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Recycling plastic is tricky business, and many plastics are better off as garbage.
by Rachel Cernansky
published online July 6, 2009
You just polished off some yogurt and, because of that chasing-arrows symbol on the bottom of the container, you assume it should go in the recycle bin. Right?
Not necessarily.
Glass, metal, and paper are pretty straightforward, but when it comes to plastic, things get tricky. The truth is that what you can recycle depends on where you live and what materials your city’s facilities can handle. There are many different types of plastic, and they cannot all be recycled together. So unless you’re diligent about sorting all your plastics, then “recycling” that yogurt container may be doing more harm than simply throwing it away.
Recycling is generally far better than sending waste to landfills and relying on new raw materials to drive the consumer economy. It takes two-thirds less energy to make products from recycled plastic than from virgin plastic. By the last official measure in 2005, Americans recycle an estimated 32 percent of their total waste, which averages nearly a ton per person per year, around a third of which is plastic. Our recycling efforts save the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing 39.6 million cars from the road.
But not all plastic can be recycled, and only about 6.8 percent of the total plastic used in the U.S. actually goes that route—although the rate is higher with bottles: 37 percent for soft drink and 28 percent for milk and water bottles.
The chief problem lies in plastic’s complexity: There are as many types of plastic as there are uses. And since each type can only be recycled with its own kind, plastics need to be carefully sorted before they can be processed. The presence of enough foreign materials—from food to dissimilar kinds of plastic—can ruin an entire batch of would-be recyclables.
Plastics are chemically categorized by numbers, which are displayed inside the chasing-arrow icon on many plastic containers. The two most common types are plastic #1 (polyethylene terephthalate, or PETE), which is used mainly in soda and water bottles, and #2 (high-density polyethylene, or HDPE), used in things like detergent bottles and milk jugs. Unfortunately, while plastics marked #1 or #2 are generally considered to be recyclable, not all containers with those numbers actually are.
The reason for this is that many plastics contain additives blended into the original resin, and the different additives create discrepancies even within each category. Every container in the grocery store is made with a unique blend of chemicals—plasticizers, molding agents, dyes—that combine to give a plastic its shape, color, strength, and flexibility (or lack thereof). As a result, they melt at varying temperatures and respond differently to new additives, and so they cannot all be melted down and recycled together to make a new product.
As a result, most plastic, aside from the ubiquitous clear plastic bottle, cannot, generally speaking, be recycled by most municipalities. This problem applies to the #1s and #2s, as well as yogurt containers or hummus tubs, and Chinese-takeout containers, which are usually made from #5 plastic. (It also includes plastic bags and the frustratingly hard plastic packaging that your headphones came in, which don’t even earn a recycling number.) But many people don’t know that, so they toss all of them in the blue bin, thereby reducing efficiency at the sorting plant, which is where your plastic goes when it’s collected on recycling day.
Sorting is a crucial part of the recycling process. Plastic sorting can be done manually, but it’s tedious and labor-intensive. Automatic sorting is far more efficient, but the technology is not foolproof: There are so many types of plastics that sorting equipment can’t look for all possible additives in the materials passing through. (Ironically, the increasing use of bio-plastics—which are made from renewable materials like cornstarch and are meant to be more earth-friendly than conventional oil-based plastic—has made the job of automatic sorting machines even harder.)
Any contamination in the recycle bin compromises the strength and durability of the recycled plastic that is produced, which in turn compromises its future use as a material for manufacturers. A recycled container needs to be strong enough to hold the weight of the contents inside, and many container shapes already contain weak spots where the plastic has a reduced thickness—near a bottle’s handle, for example.
While all these complications make it difficult to produce containers with a high percentage of recycled plastic, some companies are still taking on the challenge. Seventh Generation, a company that makes eco-friendly household products, is increasing the recycled content of all its packaging, with a goal of 75 percent for all products by the end of the year.
But Seventh Generation is an exception to a widespread industry trend. It is virtually impossible to calculate the industry average for how much recycled plastic goes into packaging, according to Tom Outerbridge, director of municipal recycling for Sims Metal Management, a metals and electronics recycling company. Without a built-in environmental ethic like the one Seventh Generation has, individual companies are inconsistent in their use of recycled content, and can use anywhere from zero to 100 percent recycled plastic in their products. But when the quality of the recycled plastic goes down, so does that percentage.
So if you’re wondering if you should continue to recycle your plastics, here’s an answer: Yes. But before you do, educate yourself on which plastics your city collects, and bring other types to outlets where they can be properly sorted. If you’re unsure about a plastic—an old CD jewel boxes, perhaps, or Saran Wrap—then putting it in the bin and hoping it will be recycled anyway does nothing for the environment. It’s going to be thrown into the garbage after an elaborate and costly sorting process, so you might as well just toss it out yourself.
Source: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/06-when-recycling-is-bad-for-the-environment
by photography by Timothy Archibald From the June 2009 issue, published online June 30, 2009
Robin Bell, Ken Caldera, Bill Easterling, Stephen Schneider
In the list of world challenges, global warming might be at once the most alarming and the most controversial. According to some predictions, climate change caused by human activity could cause mass extinction in the oceans, redraw the planet’s coastlines, and ravage world food supplies. At the same time, a significant portion of the American public questions whether global warming will really cause any major harm; many still doubt that human-driven warming is happening at all. How can we settle the debate? And can we intervene in the process or find ways to adapt to the new conditions? In conjunction with the National Science Foundation and the San Francisco Exploratorium, DISCOVER brought together four experts to discuss the reality and meaning of climate change. In a highly nuanced exchange of ideas, these researchers weighed the various scenarios and laid out a road map for navigating the warmer world to come. The conversation was moderated by DISCOVER’s editor in chief, Corey S. Powell.
POWELL: One question I hear all the time is whether the current change in climate is truly extraordinary. Even if humans are contributing to global warming, isn’t this just like the natural variations that have happened many times in the past?
Robin Bell: A little background first. I spend a lot of time studying the ice sheets at the bottom of the planet—how they form and how they collapse. The poles are like the planet’s air conditioner. When things are working well, the poles keep the planet nice and cool and we don’t think about it. When things stop working, the poles can start to melt and there’s a puddle on the floor. Today both poles are getting warmer; in Greenland and Antarctica you can see the surface of the ice dropping, and you can see there’s less mass when you measure the ice from space. The process has been ongoing, but it looks like it’s happening faster than it was. We know the ice sheets have come and gone in the past. Why is this any different? One of the most compelling reasons is that in the past the ice sheets from the two poles didn’t move together—one would lead and the other would follow. This time, both the north and south are spewing ice into the global ocean, accelerating at the same time.
Ken Caldeira: Another indication of how unusual all this is can be seen by looking at ocean chemistry. When we drive our car and carbon dioxide comes out of the tailpipe, within a year it has spread throughout the atmosphere and is integrated with the surface ocean. When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it forms carbonic acid, and in high enough concentrations carbonic acid is corrosive to the shells and skeletons of many marine organisms. To measure the impact, people go out in ships and drill holes in the ocean floor, where shells of marine organisms have settled throughout geologic history. What we see is that if we continue in our current trends in burning fossil fuels, the ocean will become more acidic than it has been at any time in the past 65 million years. The last time the ocean was as acidic as it has the potential to become in the coming decades, we saw a mass extinction event.
POWELL: Yet as you note, the earth got warm in the past, too.
Caldeira: That’s true, but it got warm over millions of years, and ecosystems had a chance to adapt. What we’re seeing are rates of increase in greenhouse gases and warming that exceed natural rates by a factor of 100. So what we’re doing is really unusual when seen from a geologic perspective.
POWELL: Humans are doing in centuries what natural processes do over millions of years?
Caldeira: Yes, and the other timescale mismatch is that what we do over the next decades will affect life on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years. We are at a critical juncture in earth history. If we don’t do the right thing and there are geologists around 50 million years from now, they’ll be able to look at cores and see the remnants of a civilization that developed advanced technology but didn’t develop the wisdom to use it wisely.
POWELL: What about the impact of global warming on agriculture? As the climate changes, will people have enough to eat?
Bill Easterling: One of the most remarkable achievements of the 20th century was the way we were able to increase the global food supply in pace with unprecedented population growth. We will have to raise the food supply another two times to feed all of the people that we think will be alive by the latter third of the 21st century. We have reason to be somewhat sanguine about doing it if climate stays more or less the same, but how will we do it with the climate change? Based on our simulations and on 25 years of research, what bothers us most is that in the tropics, where the majority of poor people live today, crops are currently raised at temperatures pretty close to their photosynthetic optimums.
POWELL: Meaning that higher temperatures will make it difficult for us to produce the amount of food we need?
Easterling: If you go any higher, yields begin to fall. On the other hand, in the midlatitudes—in the temperate zones where we live and where many of the grain belts of Europe and North America are located—a little bit of warming in some cases is not a bad thing, at least not at first. These are regions where crops are currently cold-limited. In other words, if you warm the temperatures, you actually might get a little bit of additional yield. So you’ve already begun to set up a kind of haves and have-nots, an imbalance where the poorest people in the world who vitally depend on agriculture as a development tool, in addition to providing food security, are now being even further disadvantaged. But there really aren’t many winners in the long run because even if the higher latitudes are given an advantage, they still are faced with moving food across large distances and making sure that it’s done in such a way that the farming systems in the receiving countries are not put out of business because of the inundation of free or subsidized food.
POWELL: Climate change is such a huge issue that people tend to feel paralyzed by it. Stephen, you’ve framed it in a helpful way as a problem of risk management. What does that mean?
Stephen Schneider: I often testify before Congress and talk to the media, and they always ask the same question: Is the science settled enough for us to have policy? Do we know enough to spend money fixing this? But science, and especially system science, is very complicated. Now, in any system that’s complicated there are some components that are well established. In other words, they’re relatively settled. We know that the world is now 0.75 degrees Celsius warmer than it was a century and a half ago. We know that the ice sheets are decreasing. But then there are other components with competing potential outcomes—for instance, will a change of three degrees make crop yields go up or down?
POWELL: So how should we separate out the well-established parts, and how do we evaluate the ones that are not so certain?
“With any one line of evidence, there might be a 25% chance it’s random. But the probability of all these events’ lining up is pretty darn low—unless it is global warming.”
Schneider: When you’re covering climate change, you don’t get somebody from a deep ecology group to tell you we’re near the end of the world and then somebody from the Competitive Enterprise Institute who’s going to tell you carbon dioxide is a fertilizer while forgetting about ocean acidification. If you do that, the two lowest-probability outcomes get most of the time in the media and you get this dumbed-down debate. It’s bipolar, and that’s not how system science works. There are multiple potential outcomes. What we do is whittle out the relative likelihood of each of these outcomes so we can make a value judgment about whether or not the risks are adequate to move forward. Risk is what can happen, multiplied by the probability of its happening. That’s what we call an objective or scientific assessment. We try to make the risk aspects clear and then leave the risk management where it properly belongs, which is out among the public and in the political world.
POWELL: In the news, climate change is often described in terms of legislation and treaties. So I was surprised, Ken, when I heard you call it a “hardware problem.” Can you explain that?
Caldeira: Many people have been looking at this as a problem of getting international cooperation and international agreements. We’ve had the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Round Table coming up. But when China builds a power plant that’s going to spew carbon dioxide into the environment for at least the next 75 years, what’s important is that we build it correctly. To me the risks are so clear. Economists estimate that transforming our economy into having an energy system that does not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere might cost 2 percent of our wealth each year. Now, I can go to any group of people and say, “Let’s pretend we already have energy systems based on solar, wind, and other sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases.” Then I say, “You can make 2 percent more money each year, but in return for being 2 percent richer we’re going to have to melt the ice caps and acidify the oceans and shift weather patterns. Now, would you trade all that environmental risk in order to be 2 percent richer?” I’ve asked this of climate skeptics. Even they say, “Well, if we already had this carbon-neutral energy system, I would go with it.” That makes me think it’s not the cost of transforming our energy system—it’s that we don’t have the cooperation we need to start doing the job. If we wait until we have international cooperation, it will be too late. What we need is leadership that will say, “We have to stop building devices that emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
POWELL: What does “leadership” mean in this context?
Caldeira: We need to say we can’t afford to have gasoline cars that emit carbon dioxide—so can we have an electric car system with swappable batteries? We can’t afford to build a coal-fired power plant with CO2 coming out—so can we develop carbon capture and storage technologies, or should we be looking at solar-thermal? We have to start building the new energy system, and we need the political leadership to say we’re going to start doing this. We need research and development to come up with the technology because it’s not all on the shelf. I think if the United States started doing this in a serious way, Europe would follow. If the United States and Europe did this, I think it would not be long before China and India joined us.
POWELL: Snap poll: Do you consider yourselves fundamentally optimistic or pessimistic about whether we have the technological and political will to fix this problem?
Bell: I’m an optimist. Oh, we are changing the planet. We may have already changed the ice sheets to a point that some parts of them may go, but we have the ability to stop changing it more and to adapt to what we have already done.
Caldeira: I’m also optimistic about our abilities. Unfortunately I’m pessimistic about our wisdom. We have the capability to do amazing things in a short amount of time, but it takes a political decision with follow-through. I’m not confident we’ll get it.
Easterling: I temper my optimism by saying that we’re probably looking at an adaptive challenge. That is, we’re going to have to adapt to a certain amount of warming no matter what, even if we were to bring global emissions of greenhouse gases back to year-2000 levels, and that adaptation would be draconian if we were to do it all at once.
Schneider: The first time I was asked that question in a public place was sometime in the 1970s in front of a congressional committee. My answer was a little bit like Ken’s. I said, “I’m technologically optimistic and politically bleak.” That proved to be a pretty good forecast for the next 35 years. But now I’m getting more optimistic because there’s getting to be some alignment of the stars between Congress and the White House. The tough problem is going to be China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and the countries that are even poorer than that. Can you imagine telling this current Congress that we need half a trillion dollars’ worth of technology transfers to help developing countries go through the transition?
POWELL: That raises a good question: How much money do we need to spend on addressing global warming?
Schneider: I think we’ll need $500 billion to get going. Over time, it will be trillions.
Caldeira: But we’re talking about something that’s small compared with the money we invest in medical care. It’s smaller than what we invest in the military budget. I think we need to start looking at climate change as the kind of threat that we must spend real money on to address.
POWELL: Have you all adjusted your personal lifestyle in response to climate change? What measures are important? For instance, will driving a hybrid car or turning down your thermostat really be meaningful, or is this just a drop in the ocean?
Bell: Personally, I’ve done all the easy things. We’ve changed our lightbulbs [to compact fluorescents]. We got rid of one of our cars. But the work I do is an energy hog. I travel to events like this to talk about the changing climate. I go to Antarctica and I burn a lot of carbon to do what I do. So professionally I’m a pig when it comes to carbon. The really hard thing is airline travel. My husband won’t get on a plane for fun anymore. But he’ll go anywhere on a sailboat.
Easterling: I’m the dean of a college at Penn State, and I am notorious for being in a charcoal gray suit riding my bicycle in three inches of snow. I try to set an example, and I haven’t fallen yet.
Caldeira: I’ve done some things, like I now drive a little scooter instead of a car to work, but I really think that this emphasis on the personal carbon footprint plays into the interests of the people who would like to see our current energy system continue. We won’t solve this problem by telling people not to have toast.
Schneider: This is the hypocrisy question. Yeah, Senator Inhofe loves to ask that one of Al Gore, and I get it all the time too. In fact, I ask it of my freshmen and sophomores: “Is your professor a hypocrite?” I live in a green house with twice the legally required insulation and a heat recovery ventilator, and I drive a hybrid and I bike and I live two miles from work, but then there are those 170,000 miles up there on United Airlines, and that is 90-odd percent of my footprint, just as Robin said.
Audience member: What is the most compelling evidence you have that human behavior is actually warming the planet?
Caldeira: To me the most compelling evidence is the fact that the stratosphere—the upper atmosphere—is cooling while the lower atmosphere and the land surface are warming. That’s a sign that greenhouse gases are trapping energy and keeping that energy close to the surface of the earth. I mentioned that in ocean acidification, you actually see animals that should make shells unable to make shells anymore. You could demonstrate the same kind of effect in a bell jar in the lab. There is a level of certainty about it.
POWELL: What about you, Bill? You’re looking not at climate records but rather at agriculture. Do you see a real break from the past there, indicating a unique signature of global warming?
Easterling: One of the problems with agriculture is that it’s a highly managed ecosystem. So it’s often tricky to try to separate out the climate change signal from what might be a host of other things relating to how we manage crops and livestock. But we have seen an increase in the length of the frost-free season. We have seen changes in the incidences and the life cycles of critical agricultural pests, which can be explained only by a general warming. Of course, this is all circumstantial. What made all this come into sharp focus for me was not what we were observing but what we were able to simulate on a computer. Over the past 10 to 15 years, we have been running experiments with very complex and increasingly reliable global climate models. When we entered into the computer all the various things that forced the climate to change, we were able to faithfully reproduce the temperature record of the past 100 years globally. When you take out the component of human-generated carbon dioxide, the models don’t work at all. There are all these people who say, “Well, what about the sun? Why don’t they think about solar variability?” Of course we think about the sun. The models think about all these things, but the models work only if you put all the components in, and one of the big components is us.
POWELL: How you deal with skeptics, both in Congress and in the public, who always seem to have a contrary statistic?
Schneider: First, with regard to your due diligence as a publisher, why hasn’t DISCOVER published a compelling account of the other side? Because there isn’t any. That’s a pretty good reason. There are a lot of things in that speculative and competing explanations category, but there is no preponderance, and that is what is compelling to me. For example, take the evidence that Robin cited. If you were a cynic and you asked about the probability of the ice sheet in the north going up, it’s 50 percent. Going down? Fifty percent. And the South Pole going up? Fifty percent. Going down? Fifty percent. Probability they are both going together? Twenty-five percent. What’s the probability of the stratosphere cooling while the earth gets warmer? Again, assuming we knew nothing, 50 percent. Troposphere warming? Fifty. The probability that one will go up while the other goes down? Twenty-five percent. Same thing for other patterns, like the way high-latitude continents are warming more than low-latitude ones are. With any single line of evidence, you can say, “Oh, well, there’s still a 25 percent chance it’s random,” but what happens when you put all these events together? The probability of all these events’ lining up the same way is pretty darn low unless we are dealing with global warming.
“We’re going to have to adapt to a certain amount of warming no matter what, even if we were to bring global emissions of greenhouse gases back to year-2000 levels.”
Caldeira: Climate science has reached the point that plate tectonics reached 30 years ago. It is the basic view of the vast majority of working scientists that human-induced climate change is real. There is a real diversity of informed opinion on how important climate change is going to be to various things that affect humans, and there is a diversity of opinion on how to address this problem, but the debate over human-induced climate change is over.
Audience member: I work in a hard-rock mining industry, and the majority of my colleagues tell me I’m crazy when I talk about climate change. Where are some good sources of information that rationally discuss all of these different naysayers’ theories?
Caldeira: One useful Web site is realclimate.org.
Schneider: I have a contrarian section on my Web site, which is climatechange.net. We’re about to triple it because we had to deal with those famous climate professors, you know, professors Limbaugh and Crichton. [Laughter] They have a standard technique, doing much the same thing that the American Tobacco Institute did for a long time, which is to cite the three studies that were equivocal and ignore the 33 studies that were definitive. They use the argument that we still do not, to this day, understand the detailed biological connections between smoking and cancer, but the evidence and data are so overwhelming you’d have to be nuts not to act on it—unless you’re in the business.
Caldeira: There was a climate contrarian who testified before the Senate last week. He made the claim that climate scientists were some kind of club and they all made money by somehow supporting each other’s findings. The reality of science is that a scientific career is made by showing that all the people around you believe something that’s not true. If a scientist could provide evidence that the climate theory is incorrect and that global warming is not a product of human activities, he or she would be held up as the Darwin or the Einstein of climate science. We’re highly incentivized to show that all our colleagues are wrong. If we could come up with good evidence that they’re wrong, we would be out there publishing it. The evidence just doesn’t exist.
Easterling: Even science is not value neutral. We make decisions and we have values in our judgments, but at the end of the day we have a code of ethics that says we look at the data and, using our prior knowledge, we make our best judgment. That’s all it is.
Robin Bell A senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Bell has coordinated eight major Antarctic expeditions. She studies the mechanisms of ice sheet collapse, the origins of subglacial lakes, and their hidden ecosystems.
Ken Caldera A professor at Stanford and staff member in the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Caldeira works at the nexus of climate, the carbon cycle, and energy. He has studied issues such as ocean acidification, intentional intervention in climate systems, mass-extinction events in the earth’s geologic history, and the scale of change needed to address our present carbon-driven climate problems.
Bill Easterling Dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, Easterling studies global warming and its potential effects on the world’s food supply. He has served on the National Research Council and the National Science Foundation and was a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) team.
Stephen Schneider A senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, Schneider assesses ecological and economic impacts of human-induced climate change to identify potential political and technological solutions. He has been a principal member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1988. In 2007 he joined four generations of IPCC authors, including Easterling, in receiving a Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking work.
Corey Powell
Source: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jun/30-state-of-the-climate-and-science
Date: 23-Apr-09
Country: US
Author: Ross Colvin
President Barack Obama walks towards Air Force One before departing Andrews Air Force outside Washington for an Earth Day event in Iowa, April 22, 2009.
Photo: Larry Downing
NEWTON – President Barack Obama said on Wednesday the United States must lead the world on renewable energy and pressed Congress to set greenhouse gas limits deemed crucial for the success of global talks on climate change.
Obama, who has kept energy reform high on his priority list since taking office in January, used Earth Day to tout the need for a U.S. shift to less-polluting fuels and a concerted effort to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.
“It is time for us to lay a new foundation for economic growth by beginning a new era of energy exploration in America,” Obama told workers at a wind power technology plant in Iowa, the state that propelled his presidential campaign more than a year ago.
“The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy. America can be that nation. America must be that nation.”
U.S. negotiators are preparing proposals for international climate talks to be held in Copenhagen in December, aimed at agreeing a pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.S. Congress may hold the key to the Obama administration’s credibility at those talks. It is mulling legislation that would put a cap on carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions, forming a so-called cap-and-trade system that is similar to the European Union’s.
In Washington, senior Obama administration officials urged lawmakers to back the bill.
“There will be no new global deal if the United States is not part of it, and we won’t be part of it unless we are on track in enacting our own domestic plan,” Todd Stern, the top U.S. climate negotiator, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“Unless we stand and deliver by enacting strong, mandatory nationwide climate and energy legislation, the effort to negotiate a new international agreement will come up short.”
Washington is hosting a meeting of big economies next week to help forge a climate deal. In a reference to his predecessor, former Republican President George W. Bush, Democrat Obama said the days of a slow U.S. response to global climate talks were over.
TOUGH LEGISLATION IN THE WORKS
The House of Representatives is taking the lead in Congress on rules imposing tough new caps on CO2 emissions and other pollutants that are thrust into the atmosphere by big manufacturers, utilities and vehicles.
Last month House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman unveiled a bill that seeks to lower CO2 emissions to 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and more than 80 percent by 2050.
The controversial measures could face trouble in the 100-member Senate, however, where 60 votes are required for passage. Republicans have criticized the cap-and-trade system as a backhanded energy tax.
An Environmental Protection Agency analysis of Waxman’s bill found that it would raise electricity prices 22 percent by the year 2030 and cost American households an average of $98 to $140 each year through 2050.
EPA head Lisa Jackson said the cost to Americans from the bill would be “modest compared to the benefits that science and plain common sense tell us a comprehensive energy and climate policy will deliver.”
The EPA declared CO2 and other tailpipe emissions a danger to human health and welfare last week, opening the way for government regulation by the Executive Branch of greenhouse gases, but Obama said in Iowa he preferred legislation to do the job.
The U.S. Interior Department issued long-delayed guidelines on Wednesday for leasing offshore areas for renewable energy production, opening the door to wind power generation off the coasts.
And the White House brought in fuel-efficient cars from U.S. producers Chrysler, GM and Ford for viewing as it prepares to replace cars in its 43-vehicle fleet.
Obama said the United States should increase domestic production of oil and natural gas in the short-term while emphasizing renewable energy such as wind power held the keys to the U.S. energy future.
(Editing by Philip Barbara)
© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved
Source: http://www.planetark.com/enviro-news/item/52561
Updated Wed. Jul. 22 2009 2:57 PM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
Canada has recorded its first case of Tamiflu-resistant H1N1 virus, in a Quebec man who had been given the drug to prevent infection.
The 60-year-old man was given the antiviral medication after his son fell ill with the pandemic virus. But he managed to come down with the flu anyway.
He recovered quickly and did not require hospital treatment. There is no evidence he transmitted the resistant virus to anyone else.
Meanwhile, Japan revealed Tuesday it had found a second such case of Tamiflu resistance.
The cases are the fourth and fifth globally since the new H1N1 virus was discovered in April.
Jirina Vlk, spokesperson for the Public Health Agency of Canada, says the Quebec man’s case appears to be an isolated one of Tamiflu resistance, adding her agency continues to be vigilant for similar cases.
Vlk said the agency recommends using Tamiflu for treatment only, not for prophylaxis to try to prevent illness.
Infectious disease expert Dr. Neil Rau says there has been evidence that giving Tamiflu to those who have been exposed to the virus can prevent infection. “But the downside to that is exactly what we’re seeing here in Quebec,” he told CTV News Channel.
“I think this may be a lesson not give people this drug in this fashion.”
Dr. Allison McGeer, an influenza expert at Toronto’s Mount Sinai University, says using Tamiflu to prevent infection has been seen, on occasion in the past, to give rise to resistant viruses.
“We know that it was going to happen and it’s not good news that it’s happening,” McGeer told The Canadian Press.
She said that given the amount of Tamiflu being used in the world right now, such cases were bound to arise. It remains to be seen whether such cases will arise only sporadically or whether there will be widespread Tamiflu resistance.
Other cases of Tamiflu resistance in H1N1 cases have been reported in Denmark, Japan and Hong Kong.
The newest Japan case was in a person who had been given the antiviral drug after being exposed to the pandemic virus. The person recovered after being successfully treated with Relenza, a second drug in the same class as Tamiflu. It appears there was no further spread of the resistant virus.
Three of the four cases arose in people who had been taking the drug prophylactically. The other was in a San Francisco girl who travelled to Hong Kong and was discovered to be ill there. She hadn’t taken the drug ahead of her infection, suggesting the virus that caused her infection was already resistant.
U.S. officials have intensified surveillance for resistant viruses in the San Francisco area but say they have not found other cases.
Flu survivor thought he would die
A Toronto area man who had one of the first cases of H1N1 says the illness put him into intensive care and had him wondering if he was going to survive.
Santini Gale says thought when he first became ill in late April that he had a simple cold.
“At the time that I got it, it was really the early stages of swine flu. So there was no information out there about it,” he told Canada AM Wednesday.
He suspected he had bronchitis and went to a walk-in clinic for a prescription for antibiotics. But after seven days of treatment, he was still sick. “If anything, I was even worse,” he says.
His symptoms continued to intensify to include dizziness, nausea and intense fever. He developed pain in his chest, crushing headaches and realized he needed to get to hospital.
“It literally immobilized me… this was something where I couldn’t get out of bed. I became dehydrated. I hadn’t eaten in days. I was sleeping for days on end. It was like my body was completely shutting down,” he recounted
The hospital treated him for dehydration, gave him more antibiotics, morphine for the pain, and put him on Tamiflu. After two nights in intensive care, he recovered and was sent home on May 8.
Gale says he has no idea why he developed a severe case of H1N1, but says that while health authorities say the virus causes mostly mild disease, that was certainly not his experience.
“In my case, it was far from mild. It was beyond severe,” he said.
With files from The Canadian Press
Source: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090722/h1n1_090722/20090722?s_name=medExpress2007
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