Environment Action Committee
Environment Action Committee
BE EARTHWISE! VOTE with your consumer dollars to prevent food waste | Oil Train Program - Meeting with CSX Corporation Representatives | Schenectady Recycles! | Clean Air Act
BE EARTHWISE! VOTE with your consumer dollars to prevent food waste.
Food Waste constitutes the third largest contributor to global warming. Discarded food also wastes the water, labor, and fuel used to produce and transport that food. One third of the food grown globally does not get consumed. An estimated 40% of the food people purchase in the U.S.A. gets tossed. Annually, that amounts to $165 Billion and over $2,000 for a family of four.
More than 820 million people worldwide live with chronic food deprivation. Food insecurity includes the continuum from famine, hunger, food deprivation, malnutrition to nutritional deficiencies from eating empty calories. In America and New York State, one in every 7 people experiences food insecurity in one form or another. The 1 in 7 statistic varies from county to county. According to Feeding America, approximately 2.3 million people or 12% of New York's population experience a challenge feeding themselves and their loved ones.
Food insecurity can affect the people we interact with every day and we may not even know it: older adults living on a fixed income, the three out of four working Americans living paycheck to paycheck, college students living on a budget and our children. America has an abundance of healthy foods. By wasting less food, we can nourish ourselves and our neighbors and sustain the environment at the same time.
Oil Train Program - Meeting with CSX Corporation Representatives
The Environment Committee invited representatives from CSX Rail Corporation to speak with it about the safety of oil trains which increasingly are moving through Schenectady County.
Maurice O'Connell (Regional Vice President for State Government and Community Affairs) and Robert Rohauer (Manager of Community Affairs and Safety) for CSX Corporation met with the Committee on March 9th. They described the work CSX does to build safeguards into the system and the training they do in the handling of hazardous situations on the railroad for local first responders and their own employees. Oil trains were a significant part of the discussion.
CSX Corporation operates a 21,000 mile rail network across 23 Eastern states and into Quebec and Ontario. Oil trains are not a large part of their business, accounting for approximately 2% of the total. The tanker cars are not owned by the railroad but are owned by the shippers (customers of CSX) or by leasing companies. They are packed by the shippers in accordance to guidelines established by the Federal Government (new guidelines may be issued as early as May or June 2015). As long as the rail cars are packed in compliance with the prescribed guidelines, the railroads are obligated to move them. The railroads are governed by interstate commerce laws rather than state laws. The railroad's role is to ship the oil from its point of origin (the Bakken fields of North Dakota) to its destination. Oil trains are handed to CSX from Canadian Pacific (CP) in Chicago. The
vast majority of the CSX trains go through Selkirk to Philadelphia or New Jersey. The CSX trains that go to Albany offload to large Buckeye Oil storage tanks; from the tanks the oil is taken on barges to New York City and then to refineries on the coast. CP also ships oil to Albany, serving the Global Partners Oil Company. The CP cars are the ones that can be seen along I-787. This oil is stored in tanks behind the Ezra Prentice Apartments, which is a concern to residents of that area. The oil trains that go through Glenville are operated by PanAm which takes over from CSX in Rotterdam Junction.
Railroads support tougher federal safety standards for new tank cars and retrofitting of existing cars used to transport crude oil. The railroads are liable for accidents that occur on their tracks so they have a vested interest in preventing hazardous situations on the railroad and in mitigating the impact of any that do occur.
CSX hosts training programs for emergency responders in local communities. CSX also has its own highly trained HAZMAT field officers who are trained to respond to incidents, especially those related to hazardous materials including oil. In 2013, following the Lac Megantic disaster in Quebec (which took place on an independent short line), new government standards including inspections, wayside detectors and new braking requirements and training of all first responders on Class I lines were issued. All class I railroads in the USA and in Canada adopted these standards.
Betsy Chase and Ruth Bonn
Schenectady Recycles!
If you are a LWV member who lives in the City of Schenectady, we encourage you to take a recycling lead in your own neighborhood. In
addition to setting a good recycling example, attending neighborhood association meetings and participating in recycling discussions would help give direction and leadership to your neighborhood recycling program.
Recycling is part of the larger "quality of life" picture that neighborhood associations are concerned about. Dynamic leadership is needed. Each of us can work within our own neighborhood associations to form a recycling core that can address this aspect of the quality of life. We are learning through our Woodlawn pilot, just how central recycling issues are to the perception of quality of life. SR! strongly urges you to take a leadership role in this effort.
Nancy Peterson and Roberta Farrell
