1. Natural gas mining has recently been entering a boom period in Pennsylvania, because of a technique called “fracking” that allows drillers to pump hundreds of thousands of gallons of salt and mineral laden water known as “brine” to penetrate the “natural gas,” which is primarily methane but lots of other compounds as well, trapped in the Marcellus shale rock underground. What to do with all of that brine? Well, more often than we’d like to think, it’s just dumped either into old coal mines, where it winds up in local waterways, or directly into streams. This brine pollution is often highly toxic to plants, and animals nearby and downstream. Local Pennsylvania landscaper Bob Donnan has experienced these wells first-hand:
   

   They say “fools rush in.” Are the good folks of Pennsylvania being caught unawares by all this? Will the citizens of New York State be the next to jeopardize their precious water resources? Whatever those answers are, they probably won’t be very long in coming. It’s a rapidly changing landscape out there around Hickory, as well as other small communities sitting atop these Marcellus Shale gas reserves.

   This web page was created to share photos of what gas development looks like around Hickory Pennsylvania. I suggest you follow some of the links below, do some reading, and take a look at this issue for yourself. I can only share what I have personally experienced and seen in these early stages of drilling. Time will tell where this natural gas boom will lead us. As with the huge National debt, our ultimate hope is that we don’t leave our children, and their children’s children another nightmare to deal with sometime down the road.

2. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on drillers being caught dumping their brine into the Allegheny National Forest:
   

   Two men from a Kansas oil-drilling firm pleaded guilty today to illegally dumping 200,000 gallons of brine water down an abandoned well in Pennsylvania’s only national forest.

   The pollution by Swamp Angel LLC in the Allegheny National Forest could contaminate groundwater and streams, but authorities have not linked any water damage conclusively to the pollution, acting U.S. Attorney Robert Cessar said.

   The pleas before a federal judge in Erie should send a signal to oil and gas drillers to properly dispose of brine, a saltwater byproduct of the drilling process that sometimes also contains metals, Mr. Cessar said.

   “These guys were drilling oil wells, produced this brine water and decided they weren’t going to pay for its disposal,” Mr. Cessar said. “This is the result of them getting caught. That’s the case in a nutshell.”

3. There’s also the significant risk that all of this brine water will contaminate underground drinking water. According to Richard Caperton and Tom Kenworthy at the Center for American Progress, the oil and gas industry would like the EPA to not regulate their fracking operations:
   

   The latest draft of the climate and energy bill being written by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) reportedly includes language saying U.S. EPA would not regulate the oil and gas drilling technique.

   Hopefully, this is just wishful thinking by gas companies, rather than a proposal that’s actually in the comprehensive, bipartisan clean energy and global warming legislation under development by the three senators.

   The EPA should have the ability to protect people from all potential sources of drinking water contamination, including hydraulic fracturing (also known as “fracking”). Recognizing the potential threat to water supplies, the EPA announced last week it will undertake a major study of the process to see if it poses dangers to public health and safety.

   In the fracking process, a solution of water, sand and chemicals is injected into underground rock formations. This cracks the rock, releasing natural gas that wasn’t previously recoverable. Unfortunately, as CAP’s Tom Kenworthy recently explained, there’s a risk that the chemicals in fracking fluids will pollute nearby drinking water sources. This is especially important in light of today’s news report (subscription req’d.) that a gas drilling company has violated an agreement with the government and injected diesel fuel near drinking water aquifers. “One of the world’s largest oilfield services companies continued to tell U.S. EPA it was complying with an agreement barring the injection of diesel fuel near drinking-water aquifers, documents show, after admitting to Congress that it had violated the pact,” according to the report.

   If the industry succeeds in getting a fracking exemption in Senate energy and climate legislation, it would expand special treatment for hydraulic fracturing that started with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that exempted the process from EPA regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Allegedly, the draft proposal would also protect the oil and gas industry from having to publicly disclose the chemicals they use, which removes neighbors’ right to know about the risk posed by adjacent drilling.

4. One way to deal with all of that brine water is to treat it by removing the dissolved salts and minerals in the water and hand it back to drillers to re-use the water, and a facility in nearby New Stanton, Pennsylvania is opening this Spring to handle some of the commonwealth’s growing supply of drilling wastewater this way:
   

   The treatment plant will create 20 to 30 jobs, said Frobouck, who scrapped plans for an ethanol plant at the East Huntingdon facility last year. The drilling companies would truck the water to the plant, but Frobouck said he envisions establishing transfer stations later.

   The treatment process will remove total dissolved solids — salts, organic matter and other materials. Treated water will be returned to the drillers for re-use, and the remaining sludge will be dried and sent to landfills, Frobouck said.

Jack Webb Shilling for Fatima Cigrarettes

This audo advertisement (click the Fatima picture for the audio) for Fatima cigarettes originally aired on April 15, 1954 during a Dragnet episode called “The Big Pug.”  Fatima, a Liggett and Myers tobacco company brand, was the sponsor of the episode and ran similar ads as “public service announcements” at the start, middle, and end of the episode.  This is the ad from midway during the show.  It’s about a minute and a half long.

While listening to this old episode of Sgt. Friday doing his “Just the facts, ma’am” Dragnet best, I was struck by how bold the assertions were during these ads.  ”It’s wise to smoke Fatima cigarettes” is their constant refrain.  This particular ad features a woman who works as a late-night news journalist at a big-time news agency.  In this ad she equates working longer with smoking more.

A paper by Professor David Rosner of Columbia University I recently read about the role that historians have been playing in pending law suits against tobacco companies made me think about whether people who became addicted to cigarette-delivered nicotine in past decades were aware of the health risks of smoking.  A great many consulting historians are arguing for their tobacco company employers that people were indeed aware of these risks and have been submitting histories of their awareness as evidence in these court cases.  Ads like this one suggest that smoking was not only a normal part of life, but also a routine part of life as successful hard-working career men and women.

According to the 1870 federal census, one percent of the people owned 72 percent of all the wealth in the great industrial city of Pittsburgh.  What’s more, just half of these wealthiest one percent (0.5% of the population) owned 59 percent, well more than half of all the wealth in historic Pittsburgh.  In fact, all of the net wealth in the city was held by just ten percent of the city’s population.  Simply put, the top ten wealthiest people in Pittsburgh owned nearly fifteen percent of the city that was at the time the heart of the nation’s growing industrial might.

There are those who have more than others.  True then and true now.  According to the World Institute for Development Economics Research, the wealthiest two percent of people globally own more than half of all the household wealth on the planet.  Half of those (just 1%) own more than 40% of global assets, while fully 85% of those global assets are held by the wealthiest top ten percent of us.  Within the United States, a similarly unequal distribution of wealth continues to exist.  The wealthiest 400 Americans (.001% or one thousandth of the population) own about 2.5% of U.S. wealth.  The wealthiest ten percent of Americans own 70% of the wealth in this country, and the top tenth of those (1% of U.S. population) hold 35% of the nation’s wealth.  In the dry language of the Census Bureau, this wealth inequality is described like this:

The distribution of wealth in the United States has a large positive skew, with relatively few households holding a large proportion of the wealth.

While it’s true that there is more economic equality within the United States today than there was in late nineteenth century Pittsburgh, and inequality within the United States is less than the inequality between the world’s wealthiest and the planet’s poorest, it remains staggeringly unequal.  Among developed nations, only Switzerland bests the United States in the percent of a nation’s wealth owned by the wealthiest ten percent of the population with its top ten percent owning 71% of Swiss wealth.  In the UK, the top ten percent own 56%, and in neighboring Canada, the top ten percent own 53% of the country’s wealth.

We read about the staggering fortunes of the most wealthy among us every year about this time when Forbes magazine releases its annual Forbes list of the wealthiest people in the world.  The global news media trumpets the jostling transitions of those at the top.  Headlines blare:

Gates Edged Out as World’s Richest Man

and

Mexico’s Slim a Born Wheeler and Dealer

and

Meet the World’s New Richest Man

As interesting and insightful as these facts about the wealthiest among us, what about those at the lower end of the ladder?  What about the 85% of the 1870 population in Pittsburgh that had no net worth, or the 80% of contemporary Americans who own only 15% of the wealth in the country, or indeed about the 50% of the global population who own less than 1% of its wealth?

The Insight Center for Community Economic Development recently released a report that examines the net worth of those 85% of Americans with less wealth combined than the top quintile of Americans.   By examining the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, they found that African-American women in the United States during their prime working years between 36 and 49 have a median net worth of only $5.  Yes, that’s right.  The 36-49 year old African-American woman at the very middle of the distribution from the poorest to the wealthiest of 36-49 year old African-American women has a net worth of less than the cost of a Venti Frappuccino at Starbucks.  While half have more wealth than that, half have even less.

Reports like these almost never make the news, although my hometown Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper’s Tim Grant did write about it :

In a groundbreaking report released Monday by a leading economic research group, social scientists turned a spotlight on the grave financial challenges facing an often overlooked group of women, many of whom could not take an unpaid sick day or repair a major appliance without going into debt.

“The popular image is they spend too much, which is the reason they are running up credit card and consumer debt, but the cost of living has risen faster than income, and they need to go into debt for basic daily necessities,” Ms. Lui said. “It’s compounded because unemployment is twice as high in the black community than it is in the white community.”

For all working-age black women 18 to 64, the financial picture is bleak. Their median household wealth is only $100. Hispanic women in that age group have a median wealth of $120.

There aren’t more mainstream media stories written about reports like these that call out the staggering inequality in America, because they make everyone feel badly.  Who wants that?

In fact, recent research suggests that, whether we read about it in the news or not, we do badly, all of us, because of it.  Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show in a well-reviewed work that all sorts of woes from social ills like drugs and violence to health problems like obesity and mental illness affect everyone in highly unequal societies more than those in less unequal societies.

Figure 1: Income inequality is the ratio of the wealth of the top 20% compared to the lowest 20% in each country. Health and social problems is an index of mental illness, trust, life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, educational performance, teenage birth, homicide, imprisonment, and social mobility.

The chart in Figure 1 shows that there is a very clear relationship between social and health problems in a country and the extent of economic inequality within that country.  In Canada, for instance, where the top ten percent own 53% of the country’s wealth, health and social problems are significantly lower than in the United States where the top ten percent own 70% of the country’s wealth.  In Norway, where the top 10 percent hold a still substantial but lower 50% of the country’s wealth, social and health problems are lower still.  Even more importantly, however, is that the distribution of wealth in countries like the UK, Canada, and Norway is not only less concentrated at the top of the scale, it is also less diluted at the bottom end of the scale through strong social safety nets.

Figure 2: There is no relationship between a nation's wealth and social and health problems.

Further, what isn’t  indicative of fewer social and health problems is more wealth.  Figure 2 shows this same index of social and health problems plotted against national income per person.  As you can see, there is no relationship between the wealth of a nation and the social and health problems of its people, while there is a strong relationship between the extent of economic inequality within a nation and the social and health problems there.  As you can see from Figure 2, the United States clearly has the most wealth and the most health and social problems.  Portugal, on the other hand, is not far behind in the index of health and social problems in second place, but has the lowest national income per person.  What Portugal does share with the United States, as seen back in Figure 1, is a very high degree of economic inequality.  Norway, however, has the second highest amount of national income per person and yet ranks third lowest on the index of social and health problems.  Unsurprisingly, Norway also has the third lowest extent of income inequality as seen in Figure 1.  Clearly, there is no relationship between the wealth of a nation and the social and health problems of its people.  Just as clearly, there is a strong relationship between economic inequality in a country and the amount of health and social problems occurring there.

Figure 3: National mental illness rates and income inequality are related

This relationship is also apparent for the individual components like mental health of the social and health index.  Once again, Figure 3 shows the United States leading the pack in both income inequality and this time in the percent of its population with mental illness.  Countries like Belgium with significantly lower income inequality or Japan with the lowest extent of inequality both rank near or at the bottom of the scale for the percent of their population with mental health problems.

Is there some sort of confounding variable present in seemingly disparate countries like Belgium and Japan that isn’t present in the United States and Portugal that could possibly explain these disparities better than economic inequality could?  Is there, as they say, something in the water?  If so, there is no evidence to support that or anything else.  There is, however, this strong evidence that economic inequality does significantly impact the extent of social and health problems in a society.

Why is this? Why does economic inequality make everyone in a society do worse than they would otherwise?  What are the mechanisms by which inequality drives social and health problems?  Wilkinson and Pickett suggest three of them based on documented scientific insights.

First, humans are by nature cooperative.  Of course, we aren’t always cooperative, and some of us are more cooperative than others.  Nevertheless, we are as a species far more cooperative than others and a comparison with our closest relatives highlights just how cooperative we naturally are.

Consider the gestural point.  Sticking your index finger out and perhaps extending your arm towards a distant object is universally understood by humans from a very early age to signify that the person pointing is pointing at something that he or she wants the other person to notice.  Everyone knows this “Hey, look at that delicous cake” meaning of pointing, including, interestingly, your dog.  I can point to the piece of toast that my daughter has dropped on the kitchen floor, and my dog will easily understand that this means that I’m pointing to food that she can eat.  But no other species besides our dogs and ourselves know that that is what we are communicating when we point like that.  If you were to point like that to a chimpanzee, maybe by pointing towards a bunch of bananas in your grocery store bag, the chimpanzee would not understand what you meant.

This has nothing to do with prior training, but instead has to do with the fact that chimpanzees and other non-human primates are not cooperative.  The chimpanzee would not realize that there were those bananas in that bag until you began to grab them yourself.  In order to understand the declarative pointing gesture, you must first be able to assume that the pointer is trying to cooperate rather than compete with you.  Your dog gets this.  An infant human already knows this, but a non-human primate will never understand this.

Figure 4: Trusting others and income inequality are inversely related.

Humans (and our best friends) are uniquely cooperative.  As Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman’s recent research at UCLA has shown, when we experience social exclusion, the same neural network is activated in our brains that is activated by physical pain.  Broken hearts and hurt feelings are real social forms of pain to humans.  Unequal societies have more of this social pain, less social support, and, as Figure 4 shows, less of that cooperative trust than more equal societies.

Secondly, even though we are considerably cooperative, we are also quite social.  Like other primates, we strive for status and part of us would relish being top dog.  We measure our own standing against that of others.  Consider that all of the graphs and discussion of the distribution of wealth in societies just in this article alone are essentially all ways of measuring people against one another socially.

Our self-esteem is linked to the ways in which other people rank and measure us.  We’d all like to be so self-assured that winning and losing didn’t matter, but the reality is that these things matter a great deal to all of us.  It’s part of life as a human.  Over two hundred scientific experiments have been conducted on the amounts that levels of cortisol, one of the primary stress hormones, rise in response to specific stressors, and it has been found by Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kearney at UCLA that performance judgements that threaten our social status or self-esteem and over which performance we have little or no control, such as running late to an important sales meeting but being stuck in traffic, “provoked larger and more reliable cortisol” than any other kind of stress.  We’ve all been in situations in which our performance was important, but no matter how hard we tried, we could never measure up.  These are stressful situations while we’re experiencing them, and afterwards often become depressing memories we’d rather not remember.

As Robert Sapolsky’s and many others’ research has shown, these high cortisol levels from psychological stress take an enormous toll on our bodies.  Elevated cortisol levels raise blood sugar and blood pressure.  While under the psychological stress of avoiding being eaten by a big stalking lion on the African savanna, these physiological changes are highly adaptive, enabling us to run faster and jump higher.  While sitting at a desk in an office worrying about taxes or retirement, these elevated cortisol levels lead to obesity and heart disease.

Quite simply, we want to be as good as those around us, and when we can’t, it stresses us out, which leads to a whole host of social and health problems from early onset puberty to drug use to violence to mental illness, several of which, because cortisol passes through the placental barrier, are passed on from mothers to children in utero.

Of course, we employ strategies like working hard to reach the top of the social ladder or at least avoid the bottom rungs.  Consequently, as several studies have shown, people work longer hours in more unequal societies.  We also know that, whether through birth, skin color, or simple luck, sheer hard work does not always correspond well to economic success or social status.  Does the Wall Street banker or Hilton heiress work harder than the Midwestern roofer?  People in more unequal societies also tend to borrow more on credit than those in more equal societies as an alternative strategy to keep up with the Joneses.  That keeping up is a whole lot easier when the Joneses of society are more rather than less like us.

Figure 5: There is a strong relationship between teen pregnancy and economic inequality.

Thirdly, Jay Belsky of Penn State, Laurence Steinberg of Temple, and Patricia Draper of Penn State found that when people learn as children that others are “opportunistic and self-serving and [that] resources are scarce and/or unpredictable,” they reach puberty earlier, become sexually active earlier, form more short-term relationships, and make less of an investment in their own parenting.  By contrast, those who learn as children that “others are trustworthy, relationships are enduring and mutually rewarding and resources [are] more or less constantly available” reach puberty later, defer sexual activity longer, form more long-term relationships, and make a greater investment in their own parenting.  As seen in Figure 5, a comparison of teen pregnancy rates across countries with more or less economic inequality bears this out.

All of the social and health problems that comprise Wilkinson and Pickett’s social and health index are certainly well-known and much-discussed topics in the United States.  It certainly isn’t an issue of a lack of awareness of these problems.  Rather, as Wilkinson and Pickett state:

Every problem is seen as needing its own solution — unrelated to others.  People are encouraged to take exercise, not to have unprotected sex, to say no to drugs, to try to relax, to sort-out their work-life balance, and to give their children ‘quality’ time.  The only thing that many of these policies do have in common is that they often seem to be based on the belief that the poor need to be taught to be more sensible.  The glaringly obvious fact that these problems have common roots in inequality and relative depravation disappears from view.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pittsburgh was filled with advice on how the grinding poverty, high crime, and excessive mortality experienced by the majority of the city’s residents could be cured by stopping the idleness of its working classes and teaching them self-improvement.  They had filthy habits, played too much baseball, and drank too much beer.  Instead, they should, reformers insisted, strive for refinement and betterment through walks across green fields, literature reading, and art appreciation.  So, Andrew Carnegie and others in the top one-half of one percent of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest built libraries, museums, and garden parks for those toiling for pennies in their mills and foundries twelve hours a day seven days a week.

Pittsburgh’s wonderful public libraries, stunning museums, and beautiful city parks are indeed valuable additions to civic life in the city.  Yet, we also know that the root of many of these social and health problems lies not in a lack of refinement and beauty, but in a lack of equality.  There are those who have more than others.  True then, true now, and likely to be true throughout our future.  However, it is not the existence of a gap between the richest and the poorest that appears to matter most, it is the extent to which that gap gapes that affects us all.  Certainly, much more could and should be done to make life more secure and less stressful for those on the bottom, because doing so would benefit us all.

A group of scientists has published a report stating that the FDA was wrong to assert that the common chemical in plastics is harmless. BPA, according to the report,
From can affect brain and behavioral development in infants and kids.

The Food and Drug Administration ignored scientific evidence and used flawed methods when it determined that a chemical widely used in baby bottles and in the lining of cans is not harmful, a scientific advisory panel has found.

In a highly critical report to be released today, the panel of scientists from government and academia said the FDA did not take into consideration scores of studies that have linked bisphenol A (BPA) to prostate cancer, diabetes and other health problems in animals when it completed a draft risk assessment of the chemical last month. The panel said the FDA didn’t use enough infant formula samples and didn’t adequately account for variations among the samples.

Taking those studies into consideration, the panel concluded, the FDA’s margin of safety is “inadequate”. The panel is part of the Science Board, a committee of advisers to the FDA commissioner, and was set up to review the FDA’s risk assessment of BPA.

Many of the studies that the panel said the FDA ignored were reviewed by the National Toxicology Program, which concluded in September that it had “some concern” that BPA can affect brain and behavioral development in infants and small children.

From CNN:

The discovery of excessive levels of the industrial chemical melamine in Chinese eggs has prompted the Hong Kong authorities to expand health tests to include meat products imported from China, a senior official said Sunday.

The move follows the announcement late Saturday that Hong Kong testers had found 4.7 parts per million of melamine in imported eggs produced by a division of China’s Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group. The legal limit for melamine in foodstuffs in Hong Kong is 2.5 ppm.

Hong Kong Secretary for Food and Health York Chow said the melamine may have come from feed given to the chickens that laid the eggs. “The preliminary opinion experts have given us is that there is a problem with the (chicken) feed,” Chow told reporters Saturday.

The practice of local sewage authorities re-using water used in drilling deep natural gas wells has caused the amount of total dissolved solids in the Monongahela River to exceed EPA levels. These solids make the water smell and taste badly, and may be harmful to human health. We don’t know for sure, because we aren’t told what these solids actually are. There is an advisory to use bottled water for cooking and drinking, which suggests that they may, in fact, be harmful.

Using the age-old mantra of engineers that ‘the solution to pollution is dilution’, the Army Corps of Engineers is going to release more water from dams in West Virginia into the Mon.

This is just one of the many examples of Pittsburgh not living up to its Clean and Green hype. There are lots of promises and plans, but issues like these never seem to go away.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has more:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has started releasing more water from the Tygart and Stonewall Jackson dams in West Virginia to help dilute contaminants in the Monongahela River. Robert Yue, a hydrologic engineer for the Corps, said it will take about two days for the additional water to travel down the Tygart River to the Mon.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection requested the releases because the concentration of total dissolved solids in the Mon exceeds the state and federal limit of 500 parts per million.

From the New York Times:

By now the cardiovascular benefits of a daily glass of wine are well known. But many teetotalers wonder whether they can reap the same rewards from wine’s unfermented sibling, or are they simply left out altogether.

Grape juice may not provide much buzz, but you can still toast to good health when it comes to its ability to avert heart disease. Alcohol in moderation can relax blood vessels and increase levels of HDL, the “good” cholesterol. But the substances believed to provide much of red wine’s heart benefits — resveratrol and flavonoids — are also found in grape juice, especially the variety made from red and dark purple Concord grapes.

Independent studies have found that like alcohol, grape juice can reduce the risk of blood clots and prevent LDL (“bad” cholesterol) from sticking to coronary arteries, among other cardiac benefits. One, conducted by scientists at the University of Wisconsin and published in the journal Circulation, looked at the effects of two servings of Concord grape juice a day in 15 people with coronary artery disease. After two weeks, the subjects had improved blood flow and reduced oxidation of LDL. Oxidized LDL can damage arteries.

Other studies in humans and animals, including one last year in the journal Atherosclerosis, have shown that daily consumption may lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels. But beware: some varieties of juice have sugar and artificial ingredients.

From The Economist:

A little automation could save lives

TIME and again, evidence shows computer-controlled vehicles have fewer accidents than those driven by people. Still, we have a pathological reluctance to surrender control. We seem to find all-too-frequent deaths caused by human carelessness somehow preferable to the obscure possibility of death by bloodless automaton.

The rail crash on September 12th—America’s deadliest in 15 years—would have been wholly preventable had an electronic controller been allowed to intercede. Instead, a Metrolink commuter train heading north from Los Angeles with 220 people on board collided head-on with a southbound Union Pacific freight train, killing 25 people and injuring 135 more. …

From The Economist:

A scandal in China over deadly baby milk

“QUALITY and safety are the foundations of social harmony,” proclaim posters at the headquarters of the Sanlu Group in Shijiazhuang, capital of China’s northern province of Hebei. Sanlu was until recently one of China’s biggest producers of milk powder. Now, dozens of people, many clutching infants, queue in the hot sun outside to return powder that could be contaminated with a potentially lethal chemical. The harmony of China’s consumers has rarely been so tested.

The safety scandal engulfing not only Sanlu, fingered as the main culprit, but much of China’s dairy industry, is an embarrassment to China’s leaders. In July last year, after widespread complaints at home and abroad about tainted Chinese-made food and medicine, the authorities executed a former head of the country’s food-and-drug safety agency for taking bribes. This year, to improve monitoring, the agency was put under the Ministry of Health. The sale of tainted milk powder, which has so far made more than 6,000 infants ill and by Thursday September 18th had killed four, shows controls remain dangerously slack. …