“How air pollution affects the human body” presentation at VUJC Tuesday

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1. My quick observation. We know this will presented from her point of view with only the data the HDC group wants you to know. Will the college also present a forum to other a different point of view? I am all for transparency and the truth coming out but it is known the HDC group has argued by presenting part of the facts and not telling the research that does not agree with their political point of view. Facts show the plant would be cleaner as a nat gas/grass plant than coal.
   Being science, you have to be careful of where the money comes from. Climate change science is so rotten because of the $1 trillion dollars global pumped into it. They say the earth gets warmer when data shows it has cooled over the last 13 years. That being said it has been known that Lucas Oil has sided with HDC and why is that? What could Lucas Oil want or benefit from this cleaner plant shutting down production from a coal plant?
   We know the city really wanted to turn the plant back on to boost tax revenue. They went down an approved EPA path with one of the green power plant paths. In the end, the power plant is about maximizing a city resource and in tax revenue the city would use to offset the tax increases they WILL have to do in the future since the private economy growth has been stalled since 2002 and the government can’t grow anymore to offset it. The plant switching to nat gas/grass is only effective because states (not Indiana thankfully) have passed laws where they must buy a % of power as ‘green’ power on the green power exchanges (government loves exchanges). This power is 5-6 times more expensive than coal/nuclear power. You remove the grass and go 100% nat gas, you are no longer ‘green’ and can’t be sold on the exchanges. Nat gas competes against coal/nuclear and is more expensive than both. That is why the grass is part of the equation.
   I will offer, if the people truly wanted air in Dubois County and Jasper cleaner there are two more effective actions we could take.
   1. Protest the Petersburgs coal plant. That direct effect on Dubois County and is the dirtiest plant in the area.
   2. Push for Interstate I-67 that would get truck traffic out of the city of Jasper. Truck traffic that must drive slow, shift constantly and inefficently burn the diesel fuel.
   Will the exhaust from the nat gas/grass plant be worse than clean air? Yes. So is auto exhaust, truck exhaust, campfire smoke, furance fumes, manufacturing plant exhaust… but somehow they aren’t targeted.
   Globally, the biggest single producer of smoke/fumes that reduce air quality is China. They burn more coal than the rest of the world combined. I doubt they care about their people’s health being a Communist/Fascist country that are. Our air quality is directly effected by what they do, though the west coast suffer a larger % of the exhaust than we do as the mountains stop a large % of it that would head to us.
   As you see, there are a lot of things to think about when discussing power plants. Heck, if we truly wanted clean air we all should be advocating for the modern and wholely redesigned nuclear plants that are small and 100s of times safers than the plants we remember from the 60s and 70s.

   1. So to make this short without government subsidies which I think you oppose the conversion of the power plant is not economically feasible? It is my impression that you do not support such things?

   2. From Dr. Norma Kreilein,

      Why do you call the Petersburg plant dirty when IDEM insists it meets standards? You cannot protest what is coming out of the IPL plant in Petersburg without protesting the agency that fails to protect citizens. . . .and one intermittent particulate monitor in Jasper is a joke. To monitor and analyze this area more effectively would also disclose the rest of the **** that is being produced around Jasper as well. So quit the hypocrisy of blaming Petersburg when you support Catasein who on hiwebsite currently insists his plant will produce “only 1/1000 of 1%” of the 6.5 lb of dioxin produced in Dubois County per year. “The other side of the story” as you so conveniently want to know, is that “small amount” is still 29,500 micrograms. The recommended EPA dioxin limit is .7 picograms/kilogram/day which is almost double the World Health Organization’s 1-4 picogram/kg/day limit. A picogram is a millionth of a millionth of a gram, so the yearly limit is .0244 MICROgrams per person per year. If Jay is correct, Dubois County (not Petersburg or anyone else we can blame) currently produces 2,951,000,000 micrograms of dioxin, or enough for the acceptable limit for 120,942,622,950 people, so we should be glad that the Jasper Clean Energy Plant will only add to the environment enough for the yearly limit of 1,347,488 more people. This is the man, proposal, and poisoning policy that you support and that Jasper government has sunk $700K into defending.

      What is the other side of that story? Does it involve money? Greed? A little decimal confusion? If there is another side of the story, why hasn’t Jasper government presented it? They put $3000 dollars into an ad 2 1/2 years ago, and even Shaddix called their articles “irrelevant.” Can they present figures that will withstand university scrutiny? Would your statements pass anything besides a comment column because my reasoning passed pediatric boards, and my inflammatory presentation passed at a Congressional briefing. By the way, that’s where the facts have to be correct.

      By all means, protest the Petersburg power plant. I do. But you will find yourself questioning IDEM’s pathetic enforcement and monitoring, and with more stringent monitoring, enforcement, and permitting, Jasper’s plant would have closed a long time ago. Biomass incineration supporters are the dirty pot calling the coal black, and both rely on IDEM’s monitoring strategy.

      What is a little more? Even if the EPA limit is debated and the figures were off by a factor of a hundred, the numbers are still nauseating, staggering and yet illuminating of Jasper officials tolerating poisoning the public they are supposed to protect. Is Jasper government ignorant of what this much dioxin will do or fully aware of how much is put into our environment? Jasper City government, especially Bud Hauersperger, has consistently maintained that the amount of dioxin Jay’s plant will release is not anything we need to worry about. I am curious as to what they would consider dangerous, and why we trust either Mr. Catasein or Jasper officials to do the math. Are we better off if a few million or billion exposure limits don’t matter to you, or if you don’t know the difference?

      I am curious as to how you define “cleaner.” Another politician, Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair, “It depends on what the meaning of the words ‘is’ is.” and “It depends on how you define alone…” Is AIDS cleaner than polio? Your statement that there are “facts” that biomass is cleaner than coal are uncited, fail to include the new knowledge of ultrafine toxicity, and, as so, are basically useless without scientific backup. That may be good enough for you to call yourself a Jasper politician, but not good enough to make it a scientifically valid argument true enough to protect our childrens lungs. It takes alot more than word play to do that.

      I never chose to get involved in politics. Trying to respond to your vague uncited rhetoric alone is time consuming but sometimes curiously enjoyable. I am arguing health care policy and suggest that everyone be more involved and informed in what the politicians such as yourself are hiding. If citizens think that politicians are messing up health care, they had better wake up to the fact that politicians can mess up health directly by turning a blind eye to polluting industries.

      By the way we have had Forrest Lucas’s support because he is against the useless and fraudulent consumption of government subsidies. This was NOT a city meeting; I don’t know if it was recorded. For the record, there were many questions (from myself and the crowd) left inadequately answered by the city. They were not given a cutoff, unlike citizens in the 2011 public forum.

      I would be happy to present the talk again. The link below is only for part of the talk. The city did not challenge any of the dioxin figures or the IDEM monitoring maps though they had the opportunity to. Dean Johnson invited us back freely in the future. I would forward the entire powerpoint, though some of it is complicated and a presentation allows for explanation and questions, key to understanding some of this complicated stuff. If DC Free Press would allow a tape to have the verbal explanation of the slides, I would send the whole power point in.

2. It doubt it was recorded but if it was it would be nice for people to be able to view the presentation and the questions which were asked afterwards. I think all the city meetings should be recorded and posted on the city web page for viewing. This woul give people the opportunity to view at their leasure.

   1. Here is a link to Dr. Kreilein’s presentation. http://www.saveamericasforests.org/Forests%20-%20Incinerators%20-%20Biomass/Documents/Briefing/index.html

   2. The city does record the city meetings and they are available at the City Hall for a fee.

      1. Thank you. Would be nice if they would post them on the city web page. Anyone from the city reading this? Is DC Freepress going to have a follow up article on the questions asked by those whom attended?

         1. No, we don’t plan on adding anything to this event.

      2. If they are held in the council room (upstairs meeting room) if held elsewheres who knows.

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