Large manufacturers and chemical producers have lobbied ferociously to stop the National Institutes of Health from classifying formaldehyde as a carcinogen. A wide body of research has linked the chemical to cancer, but industrial polluters have stymied regulators from action.

Last year, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that billionaire David Koch, whose company Georgia Pacfic (a subsidiary of Koch Industries) is one of the country’s top producers of formaldehyde, was appointed to the NIH cancer board at a time when the NIH delayed action on the chemical. The news was met with protests from environmental groups. Koch offered his resignation from the board in September.

Yesterday, the NIH finally handed down a report officially classifying formaldehyde as a carcinogen:

Government scientists listed formaldehyde as a carcinogen, and said it is found in worrisome quantities in plywood, particle board, mortuaries and hair salons. They also said that styrene, which is used in boats, bathtubs and in disposable foam plastic cups and plates, may cause cancer but is generally found in such low levels in consumer products that risks are low. Frequent and intense exposures in manufacturing plants are far more worrisome than the intermittent contact that most consumers have, but government scientists said that consumers should still avoid contact with formaldehyde and styrene along with six other chemicals that were added Friday to the government’s official Report on Carcinogens. Its release was delayed for years because of intense lobbying from the chemical industry, which disputed its findings.

An investigation by ProPublica found that Sens. David Vitter (R-LA) and James Inhofe (R-OK) had used their power to add years of delay to the report. The piece linked Vitter to lobbying from Koch’s Georgia Pacific company, which has plywood plants in Louisiana.

Stanford climate scientists forecast permanently hotter summers

The tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer temperatures within the next 20 to 60 years if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, according to a new climate study by Stanford University scientists….

“According to our projections, large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years,” said the study’s lead author, Noah Diffenbaugh,

That’s from the Stanford release for a new Climatic Change study (PDF here).  The study, based on observations and models, finds that most major countries, including the United States, are “likely to face unprecedented climate stresses even with the relatively moderate warming expected over the next half-century.”

As a taste of things to come, much of the United States has just been hit by a monster heat wave. Steve Scolnik at Capital Climate analyzed the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and found, “U.S. heat records in the first 9 days of June have outnumbered cold records by an eye-popping ratio of 13 to 1″ — 1609 to 124:

Monthly total number of daily high temperature and low temperature records set in the U.S. for June 2010 through June 9, 2011, data from NOAA.

I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one record temperature on global warming.  If you want to know how to judge whether the 13-to-1 ratio for the first 9 days of June is a big deal, here’s what a 2009 National Center for Atmospheric Research study found over the past six decades (see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.“):

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This week, a two-week long intercession meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference began in Bonn, Germany. Reports from Bonn indicate that there is a divide among the Parties about what needs to be accomplished in the run-up to the next major climate summit in Durban, South Africa at the end of this year.

Some aim to work towards the implementation of the agreements made in Cancun in December 2010—specifically, operationalizing the new institutions agreed upon in Cancun, such as the Green Climate Fund, the Technology Mechanism, and the Adaptation Framework. Others are more focused on making progress toward a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.

Here is a news roundup of what has been happening thus far:

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A penny for your cyber thoughts.

Comments and critiques of the new design and lame commenting system two weeks in are welcome.   Improvements — and access to the old comments — are coming, though it may take a little while.

By Stewart Boss

Are the new EPA standards for power plant emissions the “right tool at the right time?” A group of progressive utilities thinks so.

A debate this week at the Environmental Law Institute gave the electric utility industry an opportunity to spar over the Environmental Protection Agency’s court-ordered rules establishing standards that will, for the first time ever, set limits on emissions of mercury and other air toxics.

Arguing for the regulations were John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Michael Bradley of the Clean Energy Group, a coalition of utilities that support clean energy. Those utilities – Calpine Corporation, Constellation Energy, Exelon Corporation, NextEra Energy, National Grid, PG&E Corporation and the Public Service Enterprise Group – represent more than 146,000 MW of generating capacity.

Despite claims from utilities opposed to regulation that EPA rules will kill jobs and hurt the economy, the Clean Energy Group actually says that the industry is better prepared for the changes than many admit: nearly 60 percent of all coal-fired boilers that submitted stack test data to EPA are already achieving the Utility Toxics Rule’s proposed mercury emissions standard (100 boilers out of a total 178).

Since 2000, the electric industry has been anticipating that EPA would regulate hazardous air pollutant emissions, and as a result, many companies have already taken steps to install control technologies that will allow them to comply with requirements of the rule on time. The technologies to control emissions at coal‐fired power plants, including mercury and hydrochloric acid, are available and cost‐effective.

In his opening statement for the debate, the Clean Energy Group’s Bradley presented five “truths” about the Utility Toxics Rule.
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