Coal plant emissions killed up to 1,15,000 people in 2011-12:

India

Coal plant emissions killed up to 1,15,000 people in 2011-12

IANS | Posted on Apr 30, 2013 at 05:35am IST

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New Delhi: Emissions from coal plants resulted in 80,000 to 1,15,000 premature deaths and more than 20 million asthma cases in 2011-12 in the country, the Lok Sabha was informed on Monday. According to a report titled 'Coal Kills - An assessment of death and disease caused by India's dirtiest energy source', the coal-based plants quantified additional health impacts, such as hundreds of thousands of heart attacks.

The estimated monetary cost associated with these health impacts exceeded Rs.16,000 to Rs.23,000 crore per year, the report said. The Central Pollution Control Board has said that steps have been taken to curb the pollution emission from such coal-based power plants.

Emphasis is placed on cleaner technology while granting environmental clearance to new coal-based thermal power plants, Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Abu Hasem Khan Choudhury said in a written reply.

The estimated monetary cost associated with these health impacts exceeded Rs.16,000 to Rs.23,000 crore per year, the report said.

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Robert Redford: Another Looming Cliff of Grave Consequence

Robert Redford: Another Looming Cliff of Grave Consequence:

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Robert Redford

Actor, director and environmental activist

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Another Looming Cliff of Grave Consequence

Posted: 01/04/2013 7:52 am

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Climate Change , Keystone Pipeline , TransCanada , TransCanada , Robert Redford ,Keystone , Keystone Xl Environmental Review , Obama Keystone Xl , TransCanada ,Transcanada Pipeline , Green News

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The wake up call that Hurricane Sandy gave us was but one of many just in the last year. We can see that climate change is happening all around the country after the wildfires, droughts, floods and violent storms of 2012. So when President Obama said it was time to deal with global warming in his victory speech, that made perfect sense.

Why then would one of the first decisions after the election be to ignore the climate impacts of one of the dirtiest energy projects out there? That doesn't make any sense.

The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is winding its way through a State Department environmental review process. The State Department messed up last time around. They didn't include climate and a lot of other concerns that people along the pipeline path have. After the President rejected this pipeline earlier this year and TransCanada reapplied for a presidential permit for the northern section, the State Department got another chance to get it right.

It begs the question then, why does it look like they are going to get it wrong?

The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is a disaster in the making. It will cause expansion of the expensive and dirty tar sands oil excavation up in Canada's Boreal forest. It threatens our own farms, and waters throughout our heartland. And it is going to make climate change worse as more tarry gunk is dug up, turned into gasoline and diesel and burned in cars and trucks.

All of this is for a pipeline that is meant to export tar sand oil overseas from America's Gulf Coast. Our heartland, aquifers and climate are meant to sustain us. Instead the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline means that we take all the risks - from pipeline leaks and blows to the aftermath of toxic pools of wastewater -- and Big Oil reaps all the benefits. Canadians know better - they haven't let new tar sands pipeline be built yet to either of their own coasts. In fact, the proposed Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline to the west coast is considered dead by many.

It only makes sense to get the environmental review right. And that means taking a hard look at the climate impacts.

This is a time for climate leadership. So, instead of a shoddy Keystone XL environmental review, the first major climate action for this Administration's second term should be to set limits on climate change pollution from power plants. That is the kind of action that makes sense.

And then it will make sense to reject this dirty energy project. With extreme weather taking its toll on communities all over America, we can't afford another major dirty energy project such as the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

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Coca-Cola Plans to Invest $5 Billion in India - WSJ.com

Coca-Cola Plans to Invest $5 Billion in India - WSJ.com:

By NIKHIL GULATI And RUMMAN AHMED

Coca-Cola announced plans to invest $5 billion in India by 2020 to boost consumption and increase its presence in one of the fastest emerging markets. The WSJ's Isabella Steger speaks with reporter Alex Frangos about why foreign investors are still betting on India.

NEW DELHI—Coca-Cola Co.'s KO +0.30% chief executive Muhtar Kent said the company and its bottling partners will invest $5 billion in India by 2020 as it looks to raise its presence in one of its fastest-growing emerging markets.

"We think there's potential here," Mr. Kent said Tuesday during a visit to India, adding that the company wants "to stay ahead of the curve" in the country.

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Bloomberg News

Coke will spend $5 billion in India. Above, a roadside cart in New Delhi.

India, a country of 1.2 billion people, remains one of the last big frontiers for the Atlanta-based beverage giant. As Mr. Kent pointed out, Indians on average consume only 12 eight-ounce bottles of Coke a year compared with 240 in Brazil and 90 bottles globally.

The investment outlay of $5 billion marks an increase on plans announced late last year to invest $2 billion in India over the next five years. Coca-Cola has put $2 billion into its Indian operations in the past two decades.

The company plans to spend the money increasing capacity at its Indian bottling unit and at its 13 bottling franchisees, expanding distribution and brand building.

Earlier

• Coke Ready to Share Cash, Not Blame6/18/2012

Mr. Kent's bullishness comes despite the company's tumultuous history in India. In the late 1970s, Coca-Cola left the country after refusing to partner with an Indian company and hand over its secret ingredients. It returned in 1993 after India liberalized its economy.

It has faced other challenges since then. In 2006, the company took out ads in Indian newspapers to counter unfounded claims by local non-government groups that its products contained illegal levels of pesticides.

For India, Coca-Cola's optimism on the country is a rare bit of good news at a time when foreign businesses have soured on the country for policy flip-flops, including plans to retroactively tax deals involving overseas investors.

Other consumer goods companies also are planning to expand in India. Last week, Swedish furniture company IKEA Group said it would invest nearly $1.9 billion in the country to set up 25 stores in coming years. Later this year, Seattle-based coffee-chain operator Starbucks Corp. SBUX -1.25% is expected to open its first store in India.

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The planned investments show how big consumer goods and lifestyle companies can't afford to ignore India's growing middle class, estimated at about 20% of the population, despite the difficulties of doing business here.

Although economic growth slowed to 5.3% in the first three months of 2012, in part due to weak investment, that's better than almost flat rates in most of Europe and the U.S.

Coca-Cola for years trailed rival PepsiCo Inc. PEP -0.22% in the Indian market. PepsiCo began selling its cola in India a few years before Coca-Cola returned in 1993, giving it an edge. Homegrown Indian colas like Parle Agro Pvt. Ltd.'s Thums Up also became popular.

On its return, Coca-Cola bought Parle's four leading soft drinks brands—Thums Up, Limca, Gold Spot and Maaza—giving the company an instant 60% share of the Indian soft drinks market. At the time, PepsiCo had less than 30%.

The Parle acquisition also handed Coca-Cola a nationwide bottling and marketing system on which to piggyback its own brands.

Now, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo together dominate the market for carbonated soft drinks in India, where soda sales overall are estimated to total 60 billion rupees ($1.05 billion). Coke accounted for 60% of retail value sales of carbonated soft drinks in India in 2011 versus PepsiCo's 37%, according to data from Euromonitor International.

Coca-Cola's dominance comes from Thums Up and Sprite, another of its brands, which both had a 16.5% market share in 2011, making them the nation's most-popular carbonated drinks.

But in the battle of colas, Pepsi had a 15% market share compared to Coke's 8.8%, according to Euromonitor.

PepsiCo, too, has been investing in its Indian operation. PepsiCo's chief executive, Indra Nooyi, was born in India.

India has been one of Coca-Cola's fastest-growing emerging markets. Sales in the January-March period jumped 20% compared with a 9% increase in China and 4% in Brazil.

The investments by Coca-Cola in India are part of a plan to spend $30 billion to build capacity and on marketing in emerging economies to fulfill its aim of doubling revenue and volume by 2020.

Write to Nikhil Gulati at nikhil.gulati@dowjones.com and Rumman Ahmed atrumman.ahmed@dowjones.com

A version of this article appeared June 27, 2012, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: India Has 1.2 Billion People But Not Enough Drink Coke.

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Pharmageddon: The Drug Industry's Grip on Our Health and Lives:

David Healy works to raise awareness of how pharmaceutical companies have turned into marketing organizations. (photo: ShockMD.com)

Pharmageddon: The Drug Industry's Grip on Our Health and Lives

By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet

24 June 12

An interview with David Healy, an expert witness in homicide, suicide and birth defect legal actions involving psychotropic drugs.

avid Healy is a Professor of Psychiatry at Bangor University. He is a former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, and author of over 175 peer reviewed articles, 200 other pieces and 20 books, including The Antidepressant Era, and The Creation of Psychopharmacology from Harvard University Press,The Psychopharmacologists Volumes 1-3, Let Them Eat Prozac, Mania, & Pharmageddon. He has been involved as an expert witness in homicide, suicide and birth defect legal actions involving psychotropic drugs, and in bringing problems with these drugs to the attention of American and British regulators, as well raising awareness of how pharmaceutical companies sell drugs by marketing diseases and co-opting academic opinion-leaders, ghostwriting their articles.

Rosenberg: Your new book, Pharmageddon, gives a bleak picture of the doctored data, skewed drug trials and rigged treatment guidelines that characterize today's pharmaceutical industry. Many people will be shocked to learn the abuses are not limited to the US, where direct-to-consumer advertising is legal, but found in Europe.

Healy: The situation is identical. Pharma actually finds socialized health care systems easier to exploit. And despite direct-to-consumer advertising, more money is spent on marketing to doctors who are the real consumers. They are also pressured by the treatment guidelines process which is based on "evidence" that Pharma makes sure to keep secret so they are really in the dark, though they may not realize it.

Rosenberg: One example you give of Pharma's reach and power is the eerie symmetry between the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), conceptualized and funded by US Pharma, and Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

Healy: Despite their public/private differences, both organizations recommend the use of branded antipsychotics like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel before the use of older, affordable antipsychotics which of course enriches Pharma. One of the otherissues is this-there is a new bill aimed at speeding up the FDA approval process yet again-and also getting regulators to take into account the jobs that come with a strong pharmaceutical sector. Both America and Europe have been keen to keep their companies happy and have turned a blind eye to the outsourcing of clinical trials to Asia and Eastern Europe.

Rosenberg: In Pharmageddon, you chronicle how clinical trial oversight has gone from a hospital and university-based system to a for-profit system run by clinical research organizations or CROs.

Healy: The drug companies have outsourced all their operations from drug development and testing to clinical trials to scientific and academic writing so that they have become nothing but marketing organizations at their core. At each juncture where they have spun off a traditional responsibility, no one has objected and so it continues.

Rosenberg: There have been reports of risks to human subjects in overseas trials as well as bribes and protocol irregularities. Who oversees the ethics of outsourced trials and the quality of their data?

Healy: Clinical trials are overseen by private Institutional Review Boards, which are funded by the organizations they regulate-

Rosenberg: Like Moody's and Standard & Poor's are funded by their clients?

Healy: Yes. A recent large trial for the antipsychotic Abilify demonstrates the danger with outsourced clinical trials. On the basis of about 28 trials in the US, Abilify did not prophylactically stabilize mood as the manufacturer wants to claim. But when data from just two trials from Mexico were mixed in, it did.

Rosenberg: Most of Pharma's power to mislead and harm comes from such opaque and distorted data, you charge in Pharmageddon.

Healy: Without access to the raw drug data, medical professionals cannot practice responsible medicine and guidelines cannot be written. Yet Pharma, with very few exceptions, refuses to publish the data and share them with practitioners. This result is guidelines that are fictions and doctors who lack critical information they need to prescribe and treat.

Rosenberg: Pharma's stonewalling of data and use of ghostwriters has resulted in articles in major medical journals that made Vioxx, hormone therapy and Neurontin look safe when they weren't. Another example you give is a paper in the Journal of the American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in which GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has made the antidepressant Paxil look safe by hiding raw data. Then editor, Mina Dulcan, says about the missing data, which hid Paxil's suicidal side effect in children, "I can't control the authors. No, I don't have regrets."

Healy: If we were getting our drug information from the New York Times instead of medical journals, we would all be a lot safer. When theTimes reporter Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated stories, he was history. But the editors and writers involved with journal fraud still have their jobs and the articles are not even retracted. In fact, Liz Wager, the chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is herself Pharma linked.

[Ed note. The COPE site says, "Liz provides writing, editing, training and consultancy services for various pharmaceutical companies (most recently Astra Zeneca, Cephalon, Cordis, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Janssen-Cilag, Merck Serono, Mundipharma, Norgine, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi Pasteur and Vifor). ]

Rosenberg: Many conflicts of interest in your book, including COPE's leadership, are structural and create a closed loop of misinformation, especially because of the money that Pharma wields. How can sunlight and transparency ever break through?

Healy: Some colleagues and I are in the process of fine-tuning a free web site that offers FDA MedWatch data with other crucial dug information but gets people affected by treatment to report in detail for perhaps the first time. The site, called RxISK.org, also helps patients file an adverse event report to US and Canadian authorities, with other countries to follow. For too long, patients, doctors and pharmacists have been isolated from each other when they encounter adverse drug events and only Pharma's messages get out. This will help them communicate directly.

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Fukushima: The US Must Step In

Fukushima: The US Must Step In:

What Is the United States Government Waiting for?

June 11, 2012

Prime Minister Noda and President Obama

By Akio Matsumura

Read in Japanese and German.

We continue to post the opinions of many international scientists on the potential global catastrophe that would result from the collapse of Reactor 4 at Fukushima Dai-ichi. The message now is simple and clear—Japan’s government will not act; it is the United States who must step forward—yet no action has been taken.

I was amazed when I heard that one million Japanese had read our article that introduces Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata’s courageous appeal at the public hearing of the House of Councilors of Japan and Robert Alvarez’s famous figure that there is 85 times greater Cesium-137 at Fukushima than at Chernobyl accident. People from 176 nations have visited our blog and Ambassador Murata and Robert Alvarez have been quoted in online and print media in many of them. Despite this global attention, the Japanese government seems to be further from taking action to deal with the growing dangers of Fukushima Dai-ichi. In April I flew to Japan to meet with government and opposition party leaders to convey how dangerous the situation is. Ambassador Murata and I met with Mr. Fujimura, Chief Cabinet Secretary, who assured us he would convey our message to Prime Minister Noda before his departure for Washington to meet with President Obama on April 30. It was to our great disappointment that the idea of an independent assessment team and international technical support for the disaster were not mentioned publicly. I was also astonished to hear that many Japanese political leaders were not aware of the potential global catastrophe because they were not told anything about it by TEPCO. I find it difficult to understand their mindset. Why would the Japanese political leaders think it appropriate to depend on one source (with an obvious and inherent conflict of interest) to judge what issues have resulted from the Fukushima accident and who is most appropriate to handle it? As a result of this myopia, Japan’s leadership lacks a clear picture of the situation and has little idea where it is steering its country and people.

Let me clarify briefly why Fukushima Dai-ichi remains an enormous danger for which no scientists can recommend a solution at the moment.

Any one of the following accidents could seriously endanger the entire Fukushima Dai-ichi area.

1.      In reactors 1, 2 and 3, complete core meltdowns have occurred.  Japanese authorities have admitted the possibility that the fuel may have melted through the bottom of the reactor core vessels. It is speculated that this might lead to unintended criticality (resumption of the chain reaction) or a powerful steam explosion – either event could lead to major new releases of radioactivity into the environment.

2.      Reactors 1 and 3 are sites of particularly intense penetrating radiation, making those areas unapproachable.  As a result, reinforcement repairs have not yet been done since the Fukushima accident.  The ability of these structures to withstand a strong aftershock earthquake is uncertain.

3.      The temporary cooling pipes installed in each of the crippled reactors pass through rubble and debris.

They are unprotected and highly vulnerable to damage. This could lead to a failure of some cooling systems, causing overheating of the fuel, further fuel damage with radioactive releases, additional hydrogen gas explosions, possibly even a zirconium fire and fuel melting within the spent fuel pools.

4.      Reactor No. 4 building and its frame are serious damaged. The spent fuel pool in Unit 4, with a total weight of 1,670 tons, is suspended 100 feet (30 meters) above ground, beside a wall which is bulging outward.

If this pool collapses or drains, the resulting blast of penetrating radiation will shut down the entire area. At the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station, the spent fuel pools alone contain an amount of cesium-137 that is 85 times greater than at Chernobyl.

Any of these occurrences could have major consequences for the entire Fukushima Dai-ichi area.

Due to the pressure by the public and media, the government of Japan sent Mr. Goshi Hosono, Minister of the Environment and Nuclear Power Policy, to Reactor 4 on May 26. He spent half an hour on a temporary staircase at the site. Surprisingly, he said the structure supporting the pool appeared sound. (So our constant request for an Independent Assessment team was accomplished within 30 minutes, just like that. Thanks, Japan.) Minister Hosono also said at the press meeting that Reactor 4 could stand a Magnitude-6 earthquake. I don’t understand why he said this. We are warning that Japanese geologists predict that a 90% probability M-7 earthquake will be hitting Japan within three years.

Is he preparing his excuse that a M-7 earthquake was beyond his assumption?

Does the government of Japan think that the public is stupid enough to believe in such a performance? If they are so brazen, it’s probably because they know the Japanese media will cover what they wish to be covered. If we were talking about business as usual, I could ignore this as political theater, but we are talking about a global catastrophe that mankind has never experienced. “Frustration” and “disappointment” take on new meaning with each passing day.

I decided to visit Washington, D.C., to meet with a retired Army Lieutenant General, an old friend who I first met at the United Nations, to explain how Fukushima should be considered an urgent international security priority, and how it requires immediate U.S. action.

He agreed. He saw very clearly why Fukushima needs action now and he was puzzled why all possible actors have been so slow to move. One year and two months have now passed and it is a mystery what the United States government is waiting for. Investigating Reactor 4 should be a prioritized national security issue. We think we have been lucky for 14 months but it was a litmus test to see if opinion leaders from all walks of life would stand up to face the challenge. They haven’t thus far. And I don’t think we can count on luck for 14 more months.

I also met with Bob Alvarez in Washington and we talked for several hours. I thanked him for his calculation of Cs-137 at Fukushima Daiichi site; the simple figure has helped draw the public’s attention to the issue. Mr. Alvarez said that the figure of a ten times Cs-137 at Reactor 4 compared to Chernobyl is low, but is useful to avoid scientific arguments; a higher figure might be 50 times, which means that 85 times greater than Chernobyl might be an underestimate as well.

But it doesn’t matter, Alvarez said, whether the magnitude is 10 or 20 times greater at Reactor 4. The Cesium-137 in Reactor 4 would cause all of Japan’s land  to become an evacuation zone, the strong radiation would affect East Asia and North America, and the radioactive material fall out would remain there for several hundred years.  He asked me if Japanese leaders understand this. My answer is, yes, they understand it in theory but not in a practical sense. Prime Minister Noda, the sixth premier in the past five years, does not have the political power to make a decision to request the Independent Assessment team and the international technical support teams outside of TEPCO.

I told him that I came to Washington to explain that Japan will not take the first step; its leadership does not have the power to act first and survive politically, and does not have the courage to take the first step without thinking of the second.

Our guest speaker at the Moscow Global Forum in 1990, Dr. Robert Socolow, a professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University wrote his essay to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists dated March 21, 2011.

We must explain, over and over, the concept of ‘afterheat,’ the fire that you can’t put out, the generation of heat from fission fragments now and weeks from now and months from now, heat that must be removed. Journalists are having such a hard time communicating this concept because it is so unfamiliar to them and nearly everyone they are writing for. Every layman feels that every fire can be put out.

It is so difficult, as Dr. Socolow says, to convince political leaders to take action in the face of an unknown – in this case an unprecedented catastrophe that they cannot conceive of in terms of an election cycle.

In the same way, I must explain to foreign leaders over and over again that Japan’s Prime Minister is a consensus builder, not a risk taker. He won’t face up to this challenge.

The United States government is the only other logical actor, and I find it very difficult to understand why they remain silent.

If this global catastrophe occurs, what will the world history books say?

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