Needless Dominican Deaths

[Keith R]

HOWMAR & LarrySpencer,
If you guys want to snipe at each other, especially off-topic, then take it to PM please.

The Environment Forum Moderator

[LarrySpencer]

Well, I think we've exhausted this subject. What's the verdict? Are many children dying premature deaths due to vehicle emissions?

1. Where are the numbers to support this.
2. Where is the direct link to show that this is the exact cause?

I agree that something definately needs to be done to curb the problem with pollutants in the air, and I think the government has taken a great step by limiting the age of vehicles imported into the Dominican Republic. What more can me done is yet to be seen. The old cars will die off and the imported cars will be older with altered smog systems and we will be right back in the same boat.

It's quite fine to argue and complain about the subject, but who is actually going to do something about it?

[Keith R]

Originally Posted by LarrySpencer

Well, I think we've exhausted this subject. What's the verdict? Are many children dying premature deaths due to vehicle emissions?

1. Where are the numbers to support this.
2. Where is the direct link to show that this is the exact cause?

Evidently you did not bother to read my post:

A direct correlation? I can't prove it yet. No decent studies by environmental health authorities, although I am told some are planned with help from PAHO/WHO. Hope so. I think the data might shake some policymakers into thinking twice about the consequences of inaction, but then again, I tend to be an optimist.

It is amusing to find someone demanding numbers and links to support contentions who himself has made several assertions -- such as regarding the source of and quality of gasoline sold in the DR - I'm still waiting for the proof that it comes predominantly from East Coast US -- that he himself cannot back up when questioned.

It's quite fine to argue and complain about the subject, but who is actually going to do something about it?

I agree. Any suggestions that might work in a Dominican context?

[LarrySpencer]

While I respect and even agree with many of your opinions, I believe that you have taken me out of context at times. Yes, I have no proof on the numbers, and in fact am realizing that there aren't many numbers and was incorrect. However, you have missed the boat on many occassions, and this has happened from our first discussions when I wais not to just on the overreactionist's bandwagon and you accused me of calling you an overreactionist.

1. I was not looking for your direct correlations, as you did not start this thread. I was looking for those of Profolio, who stated, "The polution entering the air by cars and motorcycles in such disgraceful condition is bringing premature death to thousands of Dominicans."

2. I find it amusing that someone so intent on picking apart each of my words has substituted my words from "much", to his own "most" and "predominately," when I never once used these words. As well as east coast. I said the same who supply the east coast, meaning Texas.

3. Yes, it is true that I am not well as well versed on the Dominican Republic as you, and therefore I only have the models I have seen on which to base my opinions. If you go back and read my post carefully, you will see that I never once compared California to the Dominican Republic, yet only used the model to convey and idea.

Ideas. That's what the Dominican Republic needs because they obviously haven't come up many on their own...and if they end up coming from the US and even from California, so be it.

I believe the first place to start is through education. Public schools must have some mandate for studies on Natural Resources and their conservation and protection. The laws that are in affect now must be enforced. I say "the laws that are in affect now" because there is no reason to establish new laws. They didn't enforce the old ones, so why would they enforce the new? It will be like the commercials you see on television for stopping at red lights., it's nice to watch, but it will have no immediate effect. Unless there is a set of officers sitting there on motorcycles who actually pull people over, they will continue to run right through them. Seeing the officer sitting there on a continuous basis will help to build better habits.

Gross polluters must be taken off the roads and either be repaired or destroyed. What kind of inspections are there at this point for vehicles when they are registered, and for how long does this registration last?

Better, cleaner mixtures of fuel must be created and distributed. Not just distributed, but at a reasonable cost to the consumer, meaning that the government must be willing to take a smaller cut.

And Keith, I feel for you and your daughter having to live with asthma. I know that can't be easy to live with.

[Keith R]

Originally Posted by LarrySpencer

While I respect and even agree with many of your opinions, I believe that you have taken me out of context at times. Yes, I have no proof on the numbers, and in fact am realizing that there aren't many numbers and was incorrect. However, you have missed the boat on many occassions, and this has happened from our first discussions when I wais not to just on the overreactionist's bandwagon and you accused me of calling you an overreactionist.

Actually, Larry, it was not unreasonable to assume you were aiming the charge at me, since it came in a post (#15) responding directly to me:

Asthma, I'm terribly sorry about your child being afflicted with this awful disease, but let's not jump to conclusions about the causes.

So, although your child suffers from this, don't go jumping on the environmental over reactionists bandwagon just yet.

Re-read the entire post. If you were addressing the post to anyone else, it was not apparent to me or anyone else.

2. I find it amusing that someone so intent on picking apart each of my words has substituted my words from "much", to his own "most" and "predominately," when I never once used these words. As well as east coast. I said the same who supply the east coast, meaning Texas.

You know, Larry, it really doesn't matter much whether it was Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado or the East Coast -- the point is, you claimed a fact that was not a fact, tried to use it as a lynchpin of your response.

Yes, let's talk about the Dominican Republic.

Much of the gasoline in the Dominican Republic is imported from the United States, from the same refineries that provide gasoline for much of the east coast of the US, so comparing the two fuels in not a far stretch.

I don't know if you were repeating what you read/heard/were told somewhere else, or simply made it up. But you presented it to us as fact, and damaged your credibility by doing so. Your efforts to justify it rather than admit the mistake before now did not help your credibility either, frankly.

3. Yes, it is true that I am not well as well versed on the Dominican Republic as you, and therefore I only have the models I have seen on which to base my opinions. If you go back and read my post carefully, you will see that I never once compared California to the Dominican Republic, yet only used the model to convey and idea.

I am by no means the grand authority on the DR (that's Hillbilly's job as Grand Vizier. LOL). I am still learning new stuff about it every day, and feel that will probably be true until I die 40 or more years from now. But by now I have learned quite a bit, especially about the peril of applying First World models and assumptions to Dominican realities -- something I, like probably most of us here at DR1, have been guilty of at one time or another. Stick around the DR and DR1, you'll learn this more and more as well.

Ideas. That's what the Dominican Republic needs because they obviously haven't come up many on their own...and if they end up coming from the US and even from California, so be it.

Well in point of fact, yes the Dominicans have come up with ideas, but many of their ideas so far on air and water pollution and waste management have not been practical/workable. So I agree. They need all the ideas we can share, and not just from the US. I like to discuss with them concepts that are being tried, with some success, in other Latin American and/or Caribbean nations. They tend to relate to them better, are more willing to listen to such ideas, and realize that the conditions in question are analogous enough that the concepts just might be do-able in the DR too....

So be careful and choosy about which ideas we promote. Frankly, some ideas from California aren't applied even in the rest of North America -- how can you expect them to apply in the DR? Example: California has a complex Rigid Plastic Container Law that some Californians think is great, but only one other US state has a RPPC law -- Oregon -- and it is far simpler. Most other states would not touch the Californian model, think it's too unweldy.

Another, non-Californian example to illustrate the point about caution in promoting First World models in countries such as the DR: the Germans have been going around Latin America for years promoting their waste recovery and packaging waste law model as the be-all and end-all that everyone should emulate. But everyone has learned that only the Austrians have imitated it, that it does not work even in Germany, it is costly, most Europeans won't touch it, so why should Latin Americans emulate it?

I believe the first place to start is through education. Public schools must have some mandate for studies on Natural Resources and their conservation and protection.

Well, actually the Environment Law of 2000 has such a mandate already.

CAPÍTULO VII DE LA EDUCACIÓN Y DIVULGACIÓN AMBIENTALES

Art. 56.- La Secretaría de Estado de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, en coordinación con la Secretaría de Estado de Educación, llevará a cabo programas de educación ambiental –formal y no formal- con la participación de instituciones públicas y privadas que realizan actividades educativas.

Art. 57.- La Secretaría de Estado de Educación incorporará como eje transversal, la educación ambiental con enfoque interdisciplinario y carácter obligatorio en los planes y programas de todos los grados, niveles, ciclos y modalidades de enseñanza del sistema educativo, así como de los institutos técnicos, de formación, capacitación, y actualización docente, de acuerdo con la política establecida por el Estado para el sector.

Art. 58.- El Consejo Nacional de Educación Superior, en coordinación con la Secretaría de Estado de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, garantizará la incorporación de la dimensión ambiental en los planes de estudios de pre y postgrado, curriculares y extracurriculares, dirigidos a la formación y el perfeccionamiento de los profesionales de todas las ramas, en la perspectiva de contribuir al uso sostenible de los recursos naturales y la protección y mejoramiento del medio ambiente.

During my last visit to SD in August, I was told by more than one Administration official that the Fernandez government, unlike that of his predecessor, takes this mandate seriously and is working on implementing it. I'm a bit skeptical, I am sad to say. This Administration's record so far on education does not inspire great confidence on this front.

The laws that are in affect now must be enforced. I say "the laws that are in affect now" because there is no reason to establish new laws. They didn't enforce the old ones, so why would they enforce the new?

Agreed. There is a little bit of hope on this front. I met twice with the chief of the Environment Police when in SD in August, and I was favorably impressed. If this man and his team are allowed to do their job the way he wants to, there is some hope for real enforcement. It will have to build slowly, because they are still ramping up their human resources. But he has a good strategy and something I do not see often enough in the eyes of Dominican officials: real determination to make a difference. I will be writing more on this subject on the soon-to-come Environment Blog we will be launching along with DR1.

I also take some hope by the fact that the Environment Police and Environment Prosecutor recently decided to take on a Senator and won:

http://www.ceiba.gov.do/2004/noticia...14-oct-05.html

How often do you read a story like that in the DR? Not often enough, I think. I hope this is not the last one of this nature we see from the Environment Police.

Gross polluters must be taken off the roads and either be repaired or destroyed. What kind of inspections are there at this point for vehicles when they are registered, and for how long does this registration last?

I'll have to double-check, but I believe that the DR still only does safety inspections, not emissions. Knowing Dominican realities, I think any emissions inspection regime for the DR would have to be designed very, very carefully. For example, if you are going to do tailpipe readings in the traditional manner, you at the very least must have a system which electronically does not allow the test to proceed until the measuring wand is placed properly, and does not in any way allow the tester to change the result read-out, and probably have to have the result read-out automatically sent electronically to the office issuing the registration or sticker based on the results, so that anyone coming in with a faked readout sheet could (notice I didn't say would) get caught.

My guess is that in order to make the inspection system really stick you would have to have someone doing spot checks on streets and roads, empowered to give out tickets and revoke the emissions sticker then and there. But I don't foresee this in the DR anytime soon.

Better, cleaner mixtures of fuel must be created and distributed. Not just distributed, but at a reasonable cost to the consumer, meaning that the government must be willing to take a smaller cut.

Would be nice. But who is going to pay to refit Refindomsa to do it? I'm not trying to be sarcastic. It's a legit question at a time when the DR says that it does not have its own money to make such capital investments. I guess alternatively the DR could bite the bullet and allow imports of cleaner refined fuel, perhaps with a tariff and (hydrocarbons) tax break, but then they'd be undercutting Refindomsa's partial monopoly and robbing their treasury of quite a few funds, so I doubt they'll do this either. Or maybe they should really bite the bullet and let Refindomsa become majority owned by private interests (maybe with the DR Govt retaining a "golden share" such as the UK Govt has in British Air and other firms?) with ironclad contractual obligations on their part to produce cleaner fuels in line with Environment Ministry dictates and that the government will actually enforce the new consumer law's provisions on price gouging.... Just musing here, I have no clear answers either...

And Keith, I feel for you and your daughter having to live with asthma. I know that can't be easy to live with.

Well, thanks for the sentiment, but I am not full or acute asthmatic (doc likes to call it bronchial asthmastic), nor is my daughter, thank God. And unlike me, she has not had a serious episode since we moved back to Virginia. Why? Well, near as we can tell, her triggers are linked to air quality, and I am not talking pollen or simple dust (or Nals' sand! LOL) -- I mean smog! A correlation between her pulminary troubles in SD and ambiente air quality there? Again, I can't prove it, but I have my strong suspicions.

And I know I am not alone in that -- some Dominican doctors and public health officials I have spoken to are worried there is one as well. But until good, proper, current diagnostics are done, no one -- not you, me, Porfirio,etc. -- can say with any true certainly what the air quality actually is and over what time sequence, what are the biggest contributors in order of rank, and what correlations there are to epidemological trends (the data for which is also quite spare in the DR).

So yeah, in that sense, we should not jump to conclusions. But as my dad the MD used to say, if his clinical observation and experience and instincts are telling him loudly that there is a link between a health condition and certain factors, but medical science has yet to prove it conclusively, it was still his duty to voice his concerns and suspicions to the patient. My eyes, nose, lungs, and 25 years of dealing with environment & health issues suggest to me that SD has a more serious air pollution problem than officials care to admit, that vehicle emissions are more a contributing factor than officials care to admit, and that health impacts are rising.

This needs to be properly and scientifically diagnosed, and policies designed on the basis of the findings, not our suppositions/biases or those of Dominican government officials.

Although there are some shortcomings I see with the preliminary study that produced these figures, and the data are several years old (2000), the charts attached below from the Environment Ministry's environmental diagnostic published in December 2002 may be of interest and help ground this thread in something closer to reality.

Regards,
Keith

[LarrySpencer]

Originally Posted by Keith R

Although there are some shortcomings I see with the preliminary study that produced these figures, and the data are several years old (2000), the charts attached below from the Environment Ministry's environmental diagnostic published in December 2002 may be of interest and help ground this thread in something closer to reality.

Do you know if they completed this on their own, or if an independent auditor was used? What are the benchmarks, are they also listed within the report?

[Keith R]

Originally Posted by LarrySpencer

Do you know if they completed this on their own, or if an independent auditor was used? What are the benchmarks, are they also listed within the report?

That's part of my concern about this data. The Dominican government rarely does their own health and environment studies; they use consultants (you can't really call them an "auditor" in this case) to pull them together, in this case, Abt Associates Inc., with assistance and review by a technical committee of government specialists and others such as the environmental health specialist in PAHO's office in the DR The consultants ran up against the same raw data and study constraints almost everyone else does -- for example, they say that they could not get good fuel quality and consumption data for the DR, so they had to make some assumptions and estimates on this critical starting point in the analysis. They also had to rely on some incomplete, short-term monitoring data and a couple of university studies. But it's really the only data out right now, such as it is.

That's why I say that a proper (rigorous, complete) and scientific diagnosis yet needs to be done. Why the Dominican government has not yet done it, I'm not sure -- cost, maybe? But then, there are plenty of multilateral sources willing to help fund the set-up of regular monitoring stations if the government asks for it, as has happened in many Latin American countries already. Cynics may suggest that DR officials haven't done the monitoring yet because they don't want to know the results, but I'm hoping that they're just being slow about getting to it...

It's been a year or two since I read the study, so I need to go back over it again in greater detail. But during a quick glance last night this passage popped out at me:

Hubo toda una gama de fuentes que no fue analizada. A lo largo de nuestra estadía en Santo Domingo y visita a Santiago, y la experiencia acumulada en otros países, se considera que los emisores más importantes son las fuentes móviles (ya discutidas), las plantas de generadoras de electricidad, las industrias de uso intensivo de energía (fabricación de vidrio, cementeras, refinerías, pinturas y solventes, etc.), y en el caso particular de República Dominicana las emisiones de las múltiples generadores de electricidad para uso comercial y residencial (y por supuesto industrial), debido a la poca confiabilidad del sistema nacional de abastecimiento de electricidad. Adicionalmente hay muchos otros rubros básicos que no pudieron ser estudiados. Uno de particular interés (por razones de contaminación, así como de impacto social) es la quema de basura en vertederos al aire libre.

Essentially, the study admits that many sources remain to be studied and estimated properly, but they consider the main suspects to be exactly the ones we have raised in this thread: vehicles, electricity generation plants, certain industries (I had forgotten to mention the cement plants and paint/solvent producers!), the plantas and open-air trash burning.

[LarrySpencer]

Wow, they've got a lot of work to do. It looks as if it was more of a hit and miss type thing, as if it was a report that needed to be generated quickly in order to qualify for some sort of funding.

[Keith R]

Actually, sad to say, this was done with funding -- as part of a larger project funded by the World Bank. The project, launched in 1999 and finished a few years later, aimed at setting a grand national environment policy and priorities (institutional, personnel, training, monitoring, regulation/guideline setting, etc.) once the Environment Law was passed. Part of the exercise involved cateloguing and assessing what environmental problems the DR faced, which ones should be given priority attention, and what were the cost/benefits of the various policy approaches. The final product was not the worst I have seen in Latin America, but it was certainly not the best.

[LarrySpencer]

Originally Posted by Keith R

Actually, sad to say, this was done with funding -- as part of a larger project funded by the World Bank. The project, launched in 1999 and finished a few years later, aimed at setting a grand national environment policy and priorities (institutional, personnel, training, monitoring, regulation/guideline setting, etc.) once the Environment Law was passed. Part of the exercise involved cateloguing and assessing what environmental problems the DR faced, which ones should be given priority attention, and what were the cost/benefits of the various policy approaches. The final product was not the worst I have seen in Latin America, but it was certainly not the best.

True. How could they have possibly have know which to place high on the priority list if them didn't even do a thorough investigation?

Well, like you said, at least now they have the new environmetal legislation. In time it will be refined. Thanks for all the info. I'm reading Luis Pellerano's press release on it right now. It seems the law, from their view, is to stream line the environmental review process required for development.

So the World Bank funded this in order for the Dominican Republic to streamline the process, build up foreign investment, require all types of upfront environmental impact studies prior to development, and that's it.....

Is this correct? So everything will be upfront in order to get the permits, but once that in completed, all the pollution they create will be pretty much unregulated? I need to find more than just this press release....

http://www.bomchilgroup.org/domfeb02.html