Speaking of the earth

A few recent environmental notes to wrap up the day.

Lead - The EPA set a standard for airborne lead exposure back in 1978. Since then, numerous - like 6,000 numerous - studies have shown that lead exposure is damaging to children at much lower levels; indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics says there is "no safe level of lead exposure for children." Even so, the agency resisted calls for a tighter standard.

But as the result of a court settlement of a suit brought by the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, the EPA finally had to act. So on Friday,

EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson said he was lowering the current standard of 1.5 micrograms [of lead] per cubic meter of air to 0.15 micrograms per cubic meter. That figure was in keeping with the recommendations of both the EPA staff and the agency's independent Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, but the EPA's Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee had urged a sharply lower limit of 0.02 micrograms. ...

Environmentalists hailed the decision as a significant public health advance but questioned some aspects of the EPA's plans for measuring lead pollution under the new rule.

One specific concern is that half of the air-monitoring stations in the country have been dismantled over the last several years and more need to be set up. Another is that lead pollution levels will be measured

over three-month averages rather than the one-month averages the agency's scientific advisers recommended. Averaging the readings over three months, they said, would obscure spikes in pollution that could threaten children and adults.

Frank O'Donnell, who heads the public watchdog group Clean Air Watch, said "a three-month average would permit smelters and other lead polluters to belch high levels of lead periodically and still be considered legal."

Thanks to strict environmental controls, the average level of lead in the air has dropped 97% since the 1970s. But it accumulates in the environment and exposure is still high in urban, particularly poor and minority, areas. More than 300,000 children show effects of lead poisoning in the US. So this is good, but we've still got a ways to go.

For one thing, it will be October 2011 before the standards can be enforced because of the need to improve the monitoring network from the current 133 stations to over 300. At that point the EPA will designate which areas need to reduce their lead concentrations; those areas will have five years to comply - which means the even without delays, it could be October 2016, eight years from now, before the standards are fully in force.

Perhaps the best news out of the announcement, though, was that neither a last minute push by battery recyclers nor lobbying by the White House to cut back on monitoring even further succeeded in heading off the new standard.

Perchlorate - Earlier this month, the EPA

formally refused ... to set a drinking-water safety standard for perchlorate, a chemical in rocket fuel that has been linked to thyroid problems in pregnant women, newborns and young children.

The agency quietly issued a press release announcing the decision, claiming that levels of the chemical were low enough to be safe in 99% of public drinking water systems, so there isn't a "meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction" through establishing a national standard. Of course, the "safe" standard used in the final release is 15 times higher than what the agency itself proposed in 2002; by the earlier standard, 16 million people are drinking water that is unsafe due to perchlorate contamination.

And the decision comes in the wake of reports that

White House officials had extensively edited the EPA's perchlorate rule-making documentation to remove scientific data highlighting some of the risks associated with the chemical, which has been found in water in 35 states. The Defense Department and Pentagon contractors who face legal liability stemming from rocket fuel contamination have lobbied for six years to avoid a federal drinking-water standard for perchlorate.

Some environmental groups intend to sue in federal court in an attempt to get the rule overturned.

Beluga whales - Sarah Palin just can't get no respect, you betcha. In the face of opposition by the GOPper's nominee for Veep, the federal government declared on Friday that the beluga whales of Alaska's Cook Inlet - one of five beluga whale populations in Alaskan waters - are endangered and require additional protection.

"In spite of protections already in place, Cook Inlet beluga whales are not recovering," said James Balsiger, NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] acting assistant administrator.

Palin, who had insisted that there was no scientific basis for the listing, won a six-month delay last April so that a new summer count could be included in the data. However, that count showed no increase over the 375 counted a year before and compared clearly unfavorably with the peak number of 653 in 1995.

Wolves - The northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf was returned to the endangered species list earlier this week as the result of a suit by twelve environmental groups.

In February, the feds had delisted the gray wolf in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, removing the species from federal protection for the first time since 1974.

[US District Court Judge Donald] Molloy's Tuesday order came at the request of federal biologists who acknowledged they had failed to prove the animal had fully recovered from near-decimation last century. ...

"The judge was pretty clear (we) were going to lose the case if we went forward," said Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator in the Northern Rockies for Fish and Wildlife Service.

So they bailed.

Judge Molloy's order may also have been influenced by the fact that almost as soon as the wolf was delisted, Wyoming allowed them to be shot on sight and all three states planned public hunts. Molloy issued an injunction against the killing in July.

Federal officials say they intend to revamp their delisting proposal and reissue it in early 2009, again removing the federal protection.

Wolves had all but disappeared in the mainland United States by 1974. In 1995, 66 gray wolves from Canada were released in Idaho and near Yellowstone national park in hopes that their numbers would multiply.

There now are an estimated 1,200 wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, where wary farmers regard them as a threat to livestock.

That threat is often exaggerated and is built more on anecdote than actual study. In fact, it's likely that the image of wolf as livestock predator got its start when settlers pushing west killed large numbers of what would otherwise be prey for the wolves - such as deer, bison, elk, and moose - and then blamed the wolves when, lacking other prey, the animals turned to the sheep and cattle of the ranchers. It is also true that what are labeled wolf attacks are sometimes done instead by dogs or coyotes.

But perhaps the best evidence against the claim that wolves are a serious threat to livestock is the simple fact that if that were so, when they became a protected species and their numbers increased, the damage they inflicted on herds and flocks should have increased right along with that - and it didn't.