air quality

photo by Matthew Logelin

The problems: 1) Indoor air pollution in the developing world caused by cooking fires and sooty illumination results in an estimated 1.6 million deaths per year, 2) Deforestation resulting from over use of wood as an energy source causes serious ecosystem degradation in many parts of the developing world.

A solution, as Envirofit sees it: New cookstoves, which while still burning biomass (wood, crop waste, dried animal dung) reduce indoor air pollution by 80%, reduce fuel usage by 50% and decrease cooking times by 40%.
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Headlines revealing the discovery that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reduced the value of a statistical life by almost a million dollars abound. The news, as you might expect, generates some of the best humorous comments (quotes overleaf). But what does it all really mean? How does it affect your environmental quality? And how does it affect your finances, especially in a down economy?...

In a taste of what would come if the U.S. were to take the lead in developing global alternative energy solutions, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has signed a multi-million dollar agreement to bring their expertise to an assessment of health risks in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) due to environmental factors.

And since the U.A.E. has gone from a small nomadic and seafaring economy to one that is highly industrialized in just the last 40 years as one of the fastest developing nations in the world the truth is that there is plenty of cause for concern. A fact leadership in that country fully recognizes, and is attempting to tackle before...

"USEDA" (formerly know as the US Environmental Protection Agency) is proposing revisions to decades-old air quality regulations that will make it easier for coal-fired generation plants to obtain construction and operating permits for sites where air quality is currently good: in and around national and state parks. Must be a coincidence. For you AQ techies, the proposed rule changes would:
•Substitute an annual average of emissions for the current "maximum" emissions that is measured over a few hours, up to a single day.
•Exclude from pollution estimates output from existing industrial emitters that have been granted variances.
•Switch from calc...