (DDF). This is based on the number of bedrooms and is estimated at 120 gallons per day of flow per bedroom. The minimum sized system would be a one or two-bedroom system at 240 gal/day DDF. These are conservative estimates. Under sizing a septic system is riskier than over sizing one. The ILR and HLLR calculations determine the size of the leaching area required in lineal feet assuming the most commonly used leaching chambers 24 inches wide and 8 or 12 inches tall. The calculations determine how many leach lines there should be and how long they should be, adding in “resting” footage that can be conserved or available for high use times. The slope of the site is also factored into the calculations since slopes have better drainage. Trench depth is dependent on the soil characteristics. A restriction, or ‘limiting condition’, such as a seasonal perched water table shows what are known as concentrations and depletions which indicate respectively oxidation and reducing conditions. They are also known as redoximorphic features. Oxidation occurs when the water table drops lower and the soil there dries out and reduction occurs when the soil becomes saturated over time. Concentrations are typically reddish or yellowish iron oxides and some black manganese oxides. Depletions are typically gleyed soil, a greenish-gray very indicative of saturating conditions. The gleyed soil is a restricting layer as are clays that often occur lower in a soil profile. There should be a minimum of 12 inches of soil between the bottom of the trenches and the restricting layer. This is for the sewage effluent to percolate through before it reaches saturated conditions. Loams, silt loams, and sandy loams are the preferred soil types for leach fields due to sufficient permeability to allow the effluent to penetrate the soil and remain oxygenated enough for treatment to continue. Leach fields utilize the aerobic bacteria in the soil for decomposition of the particles in the effluent. Aerobic bacteria consume oxygen. Oxygen is present in higher amounts closer to the ground surface and deeper soils are more likely to be saturated or partly saturated. Sand-lined systems work well due to the high permeability of the sand combined with the effluent flow rate. The depth to the restricting soil layer is known as the vertical separation distance (VSP). The method used to evaluate suitability based on depth is the ability to keep at least 12 inches of soil from the bottom of the leaching trench to the restricting layer and at least 2 inches of soil to cover the chambers.

6)        When the system is designed, it is drawn out roughly to scale and given to the installer who then tweaks it a little or not for the ‘design layout’ which goes back to the regulator (in our case the local county health department) for approval to issue the permit. The drawings should depict roads, structures, system components, isolation distances, property lines, ponds, streams, a water well if present, and a diversion drain, often recommended to divert excess water away from the leach field. Permits are issued when fees are remitted. An installation permit is issued, and an operation permit is issued. The installation permit is good for one year but can be extended for six months upon reasonable request. The operation permit expires in 10 years when the septic must be inspected again with agreed fees remitted at that time.

 

System Installation

7)        When the system is installed, the regulator inspects that installation, noting tank(s) type, manufacturer, size, materials used, length of leach lines, degree of smearing on trench walls if present (which should be raked out) which can impede percolation, amount of drop to the leach field (should be a minimum of 1/4" per foot), the inspection ports, how level the leach lines are, and whether any are wet. Sometimes lines can be rerouted around the water, and since the excavator is there, it can be done quickly. Then the system is approved for backfill. The installer then provides an “as-built” to show in picture form the final system configuration. The system is then approved and finalized. Approval may be mailed or preferably emailed with all documents pertaining to the system and fact sheets specific to that system to the owner. 

 

Operation and Maintenance

8)        Operation & maintenance (O&M) inspections of the system are done first with a 12-month inspection. Here the regulator goes out to check the system for possible issues. Typically, the regulator looks into the outlet compartment of the tank to check the outlet filter, making sure it is not clogged or to note whether it should be cleaned. The inlet compartment may also be inspected to determine sludge level is high enough to warrant pumping. Each inspection port is examined to see if there is sitting water, which there should not be, although there can be some at a low level. The distribution box and/or drop boxes are opened and examined to determine if the pipe levels are still good and whether any pipes have moved causing some leach lines to be bypassed. Water levels are noted to determine if there are any clogs. Any running water in drop boxes or even into the tanks should be accounted for as it could have resulted from a leaky appliance such as a toilet. The leach field is examined to see if any water is surfacing. If there is a problem – such as the boxes or tank being covered, pipe movement, water in ports, or water surfacing, then the installer is called in to fix. This is important since the installers are legally required through their bonding to essentially warrant the system for 18 months.

9)        A 10-year inspection is required in some states, and this may include older existing systems as well. These older systems are more likely to have some of the issues noted above. 10-year inspections also require estimating the solids level in the inlet compartment where the solids abide and decompose. If this sludge level is high, it is recommended that the tank be pumped out. Many of these older systems and newer ones as well have pre-treatment components such as aerators, UV lights, and chlorinators, and lift station pumps where there is no topographical drop or a rise to the leach field. Aerators are motors that oxygenate the effluent so that it is partially treated before it enters the leach field. Lift stations are usually ½ hp pumps that pump the effluent through 2-inch pipes up to the leaching area. These too can pump too hard, causing the effluent to bypass some leach lines. Unfortunately, aerators and pumps have short life spans and must be repaired and/or replaced at the owner’s expense. Often when they stop working, they are not repaired or replaced due to costs. UV lights have even shorter life spans but cost less. This ends up resulting in issues where the landowner does not want to pay or cannot afford to pay for repairs and replacements. Sometimes they are eligible for grants, full or partial, if they apply. It is recommended that the required 10-year inspections are done by a service provider as they are equipped to fix issues with the system. They could also pump it out while they are there. Otherwise, the local health department can do the inspection and provide guidance for what needs to be done.

 

     There are quite a few different kinds of septic systems based mainly on the limitations of the site for soil absorption of septage effluent. In many places, the soil is unsuitable to absorb effluent, typically due to the depth of saturation, whether it is an apparent or seasonal water table. In such places there are types of systems including mound systems, low-pressure drip systems, sand-lined systems, peat pod systems, systems with synthetic leaching components, and spray systems where the treated effluent is sprayed on a time schedule. Some of these systems will work well for decades but the ones with mechanical components: aerators, UV lights, chlorinators, lift pumps or other pumps, and spray heads will likely need to be maintained with considerable expense to the owner. Some of these systems are quite expensive to install as well. Some of the older systems may discharge to a stream, ravine, or ditch after minimal or even no treatment. To determine if that is the case one may conduct a dye test by putting dye down a sink or in the tank then running the water for a time to see if the dye shows up in the outfall water. 

 

                                                                                                                                                              

Climate Change and Future Generations: The Problem with Using the Prevailing Discount Rate Combined with the 20-Year Time Frame for Methane in the Atmosphere to Estimate Impacts: A Summary & Review of Ted Nordhaus’s article: Gaslighting Intergenerational Equity, in The Breakthrough Journal

     I found Ted Nordhaus’s May 29 article in the Breakthrough Journal, ‘Gaslighting Intergenerational Equity: What Policy Choices Reveal About the Social Discount Preferences of the Climate Movement’, to be quite insightful. Gaslighting Intergenerational Equity | The Breakthrough Institute. Here Nordhaus points out some poorly depicted emissions metrics debatably being misused to paint a deceptive climate emissions narrative. It is a great article and I will reproduce much of it here.

     As noted in my recent book summary and review of Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World, she points out the dual nature of the idea of sustainability as providing for the needs of the present generation while preserving the environment for future generations.

     Nordhaus points out in the article that the climate change issue is very often depicted as an issue of intergenerational equity. A generation is considered to be between 20 and 30 years. He notes that one prevailing paradigm is that we must cut emissions quickly for future generations. CO2 emitted to the atmosphere will remain there helping to warm the climate for a thousand years. 

     Balancing the tradeoff between current benefits and future costs is done with a metric known as the social discount rate. This is similar to other calculated discount rates in standard economic modeling when considering future costs. Long trends in economic growth indicate that the people of the future will have more financial resources to tackle climate issues than we do now just as people of the future will have more resources to tackle other problems. Nordhaus’s uncle, the economist William Nordhaus was a key developer of climate change economic modeling in the 1990s. Ted Nordhaus writes:

 

“Applying standard economic approaches to social discounting typically produced results suggesting that the world shouldn’t spend very much money today to mitigate future climate change. A discount rate of, say, 3%, applied over many decades or centuries heavily discounts future costs, even if those costs in absolute terms are very large. Environmentalists, who believed that far reaching action was urgently needed to mitigate climate change, were not happy with this result.”

 

He also points out that that idea was challenged by the UK’s Nicholas Stern in the 2007 Stern Report where he argues that “intergenerational equity justified a discount rate of close to zero for assessing how much cost governments should impose on present day consumption to avoid future climate impacts” Debates ensued between William Nordhaus and other economists who supported the Stern Report’s conclusions. Ted says that ‘environmental partisans’ readily adopted the economic conclusions of the Stern Report. He also notes that these partisans want to have it both ways – applying market-based discount rates for clean tech like solar (which only lasts 20-30 years). Nuclear plants, which last about 80 years or more can benefit from a low discount rate as the long lifespan more than offsets the higher upfront costs.

 

 

The Bogus Argument That Natural Gas is Worse for the Climate Than Coal

 

 

     These partisans are in essence utilizing an accounting trick. Ted puts it in succinct terms as follows:

 

“But by far the most extreme case of talking low discount rates in theory while advocating for high discount rates in practice has been the analytical sleight of hand that environmental opponents of natural gas have used in order to claim that it is as bad for the climate as coal, which has turned the social discounting preferences of climate advocates completely on their head.”

 

He goes through the 20-year global warming potential (GWP) for methane that was made popular by environmentalist-funded Cornell professor Robert Howarth to argue that gas was worse than coal. This 20-year GWP for methane has been adopted by many environmentalists. What they fail to point out is that methane does not last long in the atmosphere. While it’s GWP in the short term is indeed much higher by volume than CO2, but that CO2 will stay in the atmosphere continuing to cause warming and the methane will be converted into a statistically insignificant amount of CO2 after 20 years or so. That means that much of the methane emitted in say 2000 or 2004 is no longer in the atmosphere warming the planet, or as Nordhaus puts it:

 

“The reason that this matters is that while methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, it stays in the atmosphere for less than 20 years, then breaks down into a residual carbon dioxide molecule. It can’t accumulate in the atmosphere in the same way that carbon dioxide does and the residual contribution to carbon dioxide accumulation is insignificant because the total amount of anthropogenic methane emissions is vastly smaller by volume than carbon dioxide emissions are.”

 

“Today’s methane emissions simply can’t significantly affect the climate that future generations will inherit because, except for the very tiny amount of residual carbon dioxide it leaves behind, it is gone from the atmosphere within 20 years. For this reason, when Howarth and others insist that gas is as bad as coal, they are de facto utilizing a very high social discount rate, somewhere north of 10%. Or, in less abstract terms, they are preferring to avoid very short lived methane emissions from natural gas over carbon emissions from coal generation that will remain in the atmosphere for a thousand years.”

 

Nordhaus points to a 2019 paper in Earth Systems Dynamics: ‘A quantitative approach to evaluating the GWP timescale through implicit discount rates.’ The abstract of that paper which follows shows that the 100-year GWP of CO2 and CH4 is a metric that is consistent with the 3.3% social discount rate often given for intergenerational equity considerations:

 

“The 100-year global warming potential (GWP) is the primary metric used to compare the climate impacts of emissions of different greenhouse gases (GHGs). The GWP relies on radiative forcing rather than damages, assumes constant future concentrations, and integrates over a timescale of 100 years without discounting; these choices lead to a metric that is transparent and simple to calculate, but have also been criticized. In this paper, we take a quantitative approach to evaluating the choice of time horizon, accounting for many of these complicating factors. By calculating an equivalent GWP timescale based on discounted damages resulting from CH4 and CO2 pulses, we show that a 100-year timescale is consistent with a discount rate of 3.3% (interquartile range of 2.7% to 4.1% in a sensitivity analysis). This range of discount rates is consistent with those often considered for climate impact analyses. With increasing discount rates, equivalent timescales decrease. We recognize the limitations of evaluating metrics by relying only on climate impact equivalencies without consideration of the economic and political implications of metric implementation.”

 

This does not mean, of course, that we should not continue to capture more leaking methane from oil & gas systems, landfills, wastewater treatment, and agricultural sources. Indeed, we should. We should also consider the stronger short-term effects of methane. We should, however, not forget that methane is quite temporary compared to CO2 and that CO2 is by far, by magnitudes, a greater risk to overall warming, especially post-20-year warming, than methane. Nordhaus goes on to state that the only reason the 20-year GWP is used for methane is to “inflate its emissions relative to coal” knowing that natural gas is the main energy source replacing coal around the world.

     Nordhaus also mentions that the Biden administration’s recent decision to pause LNG development to consider potential climate impacts is based on a new unpublished analysis from Howarth. I have argued against Howarth’s inflated numbers for oil & gas methane leakage rates for years since his estimates are always much higher than numerous other studies. Many have argued that Howarth is biased. About the LNG pause, Nordhaus writes:

 

“The basis for doing so was a new, unpublished Howarth analysis claiming that leakage from natural gas export and transport facilities resulted in emissions comparable to burning coal and featuring two hallmarks of all of Howarth’s work—leakage rates higher than anyone else’s estimates and greenhouse gas emissions comparisons calculated using 20-year warming impact. The likely result, should the pause continue, will be to shift the energy mix in Europe and Asia toward coal, as well as gas produced in Russia, Asia, and the Middle East with significantly higher emissions intensity.”

 

An example of another way methane mitigation efforts are failing now or potentially failing in the future is given with agricultural methane from cows. He considers the effect of feed additives, which while decreasing immediate emissions have been shown to lower the growth rates of cows. That could change in the future and additives should still be pursued but right now they are relatively inefficient. He explains as follows:

 

“A steer that gets to market in 18 instead of 34 months produces proportionately less methane during its lifetime. The same is the case for a dairy cow that produces 50% more milk per day. Enteric methane reduction efforts that further reduce emissions without reducing the efficiency of beef and dairy production will reduce emissions. But any policy or technology that reduces emissions at the expense of productivity will generally do the opposite, or at the very least, see significantly diminished benefits. All else equal, a feed additive that cuts methane by 25%, for instance, but that also reduces milk output or increases the time that it takes to get to slaughter weight by a similar proportion won’t achieve any net emissions benefit.”

 

Lower efficiency means higher costs and longer times to get the animal to market, which can advantage livestock production elsewhere that is not as environmentally efficient (The U.S. and Canada produce livestock with the most environmental efficiency and the least emissions). Better yet for society and for animals, we should eat no or less meat. Or as Nordhaus puts it:

 

“Reducing livestock productivity in the US has a carbon opportunity cost that comes with it, in the form of increasing livestock production in places like Latin America where livestock systems are generally more land intensive and very strongly associated with land use change and deforestation. Shifting production from the US to Brazil or Argentina increases pressure to convert more forest and grassland to pasture, which in turn results in higher carbon emissions from the agriculture sector.”

 

     The bottom line is that CO2 is by far the main event in climate mitigation and even more so for future generations since methane emitted today will be mostly or entirely gone from the atmosphere before the next generation even appears. Thus, methane cannot even contribute to intergenerational equity since its residence time is less than a generation. Finally, he writes that:

 

“… any policy that requires the use of 20 year warming for justification is definitionally applying a very high social discount rate to climate policy tradeoffs and will almost certainly increase carbon emissions, increase long-term warming, and increase economic costs to future generations associated with that warming.”

 

 

References:

Gaslighting Intergenerational Equity: What Policy Choices Reveal About the Social Discount Preferences of the Climate Movement. Ted Nordhaus. Breakthrough Journal. May 29, 2024. Gaslighting Intergenerational Equity | The Breakthrough Institute

A quantitative approach to evaluating the GWP timescale through implicit discount rates.  Marcus C. Sarofim and Michael R. Giordano. Earth Systems Dynamics. Earth Syst Dyn. 2018; 9: 1013–1024. . A quantitative approach to evaluating the GWP timescale through implicit discount rates - PMC (nih.gov)

Book Summary and Review: Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. By Hannah Ritchie, Deputy Editor and Lead Researcher of Our World in Data. (Little Brown Spark/Hachett Book Group, 2024).

     For more than a few years now I have been reading short interpretations and explanations of data by Hannah Ritchie on the Our World in Data website. I was delighted when I saw her on Amanpour and Company and decided to get her new book. Ritchie is in the ‘gen y’ age range of 25-40 and I think perhaps she can communicate some realities about data to younger people. In this book, as a Ph.D. data scientist, she utilizes the data as much as possible to arrive at conclusions regarding risk levels, risk perception and misperception, and policy. She also points out the many misconceptions and fallacies among environmentalists as she considers herself an environmentalist as well but of a more pragmatic and less aspirational type.

     Through the course of the book, she dispels various myths and misconceptions that had become dogma among environmentalists. She also recounts some of her changes in position and policy regarding a few different topics. These changes came about due to the data showing that her previously held positions were not supported by the data. A well-known axiom is: ‘The data doesn’t lie.’ Analyzing data is a preceding step to determining what is true or not true. As a data scientist for a company that compiles and presents global data, she has a front-row seat in analyzing data. In presenting results from data analysis there are responsibilities to show the limitations of data interpretations. Data and its interpretation can be manipulated, cherry-picked, full of caveats, and presented in various skewed and incomplete ways, often to favor a certain narrative being promoted.

     The chapter headings reveal the subjects addressed: sustainability, air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing. These represent many of the major environmental challenges for our global society. These, she deems are the world’s biggest environmental problems. As expected, this book is full of graphs and charts.

     She begins by dissing the catastrophist narratives that have been spread in recent years, resulting in children being bombarded with environmental pessimism. She believes that the data shows that we are making important headway on some problems and others are not as bad as depicted. She argues that in many cases the data does not support catastrophist interpretations, but rather optimistic ones. She tells how hearing Swiss physician, statistician, and public speaker Hans Rosling speak one night, impacted her and her views. Rosling was famous for showing people that they very often have their facts about the world wrong, that they are not integrating global data into their policy opinions. Things are often not as bad as depicted in the media and in society in general. I would recommend Stephen Pinker, Bjorn Lomborg, and Ted Nordhaus as other thinkers revealing similar results. It is the data that is most important. She argues: “If we want clarity we have to take in the full picture, and that means giving ourselves some distance. If we take several steps back, we can see something truly radical, game-changing and life-giving: humanity is in a truly unique position to build a sustainable world.”

     She argues that doom is a huge exaggeration, and I would add that an exaggeration is fairly synonymous with a lie. Interestingly, she also argues that these exaggerations tend to undermine the reputations of scientists and erode trust in science, even as they are proved wrong as many are. She also takes on the shift to the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5 deg C temperature rise. That goal was always considered non-attainable and by putting catastrophic impacts at that threshold we add to the impending sense of doom. We don’t really know what average global temperature increase will trigger catastrophic impacts. The same can be said for the activist group 350.org. We don’t really know whether 350ppm is better than 400ppm. We do know that we need our atmospheric CO2 concentration to peak at some point and then begin to drop. There are some important benefits like better plant growth and global greening at our current CO2 concentration of 425ppm.

     In opposition to the radical group Extinction Rebellion who argue that they are the last generation, Ritchie argues that we can be the first generation to achieve a sustainable world.

She notes that while our environmental challenges are big and important, they are not our major existential risks, and that we need to be realistic in comparing facts, acknowledging progress toward solving problems while also acknowledging that they are still major problems.

     In the first chapter about sustainability, she notes that “the world has never been sustainable.” Of course, people often forget this or perhaps never learn it, being deceived that the past was without serious environmental problems. She uses the 1987 UN definition of sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Thus, there are two aspects: meeting present needs and preserving future needs. One is mostly human well-being, and the other is mostly environmental protection. Both are necessary and she argues that we have never achieved both so that is why the world has never been sustainable.

     With graphs she shows our very important improvements in child and mother mortality, life expectancy, in addressing hunger and malnutrition, access to basic resources like clean water, energy, and sanitation, education, and extreme poverty. She also points out two approaches that will not help fix our problems: depopulation and degrowth. Ending poverty requires economic growth as redistribution alone would fall very far short. The wealth that economic growth provides also helps us better address our environmental problems.

     The section on air pollution points out how it has improved in many places, including in Beijing, China, falling there by 55% between 2013 and 2020.

 

Indoor fires have been polluting the lungs of people for millennia, even 400,000 years ago as analysis of the teeth of hunter-gatherers in Israel showed. Indoor and outdoor wood smoke has long been a major pollutant and continues to be in many places. We all know about the London smog and other events where toxic coal smoke was implicated. We now know much about the effects of black lung disease, silicosis, and other lung diseases from coal dust, silica dust, and other dust. But there are success stories like addressing acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, and the reduction in sulfur dioxide and NOx emissions in many countries. The following graph is for the UK but mirrors other developed countries.

 

These successes show that we can solve many of our environmental problems and that we can do it with sufficient global cooperation. In many cases the air we are breathing now is cleaner than the air our ancestors breathed. Passing peak air pollution has been achieved in many developed countries and is beginning to occur in developing countries. Even so, air pollution still causes many premature deaths. She thinks that we are approaching the peak of deaths from air pollution and that they will eventually sometime soon begin to trend downward. Air pollution deaths per capita have been falling steadily for decades in many countries and in the world as a whole.

     While she says the solution to air pollution is to stop burning stuff, that is of course, not at all a practical solution at present. Useful solutions to reduce air pollution include use of cleaner cooking fuels, reducing crop waste burning, de-sulfuring fossil fuels like diesel, and more replacing of fossil fuels with renewables and nuclear energy. She points out that while we worry about climate change killing people in the future, air pollution has long been killing people and continues to do so.

     In the chapter on climate change she points out that it was once thought not so long ago that we were headed to 4-6 deg C of temperature increase. Now, it seems likely that we can keep it reasonably below 2.5 deg C of increase, much closer to the original goal of 2.0 deg C. 1.5 deg C seems quite unlikely in nearly all scenarios. Ritchie is more optimistic that we can hit the 2.0 target. I think we will likely be closer to 2.5 deg unless technology catches up. She also shows how she got caught up in catastrophism when she was younger due to what is known as the risk perception gap, the gap between perceived level of risk and real level of risk. Seeing the data removed the gap. She also points out how our improvements in disaster mitigation and extreme weather preparedness can help us adapt to climate change impacts. Importantly, she points out that while total global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, emissions per person have peaked. This happened a decade ago and she notes that it is a fact that is very rarely acknowledged. Total emissions are also expected to peak soon. She mentions the importance of using similar metrics to compare and how the thorny issues of assigning values or attributes to certain emissions sources can be exploited in arguments. She also points out that her own and indeed our own carbon footprints are less than those of our grandparents, less than half in her case. Technology has enabled that change. Energy use per capita has dropped by 25% since 1960.  Technology leads to better efficiency which allows us to do more with less and to grow our economies while reducing emissions. She points out the use of trade records to quantify the “offshored” emissions so that proper emissions accounting is practiced. Offshored emissions uncertainties have been a point of disagreement with catastrophists often arguing that they are much more than they really are. She notes that in the UK since 1990 GDP per capita increased by 50%, domestic emissions have been halved, and consumption-based emissions (those accounting for offshored emissions as imported emissions) have dropped by one third. Thus, as the following 2^nd graph shows, many countries have decoupled economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions.

The ‘Energy Ladder’ The dominant energy source for cooking and heating, by level of income.

 

While she points out that solar, wind, and battery costs have continued to drop though time, she probably went to press before the rising interest rates made costs soar in those sectors. A pie chart showing the sources of emissions shows the main issues we must address if we are to solve climate change.

    

She notes that coal use continues a steady drop in many countries and globally. She also notes some of the issues with wind and solar like land use and minerals demand. She doesn’t mention much or anything about the challenges and costs of integrating intermittent and variable energy sources.

     She considers transport and the footprint of an EV vs. an ICE vehicle, noting that global sales of new petrol cars peaked in 2017. In considering the emissions of food she offers the following solutions: 1) Eat less meat and dairy, especially beef. 2) Adopt the best and most efficient farming practices we can. 3) reduce overconsumption. 4) Reduce food waste. 5) Close yield gaps across the world. The graph below compares the emissions of different meats and plant proteins.

 

Plant-based foods are better for the climate Measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) per 100 grams of protein.

 

     She covers the challenges of decarbonizing the heavy industry sector. Currently, the best and most feasible solutions are things like carbon capture. She also considers the pros and cons of pricing carbon.

     In considering climate change adaptation she offers the following three necessities: 1) Pull people out of poverty.  2) Improve the resilience of our crops to drought, floods, and a warming world. 3) Adapt our living conditions to deal with sweltering heat.

     At the end of the chapter, she offers some interpreted data that shows gaps between the footprints of certain actions in emissions savings vs. what people think is most effective, as in the graph below.

 

     The chapter on deforestation reports that the data shows that we can be cautiously optimistic about tackling deforestation. Forests have been restored in many developed countries after vast deforestation in the 19^th century and early 20^th century. She points out that in the past it was coal that allowed some countries to decouple their population and economic growth from deforestation. She notes that the earth has lost one third of its forest since the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. When considering palm oil as a driver of deforestation she expected it to be a big one but found out instead through analyzing the data that the problem was more complicated. Estimates from the Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for global tree loss driven by palm oil ranged from 0.2% to 2%. 85% of palm oil comes from Indonesia and Malaysia. Many of the palm oil plots there had previously been logged for wood and paper. She considers recent backlash against seed oils due to their perceived health effects but notes that she found no credible evidence to support those perceived health effects, which result from a perception that omega 6’s are linked with inflammation, which has not been established. Palm oil is considered to be a seed oil. Palm oil is very productive compared to other oils in oil per hectare, 2.6 tonnes per hectare vs. 0.3 tonnes per hectare for olive oil. Yet, due mainly to the media most people perceive palm oil to be an environmentally unfriendly crop.

 

     Deforestation is really mostly about converting forests to agriculture and grazing, which make up to 75% of deforestation. A big part of that is beef grazing, which adds much to the carbon footprint of beef cows. Deforesting to grow foods for oils, the two biggest being soybean oil and palm oil, make up 18% of global deforestation. Her suggestions for solving deforestation include 1) Zero-deforestation policies, not boycotts. 2) Eat less meat, especially beef. 3) Improve crop yields – especially in sub-Saharan Africa. 4) Rich countries should pay poorer countries to keep their forests standing.  In many of these suggestions the details would need to be worked out to the agreement of all parties, no easy task. She notes that cities have magnitudes less impact on forests than does agriculture, and many benefits as well. Plant-based ingredients like soy were implicated in deforestation in Brazil in the 1990’s and early 2000’s but the vast majority of soy is actually used in animal feeds and should be attributed to animal agriculture. A mere 7% of soy production goes to vegan products like tofu, soymilk, and veggie burgers. Most of the soy that humans consume is in the form of soybean oil. Most of the animal feed is used to feed chickens, See the graph below.

 

     In the food chapter, she disses catastrophic predictions about food availability as nonsense. The data clearly support her position here. While issues like soil depletion and degradation are real, they are regional and the data show that soil is degrading in some agricultural areas while improving in others. She goes through the human history of farming. Farming has always had environmental impacts, and this continues. She recounts the development of the Haber-Bosch process for making fertilizer and reminds me of one of the Our World in Data graphs that was very impactful to me. Shown below, it shows how many people are supported by synthetic fertilizer vs. how many are not. The other technological advancement in food in the 20^th century was the selective breeding of food crops as best exemplified by the developments of crop scientists like Norman Borlaug. It was Borlaug’s Green Revolution that sunk biologist Paul Ehrlich’s extremely pessimistic predictions of massive global starvation. Not just animal feed but biofuels as well consume significant amounts of our food production, as shown below.

 

Ritchie points out that meat is an inefficient way to get calories. Smaller animals are more efficient than larger ones, but the amount of energy, water, and food inputs far exceeds the output in terms of calories. Just comparing feed inputs to caloric output, the graphic below shows the size-efficiency relationship.

 

She points out that food is related to many of our environmental problems. Freshwater resource scarcity, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water pollution, soil erosion and degradation, fertilizer runoff, and more implicate our food systems. Livestock agriculture is the biggest source of many of these issues. She says that land use and managing inputs like water and fertilizer are the two biggest problems with farming. She rightly points to agricultural intensification as one of the best and most beneficial environmental improvements. Increasing yields saves land, habitat, and resources. She considers that we may be close to peak agricultural land (including animal agriculture). She analyzed the data and concluded that peak agricultural land occurred around 2000. Breaking it up though, she thinks that we have long passed peak grazing land but have yet to pass peak farmland (plants only).

     She also sees peak fertilizer on the horizon. It peaked in rich countries long ago, beginning to peak in the U.S. back in the 1970’s. All these examples show that we can and have improved our environment and that we continue to be more efficient and to do more with less. Fertilizer use decreased also due to being used more wisely by wasting less, better targeting, and better timing. Ritchie’s recommendations for building a more sustainable global food system include the following: 1) Improve crop yields across the world (Africa is lagging here and needs to be prioritized). 2) Eat less meat, especially beef and lamb. She states: “We would cut emissions, land use and water use by much more if half the population went meat-free two days a week than we would from increasing veganism by a few percent. It’s a good idea in theory but I have my doubts. 3) Invest in meat substitutes: building burgers in the lab. 4) build a hybrid burger. Meat substitutes, of course, have a much lower emissions footprint than meat. 5) substitute dairy with plant-based alternatives. 6) Waste less food. Apparently, studies show that we would waste less food if people had more containers, ie. “Tupperware.” Increased refrigeration from farm to market would also be helpful in keeping produce fresher and making it last longer. 7) Don’t rely on indoor farming. While it can increase yields the energy inputs are very high relative to outdoor agriculture. It is only good for a few crops at present. They won’t feed the world, she says. She also points out that the benefits of eating local are usually less than not eating local. It’s a myth, she says. However, she also notes that most people think erroneously that eating local has more environmental benefits. She provides some good graphical evidence showing that vast majority of emissions come from local delivery via roads rather than from rail, ships, or planes, which are more efficient ways to deliver food. She also points out that eating organic is often or at least not always better for the environment. The main reason is lower yields which leads to higher land use. She also mentions the disaster that occurred in Sri Lanka when the country banned synthetic fertilizers which caused food production in the country to plummet, and the policy had to be rolled back. Vandana Shiva should take note. Studies have shown that pesticide levels in food are at very small levels with the majority of foods (75%) having pesticide levels at just 0.01% (one 10000^th) of the limits given for harming human health. Another thing she notes is that the detriments of plastic packaging are often overhyped.

     In considering biodiversity loss she notes that the metrics used to measure it are often tricky. She even recounts an event in the past where she misinterpreted the statistics of one study that erroneously depicted the decline of the world’s animal populations. She considers why we value biodiversity, and that some species are more needed by us and ecosystems in general than others. She notes our history of causing biodiversity loss beginning with hunting out of the megafauna in many places around the world by our much less numerous ancestors. The 1^st graph below shows human-caused extinctions all over the world in our prehistoric past. The 2^nd and 3^rd graphs show the loss of large mammal biomass due to humans and the current mammal biomass dominated by humans and their livestock. I found this one a bit shocking. The 4^th graph shows the changes in time of both.

 

The graphs above do not include wild birds or poultry, but the story is similar with our biomass of just chickens twice as much as the biomass of wild birds.

     She also considers the studies that suggest an “insect apocalypse” are overhyped and the problem is not nearly as bad as often depicted. Decrease in insect populations are occurring in some places but they are increasing in other places. She also considers the catastrophists that say we are heading for a sixth mass extinction. While extinction rates have indeed increased, they are nothing like the event-caused mass extinctions of the past. She also points out that wildlife has returned to some places where it had declined, through human conservation efforts. She shows graphs that prove this. She states that: “Overhunting and agriculture have been responsible for 75% of all plant, amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal extinctions since 1500.” That remains concerning, of course.

     She points out that we often have selfish motivations for environmental improvement. Preventing respiratory problems is a motive to mitigate air pollution and preventing skin cancer was a motive to fix the ozone layer are examples.

     Her recommendations for preventing mass extinction include protecting the most diverse sites from exploitation. Land conservation is an example. She notes that there are different levels or degrees of conservation from strict to loose. More recommendations include: “Increase crop yields to reduce farming land. Bring deforestation to an end. Eat less meat and reduce our need for livestock. Improve our efficiency of, but don’t eliminate, chemical inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides. Slow global climate change, Stop plastic leaking into our oceans.” These are all practical and crucially, achievable goals and several of them are indeed happening. Of course, much more is needed.

     The chapter about ocean plastics points out some debunked catastrophist predictions of more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. Plastic pollution is a major issue with ocean plastics, microplastics in water, soil, air, and in us, and in freshwater and on land. Plastic does indeed harm many sea creatures, including whales and turtles.

     Ritchie points out the many benefits of plastic: “It’s sterile, waterproof, versatile, and cheap.” It reduces food waste considerably. Plastic makes vehicles lighter and so reduces the emissions of transport. So many valuable things and devices are made of plastic. It is a wonder material, and its green credentials should balance its perceived environmental harms. It also makes our lives more convenient and more efficient in many ways. The great durability of plastic also means it breaks down slower if discarded in the environment. She goes through some of the data on plastic use. People in the U.S, use far more plastic than those in India, for instance. Plastic use is greater in urban areas. Packaging is the world’s biggest use of plastic, about 44%. Buildings, textiles, transport, and other consumer appliances are the other big users of plastic.

     In considering solutions to plastic pollution the important thing to tackle is where plastic ends up as discarded waste. Most plastic waste goes to landfills. Some is recycled, usually just once or twice. Chemical plastic recycling is possible but very expensive. Thus, it will remain limited in use until it gets cheaper. The key to solutions is keeping discarded plastic out of the environment aside from landfills. This is a waste management problem. Many counties have inadequate solid waste management. Open landfills are also problematic and much more likely to release contamination into the surface environment, including plastics. She points out a study that determined that 81% of global plastic pollution entering the ocean comes from Asia, which does hold 60% of the world's population. In other regions coastal plastic pollution coming from rivers is often an issue.

     She considers the issue of whether rich countries are dumping plastics overseas. This was happening on a large scale in China until China stopped accepting plastic waste in 2017. Other Asian countries are following suit. Perhaps we would be better off landfilling here rather than collecting it and sending it by ship to the other side of the world where it often ends up in open landfills and gets blown and washed into rivers and then the ocean. Now Europe has replaced Asia as the biggest importer of plastic waste. The graph below shows the drastic changes:

 

She points out that we really don’t know how the pervasive microplastics in our bodies will affect us through time. She notes that plastic pollution is probably the most solvable problem in the book. Rich countries should stop exporting plastic waste to countries with inadequate solid waste management and we should help them develop their solid waste management capabilities. This requires investment. She notes that while recycling is good and necessary it also has a more limited effect than people realize due to required energy inputs. She also says we should expect more cooperation and innovation from industry. The producers of plastics and plastic products should develop the circular economy by making that plastic and those products more recyclable. Industry also needs to lead on chemical recycling, she says. She advocates for stricter policies on plastics in the fishing industry since plastic fishing nets and other equipment is a major source of ocean plastic waste. She notes progress on cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other new technologies to gather and capture ocean plastic. She sees plastic straws and single use plastic bags as minor plastic pollution that can simply be managed better, and I agree. To end the chapter, she points out that modern well-designed and well-landfills are probably the best way to deal with solid waste.

     In considering overfishing she points out another catastrophist study that was full of inaccuracies that concluded that global collapse of fish populations would happen at some point in the future due to overfishing. The study was strongly rebutted by other marine scientists. She covers the history of whaling, its global peak in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and its dramatic fall to pre-1900 levels by 1990. She also recounts the history of ocean fishing including the development of steam trawlers in the 1880s. Fishing is now about sustainable management of what’s considered to be an ocean resource. The goal is to fish without lowering fish populations as has occurred in several species in several parts of the ocean. As the graph below shows, about one-third of global fish stocks are considered to be overexploited.

 

We also now farm more fish than we catch. Fish have basically become livestock. Aquaculture has gotten much more efficient and plant-based feeds are lowering the number of wild fish used for feed. Thus, those that eat fish need to get comfortable with eating farmed fish. Tuna, cod, haddock, and salmon have become more sustainably managed in the wild. She advocates for better monitoring of fish populations, especially in Asian waters offshore of China and India. She recounts the problem of coral bleaching and how not only climate change but overfishing, sewage dumping, fertilizer runoff contributes to it. Her recommendations for solving overfishing include eating less fish, eating the most sustainable fish, implementing strict fishing quotas, implementing stricter regs on by-catch and discards (less bottom trawling means less discards of fish often injured or killed – discards have been decreasing; more by-catch has been marketed rather than discarded), and don’t be overly optimistic about marine-protected areas.  

     In her conclusion she notes that while progress in sustainability is variable across the globe, every country has improved in education, health, nutrition, and other spheres. She talks about “leapfrogging” fossil fuels to go directly to from more primitive fuel sources like wood to wind and solar as being essential to solving climate change. I disagree, especially in the near-term. Poor countries need affordable energy and reliable dispatchable energy more than they need sustainable energy. That sustainable energy is more expensive, especially when the required reliability and dispatchability become necessary fossil fuel add-ons. At some point we may get there but that time is not now.

     Changing how we eat will be important to improving our global sustainability and these changes often should emphasize simply eating more of what’s sustainable and less of what is not. She notes that being an effective environmentalist often means debunking established environmentalist paradigms of activists. She advocates for systemic change, obviously more potentially effective than small individual changes. At the end she also advocates for joining people headed in the same direction, although that would depend on how they plan to get there.

     I would conclude by reiterating that this a very good book, especially for a younger (I’m old so by younger I mean maybe 20-40) readership. I think it is very important to be practical and realistic about our environmental problems and the best way to do this is to study and analyze the data to arrive at the best conclusions.

Longer Wells Mean More Production from Fewer Rigs: Repost of a Linked-In Post by Ted Cross of NOVI Labs (w/commentary and additional graphs)

Ted Cross of NOVI Labs gave some great perspective in this post about longer well laterals. He also breaks it out into regions, showing that half of the increase is in the prolific Permian Basin as expected. Looking at the data like this shows the great improvements in efficiency as measured by drilling productivity, or production per rig.

"Just how much have oil and gas operators been drilling? While the rig count gets most of the attention, lateral miles drilled is more directly related to production. Viewed this way, operators have been very active over the last few years." 

“In April 2023, Lower 48 operators put 2,144 lateral miles onto production, just short of the previous peaks found in 2018-2019. This is despite the rig count being ~25% lower in 2023, thanks to longer laterals and improved drilling efficiencies.”

“Zooming in, the Permian represented half of this total, putting on 1,088 miles in April 2023. For context, this is about as far as Midland is from Mexico City -- an incredible distance to drill in a month. The Permian has comprised over 50% of lateral miles drilled in Lower 48 in the post-COVID cycle.”

“The Uinta, Haynesville, and Powder River also had impressive runs during the latest cycle, peaking at fresh highs of 94, 141, and 293 miles, respectively. While much smaller than the Permian, those numbers do add up!”

“Looking forward, long laterals and drilling efficiencies will continue to be a major theme in Lower 48 development. With ExxonMobil planning 4-milers in the Permian and Appalachian operators breaking an average of 13,000' (!!), the longer lateral train shows no signs of stopping.”

 

His graph below shows those results. Below that graph, I am adding graphs of rig count and oil & natural gas production over the same time period. I also added a graph of drilling productivity vs. rig counts for the Appalachian region over a roughly similar period. All data is from EIA with EIA utilizing Baker Hughes rig count data: