Coal Costs US Public Up to $500 Billion Annually: Harvard Study

From TreeHugger:

It's well-known that the coal-fired power plants that provide the US with 50% of its electricity also inflict significant damage on the environment and citizens' health. Coal plants spew particulate emissions that cause asthma and other respiratory woes -- and they're responsible for tens of thousands of deaths every year. And then there's the environmental damage inflicted during the process of extracting, transporting, and processing the stuff. And then, there's coal's contribution to climate change. All told, it costs the nation up to $500 billion a year. That's the finding of a new Harvard study that, for the first time, examines the true cost of coal throughout its entire life cycle ...
Clearly, the fact that coal contributes more global warming pollution than any other source in the nation is far from its only problem. But vested industry interests and its political allies have long claimed that coal is the cheapest energy source around -- and if you look only at commodity prices on market exchanges, indeed, coal (sometimes) looks pretty cheap. Yet we know that's only a small fraction of the true cost of coal.
Harvard professor Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment, has just released a paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences entitled "Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal." Epstein symbolically announced the release of the study today aboard the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise, which is in the midst of its Coal Free Future Tour. I was on board as well to report on the event.
The study is the first to look at the major costs of coal from extraction to combustion. It finds that coal costs $74 billion a year in public health burdens in Appalachian communities alone. Those costs come from increased health care costs, deaths and injuries that result from mining and transporting coal, and the emissions generated during the coal's combustion.
The emissions of pollutants elsewhere were deemed to cost up to $187.5 billion a year, again due to the health costs of cancer, lung disease, and respiratory sickness. Mercury impacts account for another $29.3 billion. Epstein and his team also looked at the cost of coal's spectacular carbon emissions, in the form of various climate impacts, and the way it's already effecting land use, energy consumption, and food prices across the nation. These costs are estimated at a conservative $205 billion.
Meanwhile, the costs of the spillage of toxic waste and its cleanup, the impact of coal on crops, property values, and tourism account for billions more -- up to $18 billion a year. Add it all up, and you find that coal costs the nation up to half a trillion dollars a year.
"And this is an underestimate," Epstein said.
In the conclusion of his speech, Epstein suggested some solutions. "What can we do? We need to phase out coal rapidly. We need to move rapidly with healthy solutions." Which means, he says, smart growth in cities, more green buildings, clean energy, rooftop gardens, public transport, and communities connected with light rail. "It means more jobs, cleaner air, and healthier cities," Epstein said.

The Secrets Behind Your Flowers

From Smithsonian:

In 1967 david cheever, a graduate student in horticulture at Colorado State University, wrote a term paper titled “Bogotá, Colombia as a Cut-Flower Exporter for World Markets.” The paper suggested that the savanna near Colombia’s capital was an ideal place to grow flowers to sell in the United States. The savanna is a high plain fanning out from the Andean foothills, about 8,700 feet above sea level and 320 miles north of the Equator, and close to both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Those circumstances, Cheever wrote, create a pleasant climate with little temperature variation and consistent light, about 12 hours per day year-round—ideal for a crop that must always be available. A former lakebed, the savanna also has dense, clay-rich soil and networks of wetlands, tributaries and waterfalls left after the lake receded 100,000 years ago. And, Cheever noted, Bogotá was just a three-hour flight from Miami—closer to East Coast customers than California, the center of the U.S. flower industry.
After graduating, Cheever put his theories into practice. He and three partners invested $25,000 apiece to start a business in Colombia called Floramérica, which applied assembly-line practices and modern shipping techniques at greenhouses close to Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport. The company started with carnations. “We did our first planting in October of 1969, for Mother’s Day 1970, and we hit it right on the money,” says Cheever, 72, who is retired and lives in Medellín, Colombia, and New Hampshire.
It’s not often that a global industry springs from a school assignment, but Cheever’s paper and business efforts started an economic revolution in Colombia. A few other growers had exported flowers to the United States, but Floramérica turned it into a big business. Within five years of Floramérica’s debut at least ten more flower-growing companies were operating on the savanna, exporting some $16 million in cut flowers to the United States. By 1991, the World Bank reported, the industry was “a textbook story of how a market economy works.” Today, the country is the world’s second-largest exporter of cut flowers, after the Netherlands, shipping more than $1 billion in blooms. Colombia now commands about 70 percent of the U.S. market; if you buy a bouquet in a supermarket, big-box store or airport kiosk, it probably came from the Bogotá savanna.
This growth took place in a country ravaged by political violence for most of the 20th century and by the cocaine trade since the 1980s, and it came with significant help from the United States. To limit coca farming and expand job opportunities in Colombia, the U.S. government in 1991 suspended import duties on Colombian flowers. The results were dramatic, though disastrous for U.S. growers. In 1971, the United States produced 1.2 billion blooms of the major flowers (roses, carnations and chrysanthemums) and imported only 100 million. By 2003, the trade balance had reversed; the United States imported two billion major blooms and grew only 200 million.
In the 40 years since Cheever had his brainstorm, Colombian flowers have become another global industrial product, like food or electronics. That became apparent to me a few years ago as I stood in front of the flower display at my local supermarket before Mother’s Day (the second-biggest fresh flower-buying occasion in the United States, after Valentine’s Day). My market, in suburban Maryland, had an impressive display of hundreds of preassembled bouquets, as well as fresh, unbunched roses, gerbera daisies and alstroemeria lilies in five-gallon buckets. One $14.99 bouquet caught my eye: about 25 yellow and white gerbera daisies and a sprig of baby’s breath arranged around a single purplish rose. A sticker on the wrapping indicated it had come from Colombia, some 2,400 miles away.
How could something so delicate and perishable (and once so exotic) have come so far and still be such a bargain? It’s no secret that the inexpensive imported products Americans buy often exact a toll on the people who make them and on the environments where they are made. What was I buying into with my Mother’s Day bouquet? My search for answers took me to a barrio about 25 miles northwest of Bogotá.
In cartagenita, the buses rumble over ruts and potholes, moving slowly up and down steep hillsides lined with cinder block houses. “Turismo” is painted in flowing aquamarine script on the buses, but they are no longer used for tours. They carry workers to the flower farms.
Cartagenita is a neighborhood in Facatativá, a city of about 120,000 people and one of Colombia’s largest flower hubs. Only a few of Cartagenita’s streets are paved, and the homes are connected like town houses but without any plan, so one sometimes stands taller or shorter than the next. The barrio ends abruptly after a few blocks at open pasture. Aidé Silva, a flower worker and union leader, moved there 20 years ago. “I’ve got a house here. My husband built it,” she told me. “He worked at Floramérica, and in the afternoons and when Sunday came everybody worked building that little house.” In the years since, she said, thousands more flower workers have bought cheap land and done the same. Cartagenita has the vitality of a working-class neighborhood. There’s a buzz in the evenings as workers come home, some heading for their houses and apartments, some to hang out in the bars and open-air convenience stores.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/The-Secrets-Behind-Your-Flowers.html#ixzz1DyflTdfX

Stuxnet Hit 5 Gateway Targets on Its Way to Iranian Plant

From Wired:

Attackers behind the Stuxnet computer worm focused on targeting five organizations in Iran that they believed would get them to their final target in that country, according to a new report from security researchers.
The five organizations, believed to be the first that were infected with the worm, were targeted in five separate attacks over a number of months in 2009 and 2010, before Stuxnet was discovered in June 2010 and publicly exposed. Stuxnet spread from these organizations into other organizations on its way to its final target, which is believed to have been a nuclear enrichment facility or facilities in Iran.
“These five organizations were infected, and from those five computers Stuxnet spread out — not to just computers in those organizations, but to other computes as well,” says Liam O Murchu, manager of operations for Symantec Security Response. “It all started with those five original domains.”
The new information comes in an updated report from researchers at Symantec (.pdf), a computer security firm that has provided some of the leading analysis of the worm since it was discovered.
According to the report, Stuxnet’s first attack against the five organizations occurred in June 2009, followed by a second attack in July 2009. Eight months passed before subsequent attacks were launched in March, April and May 2010. The last attack was just one month before the code was discovered in June 2010 by VirusBlokAda, a security firm in Belarus, which said it had found the malware on computers of unspecified clients in Iran.
Symantec didn’t identify the names of the five organizations that were targeted; the company said only that all five “have a presence in Iran” and are involved in industrial processes. One of the organizations (what Symantec refers to as Domain B) was targeted with the worm in three of the five attacks. Of the remaining organizations, three of them were hit once, and the last organization was targeted twice.
Symantec has so far been able to count a constellation of 12,000 infections in the five organizations and outside organizations to which the malware spread. The most successful attack occurred in March 2010 when 69 percent of these infections occurred. The March attack targeted only Domain B, then spread.

Domain A was targeted twice (Jun 2009 and Apr 2010). The same computer appears to have been infected each time.
Domain B was targeted three times (Jun 2009, Mar 2010, and May 2010).
Domain C was targeted once (Jul 2009).
Domain D was targeted once (Jul 2009).
Domain E appears to have been targeted once (May 2010), but had three initial infections. (I.e., the same initially infected USB key was inserted into three different computers.)

O Murchu acknowledges that there could have been earlier attacks that occurred before June 2009, but no one has found evidence of this yet.
Symantec found that the shortest time between when the malware was compiled in one case — that is turned from source code into a working piece of software — and the subsequent attack using the code occurred, was just 12 hours. This occurred in the June 2009 attack.
“This tells us that the attackers more than likely knew who they wanted to infect before they completed the code,” O Murchu says. “They knew in advance who they wanted to target and how they were going to get it there.”
Stuxnet was not designed to spread via the internet but via an infected USB stick or some other targeted method within a local network. So the short timeframe between compilation and the launch of the June 2009 attack also suggests that the attackers had immediate access to the computer they attacked — either working with an insider or using an unwitting insider to introduce the infection.

“It could be they sent it to someone who put it on a USB key, or it could have been delivered via spear-phishing,” O Murchu says. “What we do see is that the exploits in Stuxnet are all land-based, so it is not going to spread wildly on the internet. From that, we can assume the attackers wanted to deliver Stuxnet to an organization that was very close to whatever the final destination for Stuxnet was.”
Symantec, working with other security firms, has so far been able to collect and examine 3,280 unique samples of the code. Stuxnet has infected more than 100,000 computers in Iran, Europe and the United States, but it’s designed to only deliver its malicious payload when it finds itself on the final system or systems it’s targeting.
On systems that are not targeted, the worm just sits and finds ways to spread to other computers in search of its target. To date, three variants of Stuxnet have been found (dating to June 2009, March 2010 and April 2010). Symantec believes a fourth variant likely exists, but researchers have not found it yet.
One of the organizations, Domain B, was targeted each time the attackers released a new version of Stuxnet.
“So it looks like they felt that if they got in there, Stuxnet would spread to the [system] they actually wanted to attack,” O Murchu says.
After the worm was discovered in June 2010, Symantec researchers worked on reverse-engineering the code to determine what it was designed to do. Two months later, the company stunned the security community when it revealed that Stuxnet was designed to attack Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), something that until then was considered a theoretical attack but had never been proven done. PLCs are components that work with SCADA systems (supervisory control and data acquisition systems) that control critical infrastructure systems and manufacturing facilities.
Shortly after Symantec released this information last August, German researcher Ralph Langner disclosed that Stuxnet was not attacking just any PLC, it was targeted to sabotage a specific facility or facilities. Speculation focused on Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz as the likely target. Iran has acknowledged that malicious software struck computers at Natanz and affected centrifuges at the plant, but has not provided any details beyond this.