“Grassroots” global warming study

Begun in 1998 and completed in 2001, the U.S. National As-sessment is the only study to

broadly examine how global warm-ing might affect communities in the U.S. Because of the subject matter, however, the assessment has been mired in political contro-versy since its release, and officials in the Bush Administration have sought to remove any reference to the report from publications com-ing out of their Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). However, in a paper published in this issue of ES&T (pp 9023–9032), research-ers report that the National Assess-ment successfully involved a wide group of people in a “grassroots” effort to teach U.S. citizens about global warming.

“It was a real innovation,” says the study’s lead author Granger Morgan, professor and head of the department of engineering and pub-lic policy at Carnegie Mellon Univer-sity. “It would be a shame if there is nothing learned so that we can’t do

it better the next time,” he says. Morgan calls the assessment—a

congressionally mandated effort to examine the impacts of climate change—a successful first effort. He adds that if the U.S. govern-ment eventually works on anoth-er broad report, the effort would benefit from better budgeting to ensure a more equitable distribu-tion of resources to various groups. The study also found that partici-pants in future assessments should be better trained and that federal agencies should actively support future assessments.

The National Assessment in-volved 9 different government agencies and 20 regional work-shops attended by a broad array of academics, policy experts, and even laypersons who provided ex-pertise on local issues. Farmers, for instance, detailed how increased rainfall or extended drought might change agricultural practices. A team of researchers then summa-rized all these findings.

To analyze the success of the ef-fort, Morgan’s group sent surveys to people who were on the Nation-al Assessment mailing list. “It’s not a statistical survey,” Morgan says. “It was just a way to seek comment from people.” Morgan and col-leagues then prepared a handful of papers and held a workshop in ear-ly 2004 in Washington, D.C. Mor-gan says that close to 100 people attended the meeting, including Jim Mahoney, director of the CCSP.

Although Mahoney did not ac-tively participate, Morgan says that his presence can be interpreted as a sign of support. “There has been a great deal of politically inspired criticism of the National Assess-ment,” says Morgan, “and the fact that Jim Mahoney came and took it seriously was a very constructive move on his part.”

The White House prohibits men-tion of the National Assessment in any publications issued by the CCSP. According to Rick Piltz, a government employee who previ-ously worked in the program, the White House fears the National As-sessment because it does not delve into complicated science (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2005, 39, 316A–317A). Instead, the National Assessment clearly explains how global warming will affect average citizens. William Clark, a professor of science and public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Govern-ment, notes that suppressing the National Assessment is obviously a political ploy, but he adds that all as-sessments are political in nature.

Mahoney has told ES&T that federal researchers are restrict-ed from referring to the National Assessment, but academics and members of nongovernmental or-ganizations actively consult it, Morgan says. —PAUL D. THACKER

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The National Assessment chapter on impacts to the Southeast notes both the2–4-inch rise in global sea levels since 1940 and the loss of Louisiana wetlands. The report states that these effects will cause more hurricane damage.

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Nanoparticle agglomeration restricts uptake into living cellsSize matters when it comes to nanoparticles entering lung cells. New research published in this is-sue of ES&T (pp 9370–9376) shows that the finer the particles, the faster they agglomerate in biologi-cal fluids, such as the lung’s airway surface liquid. This aggregation al-ters the motility of the nanoparti-cles, with the smaller ones—which

are considered the most toxic—dif-fusing the most slowly. The over-all result is lower accumulation in cells. These results suggest that the smallest particles might be less dangerous than previously thought, because their uptake can be re-duced for purely physical reasons.

“We were really surprised to find that the uptake rate at low, physiologically relevant concen-trations was limited by physical transport properties in the solu-tion rather than by the cells’ ability to engulf [cerium oxide] nanopar-ticles,” says Wendelin Stark, head of the functional materials labora-tory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the pa-per’s corresponding author.

Researchers in Stark’s group ex-

posed human lung fibroblasts—cells that form connecting tissue and are involved in the formation of asbestosis—to suspensions of different-sized cerium oxide nano-particles, ranging in diameter from 20 to 150 nanometers (nm). They observed that the smallest parti-cles immediately massed together. Stark says he chose to concentrate on cerium oxide powder, or ceria, because these nanoparticles are increasingly important in automo-tive catalystic converters as well as for industrial applications such as the polishing of computer chips.

In addition, “cells [normal-ly] do not contain cerium; that’s why whole-cell elemental analysis makes a lot of sense,” says Silvia Di-abaté, a toxicologist with the Insti-tute of Toxicology and Genetics of the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Germany). In fact, this method’s high sensitivity offers for the first time a way to explore what happens when living cells are exposed to nanoparticles at concentrations as low as 0.1 parts per million.

When they examined the cells, Stark’s group found only agglomer-ates of ceria nanoparticles, which were all contained in vesicles. Pe-ter Gehr, an expert on pulmonary particle uptake and clearance at the University of Bern (Switzer-land), says that in his uptake stud-ies he has never found such vesicles enclosing the silica or polystyrene model nanoparticles that he uses. Instead, he has found particles smaller than 200 nm in diameter to be highly mobile and to cross bio-logical membranes.

Stark says that his group’s find-ings are important for in vitro studies but that significant steps are still needed before the data can be applied to in vivo systems. —ORI SCHIPPER

News BriefsCarbon storage for greenhouse gasesCO2 emitted from burning fossil fu-els can be affordably captured and stored deep underground in oil and gas fields or coal beds, according to a new report from the Intergovernmen-tal Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report estimates that several hundreds to thousands of systems lo-cated at power plants could capture and store 220–2200 gigatonnes of CO2 over the next century. That trans-lates to 15–55% of the worldwide mitigation effort needed to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at 450–750 parts per million CO2. Less than 1% of the stored CO2 is projected to leak over 1000 years. However, IPCC guidelines do not yet provide methods to inventory and credit un-derground carbon storage. To read the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Di-oxide Capture and Storage, visit www.ipcc.ch/activity/ccsspm.pdf.

India under threat from climate changeNew research is raising awareness of the threats that climate change poses for India, Asia’s fastest grow-ing economy after China. A joint In-dia–U.K. study released September 9 predicts that global warming will push temperatures in India up by 3–4 °C by the turn of the century. Rainfall will increase substantially in many areas, but periods of drought will be-come longer in others, with ma-jor implications for forestry and agriculture, the study warned. In addition, diseases such as malaria will spread, and rising sea levels could damage India’s vast coastal railway network. Investigating the Impacts of Climate Change in India is available at www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climate change/impacts-india/index.htm.

Human lung cells take up agglomerated cerium oxide nanoparticles (clearly vis-ible as black dots) and store them in vesicles.

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higher than in wastewater efflu-ent. Moreover, engineers want to detect the presence of raw sewage because it is often associated with waterborne pathogens, Sedlak points out.

Propranolol is one of the most common prescription drugs in the U.S., and the chiral beta-blocker

exists in two enantiomeric forms. Both are present in equal concen-trations in the administered drug and the raw sewage. However, mi-croorganisms in WWTPs preferen-tially degrade the (R)-(+)-isomer, so the researchers could monitor shifts in the enantiomeric fraction (EF) in treated sewage.

Fono and Sedlak measured iso-mer shifts in seven WWTPs in the U.S. They found EFs of 0.5 in raw sewage and EFs of 0.42 or less in wastewater effluent from these plants. Using this information, Fono and Sedlak could then de-termine which of several surface waters they sampled were signifi-cantly impacted by raw sewage.

“I really like this new meth-od,” says environmental chemist Thomas Poiger of Agroscope FAW in Wädenswil (Switzerland). How-ever, he cautions that some vali-dation work remains to be done. Poiger worries that the WWTPs in-vestigated by Fono and Sedlak are

not representative of all locations and feels that more information about the human metabolism of propranolol is necessary. “I think that a combination with other po-tential markers such as ibupro-fen or caffeine would make the method even more powerful,” says Poiger.

According to Sed-lak, the main problem with the method is that it can’t yet satisfacto-rily quantify the raw sewage contribution to surface waters because EFs for propranolol vary from one WWTP effluent to another. However, the method has a good potential for routine application, he says, because it is rela-tively straightforward: A gas chromatography–mass spectrometry combination without a chiral column is used, and this eliminates the need for elaborate

column switches. In addition, pro-pranolol is sufficiently stable to be detected at most locations at con-centrations above the detection limit, Sedlak says

“This is really innovative work,” says environmental chem-ist Thomas Ternes of the German Federal Institute of Hydrology in Koblenz. He says he hopes that better quantification will make it possible to calculate contami-nant loads to rivers during rainfall events.

Sedlak thinks that the method has its highest potential in ur-ban watersheds where high CSO contributions or leaky sewers are suspected. “The contaminant con-tribution of raw sewage has to be accounted for if pharmaceutical or hormone concentrations in drink-ing-water intakes are to be predict-ed,” Sedlak says. “Otherwise, these models will very much underesti-mate the actual concentrations,” he stresses. —ANKE SCHAEFER

Distinguishing between sources of sewage contaminationWastewater is an important source of many surface-water contami-nants, including pharmaceuticals and hormones, but it has been dif-ficult to distinguish between pol-lutants from untreated sewage and those from the effluents of waste-water treatment plants (WWTPs). However, a novel method pre-sented in this issue of ES&T (pp 9244–9252) can make this key dis-tinction, which could enable engineers to more effectively reduce drinking-water contam-ination.

Untreated sewage can get into surface waters through com-bined sewer overflows (CSOs) during higher-than-average rainfall and snowmelt events as well as through leaking sewers. These sources of contaminants have been mostly neglected because the contribu-tions from raw sewage are hard to discriminate from those of wastewater effluent, according to the paper’s corresponding au-thor, David Sedlak of the civil and environmental engineering depart-ment of the University of California, Berkeley.

The method, which was devel-oped by graduate student Lorien Fono, relies on the observation that one enantiomer of proprano-lol, a popular pharmaceutical, is preferentially degraded by micro-organisms in WWTPs. The work that is the basis for the paper earned Fono the Graduate Student Research Paper Award from the American Chemical Society’s en-vironmental chemistry division in August.

Storms can cause CSOs to de-liver as many pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupters to surface waters as WWTPs, Sedlak says. This is because raw sewage can contain concentrations of contam-inants that are up to 1000 times

Lorien Fono is taking a surface water sample from the Prado wetland in California to determine whether this part of the Santa Ana River is impacted by raw sewage.

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Congress weakens environmental laws with loopholes in hurricane-recovery legislation

gress—the Congressional Research Service and the Government Ac-countability Office—have issued reports that reject the committee’s arguments.

Although the task force was supposed to wind up its work in September, it has extended its schedule of hearings to probe what Congress can do to cut environ-mental requirements that task-force members say are barriers to energy production. The task force’s report was expected to be released in November.

One of the reasons that New Or-leans flooded as badly as it did was because of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), a Corps proj-ect constructed years before NEPA, charges Darryl Malek-Wiley, the Louisiana environmental justice organizer with the Sierra Club.

“If NEPA had been in effect, MRGO wouldn’t have been con-structed, there would be healthy marshes in St. Bernard Parish, and the impact of flooding could have been reduced,” he says.

The House of Representatives has already approved Rep. Joe Barton’s (R-TX) bill, known as the Gasoline for America’s Security Act (H.R. 3893). Passed on October 7, the bill is a much-needed first step to expand refining capacity, says Richard Karp, a spokesper-son for the oil industry’s American Petroleum Institute. The legisla-tion would extend the compliance deadline for areas with federal ozone air-quality standards and set a strict schedule requiring the government to move quickly on permits for new refineries.

Although the controversial pro-vision to roll back the New Source Review requirements of the CAA was stripped from the bill at the last minute, Barton says the provi-sion will reappear in other legisla-tion later this year. A similar bill is in the Senate. Industry sources said the Senate bill is not expected to be approved. —JANET PELLEY

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have opened up new opportunities for members of Congress who have been pressing for dramatic revi-sions to the nation’s environmen-tal laws. The suite of bills designed to help Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas recover from the effects of the hurricanes contains waivers to two federal programs conser-vatives have been working hard to water down: the National Envi-ronmental Protection Act (NEPA) and the Clean Air Act’s (CAA) New Source Review program. Advocates say the rollbacks are needed to speed construction of new oil and gas facilities and flood-protection projects.

Passed by Congress in 1970, NEPA requires all federal agencies to prepare an environmental im-pact statement (EIS) for proposed projects that will significantly af-fect the environment. The final EIS can require changes to a develop-er’s project, or can prevent a proj-ect from moving forward.

A variety of proposals in Con-gress would waive NEPA entirely or streamline it for hurricane-re-covery projects, but one bill in par-ticular has garnered the spotlight: the Louisiana Katrina Reconstruc-tion Act (S. 1766), introduced on September 22 by Louisiana sena-tors Mary Landrieu (D) and David Vitter (R).

Under this bill, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) would not have to prepare an EIS for any navigation, flood-protection, or coastal-restoration project. The bill would also allow the president to issue, for two years, emergen-cy permits exempting other Gulf Coast projects from NEPA.

Members of the bipartisan House Committee on Resources’ NEPA Task Force say that the law’s requirements are what derailed past flood-protection plans in Lou-isiana and delayed oil exploration projects and refinery permitting. Yet, both research arms of Con-

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PBDEs overtaking PCBsNearly one-third of 40 breast milk samples taken from women who live in the U.S. Pacific Northwest had greater concentrations of PBdes (polybrominated diphenyl ethers) than of PCBs, according to research presented at the dioxin meeting in Toronto in August. Jianwen She of the California department of Toxic Substances Control’s Hazardous Ma-terials Laboratory and his colleagues found that in the 13 milk samples in which PBdes predominated, the lev-els of PBdes were approximately twice those of PCBs, on average. In contrast to marine food webs, where the levels of PCBs and PBdes seem to correlate, no relationship was found between PCB and PBde con-centrations in the human milk sam-ples, She said.

Natural resources can improve villagers’ livesTo reduce worldwide poverty, gov-ernments must look beyond aid proj-ects, debt relief, and trade reform and focus on turning over ownership and management of local natural re-sources to villagers living nearby, according to a report from the UN development Programme, the UN environment Programme, the World Bank, and the World Resources In-stitute (WRI), a U.S. environmental think tank. “This report addresses the stark reality of the poor: Three-fourths of them live in rural areas; their environment is all they can depend on,” WRI writes in World Resources 2005—The Wealth of the Poor: Managing Eco-systems to Fight Pov-erty. The 200-page report includes case studies showing how governments can step in and turn over ownership of resources to local citizens, who sus-tainably manage soils, forests, water, and fisheries.

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We have made huge investments in infrastructure projects. We can do more, and we should do more [infrastructure building], but we are finding that even though we made those investments, we of-ten don’t have the money to use those investments in a way that you can actually distribute them much more equally. And so the in-vestments tend to centralize the growth [in the cities], so it ends up with some people becoming richer and a lot of people becom-ing poorer.

You can provide for the people in that area, but you cannot pick up the pipes and take them across the country.

Since the mid-1980s, CSE has pro-moted the revival of water harvesting as a way to protect drought-prone regions in India. Why does such a traditional technology have relevance today?The reason why rainwater harvest-ing is such a powerful technol-ogy in my mind is because it puts technology into the hands of peo-ple. And it is about decentraliza-tion, and it is about decentralized growth.

Does the Indian government support your work?

I think there was a split in the In-dian government. I think even that is closing up. The political leaders understand what we are talking about. The president of India did rainwater harvesting in his own estate some five years ago.

The problem has been much more to break through the techno-cratic, bureaucratic systems that exist in any country, to be able to drive a new idea, particularly [one] that doesn’t bring in too much money [and] that is going to be much more complicated in its de-livery systems initially. . . . You are talking about creating institutions of people, an idea which weakens the role of bureaucracies. It is not something that any bureaucracy is very keen on. But today, I see a willingness within the bureaucra-cy to admit that this is the only so-lution that can work.

Over the past 50 years, governments and aid organizations have funded huge infrastructure projects, such as dams, storage facilities, and pipe-lines, as a way to bring clean water to people in poor nations. Today, the UN estimates that more than 1.1 bil-lion people still lack access to safe drinking water, and the trend to-ward large infrastructure projects is declining. What is the solution?

The problem with drinking-water systems [is on] two levels. One is, in cities, you need constant invest-ment in the operation and mainte-nance of drinking-water systems. One of the biggest problems of today in Europe in many cities is that your pipes were put in many years ago and you need [huge in-vestments] to refurbish your pipes. Now think about it in a country such as India, which is poor and doesn’t have the money to pay for capital costs. Even when it invests in capital costs, it doesn’t have the money to pay for the operation and maintenance costs.

The other [level] is that when you are looking at villages, your major drinking-water concern is the sustainability of the resources. The big problem is that [when] you build a hand pump, [no one talks] about who will manage the hand pump, how you get local people to participate in the management of the hand pump, how you make sure that your local watershed is protected so that the groundwa-ter is recharged so that the hand pump does not get dry, and how you make sure that you do not con-taminate your groundwater. So, it is these questions of water deliv-ery and water management, which unfortunately planners don’t think about. They think of pipes, they think of pumps, they think of the “hardware” and getting the hard-ware out. They somehow feel that all that will work. But it is not the complete story.

India ranks as the second-largest country in the world in terms of water infrastructure building. Why hasn’t this gotten water out to all of the people?

Sunita Narain has had her run-ins with government and industry managers. As director of the Coun-cil on Science and the Environ-ment (CSE), a nongovernmental organization based in New Delhi, India, Narain travels the country advocating that natural resources, particularly water, must be pro-tected to benefit the poor.

The group’s 2003 lawsuit against soft drink makers culmi-nated in the Indian Parliament ap-proving new rules to protect food supplies (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2003, 37, 387A–388A).

Narain was awarded the 2005 Stockholm Water Prize for CSE’s work promoting decentralized wa-ter management through rainwa-ter harvesting. CSE encourages the capture and storage of rainwater in tanks, in ponds, and on rooftops for replenishing groundwater re-serves for irrigation and drinking water.

In an interview with ES&T, Narain discusses why aid projects, both large and small, aren’t be-ing properly maintained in poorer countries; why the solutions of the developed world don’t work in countries such as India; and the number-one water problem in the world, human excreta.

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Sunita Narain, director of the Council on Science and the Environment.

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CSE has studied the effects of un-treated sewage and sludge releases into rivers and lakes. The UN esti-mates that at least 2.6 billion people, including more than 700 million in India, don’t have access to clean or private latrines. What is the link between providing access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities in developing countries?

When we looked at water systems some 20 years ago, the source pol-lution from industry was a key concern.

But the water pollution prob-lem which I think needs to be rec-ognized is one of human excreta: sewage. And again, you are essen-tially talking about cities in the poor world that do not have sewer-age systems [or have] partial sew-erage systems. Both the collection of waste as well as the treatment of the waste is extremely expensive. If you cannot [treat it], you end up polluting your water bodies. And

it is this, at the end of the day, that [is] the biggest crisis.

The eight UN Millennium Devel-opment Goals (MDGs), the world’s blueprint for reducing poverty by 2015, include a pledge to reduce by half the percentage of people without access to safe drinking water. Yet water is listed as a one-line bullet in the proposed MDGs implementation document drafted for discussion at the 60th UN Summit in New York this past September. Why is water a low priority in international discussions?

I think it is not on the northern countries’ agenda. Therefore, in-ternationally, the only agenda that seems to matter is when northern countries want to have it on the agenda. If water becomes part of the international agenda, it only becomes part of it in two respects: One, there is often talk about hav-ing a water convention which

would sort of centralize water de-cisions [to create] more oversight of water from the international community. Or it [is an issue] when water companies are look-ing for markets, and there is some interest to see how those markets can be opened up for water indus-tries of the north. But I do not see much more than that.

What message would you like to give the northern countries?

I think the only message in this case is [this]: Yes, you have from all evidence been able to manage your water systems. But your answers are not particularly our answers. My message is, therefore: Please do not preach. Please do not push these as the solutions that will work in our part of the world. And do this with humility. We all need a lot more humility in advocating solutions and approaches. —CATHERINE M. COONEY

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