welcome to reality trivia
environment
The environment is everything that isn't me.
Albert Einstein
july 22, 2020
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
THANKS TO THE GREED AND IGNORANCE OF THE POLITICAL LEADERS, OIL, GAS , CHEMICAL, AND PESTICIDE INDUSTRIES THE HUMAN RACE IS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES.
THIS IS WHAT TRUMP HAS WROUGHT...SAME AS HILLARY
Cattledog - demo. underground
|
24 rollbacks are in progress
Clean Power Plan Paris climate agreement Wetland and tributary protections Car and truck fuel-efficiency standards Status of 10 national monuments Status of 12 marine areas Limits on toxic discharge from power plants Coal ash discharge regulations Emissions standards for new, modified and reconstructed power plants Emissions rules for power plant start-up and shutdown Sage grouse habitat protections Fracking regulations on public lands Regulations on oil and gas drilling in some national parks Oil rig safety regulations Regulations for offshore oil and gas exploration by floating vessels Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge Hunting method regulations in Alaska Requirement for tracking emissions on federal highways Emissions standards for trailers and glider kits Limits on methane emissions on public lands Permitting process for air-polluting plants Offshore oil and gas leasing Use of birds in subsistence handicrafts Coal dust rule |
29 rules have been overturned
Flood building standards Proposed ban on a potentially harmful pesticide Freeze on new coal leases on public lands Methane reporting requirement Anti-dumping rule for coal companies Decision on Keystone XL pipeline Decision on Dakota Access pipeline Third-party settlement funds Offshore drilling ban in the Atlantic and Arctic Ban on seismic air gun testing in the Atlantic Northern Bering Sea climate resilience plan Royalty regulations for oil, gas and coal Inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews Permit-issuing process for new infrastructure projects Green Climate Fund contributions Mining restrictions in Bristol Bay, Alaska Endangered species listings Hunting ban on wolves and grizzly bears in Alaska Protections for whales and sea turtles Reusable water bottles rule for national parks National parks climate order Environmental mitigation for federal projects Calculation for “social cost” of carbon Planning rule for public lands Copper filter cake listing as hazardous waste Mine cleanup rule Sewage treatment pollution regulations Ban on use of lead ammunition on federal lands Restrictions on fishing |
7 rollbacks are in limbo
Methane emission limits at new oil and gas wells
Limits on landfill emissions
Mercury emission limits for power plants
Hazardous chemical facility regulations
Groundwater protections for uranium mines
Efficiency standards for federal buildings
Rule helping consumers buy fuel-efficient tires
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/climate/trump-environment-rules-reversed.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Methane emission limits at new oil and gas wells
Limits on landfill emissions
Mercury emission limits for power plants
Hazardous chemical facility regulations
Groundwater protections for uranium mines
Efficiency standards for federal buildings
Rule helping consumers buy fuel-efficient tires
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/climate/trump-environment-rules-reversed.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
*articles*
*US rivers and lakes are shrinking for a surprising reason: cows
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WHOLE FOODS HIGH LEVELS OF ARSENIC FOUND IN US WHOLE FOODS’ BOTTLED WATER BRAND
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Agriculture Department Eases The Way For Test-Tube Plants To Spread Into Nature
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*SO, OF COURSE, TRUMP’S EPA IGNORES HARVARD STUDY AND ITS OWN SCIENTISTS TO STICK WITH LAX AIR POLLUTION STANDARDS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WITH NATION FOCUSED ON PANDEMIC, TRUMP INTERIOR DEPT. TO GREENLIGHT KILLING OF BEAR CUBS AND WOLF PUPS IN THEIR DENS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP ADMINISTRATION USES PANDEMIC TO COVER FOR LOOSENING CROP POISON REGULATION
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP DISMANTLES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS UNDER COVER OF CORONAVIRUS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER GREENLIGHTING 'CORPORATE TAKEOVER OF OUR OCEANS WHILE THEY HOPE WE AREN'T PAYING ATTENTION'(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Critics alarmed by US nuclear agency's bid to relax rules on radioactive waste
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Gas stoves making indoor air up to five times dirtier than outdoor air, report finds
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EPA DECIDES TO REJECT THE LATEST SCIENCE, ENDANGER PUBLIC HEALTH AND IGNORE THE LAW BY KEEPING AN OUTDATED FINE PARTICLE AIR POLLUTION STANDARD(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Is Carbon Capture and Storage a Climate Solution or a Pyramid Scheme?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Coronavirus detected on particles of air pollution
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WHITE HOUSE MOVES TO WEAKEN EPA RULE ON TOXIC COMPOUNDS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Higher rates of air pollution linked to more COVID-19 deaths, study shows
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE PANDEMIC IS SLOWING DOWN THE WHOLE WORLD … AND THAT’S A GOOD THING
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump to roll back Obama-era clean car rules in huge blow to climate fight
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump administration allows companies to break pollution laws during coronavirus pandemic(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Deadly Poison Used To Kill Weeds Wreaks Havoc On Nearby Farms
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*PFAS “Forever Chemicals” Found in Tap Water Linked to Cancer Risks
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Coke and Pepsi sued for creating a plastic pollution ‘nuisance’
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP ADMINISTRATION KILLS ENDANGERED SPECIES — AND THERE’S A $2.3 MILLION BILL BARR CONNECTION, TOO(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Facing Undeniable Reality of Climate Change, Deniers Now Argue It’s Not That Bad
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump just declared war on the Chesapeake Bay
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*AMERICA’S 'RECYCLED' PLASTIC WASTE IS CLOGGING LANDFILLS, SURVEY FINDS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Refineries Are Spewing Cancer-Causing Benzene as Trump Slashes Enforcement
(ARTICLE BELOW)
cartoons(at the end)
Colorado
US rivers and lakes are shrinking for a surprising reason: cows
Cattle-feed crops, which end up as beef and dairy products, account for 23% of water consumption in the US
Troy Farah
the guardian
Thu 2 Jul 2020 05.30 EDT
As a fifth-generation rancher in Colorado, Paul Bruchez knows the value of water. Not only does he raise cattle irrigated by the Colorado River and its nearby tributaries, Bruchez runs a fly-fishing business on those same streams.
“My income, my life, requires a reliable water resource,” he said. But since moving to northern Colorado two decades ago, the Colorado River has shrunk by an average of 20% compared to last century. Climatic conditions are one culprit – the area is suffering the worst regional dry spell on record. But there’s another big problem.
Cows.
A recent analysis published in Nature found cattle to be one of the major drivers of water shortages. Notably, it is because of water used to grow crops that are fed to cows such as alfalfa and hay. Across the US, cattle-feed crops, which end up as beef and dairy products, account for 23% of all water consumption, according to the report. In the Colorado River Basin, it is over half.
“There are many smaller streams that have been dried up completely,” said Brian Richter, the study’s lead author and the president of Sustainable Waters, a water conservation non-profit. “We’re only seeing the beginning of what’s going to become a major natural resource issue for everybody living in the western United States.”
Agriculture accounts for 92% of humanity’s freshwater footprint across the planet, and has long been identified as a major culprit in drought. But the new study suggests how extreme its impact can be.
“The fact that over half of that water is going to cattle-feed crops just floored us,” Richter said. “We had to double and triple check to make sure we got the numbers right.”
Lake Mead, in Arizona and Nevada, for example, hasn’t been full since 1983, and has fallen by almost two-thirds in the last 20 years alone. According to Richter’s analysis, almost 75% of that decline can be attributed to cattle-feed irrigation.
In the Colorado River Basin as a whole, which services about 40 million people in seven states and is overtaxed to the point that it rarely ever reaches the ocean anymore, that number is 55%.
It takes a lot of water to make a double-cheeseburger. One calculation puts it at 450 gallons per quarter-pounder. The study also found that most of these water-intensive beef and dairy products are being consumed in western cities. “Beef consumers living in the Los Angeles, Portland, Denver and San Francisco metropolitan areas bear the greatest responsibility for these hydrological and ecological impacts,” Richter and his colleagues reported.
Around 60 species of fish in the western US are experiencing increased risk of extinction due to draining water tables, according to the study. As streams dry up, toxic chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides that run off from farms become concentrated, suffocating river-dwelling fauna. Invasive species can find a foothold in the changing environment.
It’s a dire situation, but people like Richter and Bruchez are working on solutions. For the past 18 years, Bruchez has been involved with local water sustainability efforts, including several multimillion dollar river restoration projects, and champions strategies like improved irrigation systems and rebuilding riparian habitat.
The most cost-effective solution, proposed in Richter’s paper, is fallowing farmland, meaning letting it sit idle, without irrigation. “You can’t get more water savings off of an acre than by not watering it,” Richter said, and described it as “growing water” rather than a crop. He noted that the strategy should be temporary and rotational, and that ranchers should be compensated because they lose income growing nothing. Fallowing is at least twice as effective as other water-saving tactics, according to Richter’s analysis.
Agricultural strategies aside, people who eat beef and dairy will ultimately need to consume less or choose products that don’t depend on irrigated crops fed to cows, Richter said. Plant-based meat alternatives can play a role, as one analysis found that a meatless Beyond Burger generates 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and has practically no impact on water scarcity.
“Reduced consumption of beef is one very effective way for an individual consumer to reduce their water and energy footprint; however, it is difficult to guarantee that there would be a subsequent decrease in water stress in the western US with decreased beef consumption,” Dr Shelie Miller, the director for University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment, said in an email. “Even with decreased water consumption associated with beef and dairy, there are a multitude of competing water demands in the western region of the US.”
In other words, even if beef and dairy are sucking American rivers dry, addressing cattle-feed crops is only part of the solution to growing water scarcity.
Bruchez, the rancher, is concerned about “the volume of water that is used to put into people’s yards, parks, golf courses, whatever for scenery”. Agriculture, he said, “isn’t in my eyes the only thing to look towards”.
“My income, my life, requires a reliable water resource,” he said. But since moving to northern Colorado two decades ago, the Colorado River has shrunk by an average of 20% compared to last century. Climatic conditions are one culprit – the area is suffering the worst regional dry spell on record. But there’s another big problem.
Cows.
A recent analysis published in Nature found cattle to be one of the major drivers of water shortages. Notably, it is because of water used to grow crops that are fed to cows such as alfalfa and hay. Across the US, cattle-feed crops, which end up as beef and dairy products, account for 23% of all water consumption, according to the report. In the Colorado River Basin, it is over half.
“There are many smaller streams that have been dried up completely,” said Brian Richter, the study’s lead author and the president of Sustainable Waters, a water conservation non-profit. “We’re only seeing the beginning of what’s going to become a major natural resource issue for everybody living in the western United States.”
Agriculture accounts for 92% of humanity’s freshwater footprint across the planet, and has long been identified as a major culprit in drought. But the new study suggests how extreme its impact can be.
“The fact that over half of that water is going to cattle-feed crops just floored us,” Richter said. “We had to double and triple check to make sure we got the numbers right.”
Lake Mead, in Arizona and Nevada, for example, hasn’t been full since 1983, and has fallen by almost two-thirds in the last 20 years alone. According to Richter’s analysis, almost 75% of that decline can be attributed to cattle-feed irrigation.
In the Colorado River Basin as a whole, which services about 40 million people in seven states and is overtaxed to the point that it rarely ever reaches the ocean anymore, that number is 55%.
It takes a lot of water to make a double-cheeseburger. One calculation puts it at 450 gallons per quarter-pounder. The study also found that most of these water-intensive beef and dairy products are being consumed in western cities. “Beef consumers living in the Los Angeles, Portland, Denver and San Francisco metropolitan areas bear the greatest responsibility for these hydrological and ecological impacts,” Richter and his colleagues reported.
Around 60 species of fish in the western US are experiencing increased risk of extinction due to draining water tables, according to the study. As streams dry up, toxic chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides that run off from farms become concentrated, suffocating river-dwelling fauna. Invasive species can find a foothold in the changing environment.
It’s a dire situation, but people like Richter and Bruchez are working on solutions. For the past 18 years, Bruchez has been involved with local water sustainability efforts, including several multimillion dollar river restoration projects, and champions strategies like improved irrigation systems and rebuilding riparian habitat.
The most cost-effective solution, proposed in Richter’s paper, is fallowing farmland, meaning letting it sit idle, without irrigation. “You can’t get more water savings off of an acre than by not watering it,” Richter said, and described it as “growing water” rather than a crop. He noted that the strategy should be temporary and rotational, and that ranchers should be compensated because they lose income growing nothing. Fallowing is at least twice as effective as other water-saving tactics, according to Richter’s analysis.
Agricultural strategies aside, people who eat beef and dairy will ultimately need to consume less or choose products that don’t depend on irrigated crops fed to cows, Richter said. Plant-based meat alternatives can play a role, as one analysis found that a meatless Beyond Burger generates 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and has practically no impact on water scarcity.
“Reduced consumption of beef is one very effective way for an individual consumer to reduce their water and energy footprint; however, it is difficult to guarantee that there would be a subsequent decrease in water stress in the western US with decreased beef consumption,” Dr Shelie Miller, the director for University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment, said in an email. “Even with decreased water consumption associated with beef and dairy, there are a multitude of competing water demands in the western region of the US.”
In other words, even if beef and dairy are sucking American rivers dry, addressing cattle-feed crops is only part of the solution to growing water scarcity.
Bruchez, the rancher, is concerned about “the volume of water that is used to put into people’s yards, parks, golf courses, whatever for scenery”. Agriculture, he said, “isn’t in my eyes the only thing to look towards”.
America's water crisis
Whole Foods High levels of arsenic found in US Whole Foods’ bottled water brand
Tests by Consumer Reports find toxic metal in Starkey Spring Water, which was
previously recalled for exceeding federal limits, and is sold on Amazon
Ryan Felton
the guardian
Wed 24 Jun 2020 05.00 EDT
Bottled water manufactured by Whole Foods and sold in most of its US stores and on Amazon contains potentially harmful levels of arsenic, according to new tests by Consumer Reports (CR).
CR recently tested dozens of bottled water brands and found that Starkey Spring Water, introduced by Whole Foods in 2015, had concerning levels of arsenic, ranging from 9.49 to 9.56 parts per billion (PPB), at least three times the level of every other brand tested. Federal regulations require manufacturers to limit the amount of arsenic, a potentially dangerous heavy metal, in bottled water to 10 PPB. CR experts believe that level does not adequately protect public health.
CR also tested samples of Starkey Spring Water in 2019, finding levels of arsenic that approached or exceeded the federal limit: three samples ranged from 9.48 to 9.86 PPB of arsenic; a fourth registered 10.1 PPB. Those results are cited in two pending consumer lawsuits over Starkey’s arsenic content.
Drinking a single bottle of Starkey probably will not harm you, says Dr James Dickerson, CR’s chief scientific officer. “But regular consumption of even small amounts of the heavy metal over extended periods increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, and lower IQ scores in children, and poses other health issues as well,” he says.
The results of the testing come as the Guardian and Consumer Reports launch a major project this week on the challenges of getting access to safe, clean, affordable water in the US. That includes how the bottled water consumers sometimes resort to as an alternative is not only expensive, but may also not always be safer.
“I think the average consumer would be stunned to learn that they’re paying a lot of extra money for bottled water, thinking that it’s significantly safer than tap, and unknowingly getting potentially dangerous levels of arsenic,” says Erik Olson, senior strategic director of health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization that has researched bottled water quality.
CR’s findings highlight inconsistencies with how water is regulated in the US. Research suggests health risks from arsenic can emerge below the federal limit of 10 PPB, especially in children, prompting two states, New Jersey and New Hampshire, to lower their level to 5 PPB. Those limits, however, only apply to tap water.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which regulates municipal water in the US, allows states to set their own standards for tap water, so long as they’re at least as strict as the federal level. But federal bottled water regulations, which are enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), generally prohibit states from creating more stringent limits for contaminants in bottled water.
That puts Starkey Spring Water in the unusual position of being legal when put in a bottle but, in certain states, illegal if it came out of a household faucet.
---
Previous recalls
Whole Foods introduced Starkey Spring Water in 2015, with chief operating officer AC Gallo telling investors “it’s amazingly pristine water” that “naturally flows out of the ground” from a spring in Idaho. That point is reinforced on the product’s label, which declares that Starkey is “made by Mother Nature”.
But in December 2016, records show that the FDA was notified of tests conducted by Florida’s bottled water regulator showing that Starkey had 11.7 PPB of arsenic, which is above the federal safety threshold. Weeks later, additional tests found 12 PPB of arsenic in samples taken from other lots.
The FDA told Whole Foods about the results, saying the findings could warrant a recall, and asked how the company planned to respond, according to FDA records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The FDA noted the potential health risks –including cancer, skin lesions, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
“With prolonged use of the product for many years, a wide variety of adverse effects may occur,” the FDA report said.
Whole Foods responded to the findings by recalling more than 2,000 cases of Starkey Spring Water in late 2016 and early 2017.
Since then, the company’s own internal tests continue to show arsenic levels at 8 to 9 PPB – lower than the levels CR found.
In California, state law requires bottlers to provide consumers an easy-to-read report detailing the quality of their product. If a bottled water has arsenic levels above 5 PPB, the company must include a disclaimer in those reports noting the elevated levels. Consumers often can find the report on a company’s website or by contacting the manufacturer directly.[...]
RELATED: REVEALED: MILLIONS OF AMERICANS CAN’T AFFORD WATER AS BILLS RISE 80% IN A DECADE
CR recently tested dozens of bottled water brands and found that Starkey Spring Water, introduced by Whole Foods in 2015, had concerning levels of arsenic, ranging from 9.49 to 9.56 parts per billion (PPB), at least three times the level of every other brand tested. Federal regulations require manufacturers to limit the amount of arsenic, a potentially dangerous heavy metal, in bottled water to 10 PPB. CR experts believe that level does not adequately protect public health.
CR also tested samples of Starkey Spring Water in 2019, finding levels of arsenic that approached or exceeded the federal limit: three samples ranged from 9.48 to 9.86 PPB of arsenic; a fourth registered 10.1 PPB. Those results are cited in two pending consumer lawsuits over Starkey’s arsenic content.
Drinking a single bottle of Starkey probably will not harm you, says Dr James Dickerson, CR’s chief scientific officer. “But regular consumption of even small amounts of the heavy metal over extended periods increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, and lower IQ scores in children, and poses other health issues as well,” he says.
The results of the testing come as the Guardian and Consumer Reports launch a major project this week on the challenges of getting access to safe, clean, affordable water in the US. That includes how the bottled water consumers sometimes resort to as an alternative is not only expensive, but may also not always be safer.
“I think the average consumer would be stunned to learn that they’re paying a lot of extra money for bottled water, thinking that it’s significantly safer than tap, and unknowingly getting potentially dangerous levels of arsenic,” says Erik Olson, senior strategic director of health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization that has researched bottled water quality.
CR’s findings highlight inconsistencies with how water is regulated in the US. Research suggests health risks from arsenic can emerge below the federal limit of 10 PPB, especially in children, prompting two states, New Jersey and New Hampshire, to lower their level to 5 PPB. Those limits, however, only apply to tap water.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which regulates municipal water in the US, allows states to set their own standards for tap water, so long as they’re at least as strict as the federal level. But federal bottled water regulations, which are enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), generally prohibit states from creating more stringent limits for contaminants in bottled water.
That puts Starkey Spring Water in the unusual position of being legal when put in a bottle but, in certain states, illegal if it came out of a household faucet.
---
Previous recalls
Whole Foods introduced Starkey Spring Water in 2015, with chief operating officer AC Gallo telling investors “it’s amazingly pristine water” that “naturally flows out of the ground” from a spring in Idaho. That point is reinforced on the product’s label, which declares that Starkey is “made by Mother Nature”.
But in December 2016, records show that the FDA was notified of tests conducted by Florida’s bottled water regulator showing that Starkey had 11.7 PPB of arsenic, which is above the federal safety threshold. Weeks later, additional tests found 12 PPB of arsenic in samples taken from other lots.
The FDA told Whole Foods about the results, saying the findings could warrant a recall, and asked how the company planned to respond, according to FDA records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The FDA noted the potential health risks –including cancer, skin lesions, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
“With prolonged use of the product for many years, a wide variety of adverse effects may occur,” the FDA report said.
Whole Foods responded to the findings by recalling more than 2,000 cases of Starkey Spring Water in late 2016 and early 2017.
Since then, the company’s own internal tests continue to show arsenic levels at 8 to 9 PPB – lower than the levels CR found.
In California, state law requires bottlers to provide consumers an easy-to-read report detailing the quality of their product. If a bottled water has arsenic levels above 5 PPB, the company must include a disclaimer in those reports noting the elevated levels. Consumers often can find the report on a company’s website or by contacting the manufacturer directly.[...]
RELATED: REVEALED: MILLIONS OF AMERICANS CAN’T AFFORD WATER AS BILLS RISE 80% IN A DECADE
poisoning americans for profit!!!
Agriculture Department Eases The Way For Test-Tube Plants To Spread Into Nature
It Helped When a Florida Billionaire Hired a Lobbyist With Close Ties to Trump
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
6/12/2020
A USDA plan to loosen regulation of genetically modified crops could benefit Florida billionaire Randal Kirk whose company hired Trump fundraiser and lobbyist Roy Bailey.
Michael Gregoire, then the acting administrator of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, withdrew a proposed regulation to give more power to APHIS to evaluate whether genetically modified plants could become harmful weeds. This happened just 21 days after Bailey became a lobbyist for Intrexon, one of Kirk’s companies.
The regulation that Trump’s Agriculture Department drafted instead would let developers determine whether their crops should be regulated based on comparing plant traits to traits that already aren’t regulated. It becomes effective Aug. 17
“This common-sense approach will ultimately give farmers more choices in the field and consumers more choices at the grocery store,” said Greg Ibach, the USDA undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs.
Kirk, who lives just 7.1 miles from Mar-a-Lago in a house an LLC bought for $25.5 million in 2011, is estimated to be worth $2.2 billion. Intrexon, where Kirk was the CEO, bought a company that developed apples that don’t brown. Intrexon, which recently was renamed Precigen, sold the biotech parts of the company to another Kirk company, Third Security LLC, after Intrexon lost $509.3 million in 2018.
Records show Intrexon paid Bailey’s lobbying firm, Bailey Strategic Advisors, about $180,000 from 2017 through 2019 to meet with officials from the White House, the president’s office, the vice president’s office, and agencies including the USDA.
Bailey has also served as the finance chair of America First Action, a super PAC that raised more than $40 million to try to re-elect Trump.
The Center for Food Safety called the regulation “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to sound science.”
Under the Plant Protection Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, is supposed to regulate genetically engineered crops to reduce risk of spreading plant pests or harmful weeds. But Trump’s regulation would allow the developers of genetically engineered plants to decide if their companies should be exempted from this.
The center said assessing the risk of plant pests must account for unintended as well as intended effects of genetic modification. For instance, the genetic engineering of Arctic apples to resist browning involved silencing genes that generate enzymes that help protect against disease and insects in some plants.
APHIS currently only regulates genetically engineered plants that were produced using genetic material derived from plant pests such as the common soil bacteria Agrobacterium.
Michael Gregoire, then the acting administrator of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, withdrew a proposed regulation to give more power to APHIS to evaluate whether genetically modified plants could become harmful weeds. This happened just 21 days after Bailey became a lobbyist for Intrexon, one of Kirk’s companies.
The regulation that Trump’s Agriculture Department drafted instead would let developers determine whether their crops should be regulated based on comparing plant traits to traits that already aren’t regulated. It becomes effective Aug. 17
“This common-sense approach will ultimately give farmers more choices in the field and consumers more choices at the grocery store,” said Greg Ibach, the USDA undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs.
Kirk, who lives just 7.1 miles from Mar-a-Lago in a house an LLC bought for $25.5 million in 2011, is estimated to be worth $2.2 billion. Intrexon, where Kirk was the CEO, bought a company that developed apples that don’t brown. Intrexon, which recently was renamed Precigen, sold the biotech parts of the company to another Kirk company, Third Security LLC, after Intrexon lost $509.3 million in 2018.
Records show Intrexon paid Bailey’s lobbying firm, Bailey Strategic Advisors, about $180,000 from 2017 through 2019 to meet with officials from the White House, the president’s office, the vice president’s office, and agencies including the USDA.
Bailey has also served as the finance chair of America First Action, a super PAC that raised more than $40 million to try to re-elect Trump.
The Center for Food Safety called the regulation “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to sound science.”
Under the Plant Protection Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, is supposed to regulate genetically engineered crops to reduce risk of spreading plant pests or harmful weeds. But Trump’s regulation would allow the developers of genetically engineered plants to decide if their companies should be exempted from this.
The center said assessing the risk of plant pests must account for unintended as well as intended effects of genetic modification. For instance, the genetic engineering of Arctic apples to resist browning involved silencing genes that generate enzymes that help protect against disease and insects in some plants.
APHIS currently only regulates genetically engineered plants that were produced using genetic material derived from plant pests such as the common soil bacteria Agrobacterium.
Soot In The Air + Coronavirus = Higher Death Rates
So, of Course, Trump’s EPA Ignores Harvard Study and Its Own Scientists to Stick with Lax Air Pollution Standards
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
june 4, 2020
A Harvard study found that long-term exposure to microscopic soot in the air appears to be associated with higher death rates from the coronavirus.
But Trump’s EPA has recommended keeping the 2012 standards for microscopic soot that are linked to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year.
The plan overrides advice from EPA staff scientists.
“I do think it’s unwise to roll back regulatory pollution standards at a time when we know there is a virus that is attacking the lungs,” said Harvard biostatistician Francesca Dominici.
Microscopic soot, or particulate matter, is about 1/30th the width of a human hair. The pollution comes from power plants, cars, trucks, wood-burning stoves and wildfires. The particles can enter the lungs and are linked to heart attacks, strokes, aggravated asthma and premature deaths.
The EPA is required by law to study the latest science about particulate matter pollution and public health every five years so the EPA administrator can set a standard to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety.
Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt removed the process of assessing air quality standards from the EPA Office of Research and Development which has much of the EPA’s scientific expertise. Pruitt moved it to Office of Air and Radiation, then headed by attorney Bill Wehrum.
Andrew Wheeler, who replaced Pruitt, fired scientists on a panel set up to study particulate matter. The committee making recommendations about microscopic soot is led by consultant Tony Cox who wrote a discredited study that claimed soot in the air can be beneficial. The panel has no statisticians, experts in modeling risk assessment or epidemiologists.
Harvard’s ‘Bogus Analysis’
Historically, Harvard’s public health studies have been vital for EPA public health rules, but Cox trashed the Harvard study. He called it “not a model that is ready for prime time” and a “bogus piece of analysis.”
“I would have zero confidence in the published results of this study because its interpretation, design and analysis are fundamentally flawed,” Cox said.
Since Trump took office, the concentration of fine particles of soot, or particulate matter 2.5, has increased 5.8%. The number of “unhealthy air days” in major cities, based on smog and PM 2.5 levels, rose to its highest level since 2012.
Industry groups that have urged the Trump EPA against tightening the rule include the American Petroleum Institute, for which Cox has done consulting work.
Save 12,000 Lives a Year
The current EPA limit for microscopic soot is 12 micrograms per cubic meter. An unofficial panel assembled by the Union of Concerned Scientists recommended lowering that limit to between 8 and 10 micrograms per cubic meter. Reducing the soot standard to 9 micrograms per cubic meter could reduce deaths by up to 27% or about 12,150 people a year.
The Harvard study, whose lead authors are doctoral student Xiao Wu and assistant professor Rachel Nethery, is the first nationwide study to estimate the relationship between long-term exposure to microscopic soot and COVID-19 death rates.
The study looked at 3,087 counties covering 98% of the population. At that time, in late April, there were just 45,817 deaths. It found an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate associated an increase in microscopic soot of 1 microgram per cubic meter.
Earlier studies also have found connections between pollution and deaths during pandemics. During the 2003 SARS outbreak, locations in China with a moderate or high long-term air pollution had SARS death rates 126% and 71% higher, respectively, than locations with low air pollution indexes.
Studies found exposure to microscopic soot associated with deaths during the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009. Historical data shows a relationship between air pollution from burning coal and deaths during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
But Trump’s EPA has recommended keeping the 2012 standards for microscopic soot that are linked to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year.
The plan overrides advice from EPA staff scientists.
“I do think it’s unwise to roll back regulatory pollution standards at a time when we know there is a virus that is attacking the lungs,” said Harvard biostatistician Francesca Dominici.
Microscopic soot, or particulate matter, is about 1/30th the width of a human hair. The pollution comes from power plants, cars, trucks, wood-burning stoves and wildfires. The particles can enter the lungs and are linked to heart attacks, strokes, aggravated asthma and premature deaths.
The EPA is required by law to study the latest science about particulate matter pollution and public health every five years so the EPA administrator can set a standard to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety.
Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt removed the process of assessing air quality standards from the EPA Office of Research and Development which has much of the EPA’s scientific expertise. Pruitt moved it to Office of Air and Radiation, then headed by attorney Bill Wehrum.
Andrew Wheeler, who replaced Pruitt, fired scientists on a panel set up to study particulate matter. The committee making recommendations about microscopic soot is led by consultant Tony Cox who wrote a discredited study that claimed soot in the air can be beneficial. The panel has no statisticians, experts in modeling risk assessment or epidemiologists.
Harvard’s ‘Bogus Analysis’
Historically, Harvard’s public health studies have been vital for EPA public health rules, but Cox trashed the Harvard study. He called it “not a model that is ready for prime time” and a “bogus piece of analysis.”
“I would have zero confidence in the published results of this study because its interpretation, design and analysis are fundamentally flawed,” Cox said.
Since Trump took office, the concentration of fine particles of soot, or particulate matter 2.5, has increased 5.8%. The number of “unhealthy air days” in major cities, based on smog and PM 2.5 levels, rose to its highest level since 2012.
Industry groups that have urged the Trump EPA against tightening the rule include the American Petroleum Institute, for which Cox has done consulting work.
Save 12,000 Lives a Year
The current EPA limit for microscopic soot is 12 micrograms per cubic meter. An unofficial panel assembled by the Union of Concerned Scientists recommended lowering that limit to between 8 and 10 micrograms per cubic meter. Reducing the soot standard to 9 micrograms per cubic meter could reduce deaths by up to 27% or about 12,150 people a year.
The Harvard study, whose lead authors are doctoral student Xiao Wu and assistant professor Rachel Nethery, is the first nationwide study to estimate the relationship between long-term exposure to microscopic soot and COVID-19 death rates.
The study looked at 3,087 counties covering 98% of the population. At that time, in late April, there were just 45,817 deaths. It found an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate associated an increase in microscopic soot of 1 microgram per cubic meter.
Earlier studies also have found connections between pollution and deaths during pandemics. During the 2003 SARS outbreak, locations in China with a moderate or high long-term air pollution had SARS death rates 126% and 71% higher, respectively, than locations with low air pollution indexes.
Studies found exposure to microscopic soot associated with deaths during the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009. Historical data shows a relationship between air pollution from burning coal and deaths during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
With nation focused on pandemic, Trump Interior Dept. to greenlight killing of bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens
May 28, 2020
By Common Dreams
“Killing has no place in our National Wildlife Refuges.”
President Donald Trump’s National Park Service plans to finalize rules this week that will allow hunters in Alaska to kill bear cubs and wolf pups while they are in their dens, reversing Obama-era regulations meant to prevent destabilization of the state’s biodiversity.
The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) accused the administration of taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to push through a rule change against the advice of dozens of natural resource experts and lawmakers.
“Amid the global pandemic, the Trump administration is declaring open season on bears and wolves through its sport hunting rule on national parklands in Alaska,” said NPCA President Theresa Pierno.
Under the new rules, hunters in Alaska will be permitted to:
Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican, claimed Thursday that the new rules are a matter of “principle” and protecting states’ rights. Conservation groups expressed outrage.
“Killing has no place in our National Wildlife Refuges,” tweeted the Wolf Conservation Center.
Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke drafted the rule before resigning in 2018 in the face of 17 federal ethics investigations, and the proposal promptly drew condemnation.
Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) led more than 70 of her colleagues in demanding the rule be withdrawn.
“The proposed rule would roll back critical protections for America’s beloved, rare and iconic native carnivores, including brown bears, black bears and wolves on the approximately 20 million acres of national preserves in Alaska—land that belongs to all Americans,” wrote the lawmakers. “The rule would effectively endorse the state of Alaska’s efforts to use extreme practices to reduce bear and wolf populations in order to artificially inflate populations of prey species for sport hunting.”
More than 100 scientists, former National Park Service employees, and academics also denounced the rule, saying “extremely limited scientific evidence” was being used to justify making it easier for hunters to kill bear cubs and wolf pups.
“Interior Secretary David Bernhardt had the opportunity to halt this rule that includes baiting park bears but chose instead to ignore commonsense and opposition by members of Congress, scientists, and tens of thousands of Americans,” said Pierno. “Shooting hibernating mama and baby bears is not the conservation legacy that our national parks are meant to preserve and no way to treat or manage park wildlife.”
President Donald Trump’s National Park Service plans to finalize rules this week that will allow hunters in Alaska to kill bear cubs and wolf pups while they are in their dens, reversing Obama-era regulations meant to prevent destabilization of the state’s biodiversity.
The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) accused the administration of taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to push through a rule change against the advice of dozens of natural resource experts and lawmakers.
“Amid the global pandemic, the Trump administration is declaring open season on bears and wolves through its sport hunting rule on national parklands in Alaska,” said NPCA President Theresa Pierno.
Under the new rules, hunters in Alaska will be permitted to:
- use bait including donuts and grease-soaked bread to draw in and kill brown bears;
- use artificial lights to enter dens and kill black bears, including females and their cubs;
- shoot caribou while they are swimming; and
- trap and kill wolves and their pups during denning season.
Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican, claimed Thursday that the new rules are a matter of “principle” and protecting states’ rights. Conservation groups expressed outrage.
“Killing has no place in our National Wildlife Refuges,” tweeted the Wolf Conservation Center.
Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke drafted the rule before resigning in 2018 in the face of 17 federal ethics investigations, and the proposal promptly drew condemnation.
Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) led more than 70 of her colleagues in demanding the rule be withdrawn.
“The proposed rule would roll back critical protections for America’s beloved, rare and iconic native carnivores, including brown bears, black bears and wolves on the approximately 20 million acres of national preserves in Alaska—land that belongs to all Americans,” wrote the lawmakers. “The rule would effectively endorse the state of Alaska’s efforts to use extreme practices to reduce bear and wolf populations in order to artificially inflate populations of prey species for sport hunting.”
More than 100 scientists, former National Park Service employees, and academics also denounced the rule, saying “extremely limited scientific evidence” was being used to justify making it easier for hunters to kill bear cubs and wolf pups.
“Interior Secretary David Bernhardt had the opportunity to halt this rule that includes baiting park bears but chose instead to ignore commonsense and opposition by members of Congress, scientists, and tens of thousands of Americans,” said Pierno. “Shooting hibernating mama and baby bears is not the conservation legacy that our national parks are meant to preserve and no way to treat or manage park wildlife.”
we are being poisoned!!!
Trump Administration Uses Pandemic To Cover For Loosening Crop Poison Regulation
A Deadly Herbicide Ends Up in Lakes and Rivers, Severely Harming Wildlife
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
5/12/2020
The Trump EPA wants to reapprove use of a dangerous herbicide.
Trump appointees are hiding behind the COVID-19 pandemic to excuse a herbicide manufacturer from monitoring levels of the poison in Midwest lakes and streams.
The EPA plans to raise the concentration of atrazine allowed in streams and lakes to 15 parts per billion. That is more than four times higher than what the EPA had recommended under the Obama administration. In April, Elissa Reaves, acting director of the herbicide re-evaluation division, suspended monitoring for the rest of the year.
“The public will now have no idea whether dangerous levels of atrazine are reaching rivers and streams throughout the Midwest,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “That’s absurd and reckless.”
Atrazine, which is banned in Europe, often washes into streams and lakes and is one of the most common contaminants of drinking water. It chemically castrates frogs. More than 70 million pounds of atrazine was sprayed in 2016, mostly to control weeds in cornfields but also on sorghum, sugarcane and other crops.
Syngenta, the Swiss company that is the main manufacturer of atrazine, didn’t report any federal lobbying in 2019. But its former lobbyists include Jeff Sands who took a $99,125 pay cut in 2017 to work for then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt as a senior agricultural adviser.
Sands, who left the EPA, received an ethics waiver from Don McGahn, then Trump’s attorney, to participate in agricultural issues, including those he previously lobbied. The waiver was not supposed to include anything relating to Syngenta.
The Swiss company is known for trashing its critics and wielded influence over EPA decisions long before Trump was elected. Syngenta commissioned a psychological profile of Tyrone Hayes, the University of California, Berkeley, professor whose research found atrazine appeared to disrupt the sexual development of frogs.
The EPA’s 2007 and 2012 assessments of atrazine excluded 74 of 75 published laboratory studies on the effects of atrazine on amphibians. The single study it relied on, which found virtually no adverse reproductive impacts even at relatively high doses of atrazine, was funded by Syngenta. Co-author Alan Hosmer was an employee of Syngenta.
The EPA’s ecological risk assessment, done during the Obama administration, repeatedly cites a 2008 paper, funded by Syngenta. The paper about atrazine’s effects on fish, amphibians and reptiles was written by pesticide industry consultant Keith Solomon and colleagues.
Jason Rohr and Krista McCoy, then at the University of South Florida, found that Solomon misrepresented more than 50 of the studies he and his colleagues reviewed with 122 inaccurate and 22 misleading statements. About 96.5% of these inaccurate or misleading statements appeared to benefit Syngenta.
Frogs are an indicator species, meaning that harm to them can show risks to other species. The average decline for amphibian populations is about 3.8% a year. At this rate, some species will disappear in half the habitats they occupy in about 20 years.
Trump appointees are hiding behind the COVID-19 pandemic to excuse a herbicide manufacturer from monitoring levels of the poison in Midwest lakes and streams.
The EPA plans to raise the concentration of atrazine allowed in streams and lakes to 15 parts per billion. That is more than four times higher than what the EPA had recommended under the Obama administration. In April, Elissa Reaves, acting director of the herbicide re-evaluation division, suspended monitoring for the rest of the year.
“The public will now have no idea whether dangerous levels of atrazine are reaching rivers and streams throughout the Midwest,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “That’s absurd and reckless.”
Atrazine, which is banned in Europe, often washes into streams and lakes and is one of the most common contaminants of drinking water. It chemically castrates frogs. More than 70 million pounds of atrazine was sprayed in 2016, mostly to control weeds in cornfields but also on sorghum, sugarcane and other crops.
Syngenta, the Swiss company that is the main manufacturer of atrazine, didn’t report any federal lobbying in 2019. But its former lobbyists include Jeff Sands who took a $99,125 pay cut in 2017 to work for then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt as a senior agricultural adviser.
Sands, who left the EPA, received an ethics waiver from Don McGahn, then Trump’s attorney, to participate in agricultural issues, including those he previously lobbied. The waiver was not supposed to include anything relating to Syngenta.
The Swiss company is known for trashing its critics and wielded influence over EPA decisions long before Trump was elected. Syngenta commissioned a psychological profile of Tyrone Hayes, the University of California, Berkeley, professor whose research found atrazine appeared to disrupt the sexual development of frogs.
The EPA’s 2007 and 2012 assessments of atrazine excluded 74 of 75 published laboratory studies on the effects of atrazine on amphibians. The single study it relied on, which found virtually no adverse reproductive impacts even at relatively high doses of atrazine, was funded by Syngenta. Co-author Alan Hosmer was an employee of Syngenta.
The EPA’s ecological risk assessment, done during the Obama administration, repeatedly cites a 2008 paper, funded by Syngenta. The paper about atrazine’s effects on fish, amphibians and reptiles was written by pesticide industry consultant Keith Solomon and colleagues.
Jason Rohr and Krista McCoy, then at the University of South Florida, found that Solomon misrepresented more than 50 of the studies he and his colleagues reviewed with 122 inaccurate and 22 misleading statements. About 96.5% of these inaccurate or misleading statements appeared to benefit Syngenta.
Frogs are an indicator species, meaning that harm to them can show risks to other species. The average decline for amphibian populations is about 3.8% a year. At this rate, some species will disappear in half the habitats they occupy in about 20 years.
america is being poisoned by its "leader"!!!
Trump dismantles environmental protections under cover of coronavirus
Administration is weakening protections ahead of the election, making changes that could take years for a Democratic president to undo
Emily Holden in Washington
the guardian
Mon 11 May 2020 02.00 EDT
The Trump administration is diligently weakening US environment protections even amid a global pandemic, continuing its rollback as the November election approaches.
During the Covid-19 lockdown, US federal agencies have eased fuel-efficiency standards for new cars; frozen rules for soot air pollution; proposed to drop review requirements for liquefied natural gas terminals; continued to lease public property to oil and gas companies; sought to speed up permitting for offshore fish farms; and advanced a proposal on mercury pollution from power plants that could make it easier for the government to conclude regulations are too costly to justify their benefits.
The government has also relaxed reporting rules for polluters during the pandemic.
Trump’s ambitions reach even to the moon, which he has announced he wants the US to mine.
Gina McCarthy, formerly Barack Obama’s environment chief, now runs the Natural Resources Defense Council. She said the Trump administration was acting to cut public health protections while the American public is distracted by a public health crisis.
“People right now are hunkered down trying to put food on the table, take care of people who are sick, worry about educating their children at home,” McCarthy said. “How many people are going to really be able to sit down and scrutinize these things in any way?”
McCarthy said the government was “literally not interested in the law or science”, and that “is going to become strikingly clear as people look at how the administration is handling Covid-19”.
The Trump administration is playing both offense and defense, rescinding and rewriting some rules and crafting others that would be time-consuming for a Democratic president to reverse.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has written what critics say will be a weak proposal for climate pollution from airplanes, a placeholder that will hinder stricter regulation.
Trump officials have been attempting to create a coronavirus relief program for oil and gas corporations, a new move in his campaign to back the industry and stymie global climate action. The president has sown distrust of climate science and vowed to exit the Paris climate agreement, which the US can do after the election.
Historians say Trump’s presidency has forced a pendulum swing back from the environmental awakening of the 1960s and 70s, when there was bipartisan support for conservation. Protecting the environment – and particularly the climate – is an issue that has become embroiled in political ideology.
“What Trump’s done is create a blitzkrieg against the environment … trying to dismantle not just Obama’s environmental achievements but turn back the clock to a pre-Richard Nixon day,” said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University who is writing a book on the subject.
“It’s just death by a thousand cuts. It’s not one issue, it’s just across the board.”
The administration is under a tight deadline to secure changes before the election. A US law, the Congressional Review Act, allows lawmakers to more easily rescind regulations or rollbacks issued later in an election year.
“They’re hitting a now or never timeline,” said Christine Tezak, the managing director at the analysis firm ClearView Energy Partners. “There’s a lot they want to get done before the election, just in case.”
Some trends are working against Trump – including states advancing environmental goals, and low-cost renewable power and natural gas helping reduce the climate footprint of the electricity sector. Even Houston, an energy hub, has issued a climate action plan. Yet such contributions are not expected to be enough to fulfill America’s role in stalling the global crisis.
Environmental advocates have challenged many of the Trump changes in court – and won. The Natural Resources Defense Council has sued 110 times and says it has prevailed in about 90% of lawsuits resolved.
Recently, judges tossed out a permit for the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline and decided the EPA cannot bar scientists who receive federal grants from serving as agency advisers.
Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer with the firm Bracewell who represents regulated industries and was a deputy EPA administrator under George W Bush, argued that many of the changes characterized as “rollbacks” are actually “sensible, reasonable regulatory reforms” or fixes to problems.
“It’s impossible to understand the Trump administration’s EPA unless you go back and look at the Obama administration,” he said. “In many groups there was a sense that there really had been a great deal of regulatory overreach. And even if you disagree with that, the regulatory programs created problems that they didn’t come back and fix.”
‘This is about who we’re protecting’
Trump’s deregulatory agenda has addressed some issues industry would rather were left alone. The agency is changing the way it calculates the benefits of mercury controls for power plants. Companies had already complied with the rule and most didn’t want it changed. But the revision is meant to set a precedent for the government to ignore some positive health outcomes of regulation.
Trump’s weakened standards often go against science too, critics say.
Last month, for example, the EPA decided not to tighten rules for soot pollution, refuting rebutting guidance from experts that more stringent standards would save lives. The EPA has also repopulated advisory boards with representatives from industry and conservative states and is trying to change what science it can consider when developing health protections.
If a Democrat takes the White House, it will take years to reverse some changes. Moving faster would require Democrats holding both chambers of Congress. Even then, industry would fight hard.
Christopher Cook, the environment chief for Boston, said Trump’s efforts had been “incongruous with all the actions that major cities are taking”.
“The thing I would ask most Americans to consider when they’re supporting stronger regulation is that this isn’t about what we’re protecting against, this is about who we’re protecting,” Cook said, noting that places with more pollution are faring worse under the coronavirus pandemic.
“Covid has been a dry run for the climate crisis. We’ve seen the populations that Covid affects because it attacks the respiratory system. We can’t continue with bad air in America.”
During the Covid-19 lockdown, US federal agencies have eased fuel-efficiency standards for new cars; frozen rules for soot air pollution; proposed to drop review requirements for liquefied natural gas terminals; continued to lease public property to oil and gas companies; sought to speed up permitting for offshore fish farms; and advanced a proposal on mercury pollution from power plants that could make it easier for the government to conclude regulations are too costly to justify their benefits.
The government has also relaxed reporting rules for polluters during the pandemic.
Trump’s ambitions reach even to the moon, which he has announced he wants the US to mine.
Gina McCarthy, formerly Barack Obama’s environment chief, now runs the Natural Resources Defense Council. She said the Trump administration was acting to cut public health protections while the American public is distracted by a public health crisis.
“People right now are hunkered down trying to put food on the table, take care of people who are sick, worry about educating their children at home,” McCarthy said. “How many people are going to really be able to sit down and scrutinize these things in any way?”
McCarthy said the government was “literally not interested in the law or science”, and that “is going to become strikingly clear as people look at how the administration is handling Covid-19”.
The Trump administration is playing both offense and defense, rescinding and rewriting some rules and crafting others that would be time-consuming for a Democratic president to reverse.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has written what critics say will be a weak proposal for climate pollution from airplanes, a placeholder that will hinder stricter regulation.
Trump officials have been attempting to create a coronavirus relief program for oil and gas corporations, a new move in his campaign to back the industry and stymie global climate action. The president has sown distrust of climate science and vowed to exit the Paris climate agreement, which the US can do after the election.
Historians say Trump’s presidency has forced a pendulum swing back from the environmental awakening of the 1960s and 70s, when there was bipartisan support for conservation. Protecting the environment – and particularly the climate – is an issue that has become embroiled in political ideology.
“What Trump’s done is create a blitzkrieg against the environment … trying to dismantle not just Obama’s environmental achievements but turn back the clock to a pre-Richard Nixon day,” said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University who is writing a book on the subject.
“It’s just death by a thousand cuts. It’s not one issue, it’s just across the board.”
The administration is under a tight deadline to secure changes before the election. A US law, the Congressional Review Act, allows lawmakers to more easily rescind regulations or rollbacks issued later in an election year.
“They’re hitting a now or never timeline,” said Christine Tezak, the managing director at the analysis firm ClearView Energy Partners. “There’s a lot they want to get done before the election, just in case.”
Some trends are working against Trump – including states advancing environmental goals, and low-cost renewable power and natural gas helping reduce the climate footprint of the electricity sector. Even Houston, an energy hub, has issued a climate action plan. Yet such contributions are not expected to be enough to fulfill America’s role in stalling the global crisis.
Environmental advocates have challenged many of the Trump changes in court – and won. The Natural Resources Defense Council has sued 110 times and says it has prevailed in about 90% of lawsuits resolved.
Recently, judges tossed out a permit for the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline and decided the EPA cannot bar scientists who receive federal grants from serving as agency advisers.
Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer with the firm Bracewell who represents regulated industries and was a deputy EPA administrator under George W Bush, argued that many of the changes characterized as “rollbacks” are actually “sensible, reasonable regulatory reforms” or fixes to problems.
“It’s impossible to understand the Trump administration’s EPA unless you go back and look at the Obama administration,” he said. “In many groups there was a sense that there really had been a great deal of regulatory overreach. And even if you disagree with that, the regulatory programs created problems that they didn’t come back and fix.”
‘This is about who we’re protecting’
Trump’s deregulatory agenda has addressed some issues industry would rather were left alone. The agency is changing the way it calculates the benefits of mercury controls for power plants. Companies had already complied with the rule and most didn’t want it changed. But the revision is meant to set a precedent for the government to ignore some positive health outcomes of regulation.
Trump’s weakened standards often go against science too, critics say.
Last month, for example, the EPA decided not to tighten rules for soot pollution, refuting rebutting guidance from experts that more stringent standards would save lives. The EPA has also repopulated advisory boards with representatives from industry and conservative states and is trying to change what science it can consider when developing health protections.
If a Democrat takes the White House, it will take years to reverse some changes. Moving faster would require Democrats holding both chambers of Congress. Even then, industry would fight hard.
Christopher Cook, the environment chief for Boston, said Trump’s efforts had been “incongruous with all the actions that major cities are taking”.
“The thing I would ask most Americans to consider when they’re supporting stronger regulation is that this isn’t about what we’re protecting against, this is about who we’re protecting,” Cook said, noting that places with more pollution are faring worse under the coronavirus pandemic.
“Covid has been a dry run for the climate crisis. We’ve seen the populations that Covid affects because it attacks the respiratory system. We can’t continue with bad air in America.”
Trump Signs Executive Order Greenlighting 'Corporate Takeover of Our Oceans While They Hope We Aren't Paying Attention'
"Trump is exploiting a public health crisis to help an industry known for pumping diseases and antibiotics into oceans."
byJake Johnson, staff writer - common dreams
Friday, May 08, 2020
President Donald Trump issued an executive order late Thursday that environmentalists warned will accelerate the corporate exploitation of oceans by relaxing regulations on and streamlining the construction of industrial offshore aquaculture facilities, which critics deride as "floating factory farms" that pump pollution and diseases into public waters.
The Don't Cage Our Ocean Coalition, which was formed to oppose ocean industrial fish farming, said in a statement that Trump's Executive Order on Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth "mandates federal agencies to craft a program for rapid authorization of industrial offshore aquaculture facilities, which use giant floating cages to cultivate finfish, allowing toxic pollution to flow into open waters."
Rosanna Marie Neil, policy counsel for Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, a member of the coalition, said the Trump White House is "supporting the corporate takeover of our oceans while they hope we aren't paying attention."
Environmental attorney Marianne Cufone similarly accused Trump of exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic to "push through dangerous short-cuts to regulatory processes, while communities struggle to stay healthy, pay rent, and put food on the table."
"The federal government should strengthen local food security during this health crisis by supporting sustainable seafood," said Cufone, "rather than allowing corporations to pollute the ecosystems we depend on."
Trump's executive order Thursday was just the latest step the president has taken amid the coronavirus pandemic to loosen regulations on polluting industries. In late March, as Common Dreams reported, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a sweeping suspension of pollution regulations and empowered the fossil fuel industry to police itself indefinitely.
Environmental groups sued the EPA over the move, which they condemned as a "free pass for polluters."
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal Thursday, White House advisers Joe Grogan and Peter Navarro touted Trump's aquaculture executive order as a step toward making the U.S. "the world's seafood superpower."
"President Trump's executive order creates a task force to enact policies that encourage fair and reciprocal trade for America's seafood industry, and strengthens enforcement of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing," Grogan and Navarro wrote. (BULLSHIT!!!)
But environmentalists cautioned that the order simply hands U.S. mega-corporations more power to plunder oceans without oversight, imperiling local fishing communities and the health of public waters.
"It is outrageous and unethical for the federal government to use the current public health crisis to bolster this polluting industry," Hallie Templeton, senior oceans campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Now is the time to prioritize our health, security, sustainable food systems, and American farmers and fishermen, not corporations."
The Don't Cage Our Ocean Coalition, which was formed to oppose ocean industrial fish farming, said in a statement that Trump's Executive Order on Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth "mandates federal agencies to craft a program for rapid authorization of industrial offshore aquaculture facilities, which use giant floating cages to cultivate finfish, allowing toxic pollution to flow into open waters."
Rosanna Marie Neil, policy counsel for Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, a member of the coalition, said the Trump White House is "supporting the corporate takeover of our oceans while they hope we aren't paying attention."
Environmental attorney Marianne Cufone similarly accused Trump of exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic to "push through dangerous short-cuts to regulatory processes, while communities struggle to stay healthy, pay rent, and put food on the table."
"The federal government should strengthen local food security during this health crisis by supporting sustainable seafood," said Cufone, "rather than allowing corporations to pollute the ecosystems we depend on."
Trump's executive order Thursday was just the latest step the president has taken amid the coronavirus pandemic to loosen regulations on polluting industries. In late March, as Common Dreams reported, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a sweeping suspension of pollution regulations and empowered the fossil fuel industry to police itself indefinitely.
Environmental groups sued the EPA over the move, which they condemned as a "free pass for polluters."
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal Thursday, White House advisers Joe Grogan and Peter Navarro touted Trump's aquaculture executive order as a step toward making the U.S. "the world's seafood superpower."
"President Trump's executive order creates a task force to enact policies that encourage fair and reciprocal trade for America's seafood industry, and strengthens enforcement of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing," Grogan and Navarro wrote. (BULLSHIT!!!)
But environmentalists cautioned that the order simply hands U.S. mega-corporations more power to plunder oceans without oversight, imperiling local fishing communities and the health of public waters.
"It is outrageous and unethical for the federal government to use the current public health crisis to bolster this polluting industry," Hallie Templeton, senior oceans campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Now is the time to prioritize our health, security, sustainable food systems, and American farmers and fishermen, not corporations."
Nuclear waste
Critics alarmed by US nuclear agency's bid to relax rules on radioactive waste
Nuclear Regulatory Commission keen to allow material to be disposed of by ‘land burial’ – with potentially damaging effects
Daniel Ross - the guardian
Thu 7 May 2020 06.30 EDT
The federal agency providing oversight of the commercial nuclear sector is attempting to push through a rule change critics say could allow dangerous amounts of radioactive material to be disposed of in places like municipal landfills, with potentially serious consequences to human health and the environment.
“This would be the most massive deregulation of radioactive waste in American history,” said Dan Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear industry watchdog non-profit, about a proposal that would permit “very low-level” radioactive waste to be disposed of by “land burial”.
Currently, low-level radioactive waste is primarily disposed of in highly regulated sites in Texas, Washington, South Carolina and Utah. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) also provides exemptions allowing “low-level waste” to be dumped in unlicensed disposal sites, but these exemptions are given only rarely, and are conducted with strict case-by-case protocols in place.
The proposed “interpretive” rule change relaxes the rules surrounding how radioactive materials would be disposed of in unlicensed disposal sites “significantly”, said Hirsch.
“If you dump radioactive waste in places that aren’t designed to deal with it, it comes back to haunt you. It’s in the air you breathe, the food that you eat, the water you drink,” he added.
In an email, David McIntyre, an NRC spokesperson, explained that the rule would apply only to a “small subset” of very low-level waste, and that the agency would not allow such disposals “if we felt public health and safety and the environment would not be protected”.
But major sticking point, say experts, concerns how the term “very low-level waste” is not defined by statute or in the NRC’s own regulations.
The NRC describes low-level wastes as contaminated materials like clothing, tools, and medical equipment. According to McIntyre, the radioactivity of “very low-level waste” is just above background. “The radioactivity level of very low-level waste is so low that it may be safely disposed of in hazardous or municipal solid waste landfills,” he wrote.
Nevertheless, “background doesn’t mean it’s safe,” said Diane D’Arrigo, radioactive waste project director for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, who added that the interpretive rule’s loose language “opens the floodgates” for nuclear waste to be disposed of “as if not radioactive.”
The proposal caps the maximum annual “cumulative dose” to a person from the radioactive wastes dumped into unlicensed sites to 25 millirems – the same limit the NRC uses for highly regulated waste disposal sites. That measurement, said D’Arrigo, is a “projected” amount that can be manipulated through modeling.
Experts point out that the nuclear industry has long sought cheaper ways to dispose of its wastes. As the nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants continues to age, and as more of them approach retirement, some of the decommissioning funds set up to safely dismantle the reactors are proving inadequate.
“The NRC regulations are in effect a cost-benefit analysis,” explained Rodney Ewing, a professor of nuclear security at Stanford University. “It’s been a common trend to look for waste streams that, if separated out, they could be disposed of in less expensive ways.”
Some environmentalists fear the rule change will also disproportionately impact low-income, marginalized communities who are more likely than their wealthier neighbors to be situated near solid waste landfills.
According to Caroline Reiser, nuclear energy legal fellow with the Natural Resources Defense Council, if the proposal is successfully passed, then the issue could end up in court.
“Once it starts getting implemented, that’s when the real fights end up happening,” she said.
“This would be the most massive deregulation of radioactive waste in American history,” said Dan Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear industry watchdog non-profit, about a proposal that would permit “very low-level” radioactive waste to be disposed of by “land burial”.
Currently, low-level radioactive waste is primarily disposed of in highly regulated sites in Texas, Washington, South Carolina and Utah. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) also provides exemptions allowing “low-level waste” to be dumped in unlicensed disposal sites, but these exemptions are given only rarely, and are conducted with strict case-by-case protocols in place.
The proposed “interpretive” rule change relaxes the rules surrounding how radioactive materials would be disposed of in unlicensed disposal sites “significantly”, said Hirsch.
“If you dump radioactive waste in places that aren’t designed to deal with it, it comes back to haunt you. It’s in the air you breathe, the food that you eat, the water you drink,” he added.
In an email, David McIntyre, an NRC spokesperson, explained that the rule would apply only to a “small subset” of very low-level waste, and that the agency would not allow such disposals “if we felt public health and safety and the environment would not be protected”.
But major sticking point, say experts, concerns how the term “very low-level waste” is not defined by statute or in the NRC’s own regulations.
The NRC describes low-level wastes as contaminated materials like clothing, tools, and medical equipment. According to McIntyre, the radioactivity of “very low-level waste” is just above background. “The radioactivity level of very low-level waste is so low that it may be safely disposed of in hazardous or municipal solid waste landfills,” he wrote.
Nevertheless, “background doesn’t mean it’s safe,” said Diane D’Arrigo, radioactive waste project director for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, who added that the interpretive rule’s loose language “opens the floodgates” for nuclear waste to be disposed of “as if not radioactive.”
The proposal caps the maximum annual “cumulative dose” to a person from the radioactive wastes dumped into unlicensed sites to 25 millirems – the same limit the NRC uses for highly regulated waste disposal sites. That measurement, said D’Arrigo, is a “projected” amount that can be manipulated through modeling.
Experts point out that the nuclear industry has long sought cheaper ways to dispose of its wastes. As the nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants continues to age, and as more of them approach retirement, some of the decommissioning funds set up to safely dismantle the reactors are proving inadequate.
“The NRC regulations are in effect a cost-benefit analysis,” explained Rodney Ewing, a professor of nuclear security at Stanford University. “It’s been a common trend to look for waste streams that, if separated out, they could be disposed of in less expensive ways.”
Some environmentalists fear the rule change will also disproportionately impact low-income, marginalized communities who are more likely than their wealthier neighbors to be situated near solid waste landfills.
According to Caroline Reiser, nuclear energy legal fellow with the Natural Resources Defense Council, if the proposal is successfully passed, then the issue could end up in court.
“Once it starts getting implemented, that’s when the real fights end up happening,” she said.
Gas stoves making indoor air up to five times dirtier than outdoor air, report finds
Gas cookers making people sick and exposing tens of millions to air pollution levels that would be illegal if they were outside
Emily Holden in Washington - the guardian
Tue 5 May 2020 06.00 EDT
Gas stoves are making people sick, contributing pollution that makes indoor air up to two to five times dirtier than outdoor air, according to a new report.
Fossil-fuel-burning stoves are likely exposing tens of millions of Americans to air pollution levels that would be illegal if they were outside, concludes the review of decades of science by the Rocky Mountain Institute and multiple environmental advocacy groups.
Lead report author Brady Seals said little attention has been paid despite longstanding knowledge of the problem. “Somehow we’ve gotten accustomed to having a combustion device, often unvented, inside of the home,” Seals said.
About a third of US households cook primarily with gas – which emits nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide, in addition to the particle pollution that all types of stoves produce. Older, poorly maintained stoves pollute even more including risks from carbon monoxide.
Even small increases in short-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide can increase asthma risks for children. One analysis found that children in homes with gas stoves have a 42% higher chance of having asthma symptoms. Another in Australia attributed 12.3% of all childhood asthma burden to gas stoves.
Nitrogen dioxide also makes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease worse and may be linked to heart problems, diabetes and cancer.
Carbon monoxide poisoning can cause a headache, nausea, a rapid heartbeat, cardiac arrest and death.
The best solution, according to the report, is to change to electric stoves. But individuals with gas stoves can also open windows, cook on their back burners, use an exhaust hood, run an air purifier with a HEPA filter and install a carbon monoxide detector.
Indoor air pollution hits poor Americans and people of color worse because they are often also exposed to lead, mercury, highways and industrial plants, said Dr Robert Gould, a California pathologist and board member for Physicians for Social Responsibility who peer-reviewed the report.
“We just need to make these investments,” Gould said. “This fits into an overall plan we would have to protect, particularly, our vulnerable populations.”
Fossil-fuel-burning stoves are likely exposing tens of millions of Americans to air pollution levels that would be illegal if they were outside, concludes the review of decades of science by the Rocky Mountain Institute and multiple environmental advocacy groups.
Lead report author Brady Seals said little attention has been paid despite longstanding knowledge of the problem. “Somehow we’ve gotten accustomed to having a combustion device, often unvented, inside of the home,” Seals said.
About a third of US households cook primarily with gas – which emits nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide, in addition to the particle pollution that all types of stoves produce. Older, poorly maintained stoves pollute even more including risks from carbon monoxide.
Even small increases in short-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide can increase asthma risks for children. One analysis found that children in homes with gas stoves have a 42% higher chance of having asthma symptoms. Another in Australia attributed 12.3% of all childhood asthma burden to gas stoves.
Nitrogen dioxide also makes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease worse and may be linked to heart problems, diabetes and cancer.
Carbon monoxide poisoning can cause a headache, nausea, a rapid heartbeat, cardiac arrest and death.
The best solution, according to the report, is to change to electric stoves. But individuals with gas stoves can also open windows, cook on their back burners, use an exhaust hood, run an air purifier with a HEPA filter and install a carbon monoxide detector.
Indoor air pollution hits poor Americans and people of color worse because they are often also exposed to lead, mercury, highways and industrial plants, said Dr Robert Gould, a California pathologist and board member for Physicians for Social Responsibility who peer-reviewed the report.
“We just need to make these investments,” Gould said. “This fits into an overall plan we would have to protect, particularly, our vulnerable populations.”
EPA decides to reject the latest science, endanger public health and ignore the law by keeping an outdated fine particle air pollution standard
May 4, 2020
By The Conversation - raw story
The COVID-19 pandemic and economic shutdown have temporarily produced clearer skies across the U.S. Meanwhile, however, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been busy finding reasons not to pursue long-lasting air quality gains.
On April 30, 2020, the agency published a proposed new rule that retains current National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate Matter without any revisions. It took this action after a five-year review process, in which scientific evidence showed unequivocally that these standards are not adequate to protect public health.
I have studied air pollution and air quality for over 30 years, and have been directly involved for a decade with EPA’s reviews of scientific findings on air pollution. This includes serving on the agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, or CASAC, and on 10 specialized panels focused on individual pollutants.
As I have written previously, the Trump administration has watered down the role of science in what is supposed to be a science-based process of setting national air quality standards. This new proposal – which I expect will be challenged in court when finalized – is the result.
Fine particle air pollution is deadly
Fine particles, known as PM2.5 because they measure 2.5 microns or less in diameter, can penetrate deeply into the lungs and bloodstream. EPA staff scientists have reaffirmed that daily and annual exposure to PM2.5 causes premature death and a variety of illnesses.
Scientists have known this for decades, but since the national standard was last revised in 2012, new studies have strengthened these findings. They include an epidemiologic study with the largest ever number of subjects and several that include PM2.5 concentrations well below the current standard.
EPA’s scientific staff estimates, based on multiple epidemiologic studies, that currently an average of 13,500 to 51,300 people die prematurely each year from breathing fine particles. Although these numbers are uncertain, the likelihood of thousands of deaths per year would typically spur regulators to tighten existing standards. However, EPA’s current political leadership disagrees.
What the law requires
The Clean Air Act directs the EPA to set air quality standards based on an accurate and thorough review of the latest science. This function is performed by CASAC, which I chaired from 2012 to 2015.
CASAC has seven members, which isn’t enough to provide the breadth, depth and diversity of expertise, experience and perspectives needed for these complex reviews. Recognizing this, for four decades the EPA has augmented the committee by convening expert review panels for each pollutant. They include scientists with extensive knowledge of epidemiology, toxicology, medicine, air quality, exposure, risk, statistics and other fields. I served on the 20-member CASAC PM Review Panel that was appointed in 2015 to help CASAC review the PM2.5 standard.
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler disbanded that panel in October 2018. Wheeler also continued a makeover of CASAC, started by his predecessor, Scott Pruitt, that removed leading researchers from the committee. Now CASAC has no epidemiologists – a key discipline for assessing PM2.5 health effects.
What our expert panel recommended
Realizing that EPA would not otherwise get the science advice it needs, the disbanded PM review panel reconvened itself in October 2019. We found that current fine particle standards are not protective of public health.
The studies published since 2012 demonstrating that exposure to fine particles causes premature death at concentrations below current standards were key to our decision. We advised the EPA that the annual standard should be reduced from its current level of 12 micrograms per cubic meter to a range of between 10 and 8 micrograms per cubic meter.
For the 24-hour standard, which regulates short-term air quality spikes, we recommended reducing the limit from the current level of 35 micrograms per cubic meter to between 30 and 25 micrograms per cubic meter. These scientific findings were based on multiple epidemiologic studies, augmented with evidence from controlled experiments with animals and humans.
Failing to protect the public
Administrator Wheeler claims that recent studies since the last time the standards were revised “do not provide a basis for revising the standards.” Wheeler acknowledges that studies based on long-term exposures below the current standards show “associations” between air quality and premature death. However, he argues that this research does not show a causal relationship. Yet, based on the overall body of evidence, he acknowledges that “a causal relationship exists between long-term PM2.5 exposure and total mortality.” In my view, his rationale is illogical and is inconsistent with the evidence.
The Clean Air Act requires regulators to set standards that will provide an “adequate margin of safety.” This means that they should be stringent enough to protect sensitive populations, such as older adults, people with preexisting cardiovascular or respiratory diseases and children with asthma.
The EPA proposal acknowledges that these groups exist, but does not specify how it will protect them from PM2.5 in the air. Wheeler is also silent regarding the role of racial and ethnic differences in exposure and risk, even though a federal court called EPA to task in 2009 for not specifically addressing at-risk groups.
Preliminary evidence suggests that exposure to particles worsens the effects of COVID-19. While this finding needs peer review and additional study, existing evidence of risk for sensitive populations shows the need for a more protective standard.
EPA currently faces lawsuits for multiple instances in which it has either sought to weaken, or failed to strengthen, air pollution regulations. They include rolling back motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards, failing to implement stringent rules limiting interstate air pollution and repealing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to limit carbon emissions from power plants. Unless EPA modifies its position on particle air quality to address the law and the science, I expect that this regulation too will end up in court.
On April 30, 2020, the agency published a proposed new rule that retains current National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate Matter without any revisions. It took this action after a five-year review process, in which scientific evidence showed unequivocally that these standards are not adequate to protect public health.
I have studied air pollution and air quality for over 30 years, and have been directly involved for a decade with EPA’s reviews of scientific findings on air pollution. This includes serving on the agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, or CASAC, and on 10 specialized panels focused on individual pollutants.
As I have written previously, the Trump administration has watered down the role of science in what is supposed to be a science-based process of setting national air quality standards. This new proposal – which I expect will be challenged in court when finalized – is the result.
Fine particle air pollution is deadly
Fine particles, known as PM2.5 because they measure 2.5 microns or less in diameter, can penetrate deeply into the lungs and bloodstream. EPA staff scientists have reaffirmed that daily and annual exposure to PM2.5 causes premature death and a variety of illnesses.
Scientists have known this for decades, but since the national standard was last revised in 2012, new studies have strengthened these findings. They include an epidemiologic study with the largest ever number of subjects and several that include PM2.5 concentrations well below the current standard.
EPA’s scientific staff estimates, based on multiple epidemiologic studies, that currently an average of 13,500 to 51,300 people die prematurely each year from breathing fine particles. Although these numbers are uncertain, the likelihood of thousands of deaths per year would typically spur regulators to tighten existing standards. However, EPA’s current political leadership disagrees.
What the law requires
The Clean Air Act directs the EPA to set air quality standards based on an accurate and thorough review of the latest science. This function is performed by CASAC, which I chaired from 2012 to 2015.
CASAC has seven members, which isn’t enough to provide the breadth, depth and diversity of expertise, experience and perspectives needed for these complex reviews. Recognizing this, for four decades the EPA has augmented the committee by convening expert review panels for each pollutant. They include scientists with extensive knowledge of epidemiology, toxicology, medicine, air quality, exposure, risk, statistics and other fields. I served on the 20-member CASAC PM Review Panel that was appointed in 2015 to help CASAC review the PM2.5 standard.
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler disbanded that panel in October 2018. Wheeler also continued a makeover of CASAC, started by his predecessor, Scott Pruitt, that removed leading researchers from the committee. Now CASAC has no epidemiologists – a key discipline for assessing PM2.5 health effects.
What our expert panel recommended
Realizing that EPA would not otherwise get the science advice it needs, the disbanded PM review panel reconvened itself in October 2019. We found that current fine particle standards are not protective of public health.
The studies published since 2012 demonstrating that exposure to fine particles causes premature death at concentrations below current standards were key to our decision. We advised the EPA that the annual standard should be reduced from its current level of 12 micrograms per cubic meter to a range of between 10 and 8 micrograms per cubic meter.
For the 24-hour standard, which regulates short-term air quality spikes, we recommended reducing the limit from the current level of 35 micrograms per cubic meter to between 30 and 25 micrograms per cubic meter. These scientific findings were based on multiple epidemiologic studies, augmented with evidence from controlled experiments with animals and humans.
Failing to protect the public
Administrator Wheeler claims that recent studies since the last time the standards were revised “do not provide a basis for revising the standards.” Wheeler acknowledges that studies based on long-term exposures below the current standards show “associations” between air quality and premature death. However, he argues that this research does not show a causal relationship. Yet, based on the overall body of evidence, he acknowledges that “a causal relationship exists between long-term PM2.5 exposure and total mortality.” In my view, his rationale is illogical and is inconsistent with the evidence.
The Clean Air Act requires regulators to set standards that will provide an “adequate margin of safety.” This means that they should be stringent enough to protect sensitive populations, such as older adults, people with preexisting cardiovascular or respiratory diseases and children with asthma.
The EPA proposal acknowledges that these groups exist, but does not specify how it will protect them from PM2.5 in the air. Wheeler is also silent regarding the role of racial and ethnic differences in exposure and risk, even though a federal court called EPA to task in 2009 for not specifically addressing at-risk groups.
Preliminary evidence suggests that exposure to particles worsens the effects of COVID-19. While this finding needs peer review and additional study, existing evidence of risk for sensitive populations shows the need for a more protective standard.
EPA currently faces lawsuits for multiple instances in which it has either sought to weaken, or failed to strengthen, air pollution regulations. They include rolling back motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards, failing to implement stringent rules limiting interstate air pollution and repealing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to limit carbon emissions from power plants. Unless EPA modifies its position on particle air quality to address the law and the science, I expect that this regulation too will end up in court.
Is Carbon Capture and Storage a Climate Solution or a Pyramid Scheme?
BY Daniel Ross, Truthout
PUBLISHED April 24, 2020
To a growing portion of the public, this is the existential question of our time: How do we significantly slash greenhouse gas emissions before it’s too late?
Solar? Wind? Nuclear? Reforestation? How about carbon capture and storage (CCS), what is in essence the process of separating carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, or from gases produced in electricity generation and industrial processes, then injecting the captured CO2 into geological rock formations typically located several kilometers underground?
CCS features in three of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) four primary pathways to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) with no overshoot — a best-case scenario to protect the planet from the very worst impacts of climate change, but one we’re currently nowhere near meeting. (Recent estimates put us on track for an increase of between 3-5°C by the end of the century.) Indeed, operational CCS projects are capturing carbon at a rate far behind where it will need to be within decades to meet those global emission reductions.
Part of the problem is how these technologies are, in many respects, still very much in the developmental stage, despite the fact that the fossil fuel industry has been using them since the 1970s. Questions also surround just how meaningfully CCS technologies are currently contributing to carbon emission reductions. For example, CCS is being used to funnel CO2 back underground to stimulate oil fields that are running dry, in a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR) — a way, say CCS skeptics, not so much of reversing course on global warming but of prolonging the life-blood of the fossil fuel industry. Strictly speaking, such technologies fall under the umbrella of carbon capture, utilization and storage, or CCUS.
“In terms of the actual efficiency of carbon capture, it’s not nearly as effective as people claim it is,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who says anthropogenic global warming must be tackled by scaling up to 100 percent renewables as quickly as possible. His own research into two CCS projects, factoring in production and processing emissions, found they trapped only between 10-11 percent of net carbon emissions averaged over 20 years.
“It’s never better to capture carbon than it is to use that money to replace coal or gas,” Jacobson said.
The underlying discrepancies at the heart of CCS have spilled out into the political arena. In his Green New Deal outlined last year, former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders struck a red line through the possibility. “To get to our goal of 100 percent sustainable energy, we will not rely on any false solutions like nuclear, geoengineering, carbon capture and sequestration,” his proposal stated. On the flip side of that coin, Joe Biden and former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg outlined plans that would accelerate development and deployment of CCS technologies.
“Understandably, there are concerns around some of the ramifications from CCS,” said Deepika Nagabhushan, director of the Clean Air Task Force’s (CATF) Decarbonized Fossil Energy program. CATF co-signed a letter last year to the Senate advocating legislation advancing the development of CCS projects.
“But the reality is that it would be very difficult – impossible, frankly — to meet some of these really ambitions temperature targets without exploring some of these technologies,” said Nagabhushan.
“Contain the Surge to Gas”
According to the Global CCS Institute, there are 51 CCS facilities globally, 19 of which are in operation and 32 in various stages of development, including construction. They include ammonia and ethanol production plants, as well as direct air-capture facilities. The CATF also maintains a database of more than 20 publicly announced projects as part of the 45Q tax credit program, which is awarded to new CCS projects in the U.S.
The holy grail of CCS is in the energy sector, the single largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the CATF’s list of CCS projects includes several at coal plants and natural gas retrofits. As for what’s currently at play in the power sector, there are two large-scale CCUS power projects in operation in North America: the Petra Nova facility in Texas and the Boundary Dam plant in Canada, both of them coal power plants. But important questions hover over their overall carbon-capture efficiencies.
The Boundary Dam, for example, is designed to trap 1 million metric tons of CO2 a year, but has captured a total of only 2.2 million metric tons over four years, according to an Institute Energy Economics and Financial Analysis report from 2018. As for the Petra Nova plant, if broader factors — like the energy needed to power the carbon capture equipment and the extra oil generated through EOR — are calculated in, “it is possible the Petra Nova project could increase, rather than decrease, global CO2 emissions,” the report claimed.
As coal is becoming increasingly uneconomic — at least relative to cleaner power resources — the potential use of CCS in the power sector should be primarily focused on natural gas, said Rachel Cleetus, policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Nevertheless, a continued push toward natural gas — the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced natural gas consumption recently set a record high — comes with its own set of problems, she added.
“Our view is that we really need to contain the surge to gas, otherwise we’re going to get locked into a pathway that will result in either a surge in emissions, CO2 and methane, or a lot of stranded assets in the natural gas sector,” Cleetus said.
For this reason, the CCS projects of the future need not focus so much on the power sector as on a broad menu of heavy carbon-producing industries, said Cleetus. “Think cement, iron and steel,” she said, adding that right now, industrial CCS applications come with other concerns such as decreased efficiency and increased water usage. “We have proof of concept, but we’re still far from scaling up.”
Indeed, CCS will have to be scaled up fast for it to play its part in effectively curbing global warming. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) sustainable development scenario holds the global temperature rise to below 1.8 °C. It’s also well within the trajectory of the various scenarios the IPCC proposed in 2018 providing a 50 percent chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 °C.
This IEA sustainable development scenario requires that by 2030, 350 million metric tons of CO2 (MtCO2) is captured per year. But system limitations mean that the CCS facilities currently in operation capture an estimated 96 MtCO2 per year only, according to the Global CCS Institute. This is a little more than a quarter of where it needs to be within 10 years. Zeroing in on individual facilities, the Petra Nova and Boundary Dam plants combined capture 2.4 MtCO2 per year, according to the IEA.
Interestingly, there’s enough available geological space in the world’s nearshore continental margins — the shallowest parts of the ocean abutting the coastline — to hold enough greenhouse gas emissions to reach an IPCC goal of six to seven gigatons of sequestered carbon dioxide a year by 2050, according to a study published last year in Nature Scientific Reports. This could be achieved by drilling between 10,000 to 14,000 injection wells worldwide in the next 30 years, the report finds.
Of course, such a goal faces tremendous obstacles, not least of all the massive investments needed to develop and build the requisite infrastructure, including pipelines. There would also have to be market incentives to persuade companies to trap and simply squirrel carbon away underground rather than using it for something like EOR. That said, the CATF argues that EOR can act as a stepping stone toward such a goal.
“Looking at the whole picture of what’s needed to achieve ambitious climate goals or to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, we do have to find ways to commercialize CCS for hard-to-decarbonize sectors where possible,” Cleetus said. “We also have to ensure strong legal, environmental and social safeguards for this technology.”
“It’s Just a Pyramid Scheme”
That CCS isn’t where it needs to be isn’t due to lack of investment — indeed, billions have been spent on carbon capture research and development over the years, some of it on expensive boondoggles. The Bush administration greenlit in 2003 what was then a billion-dollar state-of-the-art coal gasification and carbon capture facility, but cancelled the project in 2008 after massive cost overruns. The Obama administration tried and failed to revive the project.
The most infamous, however, is the Kemper coal power plant in Mississippi, a $7.5 billion coal-gasification and carbon capture project that was abandoned after massive cost overruns and delays. The plant is now the world’s most expensive natural gas power plant. However, the project’s financial failures, CATF argues, was the result of trying to develop a “first-of-a-kind” coal-gasifier, “which is completely separate from the carbon capture equipment installed on the plant.”
Indeed, CCS technologies will need road-testing through deployment for them to work more efficiently, said Nagabhushan. “Every project will be different, I can’t stress this enough,” she said. “It depends on so many factors what costs that plant will incur.”
In that respect, the political pendulum appears to be swinging in CCS’s favor — at least in the near term. A coalition of industry, labor and environmental groups recently pushed successful legislation that revamped the 45Q tax credits, increasing the amount of federal money available to companies undertaking CCS or CCUS projects. Individual states like California have woven CCS into their emissions reductions targets. Meanwhile, carbon capture costs are decreasing. According to the Energy Department, it cost $80 to capture a metric ton of carbon in 2012. Today, it costs around $50 per metric ton, while by 2030, the projected cost is $30.
Nevertheless, the urgency of the situation — greenhouse gas emissions hit a record high last year — requires a wholesale pivot away from fossil fuels. “You have biofuels. Nuclear power. Coal and carbon capture. They all claim that they can do things, and all they need is another billion dollars to solve it,” said Jacobson. “It becomes a part of what people assume is working, whereas really, it’s just a pyramid scheme.”
Solar? Wind? Nuclear? Reforestation? How about carbon capture and storage (CCS), what is in essence the process of separating carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, or from gases produced in electricity generation and industrial processes, then injecting the captured CO2 into geological rock formations typically located several kilometers underground?
CCS features in three of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) four primary pathways to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) with no overshoot — a best-case scenario to protect the planet from the very worst impacts of climate change, but one we’re currently nowhere near meeting. (Recent estimates put us on track for an increase of between 3-5°C by the end of the century.) Indeed, operational CCS projects are capturing carbon at a rate far behind where it will need to be within decades to meet those global emission reductions.
Part of the problem is how these technologies are, in many respects, still very much in the developmental stage, despite the fact that the fossil fuel industry has been using them since the 1970s. Questions also surround just how meaningfully CCS technologies are currently contributing to carbon emission reductions. For example, CCS is being used to funnel CO2 back underground to stimulate oil fields that are running dry, in a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR) — a way, say CCS skeptics, not so much of reversing course on global warming but of prolonging the life-blood of the fossil fuel industry. Strictly speaking, such technologies fall under the umbrella of carbon capture, utilization and storage, or CCUS.
“In terms of the actual efficiency of carbon capture, it’s not nearly as effective as people claim it is,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who says anthropogenic global warming must be tackled by scaling up to 100 percent renewables as quickly as possible. His own research into two CCS projects, factoring in production and processing emissions, found they trapped only between 10-11 percent of net carbon emissions averaged over 20 years.
“It’s never better to capture carbon than it is to use that money to replace coal or gas,” Jacobson said.
The underlying discrepancies at the heart of CCS have spilled out into the political arena. In his Green New Deal outlined last year, former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders struck a red line through the possibility. “To get to our goal of 100 percent sustainable energy, we will not rely on any false solutions like nuclear, geoengineering, carbon capture and sequestration,” his proposal stated. On the flip side of that coin, Joe Biden and former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg outlined plans that would accelerate development and deployment of CCS technologies.
“Understandably, there are concerns around some of the ramifications from CCS,” said Deepika Nagabhushan, director of the Clean Air Task Force’s (CATF) Decarbonized Fossil Energy program. CATF co-signed a letter last year to the Senate advocating legislation advancing the development of CCS projects.
“But the reality is that it would be very difficult – impossible, frankly — to meet some of these really ambitions temperature targets without exploring some of these technologies,” said Nagabhushan.
“Contain the Surge to Gas”
According to the Global CCS Institute, there are 51 CCS facilities globally, 19 of which are in operation and 32 in various stages of development, including construction. They include ammonia and ethanol production plants, as well as direct air-capture facilities. The CATF also maintains a database of more than 20 publicly announced projects as part of the 45Q tax credit program, which is awarded to new CCS projects in the U.S.
The holy grail of CCS is in the energy sector, the single largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the CATF’s list of CCS projects includes several at coal plants and natural gas retrofits. As for what’s currently at play in the power sector, there are two large-scale CCUS power projects in operation in North America: the Petra Nova facility in Texas and the Boundary Dam plant in Canada, both of them coal power plants. But important questions hover over their overall carbon-capture efficiencies.
The Boundary Dam, for example, is designed to trap 1 million metric tons of CO2 a year, but has captured a total of only 2.2 million metric tons over four years, according to an Institute Energy Economics and Financial Analysis report from 2018. As for the Petra Nova plant, if broader factors — like the energy needed to power the carbon capture equipment and the extra oil generated through EOR — are calculated in, “it is possible the Petra Nova project could increase, rather than decrease, global CO2 emissions,” the report claimed.
As coal is becoming increasingly uneconomic — at least relative to cleaner power resources — the potential use of CCS in the power sector should be primarily focused on natural gas, said Rachel Cleetus, policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Nevertheless, a continued push toward natural gas — the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced natural gas consumption recently set a record high — comes with its own set of problems, she added.
“Our view is that we really need to contain the surge to gas, otherwise we’re going to get locked into a pathway that will result in either a surge in emissions, CO2 and methane, or a lot of stranded assets in the natural gas sector,” Cleetus said.
For this reason, the CCS projects of the future need not focus so much on the power sector as on a broad menu of heavy carbon-producing industries, said Cleetus. “Think cement, iron and steel,” she said, adding that right now, industrial CCS applications come with other concerns such as decreased efficiency and increased water usage. “We have proof of concept, but we’re still far from scaling up.”
Indeed, CCS will have to be scaled up fast for it to play its part in effectively curbing global warming. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) sustainable development scenario holds the global temperature rise to below 1.8 °C. It’s also well within the trajectory of the various scenarios the IPCC proposed in 2018 providing a 50 percent chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 °C.
This IEA sustainable development scenario requires that by 2030, 350 million metric tons of CO2 (MtCO2) is captured per year. But system limitations mean that the CCS facilities currently in operation capture an estimated 96 MtCO2 per year only, according to the Global CCS Institute. This is a little more than a quarter of where it needs to be within 10 years. Zeroing in on individual facilities, the Petra Nova and Boundary Dam plants combined capture 2.4 MtCO2 per year, according to the IEA.
Interestingly, there’s enough available geological space in the world’s nearshore continental margins — the shallowest parts of the ocean abutting the coastline — to hold enough greenhouse gas emissions to reach an IPCC goal of six to seven gigatons of sequestered carbon dioxide a year by 2050, according to a study published last year in Nature Scientific Reports. This could be achieved by drilling between 10,000 to 14,000 injection wells worldwide in the next 30 years, the report finds.
Of course, such a goal faces tremendous obstacles, not least of all the massive investments needed to develop and build the requisite infrastructure, including pipelines. There would also have to be market incentives to persuade companies to trap and simply squirrel carbon away underground rather than using it for something like EOR. That said, the CATF argues that EOR can act as a stepping stone toward such a goal.
“Looking at the whole picture of what’s needed to achieve ambitious climate goals or to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, we do have to find ways to commercialize CCS for hard-to-decarbonize sectors where possible,” Cleetus said. “We also have to ensure strong legal, environmental and social safeguards for this technology.”
“It’s Just a Pyramid Scheme”
That CCS isn’t where it needs to be isn’t due to lack of investment — indeed, billions have been spent on carbon capture research and development over the years, some of it on expensive boondoggles. The Bush administration greenlit in 2003 what was then a billion-dollar state-of-the-art coal gasification and carbon capture facility, but cancelled the project in 2008 after massive cost overruns. The Obama administration tried and failed to revive the project.
The most infamous, however, is the Kemper coal power plant in Mississippi, a $7.5 billion coal-gasification and carbon capture project that was abandoned after massive cost overruns and delays. The plant is now the world’s most expensive natural gas power plant. However, the project’s financial failures, CATF argues, was the result of trying to develop a “first-of-a-kind” coal-gasifier, “which is completely separate from the carbon capture equipment installed on the plant.”
Indeed, CCS technologies will need road-testing through deployment for them to work more efficiently, said Nagabhushan. “Every project will be different, I can’t stress this enough,” she said. “It depends on so many factors what costs that plant will incur.”
In that respect, the political pendulum appears to be swinging in CCS’s favor — at least in the near term. A coalition of industry, labor and environmental groups recently pushed successful legislation that revamped the 45Q tax credits, increasing the amount of federal money available to companies undertaking CCS or CCUS projects. Individual states like California have woven CCS into their emissions reductions targets. Meanwhile, carbon capture costs are decreasing. According to the Energy Department, it cost $80 to capture a metric ton of carbon in 2012. Today, it costs around $50 per metric ton, while by 2030, the projected cost is $30.
Nevertheless, the urgency of the situation — greenhouse gas emissions hit a record high last year — requires a wholesale pivot away from fossil fuels. “You have biofuels. Nuclear power. Coal and carbon capture. They all claim that they can do things, and all they need is another billion dollars to solve it,” said Jacobson. “It becomes a part of what people assume is working, whereas really, it’s just a pyramid scheme.”
Air pollution
Coronavirus detected on particles of air pollution
Exclusive: Scientists examine whether this route enables infections at longer distances
Damian Carrington Environment editor
the guardian
Fri 24 Apr 2020 09.29 EDT
Coronavirus has been detected on particles of air pollution by scientists investigating whether this could enable it to be carried over longer distances and increase the number of people infected.
The work is preliminary and it is not yet known if the virus remains viable on pollution particles and in sufficient quantity to cause disease.
The Italian scientists used standard techniques to collect outdoor air pollution samples at one urban and one industrial site in Bergamo province and identified a gene highly specific to Covid-19 in multiple samples. The detection was confirmed by blind testing at an independent laboratory.
Leonardo Setti at the University of Bologna in Italy, who led the work, said it was important to investigate if the virus could be carried more widely by air pollution.
“I am a scientist and I am worried when I don’t know,” he said. “If we know, we can find a solution. But if we don’t know, we can only suffer the consequences.”
Two other research groups have suggested air pollution particles could help coronavirus travel further in the air.
A statistical analysis by Setti’s team suggests higher levels of particle pollution could explain higher rates of infection in parts of northern Italy before a lockdown was imposed, an idea supported by another preliminary analysis. The region is one of the most polluted in Europe.
Neither of the studies by Setti’s team have been peer-reviewed and therefore have not been endorsed by independent scientists. But experts agree their proposal is plausible and requires investigation.
Previous studies have shown that air pollution particles do harbour microbes and that pollution is likely to have carried the viruses causing bird flu, measles and foot-and-mouth disease over considerable distances.
The potential role of air pollution particles is linked to the broader question of how the coronavirus is transmitted.
Large virus-laden droplets from infected people’s coughs and sneezes fall to the ground within a metre or two. But much smaller droplets, less than 5 microns in diameter, can remain in the air for minutes to hours and travel further.
Experts are not sure whether these tiny airborne droplets can cause coronavirus infections, though they know the 2003 Sars coronavirus was spread in the air and that the new virus can remain viable for hours in tiny droplets.
But researchers say the importance of potential airborne transmission, and the possible boosting role of pollution particles, mean it must not be ruled out without evidence.
The work is preliminary and it is not yet known if the virus remains viable on pollution particles and in sufficient quantity to cause disease.
The Italian scientists used standard techniques to collect outdoor air pollution samples at one urban and one industrial site in Bergamo province and identified a gene highly specific to Covid-19 in multiple samples. The detection was confirmed by blind testing at an independent laboratory.
Leonardo Setti at the University of Bologna in Italy, who led the work, said it was important to investigate if the virus could be carried more widely by air pollution.
“I am a scientist and I am worried when I don’t know,” he said. “If we know, we can find a solution. But if we don’t know, we can only suffer the consequences.”
Two other research groups have suggested air pollution particles could help coronavirus travel further in the air.
A statistical analysis by Setti’s team suggests higher levels of particle pollution could explain higher rates of infection in parts of northern Italy before a lockdown was imposed, an idea supported by another preliminary analysis. The region is one of the most polluted in Europe.
Neither of the studies by Setti’s team have been peer-reviewed and therefore have not been endorsed by independent scientists. But experts agree their proposal is plausible and requires investigation.
Previous studies have shown that air pollution particles do harbour microbes and that pollution is likely to have carried the viruses causing bird flu, measles and foot-and-mouth disease over considerable distances.
The potential role of air pollution particles is linked to the broader question of how the coronavirus is transmitted.
Large virus-laden droplets from infected people’s coughs and sneezes fall to the ground within a metre or two. But much smaller droplets, less than 5 microns in diameter, can remain in the air for minutes to hours and travel further.
Experts are not sure whether these tiny airborne droplets can cause coronavirus infections, though they know the 2003 Sars coronavirus was spread in the air and that the new virus can remain viable for hours in tiny droplets.
But researchers say the importance of potential airborne transmission, and the possible boosting role of pollution particles, mean it must not be ruled out without evidence.
behind your back!!!
the bastard is trying to poison us!!!
White House moves to weaken EPA rule on toxic compounds
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER - ap
4/18/2020
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump White House has intervened to weaken one of the few public health protections pursued by its own administration, a rule to limit the use of a toxic industrial compound in consumer products, according to communications between the White House and Environmental Protection Agency.
The documents show that the White House Office of Management and Budget formally notified the EPA by email last July that it was stepping into the crafting of the rule on the compound, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, used in nonstick and stain-resistant frying pans, rugs, and countless other consumer products.
The White House repeatedly pressed the agency to agree to a major loophole that could allow substantial imports of the PFAS-tainted products to continue, greatly weakening the proposed rule. EPA pushed back on the White House demand for the loophole, known as a “safe harbor” provision for industry.
Pushed again in January, the agency responded, “EPA opposes proposing a safe harbor provision, but is open to a neutrally-worded request for comment from the public” on the White House request.
The rule is one of the few concrete steps that the Trump administration has taken to deal with growing contamination by PFAS industrial compounds. The EPA has declared dating back to 2018 that consumer exposure to the substances was a “national priority” that the agency was confronting “aggressively.”
Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, the ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, who obtained the documents revealing the White House intervention, and public-health advocates say the White House action was led by Nancy Beck, a former chemical industry executive now detailed to President Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.
In a letter sent Friday to the EPA, Carper charged the White House pressure amounts to unusual intervention in what had been the EPA’s in-house efforts to regulate imports tainted with the compound. Trump has nominated Beck to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a government panel charged with protecting Americans from harm by thousands of kinds of consumer goods.
Asked about the White House actions, EPA spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer said in an email that “consulting with other federal agencies on actions is a normal process across government,” and that “EPA is often required to engage in an interagency review process led by OMB.”
“It is routine for the agency to receive input from all of our stakeholders, including our federal partners,” Schiermeyer wrote.
The EPA did not respond to a question about whether Beck led the White House intervention. Emails sent for comment to the White House, the White House Office of Management and Budget and Beck were not immediately answered.
Carper obtained pages of back-and-forth proposed changes, redline drafts and other communications between the White House Office of Management and Budget, the EPA and others on the draft rule. No authors are listed in many of the final rounds of White House edits, drafts and proposals and EPA’s responses.
Carper wrote to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Friday to object to the White House push for weakening of the rule, newly revealed in the documents. Carper said it appeared that Beck, who was moved to the White House from a top regulatory job at the Trump EPA, “sought to make it more difficult for EPA to use its authority ... to protect Americans from these harmful substances.”
While thousands of kinds of PFAS compounds are still in use in the United States, the new EPA rule would set up agency oversight of imports of products that use a few kinds of the compounds that manufacturers agreed to phase out in this country starting in 2006. Those versions remain in production in some parts of the world.
In addition to the safe harbor loophole, another change sought by the White House would raise the technical bar for EPA to consider blocking any of the tainted products.
The agency agreed to rewrite the rule to include a third White House request, narrowing the range of imported products that would fall under the rule.
The official public comment period for the current form of the rule ends Friday, moving the proposal close to crafting of its final form. Congress, impatient for the Trump administration to start bringing the PFAS compounds under federal regulation, has ordered the administration to get a final rule out by mid-summer.
Even if the rule goes out in its current form, applying to fewer kinds of product imports, “it would certainly be better than where we are without it,” although “scaled back significantly from what it was originally,” said Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund advocacy group, and a longtime monitor of the EPA’s regulation of toxic substances.
But if the final rule includes the other two key changes being pushed by the White House “it could even do more damage than good,” Denison said.
Industries also would be likely to push for those two exceptions in regulations of future substances, Denison said. “Those two provisions would establish precedence that the EPA has never used for 40 years..”
Industries produce thousands of versions of the man-made compounds. They are used in countless products, including nonstick cookware, water-repellent sports gear, cosmetics, and grease-resistant food packaging, along with firefighting foams.
Public health studies on exposed populations have associated them with an array of health problems, including some cancers, and weakened immunity. The advent of widespread testing for the contaminant over the past few years found it in high levels in many public water systems around the country. The administration initially sought in 2018 to suppress a federal toxicology warning on the danger of the compounds, then publicly vowed action.
The documents show that the White House Office of Management and Budget formally notified the EPA by email last July that it was stepping into the crafting of the rule on the compound, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, used in nonstick and stain-resistant frying pans, rugs, and countless other consumer products.
The White House repeatedly pressed the agency to agree to a major loophole that could allow substantial imports of the PFAS-tainted products to continue, greatly weakening the proposed rule. EPA pushed back on the White House demand for the loophole, known as a “safe harbor” provision for industry.
Pushed again in January, the agency responded, “EPA opposes proposing a safe harbor provision, but is open to a neutrally-worded request for comment from the public” on the White House request.
The rule is one of the few concrete steps that the Trump administration has taken to deal with growing contamination by PFAS industrial compounds. The EPA has declared dating back to 2018 that consumer exposure to the substances was a “national priority” that the agency was confronting “aggressively.”
Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, the ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, who obtained the documents revealing the White House intervention, and public-health advocates say the White House action was led by Nancy Beck, a former chemical industry executive now detailed to President Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.
In a letter sent Friday to the EPA, Carper charged the White House pressure amounts to unusual intervention in what had been the EPA’s in-house efforts to regulate imports tainted with the compound. Trump has nominated Beck to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a government panel charged with protecting Americans from harm by thousands of kinds of consumer goods.
Asked about the White House actions, EPA spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer said in an email that “consulting with other federal agencies on actions is a normal process across government,” and that “EPA is often required to engage in an interagency review process led by OMB.”
“It is routine for the agency to receive input from all of our stakeholders, including our federal partners,” Schiermeyer wrote.
The EPA did not respond to a question about whether Beck led the White House intervention. Emails sent for comment to the White House, the White House Office of Management and Budget and Beck were not immediately answered.
Carper obtained pages of back-and-forth proposed changes, redline drafts and other communications between the White House Office of Management and Budget, the EPA and others on the draft rule. No authors are listed in many of the final rounds of White House edits, drafts and proposals and EPA’s responses.
Carper wrote to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Friday to object to the White House push for weakening of the rule, newly revealed in the documents. Carper said it appeared that Beck, who was moved to the White House from a top regulatory job at the Trump EPA, “sought to make it more difficult for EPA to use its authority ... to protect Americans from these harmful substances.”
While thousands of kinds of PFAS compounds are still in use in the United States, the new EPA rule would set up agency oversight of imports of products that use a few kinds of the compounds that manufacturers agreed to phase out in this country starting in 2006. Those versions remain in production in some parts of the world.
In addition to the safe harbor loophole, another change sought by the White House would raise the technical bar for EPA to consider blocking any of the tainted products.
The agency agreed to rewrite the rule to include a third White House request, narrowing the range of imported products that would fall under the rule.
The official public comment period for the current form of the rule ends Friday, moving the proposal close to crafting of its final form. Congress, impatient for the Trump administration to start bringing the PFAS compounds under federal regulation, has ordered the administration to get a final rule out by mid-summer.
Even if the rule goes out in its current form, applying to fewer kinds of product imports, “it would certainly be better than where we are without it,” although “scaled back significantly from what it was originally,” said Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund advocacy group, and a longtime monitor of the EPA’s regulation of toxic substances.
But if the final rule includes the other two key changes being pushed by the White House “it could even do more damage than good,” Denison said.
Industries also would be likely to push for those two exceptions in regulations of future substances, Denison said. “Those two provisions would establish precedence that the EPA has never used for 40 years..”
Industries produce thousands of versions of the man-made compounds. They are used in countless products, including nonstick cookware, water-repellent sports gear, cosmetics, and grease-resistant food packaging, along with firefighting foams.
Public health studies on exposed populations have associated them with an array of health problems, including some cancers, and weakened immunity. The advent of widespread testing for the contaminant over the past few years found it in high levels in many public water systems around the country. The administration initially sought in 2018 to suppress a federal toxicology warning on the danger of the compounds, then publicly vowed action.
Higher rates of air pollution linked to more COVID-19 deaths, study shows
A Harvard study finds even slightly higher levels were “associated with a 15% increase in the COVID-19 death rate”
IGOR DERYSH - salon
APRIL 12, 2020 12:00PM (UTC)
Areas of the United States with higher levels of air pollution experience higher COVID-19 death rates than areas with cleaner air, according to a study by researchers at Harvard University.
Researchers at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed 3,080 counties and found that even slightly elevated levels of tiny particles known as PM 2.5 — meaning 2.5 micron-wide pollutants — were linked to higher death rates. PM 2.5 particles are emitted from vehicle exhaust and coal power plants. PM 2.5 exposure has long been linked to higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory illnesses, which have all been linked to a higher risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19. Nearly 80% of patients requiring intensive care treatment have at least one of the three types of conditions.
The researchers found that an increase of just one unit of PM 2.5 was "associated with a 15% increase in the COVID-19 death rate."
The study included multiple secondary analyses and controlled for factors like household income, population, hospital capacity, and smoking rates. Researchers noted that it was difficult to "accurately quantify the number of COVID-19 cases due to limited testing capacity."
"The results of this paper suggest that long-term exposure to air pollution increases vulnerability to experiencing the most severe Covid-19 outcomes," the researchers wrote.
"This study provides evidence that counties that have more polluted air will experience higher risks of death for Covid-19," lead researcher Francesca Dominici, a biostatistics professor, told The New York Times, adding that counties with higher pollution levels "will be the ones that will have higher numbers of hospitalizations, higher numbers of deaths and where many of the resources should be concentrated."
The study demonstrates the importance of clean air regulations, which the Trump administration has relentlessly worked to roll back in the years preceding the pandemic.
Indeed, the administration last week rolled back vehicle tailpipe emissions regulations even after the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that doing so would result in higher death rates. The EPA similarly found that its decision to gut coal power plant regulations would lead to as many as 1,400 annual premature deaths.
"The study results underscore the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations to protect human health both during and after the Covid-19 crisis," the Harvard researchers warned in the new study.
The new findings echo the conclusions of past research on air pollution, which the World Health Organization blames for about 7 million deaths each year.
An analysis published in the journal Environmental Pollution similarly found a correlation between pollution rates and death rates in northern Italy, where up to 12% of patients have died from COVID-19.
Moreover, researchers at Cambridge University found that the 1918 flu pandemic, the deadliest in history, killed more people in cities that burned more coal compared to cities that did not.
A 2003 study led by Dr. Zuo-Fend Zhang, the associate dean of research at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health, found that SARS patients in parts of China with the highest pollution rates were twice as likely to die from the virus than those who lived in areas with lower rates.
Zhang told The Times that the new Harvard research was "very much consistent" with his findings.
Dr. John Balmes, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who serves as a spokesman for the American Lung Association, told the outlet he was concerned about what the findings mean for poor neighborhoods and communities of color, which tend to have higher levels of air pollution.
"We need to make sure that hospitals taking care of folks who are more vulnerable and with even greater air pollution exposure have the resources they need," he said.
A study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency found in 2018 that poor neighborhoods had about 135% as much air pollution as the overall population and black communities had 154% as much air pollution as the overall population.
"Communities of color, they've always been the sacrifice zones," Mustafa Ali, who led the environmental justice program at the EPA under President Obama, said in a video this week. "They've been the places where we've pushed things that nobody else wants."
Ali, who now works on environmental justice issues at the National Wildlife Federation pointed to data showing that black people are far more likely to die from the coronavirus. In areas like Chicago and Louisiana, black people make up roughly 70% of COVID-19 deaths despite making up just a third of the population.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said this week that, much like the longstanding issue of air pollution, black Americans are more affected by the virus because of long-running health disparities.
"When you're in the middle of a crisis, like we are now with the coronavirus, it really does… shine a very bright light on some of the real weaknesses and foibles in our society," Fauci said. "Health disparities have always existed for the African American community. But… it's shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is."
Though racial data on virus deaths is still limited, Fauci pointed to the prevalence of "underlying medical conditions — the diabetes, the hypertension, the obesity, the asthma" as the cause for the higher death rate. "The underlying reason why that is happening does not change from state to state," he added.
Dr. Uche' Blackstock, an emergency physician at New York University's Langone Health and the founder of Advancing Health Equity, agreed that the startling number of deaths among black Americans was not caused by the coronavirus alone but by decades of systemic inequality.
"This pandemic will likely magnify and further reinforce racialized health inequities, which have been both persistent and profound over the last five decades, and Black Americans have experienced the worst health outcomes of any racial group," she wrote in an op-ed at the Scientific American. "Black Americans will be more vulnerable to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic because of several manifestations of structural racism, including lack of access to testing, a higher chronic disease burden and racial bias within health care institutions."
But what is to be done in the middle of a pandemic? Fauci argued that "there's nothing we can do right now other than try to give them the best possible care to avoid complications."
New York City has taken a more proactive approach, launching a multimillion-dollar campaign to reach minority communities with information about the virus. New York state has also launched a similar awareness campaign.
Dr. Patrice Harris, the president of the American Medical Association, urged local officials to go further. Harris called for cities to implement housing policies to protect frontline workers, many of whom are black and Hispanic, and to ramp up efforts to ensure they have the necessary protective equipment.
Dr. Oliver Brooks, the president of the National Medical Association, called to expand access to health technology, including remote monitoring tools for chronic diseases. "We must create a data repository overseen by a credible organization to ensure data are consistently accessible to everyone," he said.
Ultimately, the first step in any effort will be to make the data available. Spencer Overton, the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said in a Washington Post op-ed that collecting and publishing race data throughout the entire country is necessary to educate the public and inform lawmakers.
"The disproportionate impact appears to be attributable to preexisting conditions — high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and inadequate access to health care — that make African Americans more vulnerable to the disease," he wrote. "But the handful of examples above raises an urgent question: Does the effect hold true for African Americans throughout the country? Unfortunately, there's no way for the public to know."
Researchers at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed 3,080 counties and found that even slightly elevated levels of tiny particles known as PM 2.5 — meaning 2.5 micron-wide pollutants — were linked to higher death rates. PM 2.5 particles are emitted from vehicle exhaust and coal power plants. PM 2.5 exposure has long been linked to higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory illnesses, which have all been linked to a higher risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19. Nearly 80% of patients requiring intensive care treatment have at least one of the three types of conditions.
The researchers found that an increase of just one unit of PM 2.5 was "associated with a 15% increase in the COVID-19 death rate."
The study included multiple secondary analyses and controlled for factors like household income, population, hospital capacity, and smoking rates. Researchers noted that it was difficult to "accurately quantify the number of COVID-19 cases due to limited testing capacity."
"The results of this paper suggest that long-term exposure to air pollution increases vulnerability to experiencing the most severe Covid-19 outcomes," the researchers wrote.
"This study provides evidence that counties that have more polluted air will experience higher risks of death for Covid-19," lead researcher Francesca Dominici, a biostatistics professor, told The New York Times, adding that counties with higher pollution levels "will be the ones that will have higher numbers of hospitalizations, higher numbers of deaths and where many of the resources should be concentrated."
The study demonstrates the importance of clean air regulations, which the Trump administration has relentlessly worked to roll back in the years preceding the pandemic.
Indeed, the administration last week rolled back vehicle tailpipe emissions regulations even after the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that doing so would result in higher death rates. The EPA similarly found that its decision to gut coal power plant regulations would lead to as many as 1,400 annual premature deaths.
"The study results underscore the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations to protect human health both during and after the Covid-19 crisis," the Harvard researchers warned in the new study.
The new findings echo the conclusions of past research on air pollution, which the World Health Organization blames for about 7 million deaths each year.
An analysis published in the journal Environmental Pollution similarly found a correlation between pollution rates and death rates in northern Italy, where up to 12% of patients have died from COVID-19.
Moreover, researchers at Cambridge University found that the 1918 flu pandemic, the deadliest in history, killed more people in cities that burned more coal compared to cities that did not.
A 2003 study led by Dr. Zuo-Fend Zhang, the associate dean of research at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health, found that SARS patients in parts of China with the highest pollution rates were twice as likely to die from the virus than those who lived in areas with lower rates.
Zhang told The Times that the new Harvard research was "very much consistent" with his findings.
Dr. John Balmes, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who serves as a spokesman for the American Lung Association, told the outlet he was concerned about what the findings mean for poor neighborhoods and communities of color, which tend to have higher levels of air pollution.
"We need to make sure that hospitals taking care of folks who are more vulnerable and with even greater air pollution exposure have the resources they need," he said.
A study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency found in 2018 that poor neighborhoods had about 135% as much air pollution as the overall population and black communities had 154% as much air pollution as the overall population.
"Communities of color, they've always been the sacrifice zones," Mustafa Ali, who led the environmental justice program at the EPA under President Obama, said in a video this week. "They've been the places where we've pushed things that nobody else wants."
Ali, who now works on environmental justice issues at the National Wildlife Federation pointed to data showing that black people are far more likely to die from the coronavirus. In areas like Chicago and Louisiana, black people make up roughly 70% of COVID-19 deaths despite making up just a third of the population.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said this week that, much like the longstanding issue of air pollution, black Americans are more affected by the virus because of long-running health disparities.
"When you're in the middle of a crisis, like we are now with the coronavirus, it really does… shine a very bright light on some of the real weaknesses and foibles in our society," Fauci said. "Health disparities have always existed for the African American community. But… it's shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is."
Though racial data on virus deaths is still limited, Fauci pointed to the prevalence of "underlying medical conditions — the diabetes, the hypertension, the obesity, the asthma" as the cause for the higher death rate. "The underlying reason why that is happening does not change from state to state," he added.
Dr. Uche' Blackstock, an emergency physician at New York University's Langone Health and the founder of Advancing Health Equity, agreed that the startling number of deaths among black Americans was not caused by the coronavirus alone but by decades of systemic inequality.
"This pandemic will likely magnify and further reinforce racialized health inequities, which have been both persistent and profound over the last five decades, and Black Americans have experienced the worst health outcomes of any racial group," she wrote in an op-ed at the Scientific American. "Black Americans will be more vulnerable to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic because of several manifestations of structural racism, including lack of access to testing, a higher chronic disease burden and racial bias within health care institutions."
But what is to be done in the middle of a pandemic? Fauci argued that "there's nothing we can do right now other than try to give them the best possible care to avoid complications."
New York City has taken a more proactive approach, launching a multimillion-dollar campaign to reach minority communities with information about the virus. New York state has also launched a similar awareness campaign.
Dr. Patrice Harris, the president of the American Medical Association, urged local officials to go further. Harris called for cities to implement housing policies to protect frontline workers, many of whom are black and Hispanic, and to ramp up efforts to ensure they have the necessary protective equipment.
Dr. Oliver Brooks, the president of the National Medical Association, called to expand access to health technology, including remote monitoring tools for chronic diseases. "We must create a data repository overseen by a credible organization to ensure data are consistently accessible to everyone," he said.
Ultimately, the first step in any effort will be to make the data available. Spencer Overton, the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said in a Washington Post op-ed that collecting and publishing race data throughout the entire country is necessary to educate the public and inform lawmakers.
"The disproportionate impact appears to be attributable to preexisting conditions — high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and inadequate access to health care — that make African Americans more vulnerable to the disease," he wrote. "But the handful of examples above raises an urgent question: Does the effect hold true for African Americans throughout the country? Unfortunately, there's no way for the public to know."
The Pandemic Is Slowing Down The Whole World … And That’s A Good Thing
It’s Giving the Earth a Much-Needed Break from Climate-Wrecking CO2 Emissions
By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief
4/9/2020
Awful and lethal as coronavirus is, the pandemic is producing some good news about the other big threat – climate disruption.
Sheltering at home means a sharp drop in the burning of fossil fuels, the primary source of CO 2 which drives global warming and climate disruption.
Reducing pollutants in the air may save lives, based on research into the 1918 flu pandemic in which one-third of humans were infected and an estimated 50 million died.
During that pandemic, cities that relied heavily on coal, primarily to generate electricity, experienced significantly higher mortality rates than demographically similar cities with less polluted air.
Tiny particles in the air from burning coal, diesel and other fuels have been linked to higher death rates among the infected a new national study by Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health showed.
Here are examples of how reduced fossil fuels use during this pandemic is both a human and an ecological benefit:
Each gallon of gasoline burned generates about 20 pounds of CO2, the greenhouse gas that is a major factor in climate disruption caused by global warming. The reason that eight pounds of gasoline generate 20 pounds of CO2 is explained here.
Inefficient old jumbo jets are being retired, meaning less air pollution. Both KLM and Qantas stopped flying 747s at the end of March. Fuel-efficient long-haul planes such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus 350, together with the Boeing 777, will be used when the pandemic has passed. The German airline Lufthansa shut down two of its discount sister carriers, retired a host of its jumbo and older jets and announced it expects it will be “years until worldwide demand for air travel returns to pre-crisis levels.” If companies and trade associations make wider use of video conferencing services such as Zoom, then global travel may be subdued for many years. Even with more fuel-efficient jet engines, that would be good for the environment.
None of these developments is good for workers in the affected industries and those that supply those industries. But the reduction in fossil fuel burning should have a positive impact on climate disruption, which unchecked will likely kill many millions of Earthlings as seas cover land, while droughts, fires and flooding wreak havoc and melting tundra unleashes ancient viruses unknown to modern people.
Sheltering at home means a sharp drop in the burning of fossil fuels, the primary source of CO 2 which drives global warming and climate disruption.
Reducing pollutants in the air may save lives, based on research into the 1918 flu pandemic in which one-third of humans were infected and an estimated 50 million died.
During that pandemic, cities that relied heavily on coal, primarily to generate electricity, experienced significantly higher mortality rates than demographically similar cities with less polluted air.
Tiny particles in the air from burning coal, diesel and other fuels have been linked to higher death rates among the infected a new national study by Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health showed.
Here are examples of how reduced fossil fuels use during this pandemic is both a human and an ecological benefit:
- Gasoline sales are expected to plunge to levels lower than when America had a third fewer people than the almost 330 million people today. So says the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS), which surveys 17,500 service stations. Tom Kloza, the service’s top energy analyst, said, “We are likely to see weekly gasoline demand numbers [for March] drop to levels last witnessed in the Nixon administration, and we’ll see those lower levels in April.”
- Miles driven on American roads must already have fallen sharply from job loss and shelter at home orders. Americans drove almost 3 trillion miles in January.
- Gasoline sales are collapsing. Americans burned about 142 billion gallons of gasoline last year. If sheltering at home continues through the end of 2020, that indicates 2020 gasoline consumption will fall by more than half.
- Fuel economy for cars in America averaged about 25 mpg last year. If gasoline consumption falls by half the effect on the volume of air pollution would be the same as raising automobile fuel efficiency to 50 mpg during the pandemic.
Each gallon of gasoline burned generates about 20 pounds of CO2, the greenhouse gas that is a major factor in climate disruption caused by global warming. The reason that eight pounds of gasoline generate 20 pounds of CO2 is explained here.
- Oil production will have to cut back and in some places even shut down because the world has pretty much run out of places to store oil. Not only are underground storage in salt domes near the brim, so are metal storage tanks on land and oil tankers at anchor in ports around the globe.
- New car sales are plummeting. Hyundai, which together with its sister brand Kia sold 4% of all new cars in America last year reported a 40% drop in March sales. That’s not surprising because the two brands focus on lower-income customers who will be hard hit by the loss of jobs. Porsche, a very upscale carmaker, announced that its sales fell 20% in March.
- As people reduce driving it means fewer fossil fuels will be used to fabricate cars, from turning bauxite into aluminum and iron ore into steel stamped into parts.
- The price of what Donald Trump calls “beautiful coal” has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade, down by half since 2018.
- The spot price natural gas, coal’s biggest competitor to fuel electric power stations, fell 42% from its last high in November 2019.
- Cement production also will decline. Worldwide making cement generates about 6% of all fossil fuel pollution. The United States produces about 2% of global production.
Inefficient old jumbo jets are being retired, meaning less air pollution. Both KLM and Qantas stopped flying 747s at the end of March. Fuel-efficient long-haul planes such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus 350, together with the Boeing 777, will be used when the pandemic has passed. The German airline Lufthansa shut down two of its discount sister carriers, retired a host of its jumbo and older jets and announced it expects it will be “years until worldwide demand for air travel returns to pre-crisis levels.” If companies and trade associations make wider use of video conferencing services such as Zoom, then global travel may be subdued for many years. Even with more fuel-efficient jet engines, that would be good for the environment.
None of these developments is good for workers in the affected industries and those that supply those industries. But the reduction in fossil fuel burning should have a positive impact on climate disruption, which unchecked will likely kill many millions of Earthlings as seas cover land, while droughts, fires and flooding wreak havoc and melting tundra unleashes ancient viruses unknown to modern people.
america's fool promotes pollution!!!
Trump to roll back Obama-era clean car rules in huge blow to climate fight
Announcement will allow vehicles to emit 1bn more tons of CO2
Experts say move will lead to more life-threatening air pollution
Emily Holden in Washington
the guardian
Tue 31 Mar 2020 10.00 EDT
The Trump administration is rolling back the US government’s strongest attempt to combat the climate crisis, weakening rules which compel auto companies to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles. Critics say the move will lead to more life-threatening air pollution and force Americans to spend more on gasoline.
The changes to Obama-era regulations will allow vehicles to emit about a billion more tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide – equivalent to roughly a fifth of annual US emissions.
The rollback is one of dozens Trump officials have ushered to completion, seeking to bolster the fossil fuel industry amid intense opposition from Democratic-led states and pushback from world leaders.
Experts say the world is far off track in dealing with the climate emergency, following a year of record-breaking heat, rising hunger, displacement and loss of life due to extreme temperatures and weather disasters.
Donald Trump is expected to laud the new rule as a boost to the US economy, which has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic. His administration says weakening the standards will make cars about $1,000 cheaper, leading Americans to buy new and safer models more frequently and resulting in fewer crash fatalities.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Andrew Wheeler said in a statement: “Now, more than ever, this country needs a sensible national program that strikes the right regulatory balance for the environment, the auto industry, the economy, safety, and American families.
“[This rule] does all of those things by improving fuel economy, continuing to reduce air pollution, and making new vehicles more affordable for all Americans.”
Miles Keogh, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, an organization of state and local air regulators, called the timing of the rule change “appalling”.
He said: “We know coronavirus preys on people with respiratory problems, and this dirty air rule will make more Americans vulnerable.”
The Obama administration required auto companies to make vehicles 4.7% more efficient each year. The Trump administration initially wanted to freeze any progress on fuel efficiency past 2020. But its final rule, written by the EPA and the Department of Transportation, sets an improvement rate of 1.5% per year – or an industry average of 40.4 miles per gallon by 2026.
That’s far less than the 2.4% per year by which the industry has said it will increase standards without any regulation.
The rollback has drawn opposition from nearly half of states and a significant portion of the auto industry. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia, representing about half of US residents, sued over the changes. They said weakening the standards would kill about 2,000 more people and cause 50,000 more cases of respiratory illnesses, while making the climate crisis worse.
California has long instituted more stringent auto standards than the federal government, but the Trump administration has revoked the state’s authority to do so. The state last year struck a deal with four companies – Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW of North America – to exceed what Trump is asking for and require cars, trucks and SUVs to get nearly 50 miles per gallon on average by 2026.
Democratic-run states and environmental advocates are expected to challenge the new regulation. They are already fighting the Trump administration over its weakening of dozens of other environment and public health protections.
Ann Carlson, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, said the legal fight will be “one of the hardest fought, in part because it’s the most significant”.
Carlson believes the rollback is meant to maintain demand for gasoline, which is expected to fall as vehicles become more efficient and transition to electricity.
“You can make cars with zero emissions now, zero greenhouse gases that don’t run on petroleum, anymore,” Carlson said. “So I think the big beneficiaries are absolutely the oil companies.”
The rule change comes as many communities around the US are seeing a decline in air quality, a result of climate change, wildfires, higher temperatures, regulatory rollbacks and poor enforcement of regulations, said Paul Billings, senior vice-president of advocacy for the American Lung Association.
“This will mean there will be more pollution associated with oil extraction, transport, refining – sort of all the way from the well to the pump,” Billings said. “This will mean high levels of smog, more coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, asthma attacks, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) exacerbations and also more particulate pollution.”
The effects will be worse on communities near oil processing facilities and highways, often people of color and poorer Americans.
The changes to Obama-era regulations will allow vehicles to emit about a billion more tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide – equivalent to roughly a fifth of annual US emissions.
The rollback is one of dozens Trump officials have ushered to completion, seeking to bolster the fossil fuel industry amid intense opposition from Democratic-led states and pushback from world leaders.
Experts say the world is far off track in dealing with the climate emergency, following a year of record-breaking heat, rising hunger, displacement and loss of life due to extreme temperatures and weather disasters.
Donald Trump is expected to laud the new rule as a boost to the US economy, which has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic. His administration says weakening the standards will make cars about $1,000 cheaper, leading Americans to buy new and safer models more frequently and resulting in fewer crash fatalities.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Andrew Wheeler said in a statement: “Now, more than ever, this country needs a sensible national program that strikes the right regulatory balance for the environment, the auto industry, the economy, safety, and American families.
“[This rule] does all of those things by improving fuel economy, continuing to reduce air pollution, and making new vehicles more affordable for all Americans.”
Miles Keogh, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, an organization of state and local air regulators, called the timing of the rule change “appalling”.
He said: “We know coronavirus preys on people with respiratory problems, and this dirty air rule will make more Americans vulnerable.”
The Obama administration required auto companies to make vehicles 4.7% more efficient each year. The Trump administration initially wanted to freeze any progress on fuel efficiency past 2020. But its final rule, written by the EPA and the Department of Transportation, sets an improvement rate of 1.5% per year – or an industry average of 40.4 miles per gallon by 2026.
That’s far less than the 2.4% per year by which the industry has said it will increase standards without any regulation.
The rollback has drawn opposition from nearly half of states and a significant portion of the auto industry. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia, representing about half of US residents, sued over the changes. They said weakening the standards would kill about 2,000 more people and cause 50,000 more cases of respiratory illnesses, while making the climate crisis worse.
California has long instituted more stringent auto standards than the federal government, but the Trump administration has revoked the state’s authority to do so. The state last year struck a deal with four companies – Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW of North America – to exceed what Trump is asking for and require cars, trucks and SUVs to get nearly 50 miles per gallon on average by 2026.
Democratic-run states and environmental advocates are expected to challenge the new regulation. They are already fighting the Trump administration over its weakening of dozens of other environment and public health protections.
Ann Carlson, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, said the legal fight will be “one of the hardest fought, in part because it’s the most significant”.
Carlson believes the rollback is meant to maintain demand for gasoline, which is expected to fall as vehicles become more efficient and transition to electricity.
“You can make cars with zero emissions now, zero greenhouse gases that don’t run on petroleum, anymore,” Carlson said. “So I think the big beneficiaries are absolutely the oil companies.”
The rule change comes as many communities around the US are seeing a decline in air quality, a result of climate change, wildfires, higher temperatures, regulatory rollbacks and poor enforcement of regulations, said Paul Billings, senior vice-president of advocacy for the American Lung Association.
“This will mean there will be more pollution associated with oil extraction, transport, refining – sort of all the way from the well to the pump,” Billings said. “This will mean high levels of smog, more coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, asthma attacks, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) exacerbations and also more particulate pollution.”
The effects will be worse on communities near oil processing facilities and highways, often people of color and poorer Americans.
no reason for this rule except greed and political donations!!!
death by greedy POLLUTERS of coronavirus, what a country!!!
US Environmental Protection Agency
Trump administration allows companies to break pollution laws during coronavirus pandemic
Extraordinary move signals to US companies that they will not face any sanctions for polluting the air or water
Oliver Milman and Emily Holden
the guardian
Fri 27 Mar 2020 10.53 EDT
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has suspended its enforcement of environmental laws during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, signaling to companies they will not face any sanction for polluting the air or water of Americans.
In an extraordinary move that has stunned former EPA officials, the Trump administration said it will not expect compliance with the routine monitoring and reporting of pollution and won’t pursue penalties for breaking these rules.
Polluters will be able to ignore environmental laws as long as they can claim in some way these violations were caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the event of an imminent threat to public health, the EPA will defer to the states and “consider the circumstances” over whether it should intervene.
There is no end date set for this dropping of enforcement.
Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the EPA, said that coronavirus had made it difficult for businesses to protect workers and the public while adhering to clean air and water rules.
“This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment,” Wheeler said.
The new stance has caused uproar among former EPA officials and environmental groups who warn that the sweeping will pose a further risk to public health amid the pandemic.
“EPA should never relinquish its right and its obligation to act immediately and decisively when there is threat to public health, no matter what the reason is,” said Cynthia Giles, who was head of EPA enforcement during the Obama administration.
“I am not aware of any instance when EPA ever relinquished this fundamental authority as it does in this memo. This memo amounts to a nationwide moratorium on enforcing the nation’s environmental laws and is an abdication of EPA’s responsibility to protect the public.”
A letter sent to the EPA by Giles and a number of other environmental advocates states that while it may be “reasonable in limited circumstances” to relax certain enforcement during the crisis, the blanket waiver of environmental requirements poses a danger to the American public.
There is particular concern over air pollution emitted by industrial facilities, which are predominantly located in communities with large numbers of low-income people and people of color. Covid-19 attacks the respiratory system, with its spread causing states to scramble for more ventilators to prevent thousands of infected people from dying.
The air pollution that industrial plants will not have to monitor damages the respiratory system, which is especially dangerous for already at-risk populations who may also become infected with Covid-19, which attacks the lungs.
“Excusing the potential release of excess toxic air pollutants and other pollution that exacerbates asthma, breathing difficulty and cardiovascular problems in the midst of a pandemic that can cause respiratory failure is irresponsible from a public health perspective,” the letter states.
“This is not about reporting and paperwork,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project.
“If you’re flying blind because you’re not monitoring for pollution and the public’s flying blind because you’re not reporting it, a lot of problems that come to light when you do those things are going to stay hidden,” Schaeffer said.
In one example, oil refineries will not be compelled to report on and reduce their carcinogenic benzene emissions. Ten refineries, most of them in Texas, have already been exceeding limits.
The relaxation of environmental laws follows lobbying from the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry group, which sent the EPA a letter this week calling for the suspension of rules requiring repair of leaky equipment as well as monitoring of pollution.
The EPA’s move goes even further than this request, although the regulator said it expects businesses will comply with laws “where reasonably practicable” and that it will not tolerate flagrant, intentional breaches of the law.
However, Michael Brune, executive director of Sierra Club, indicated that the move may be challenged in the courts. “While there may be no limit to the lengths Trump and Wheeler are willing to go for corporate polluters, there is a limit to what the public will allow,” Brune said. “This illegal and reckless action will not go unchecked.”
In an extraordinary move that has stunned former EPA officials, the Trump administration said it will not expect compliance with the routine monitoring and reporting of pollution and won’t pursue penalties for breaking these rules.
Polluters will be able to ignore environmental laws as long as they can claim in some way these violations were caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the event of an imminent threat to public health, the EPA will defer to the states and “consider the circumstances” over whether it should intervene.
There is no end date set for this dropping of enforcement.
Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the EPA, said that coronavirus had made it difficult for businesses to protect workers and the public while adhering to clean air and water rules.
“This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment,” Wheeler said.
The new stance has caused uproar among former EPA officials and environmental groups who warn that the sweeping will pose a further risk to public health amid the pandemic.
“EPA should never relinquish its right and its obligation to act immediately and decisively when there is threat to public health, no matter what the reason is,” said Cynthia Giles, who was head of EPA enforcement during the Obama administration.
“I am not aware of any instance when EPA ever relinquished this fundamental authority as it does in this memo. This memo amounts to a nationwide moratorium on enforcing the nation’s environmental laws and is an abdication of EPA’s responsibility to protect the public.”
A letter sent to the EPA by Giles and a number of other environmental advocates states that while it may be “reasonable in limited circumstances” to relax certain enforcement during the crisis, the blanket waiver of environmental requirements poses a danger to the American public.
There is particular concern over air pollution emitted by industrial facilities, which are predominantly located in communities with large numbers of low-income people and people of color. Covid-19 attacks the respiratory system, with its spread causing states to scramble for more ventilators to prevent thousands of infected people from dying.
The air pollution that industrial plants will not have to monitor damages the respiratory system, which is especially dangerous for already at-risk populations who may also become infected with Covid-19, which attacks the lungs.
“Excusing the potential release of excess toxic air pollutants and other pollution that exacerbates asthma, breathing difficulty and cardiovascular problems in the midst of a pandemic that can cause respiratory failure is irresponsible from a public health perspective,” the letter states.
“This is not about reporting and paperwork,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project.
“If you’re flying blind because you’re not monitoring for pollution and the public’s flying blind because you’re not reporting it, a lot of problems that come to light when you do those things are going to stay hidden,” Schaeffer said.
In one example, oil refineries will not be compelled to report on and reduce their carcinogenic benzene emissions. Ten refineries, most of them in Texas, have already been exceeding limits.
The relaxation of environmental laws follows lobbying from the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry group, which sent the EPA a letter this week calling for the suspension of rules requiring repair of leaky equipment as well as monitoring of pollution.
The EPA’s move goes even further than this request, although the regulator said it expects businesses will comply with laws “where reasonably practicable” and that it will not tolerate flagrant, intentional breaches of the law.
However, Michael Brune, executive director of Sierra Club, indicated that the move may be challenged in the courts. “While there may be no limit to the lengths Trump and Wheeler are willing to go for corporate polluters, there is a limit to what the public will allow,” Brune said. “This illegal and reckless action will not go unchecked.”
Deadly Poison Used To Kill Weeds Wreaks Havoc On Nearby Farms
Approved by Obama and Trump, Dicamba Drifts to Damage Soybeans, Peaches, Other Crops; In Court, Farmers Win a Round Against Manufacturer
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
3/12/2020
Problems with dicamba, the herbicide that tricks weeds into growing so fast they die, were found more than 50 years ago. But the EPA under Obama approved new dicamba sprays in 2016 without independent testing of how prone the herbicide was to drift to damage other fields.
A jury deliberated just 30 minutes on Feb. 15 in a Southeast Missouri courthouse named after Rush Limbaugh’s grandfather before deciding on $250 million in punitive damages for the makers of the herbicide, Monsanto and BASF. The case was brought by an owner of a peach orchard. The companies were also ordered to pay $15 million in compensation.
Trump met with CEO Werner Baumann of Bayer, the German company that now owns Monsanto, soon after his election. Trump’s EPA kept dicamba on the market. Concentrations in the air in Missouri’s Bootheel and Arkansas’s Delta have been compared to smog. The dicamba products’ EPA approval is set to expire Dec. 20 unless the agency extends it again.
“EPA understands that dicamba is a valuable pest control tool for America’s farmers,” Andrew Wheeler, then the EPA acting administrator, said in 2018.
Dicamba can damage soybeans that aren’t treated to resist it at concentrations in the air as low as one billionth of a gram per cubic meter. One tell-tale sign of damage in soybeans is “cupping” where necrosis on the leaf tip makes the leaf cup up. Peach trees like the ones on Bill and Denise Bader’s peach orchard spread over more than 1,000 acres near Campbell, Mo., are also ultra-sensitive to dicamba.
Steve Smith of Red Gold, the world’s largest privately held tomato canner, warned Congress in 2010 that widespread use of dicamba is “incompatible with Midwestern agriculture.”
Environmental groups including the National Family Farm Coalition and the Center for Food Safety sued the EPA and Monsanto in federal court in 2017. They claimed the EPA failed to analyze costs to farmers from drifting dicamba, “recklessly pushing to market” a product that damaged millions of acres of crops.
No Study of Drift
Monsanto denied requests by university researchers before the EPA approved the herbicide to study how likely it was to vaporize and drift across fields.
A three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit in January 2019, saying the case was moot because the EPA had extended the registration for the dicamba spray.
Bader Farms, the Missouri company that sued Monsanto and BASF, is the largest peach farm in Missouri with nearly 110,000 peach trees but puny compared with Monsanto and BASF. The farm is expected to go out of business because of damage from dicamba.
Bader’s legal team asked for $200 million in punitive damages or 2.5% of Monsanto’s net worth. The company put that figure at $6.5 billion in 2017 and $7.8 billion in 2018.
Decimated Peach Crop
The three-week trial focused the damage to the Bader business which the couple started in 1987. Their peach harvest dropped from an average of 162,000 bushels in the early 2000s to as low as 12,000 bushels in 2018.
Weed scientist Ford Baldwin said so many farmers were spraying dicamba that a dicamba smog would build up, often poisoning crops for an entire night. In 2017, 80% of the cotton and 65% of the soybeans in the Bootheel were planted using Xtend seed from Monsanto and nearly all of it was sprayed with dicamba.
Bayer and BASF contended that illegal spraying by farmers, inclement weather and soil fungus damaged the peach trees.
Bayer and BASF have said they plan to appeal the verdict. The lawsuit was the first of at least 140 similar cases to go to trial.
A jury deliberated just 30 minutes on Feb. 15 in a Southeast Missouri courthouse named after Rush Limbaugh’s grandfather before deciding on $250 million in punitive damages for the makers of the herbicide, Monsanto and BASF. The case was brought by an owner of a peach orchard. The companies were also ordered to pay $15 million in compensation.
Trump met with CEO Werner Baumann of Bayer, the German company that now owns Monsanto, soon after his election. Trump’s EPA kept dicamba on the market. Concentrations in the air in Missouri’s Bootheel and Arkansas’s Delta have been compared to smog. The dicamba products’ EPA approval is set to expire Dec. 20 unless the agency extends it again.
“EPA understands that dicamba is a valuable pest control tool for America’s farmers,” Andrew Wheeler, then the EPA acting administrator, said in 2018.
Dicamba can damage soybeans that aren’t treated to resist it at concentrations in the air as low as one billionth of a gram per cubic meter. One tell-tale sign of damage in soybeans is “cupping” where necrosis on the leaf tip makes the leaf cup up. Peach trees like the ones on Bill and Denise Bader’s peach orchard spread over more than 1,000 acres near Campbell, Mo., are also ultra-sensitive to dicamba.
Steve Smith of Red Gold, the world’s largest privately held tomato canner, warned Congress in 2010 that widespread use of dicamba is “incompatible with Midwestern agriculture.”
Environmental groups including the National Family Farm Coalition and the Center for Food Safety sued the EPA and Monsanto in federal court in 2017. They claimed the EPA failed to analyze costs to farmers from drifting dicamba, “recklessly pushing to market” a product that damaged millions of acres of crops.
No Study of Drift
Monsanto denied requests by university researchers before the EPA approved the herbicide to study how likely it was to vaporize and drift across fields.
A three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit in January 2019, saying the case was moot because the EPA had extended the registration for the dicamba spray.
Bader Farms, the Missouri company that sued Monsanto and BASF, is the largest peach farm in Missouri with nearly 110,000 peach trees but puny compared with Monsanto and BASF. The farm is expected to go out of business because of damage from dicamba.
Bader’s legal team asked for $200 million in punitive damages or 2.5% of Monsanto’s net worth. The company put that figure at $6.5 billion in 2017 and $7.8 billion in 2018.
Decimated Peach Crop
The three-week trial focused the damage to the Bader business which the couple started in 1987. Their peach harvest dropped from an average of 162,000 bushels in the early 2000s to as low as 12,000 bushels in 2018.
Weed scientist Ford Baldwin said so many farmers were spraying dicamba that a dicamba smog would build up, often poisoning crops for an entire night. In 2017, 80% of the cotton and 65% of the soybeans in the Bootheel were planted using Xtend seed from Monsanto and nearly all of it was sprayed with dicamba.
Bayer and BASF contended that illegal spraying by farmers, inclement weather and soil fungus damaged the peach trees.
Bayer and BASF have said they plan to appeal the verdict. The lawsuit was the first of at least 140 similar cases to go to trial.
PFAS “Forever Chemicals” Found in Tap Water Linked to Cancer Risks
BY Mike Ludwig, Truthout
PUBLISHED March 8, 2020
For the first time, scientists reviewed 26 types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and found that they all display at least one characteristic of cancer-causing chemicals that can alter crucial bodily functions. The new study comes on the heels of alarming laboratory tests that detected many of these “forever chemicals” in tap water sampled across the country and suggest that fluorinated compounds in the PFAS family have contaminated virtually every major source of drinking water in the United States.
PFAS are in a broad group of chemicals used in an array of consumer products and industrial processes for their nonstick, stain-repellent and waterproofing properties. The substances trace their chemical roots back to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the chemical originally used to make Teflon for non-stick cookware.
PFOA and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), the chemicals originally used to make 3M’s Scotchgard, were phased out after PFAS pollution contaminated local communities and raised mounting environmental health concerns. Both PFOA and PFOS are categorized as PFAS, but today, there are hundreds of other PFAS chemicals. The industry has introduced dozens of new compounds it claims are safer for humans and the environment because they made up by shorter, less-complex chains of fluorinated carbons.
However, at least one class of replacements, known as GenX chemicals, caused tumors and damage to the liver, kidney and immune system in animal studies, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Now a new study released by the Environmental Working Group suggests more than at least a dozen different PFAS compounds display some of the same “key characteristics” of PFOS and PFOA that are linked to an increased risk of cancer.
PFOS and PFOA are the most well studied PFAS, and have been linked to a number of health problems, including increased cholesterol levels, liver dysfunction and weakened immune systems in children. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified PFOA as a “possible human carcinogen” and the EPA says there is some evidence to suggest PFOS and PFOA may increase cancer risks.
Scientists have long suspected that closely-related PFAS chemicals pose similar health risks, but few have undergone rigorous safety testing, and data on how the substances react in the bodies of humans and animals tends to be scant. Still, millions of people are exposed to PFAS from a multitude of sources, including food packaging and drinking water.
“The short-chain and replacement chemicals, while they are not complete in data, do exhibit some of the similar characteristics as the well studied ones, and that’s concerning because we know we are exposed to them in drinking water, for example,” said Alexis Temkin, an Environmental Working Group toxicologist and the primary author of the new study.
Temkin worked with researchers at Indiana University to review all the publicly available data on 26 different PFAS chemicals, including PFOS and PFOA. The team found “strong evidence” that multiple PFAS suppress the immune system and interfere with cell growth and hormonal signaling, all factors associated with carcinogenicity.
While PFOS and PFOA displayed five characteristics associated with an elevated risk of cancer, the rest of the PFAS substances under review displayed at least one of these key characteristics. This suggests they may be safer than the original PFAS chemicals, but not safe enough to subject the public to widespread exposure. Temkin said the majority of PFAS the team reviewed have what’s known as “receptor mediated effects” that may alter critical bodily functions such as hormonal signaling and cell growth.
““The majority of them have what’s called receptor mediated effects,” Temkin said. “A lot of these chemicals can either bind or interact with receptors that control cell growth, or hormonal signaling like the estrogen receptor, which can play a role in breast cancer and reproductive organ cancers,” Temkin said.
To be clear, the study did not determine that PFAS cause cancer, but there is evidence to suggest that various PFAS substances act similarly to known cancer-causing substances by disrupting bodily systems. People are exposed to toxins all the time, and determining cancer risk is complicated. Temkin said more research is needed to understand how these chemicals may contribute to health problems and how the body reacts to different combinations of various PFAS substances.
“We have multiple routes of exposure, but not complete safety testing data,” Temkin said, adding no knew tests were conducted for the study and the researchers did not use data obtained from the industry, which often shields research from the public.
PFAS are “persistent” chemicals, which means they do not break down easily in the human body and the environment, allowing contamination to spread indefinitely. Last month, the EWG released laboratory tests of tap water sampled from 44 cities and towns across the country, and 43 came back positive for some level of various PFAS substances. Some of the highest levels were detected in major metropolitan areas, including New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.
The only tap water free of PFAS was sampled from Meridian, Mississippi, which draws its water from deep underground wells. Alongside previous tests and research, the findings suggest that major sources of drinking water such as rivers and lakes are contaminated with small but detectable levels of “forever chemicals” that will remain in the environment for years. Thanks to PFAS persistence and various sources of PFAS pollution, scientists now believe everyone living in the U.S. likely has some level of PFAS in their bodies.
Politicians and regulators are now scrambling to address a silent public health crisis that is only growing in scope as scientists continue to uncover new information about the health dangers of PFAS and its pervasiveness in the environment.
The EPA has a PFAS “action plan,” but the agency only recently began the regulatory process for setting mandatory federal limits for PFOS and PFOA in drinking water. The regulations could be years in the making and would not cover hundreds of additional PFAS chemicals, which Congress recently added to a national database that tracks toxic substances released into the environment. President Trump has threatened to veto legislation passed by House Democrats that would require the EPA to establish tough standards for PFAS in drinking water and designate PFOS and PFOA as hazardous substances under federal law. The EPA would have five years to determine whether other PFAS should be classified as hazardous, but the legislation is stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate.
The EPA has come under fire for dragging its feet in responding to PFAS and now says regulators are investigating polluters on criminal charges. Environmentalists recently sued the Department of Defense for using incinerators to destroy firefighting foam containing PFAS that has contaminated Air Force bases across the country, in part because nearby residents were concerned about the spread of pollution. That’s an alarming sign that there is no easy fix for cleaning up chemicals that tend to stick around and turn up everywhere.
PFAS are in a broad group of chemicals used in an array of consumer products and industrial processes for their nonstick, stain-repellent and waterproofing properties. The substances trace their chemical roots back to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the chemical originally used to make Teflon for non-stick cookware.
PFOA and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), the chemicals originally used to make 3M’s Scotchgard, were phased out after PFAS pollution contaminated local communities and raised mounting environmental health concerns. Both PFOA and PFOS are categorized as PFAS, but today, there are hundreds of other PFAS chemicals. The industry has introduced dozens of new compounds it claims are safer for humans and the environment because they made up by shorter, less-complex chains of fluorinated carbons.
However, at least one class of replacements, known as GenX chemicals, caused tumors and damage to the liver, kidney and immune system in animal studies, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Now a new study released by the Environmental Working Group suggests more than at least a dozen different PFAS compounds display some of the same “key characteristics” of PFOS and PFOA that are linked to an increased risk of cancer.
PFOS and PFOA are the most well studied PFAS, and have been linked to a number of health problems, including increased cholesterol levels, liver dysfunction and weakened immune systems in children. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified PFOA as a “possible human carcinogen” and the EPA says there is some evidence to suggest PFOS and PFOA may increase cancer risks.
Scientists have long suspected that closely-related PFAS chemicals pose similar health risks, but few have undergone rigorous safety testing, and data on how the substances react in the bodies of humans and animals tends to be scant. Still, millions of people are exposed to PFAS from a multitude of sources, including food packaging and drinking water.
“The short-chain and replacement chemicals, while they are not complete in data, do exhibit some of the similar characteristics as the well studied ones, and that’s concerning because we know we are exposed to them in drinking water, for example,” said Alexis Temkin, an Environmental Working Group toxicologist and the primary author of the new study.
Temkin worked with researchers at Indiana University to review all the publicly available data on 26 different PFAS chemicals, including PFOS and PFOA. The team found “strong evidence” that multiple PFAS suppress the immune system and interfere with cell growth and hormonal signaling, all factors associated with carcinogenicity.
While PFOS and PFOA displayed five characteristics associated with an elevated risk of cancer, the rest of the PFAS substances under review displayed at least one of these key characteristics. This suggests they may be safer than the original PFAS chemicals, but not safe enough to subject the public to widespread exposure. Temkin said the majority of PFAS the team reviewed have what’s known as “receptor mediated effects” that may alter critical bodily functions such as hormonal signaling and cell growth.
““The majority of them have what’s called receptor mediated effects,” Temkin said. “A lot of these chemicals can either bind or interact with receptors that control cell growth, or hormonal signaling like the estrogen receptor, which can play a role in breast cancer and reproductive organ cancers,” Temkin said.
To be clear, the study did not determine that PFAS cause cancer, but there is evidence to suggest that various PFAS substances act similarly to known cancer-causing substances by disrupting bodily systems. People are exposed to toxins all the time, and determining cancer risk is complicated. Temkin said more research is needed to understand how these chemicals may contribute to health problems and how the body reacts to different combinations of various PFAS substances.
“We have multiple routes of exposure, but not complete safety testing data,” Temkin said, adding no knew tests were conducted for the study and the researchers did not use data obtained from the industry, which often shields research from the public.
PFAS are “persistent” chemicals, which means they do not break down easily in the human body and the environment, allowing contamination to spread indefinitely. Last month, the EWG released laboratory tests of tap water sampled from 44 cities and towns across the country, and 43 came back positive for some level of various PFAS substances. Some of the highest levels were detected in major metropolitan areas, including New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.
The only tap water free of PFAS was sampled from Meridian, Mississippi, which draws its water from deep underground wells. Alongside previous tests and research, the findings suggest that major sources of drinking water such as rivers and lakes are contaminated with small but detectable levels of “forever chemicals” that will remain in the environment for years. Thanks to PFAS persistence and various sources of PFAS pollution, scientists now believe everyone living in the U.S. likely has some level of PFAS in their bodies.
Politicians and regulators are now scrambling to address a silent public health crisis that is only growing in scope as scientists continue to uncover new information about the health dangers of PFAS and its pervasiveness in the environment.
The EPA has a PFAS “action plan,” but the agency only recently began the regulatory process for setting mandatory federal limits for PFOS and PFOA in drinking water. The regulations could be years in the making and would not cover hundreds of additional PFAS chemicals, which Congress recently added to a national database that tracks toxic substances released into the environment. President Trump has threatened to veto legislation passed by House Democrats that would require the EPA to establish tough standards for PFAS in drinking water and designate PFOS and PFOA as hazardous substances under federal law. The EPA would have five years to determine whether other PFAS should be classified as hazardous, but the legislation is stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate.
The EPA has come under fire for dragging its feet in responding to PFAS and now says regulators are investigating polluters on criminal charges. Environmentalists recently sued the Department of Defense for using incinerators to destroy firefighting foam containing PFAS that has contaminated Air Force bases across the country, in part because nearby residents were concerned about the spread of pollution. That’s an alarming sign that there is no easy fix for cleaning up chemicals that tend to stick around and turn up everywhere.
Coke and Pepsi sued for creating a plastic pollution ‘nuisance’
California environmental group says much of the tons of plastic in the oceans can be traced back to the 10 companies they are suing
Erin McCormick - the guardian
27 Feb 2020 17.16 EST
A man sorts empty plastic bottles at a recycling center. Photograph: Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images
Coke, Pepsi, Nestle and other large companies are being sued by a California environmental group for creating a plastic pollution “nuisance” and misleading consumers about the recyclability of plastic.
The suit, filed in San Mateo county superior court on Wednesday, argues that companies that sell plastic bottles and bags that end up polluting the ocean should be held accountable for damaging the environment.
Earth Island Institute, which filed the lawsuit, says a significant amount of the eight to 20m tons of plastic entering the Earth’s oceans annually can be traced back to a handful of companies, which rely heavily on single-use plastic packaging.
The suit seeks to require these companies to pay to remediate the harm that plastic pollution has caused to the earth and oceans. It also demands these companies stop advertising products as “recyclable”, when they are, in fact, largely not recycled.
“These companies should bear the responsibility for choking our ecosystem with plastic,” said David Phillips, executive director of Earth Island Institute. “They know very well that this stuff is not being recycled, even though they are telling people on the labels that it is recyclable and making people feel like it’s being taken care of.”
The suit names 10 companies found to be top producers of the plastic collected in beach cleanups in an international audit conducted last year by 72,000 volunteers working with the group Break Free From Plastic. The companies are Coca Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, Clorox, Crystal Geyser, Mars, Danone, Mondelez International, Colgate-Palmolive, and Procter & Gamble.
“Plastic waste is a worldwide problem that demands thoughtful solutions,” said William M Dermody Jr, a spokesman for the American Beverage Association, which represents Coca Cola, Pepsi and other makers of non-alcoholic beverages. “America’s beverage companies are already taking action to address the issue by reducing our use of new plastic, investing to increase the collection of our bottles so they can be remade into new bottles as intended, and collaborating with legislators and third-party experts to achieve meaningful policy resolutions.”
Other companies, including Nestle, said they are still reviewing the lawsuit’s allegations or they could not immediately be reached.
Noting that, at the current rate of dumping, plastic will outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050, the suit charged that companies have engaged in a “decades-long campaign to deflect blame for the plastic pollution crisis to consumers”. Consumers are led to believe that the earth would be healthy, if only they recycled properly, when, in reality, there is no market for most plastics to be recycled, the suit says.
Past studies have shown only about 10% of plastic gets recycled, but Phillips said, once those numbers are updated to reflect the recent collapse of the recycling market, it will likely show that only about 5% is getting recycled.
He said customers have received misinformation downplaying the harms caused by plastic in marketing campaigns similar to the disinformation promoted by tobacco companies downplaying the dangers of smoking.
“This is the first suit of its kind,” Phillips said. “These companies are going to have to reveal how much they’ve known about how little of this stuff is being recycled.”
Martin Bourque, who runs the Ecology Center, which handles recycling for the City of Berkeley, said he is tired of knowing that some portion of the plastic collected in his city’s recycling bins will eventually just be thrown away.
“It’s about time these companies that have been telling people that this stuff is recyclable be held accountable for polluting our ecosystem,” he said.
Phillips said the suit does not mean to dissuade customers from recycling, but it seeks to have companies take more responsibility for the waste their products create.
“It’s not that we’re slamming recycling,” he said. “We’re totally in favor of recycling. We just want companies to take responsibility for what’s really happening to all this plastic they’re producing.”
The suit, filed in San Mateo county superior court on Wednesday, argues that companies that sell plastic bottles and bags that end up polluting the ocean should be held accountable for damaging the environment.
Earth Island Institute, which filed the lawsuit, says a significant amount of the eight to 20m tons of plastic entering the Earth’s oceans annually can be traced back to a handful of companies, which rely heavily on single-use plastic packaging.
The suit seeks to require these companies to pay to remediate the harm that plastic pollution has caused to the earth and oceans. It also demands these companies stop advertising products as “recyclable”, when they are, in fact, largely not recycled.
“These companies should bear the responsibility for choking our ecosystem with plastic,” said David Phillips, executive director of Earth Island Institute. “They know very well that this stuff is not being recycled, even though they are telling people on the labels that it is recyclable and making people feel like it’s being taken care of.”
The suit names 10 companies found to be top producers of the plastic collected in beach cleanups in an international audit conducted last year by 72,000 volunteers working with the group Break Free From Plastic. The companies are Coca Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, Clorox, Crystal Geyser, Mars, Danone, Mondelez International, Colgate-Palmolive, and Procter & Gamble.
“Plastic waste is a worldwide problem that demands thoughtful solutions,” said William M Dermody Jr, a spokesman for the American Beverage Association, which represents Coca Cola, Pepsi and other makers of non-alcoholic beverages. “America’s beverage companies are already taking action to address the issue by reducing our use of new plastic, investing to increase the collection of our bottles so they can be remade into new bottles as intended, and collaborating with legislators and third-party experts to achieve meaningful policy resolutions.”
Other companies, including Nestle, said they are still reviewing the lawsuit’s allegations or they could not immediately be reached.
Noting that, at the current rate of dumping, plastic will outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050, the suit charged that companies have engaged in a “decades-long campaign to deflect blame for the plastic pollution crisis to consumers”. Consumers are led to believe that the earth would be healthy, if only they recycled properly, when, in reality, there is no market for most plastics to be recycled, the suit says.
Past studies have shown only about 10% of plastic gets recycled, but Phillips said, once those numbers are updated to reflect the recent collapse of the recycling market, it will likely show that only about 5% is getting recycled.
He said customers have received misinformation downplaying the harms caused by plastic in marketing campaigns similar to the disinformation promoted by tobacco companies downplaying the dangers of smoking.
“This is the first suit of its kind,” Phillips said. “These companies are going to have to reveal how much they’ve known about how little of this stuff is being recycled.”
Martin Bourque, who runs the Ecology Center, which handles recycling for the City of Berkeley, said he is tired of knowing that some portion of the plastic collected in his city’s recycling bins will eventually just be thrown away.
“It’s about time these companies that have been telling people that this stuff is recyclable be held accountable for polluting our ecosystem,” he said.
Phillips said the suit does not mean to dissuade customers from recycling, but it seeks to have companies take more responsibility for the waste their products create.
“It’s not that we’re slamming recycling,” he said. “We’re totally in favor of recycling. We just want companies to take responsibility for what’s really happening to all this plastic they’re producing.”
Trump administration kills endangered species — and there’s a $2.3 million Bill Barr connection, too
By Sarah Okeson, DCReport @ RawStory
on February 26, 2020
Trump’s Fish and Wildlife Service has pushed an endangered freshwater mussel closer to extinction in its efforts to placate an energy company where Attorney General Bill Barr was once on the board.
Dominion Energy and Duke Energy want to route the proposed 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline through Hackers Creek in West Virginia, the site of the endangered clubshell mussel. Trump’s Fish and Wildlife Service authorized trying to rescue mussels which could be smothered by sediment from pipeline construction instead of rerouting the pipeline. Sixty-nine mussels were collected from the creek to be taken to the White Sulphur Springs National Fish Hatchery, and most of them died.
“The agency’s obligation is to protect this species including this population, not hasten its end,” said attorney Patrick Hunter of the Southern Environmental Law Center.
The clubshell mussel, listed as endangered in 1993, was once was found throughout the Ohio River basin and tributaries of western Lake Erie. The mussels now appear to be limited to 11 populations in 19 streams. Many of those don’t appear to be reproducing.
‘Indicator Species’
Mussels such as the clubshell serve as an indicator species much as the canaries that miners once carried to warn them of possible suffocation dangers. When mussels die off, that shows the streams aren’t healthy enough to support them. Clubshell mussels are vulnerable to being suffocated by sediment that flows into streams from farming or construction.
Dominion Energy, where Barr was paid $2.3 million in cash and stock awards as a board member, and Duke Energy want to build the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline to carry natural gas from West Virginia to North Carolina. Plans for the pipeline include almost 12 miles of roads near Hackers Creek and 6.4 miles where pipeline could be laid.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that assesses the impact of pipelines on endangered species, is headed by Aurelia Skipwith, an attorney and former Monsanto employee, who was confirmed by the Senate in December. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has praised Trump’s efforts to speed up approvals for pipelines, was one of three Democrats who voted for Skipwith.
Agency Saw No Impact
The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded in 2018 that the pipeline wouldn’t jeopardize the survival and recovery of the clubshell and three other species, the rusty patched bumble bee, the Indiana bat or the Madison Cave isopod.
Federal judges found that the Fish and Wildlife Service decided without legal authority that the clubshell population in Hackers Creek shouldn’t be protected because it didn’t appear to be reproducing. Judges also found flaws in the agency’s analysis of the three other species.
Supreme Court CaseThe Endangered Species Act “is not focused exclusively on protecting those populations that currently are naturally reproductive,” wrote Roger Gregory, the chief judge for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In November, Dominion Energy CEO Thomas Farrell told investors he expected to receive a new opinion from the Fish and Wildlife Service that would allow the company to resume construction on the pipeline. The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in a case focusing on another aspect of the pipeline, whether it can cross the Appalachian Trail.
Minutes from a meeting between federal regulators and employees from Dominion Energy and Duke Energy show that the Fish and Wildlife Service is once again considering authorizing the pipeline to cross the Hackers Creek watershed.
Dominion Energy and Duke Energy want to route the proposed 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline through Hackers Creek in West Virginia, the site of the endangered clubshell mussel. Trump’s Fish and Wildlife Service authorized trying to rescue mussels which could be smothered by sediment from pipeline construction instead of rerouting the pipeline. Sixty-nine mussels were collected from the creek to be taken to the White Sulphur Springs National Fish Hatchery, and most of them died.
“The agency’s obligation is to protect this species including this population, not hasten its end,” said attorney Patrick Hunter of the Southern Environmental Law Center.
The clubshell mussel, listed as endangered in 1993, was once was found throughout the Ohio River basin and tributaries of western Lake Erie. The mussels now appear to be limited to 11 populations in 19 streams. Many of those don’t appear to be reproducing.
‘Indicator Species’
Mussels such as the clubshell serve as an indicator species much as the canaries that miners once carried to warn them of possible suffocation dangers. When mussels die off, that shows the streams aren’t healthy enough to support them. Clubshell mussels are vulnerable to being suffocated by sediment that flows into streams from farming or construction.
Dominion Energy, where Barr was paid $2.3 million in cash and stock awards as a board member, and Duke Energy want to build the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline to carry natural gas from West Virginia to North Carolina. Plans for the pipeline include almost 12 miles of roads near Hackers Creek and 6.4 miles where pipeline could be laid.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that assesses the impact of pipelines on endangered species, is headed by Aurelia Skipwith, an attorney and former Monsanto employee, who was confirmed by the Senate in December. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has praised Trump’s efforts to speed up approvals for pipelines, was one of three Democrats who voted for Skipwith.
Agency Saw No Impact
The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded in 2018 that the pipeline wouldn’t jeopardize the survival and recovery of the clubshell and three other species, the rusty patched bumble bee, the Indiana bat or the Madison Cave isopod.
Federal judges found that the Fish and Wildlife Service decided without legal authority that the clubshell population in Hackers Creek shouldn’t be protected because it didn’t appear to be reproducing. Judges also found flaws in the agency’s analysis of the three other species.
Supreme Court CaseThe Endangered Species Act “is not focused exclusively on protecting those populations that currently are naturally reproductive,” wrote Roger Gregory, the chief judge for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In November, Dominion Energy CEO Thomas Farrell told investors he expected to receive a new opinion from the Fish and Wildlife Service that would allow the company to resume construction on the pipeline. The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in a case focusing on another aspect of the pipeline, whether it can cross the Appalachian Trail.
Minutes from a meeting between federal regulators and employees from Dominion Energy and Duke Energy show that the Fish and Wildlife Service is once again considering authorizing the pipeline to cross the Hackers Creek watershed.
Facing Undeniable Reality of Climate Change, Deniers Now Argue It’s Not That Bad
BY Simon Chandler, Truthout
PUBLISHED February 23, 2020
Climate change denialism has a long history. Possibly the earliest clear example dates back to October 1959, when a researcher working for none other than Royal Dutch Shell published an article in The New Scientist. Acknowledging that an “immense” quantity of fossil fuel has been burned since the middle of the 19th century, he nonetheless argued that, “Nature’s carbon cycles are so vast that there seem few grounds for believing Man will upset the balance.” Since then, articles, books, and other materials denying or belittling the existence of anthropogenic climate disruption have only proliferated, particularly as industry-funded groups, such as the Global Climate Coalition and the George C. Marshall Institute, emerged in the 1980s.
Unfortunately for such lobbyists and think tanks, it became harder to operate as evidence for the human-made nature of climate change accumulated over the years, and as an increasingly unified scientific consensus solidified around such evidence. The Global Climate Coalition disbanded in 2001, following years of targeted pressure from environmental groups and campaigners, as well as the resulting exits of such members as BP, Shell and Ford. Likewise, the George C. Marshall Institute folded in 2015, having suffered the withdrawal of funding from such backers as Exxon-Mobil, which decided to publicly end its support of the Institute and certain other disinformation groups in 2008.
Superficially, the situation appears even worse for climate change denialism now than it did 20 or even 10 years ago. In July, as a study published in Nature demonstrated that the past few decades have witnessed “unprecedented” global temperature rises, it was estimated by climate researcher John Cook that the scientific consensus on climate change has now likely passed 99 percent. Cook had previously co-authored a famous 2013 article that found that 97 percent of researchers who published work on climate change between 1991 and 2011 agreed that it was being caused by human activity, indicating the increasing coalescence of the science community around objective reality. Given that Cook has now suggested that the consensus is nearly 100 percent, the future doesn’t look bright for any corporation, lobby group, think tank or multimillionaire wanting to prevent the public from seeing the proverbial light.
However, not only is the history of climate denialism long, but it’s also constantly evolving. Because even if it’s no longer viable to openly and directly claim that human activity isn’t heating the Earth, organizations with an interest in maintaining the status quo of fossil fuels have nonetheless been finding more indirect and inventive ways of undermining the world’s growing concern for its own future.
It seems that since the emergence of Extinction Rebellion, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s activism, worldwide climate strikes and an almost-complete scientific consensus, this new form of denialism has become more active than ever. But that’s not to say it’s become more successful, since what little evidence there is indicates a stubborn failure to sway minds.
Send in the Bots
In an age where social media has become the primary medium for the consumption of news and information, it’s no surprise to learn that climate denialism has relocated to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. However, of the three major social media platforms, it’s Twitter that’s the most representative of the new kind of denialism. In contrast to simply offering a space for skeptical videos and content, what sets it apart are the legions of bots and fraudulent accounts it hosts. While Facebook makes it hard to set up a fake user account, Twitter has facilitated the existence of thousands (if not millions) of automated or astroturfed accounts — which in this case, deviously create the illusion of widespread support for the idea that anthropogenic climate change is either a lie or bad science.
In a study published in November 2018, researchers at Brown University found that bots were generating 20 percent of all posts on Twitter related to climate change. They examined a sample of 144,000 accounts discussing climate change on the platform, finding that about 23,000 of these were bots, and while this is already a high number, it’s likely that bot activity has increased in more recent months, as a kind of reactionary counterattack against the growing momentum behind climate activism.
On the one hand, this has been the impression of climate scientists and activists operating on Twitter. Replying to a tweet of a user who’d complained about climate deniers “crawling out from everywhere today,” renowned climatologist Michael E. Mann wrote in August that, “A lot of them are bots and paid trolls. It’s the preferred method of warfare by the climate change denial/delay machine.” Similarly, one active Twitter climate campaigner advised his followers to “be on the lookout for these new, low-follower accounts. There’s been a BIG uptick in them in mid-2019.”
It would of course be rash to place too much faith in these subjective impressions of increased activity, but there have also been more objective measures of surges, which tend to arise whenever the issue of climate change gains more airtime and acceptance. In early September, “climate change” became the most popular term being used by the 100,000 accounts tracked by Bot Sentinel, a tool which monitors suspect and automated Twitter users. It rose in visibility after CNN’s Climate Crisis Town Hall on September 4, appearing in 700 separate mentions within the following 24-hour period.
It’s hard to determine just who or what exactly is responsible for such spikes in activity. However, in speaking with InsideClimate News (which originally broke the story above), climate scientist Mann suggested that the usual suspects are likely pulling the strings of the new legions of climate-denying bots, just as they were with the lobby groups and think tanks of yore. “I believe this is a concerted effort, likely by bad state actors and fossil fuel interests, to create disinformation, discord and division as we approach the all-important UN Summit and children’s youth event later this month,” he said.
Mann provided no evidence for these specific claims, but there is at least an indication that energy companies have in the recent past harnessed bots and fake accounts to manufacture the veneer of public acceptance of their industry. In 2016, DeSmogBlog published an investigative report that concluded that the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN) had created at least 16 suspicious Twitter accounts to propagate a pro-Dakota Access Pipeline message. MAIN’s members include, among others, the North Dakota Petroleum Council, Petroleum Marketers, and the South Dakota Petroleum and Propane Marketers Association, the latter of which currently counts ExxonMobil as an “energy associate.”
The fact that such organizations likely involved themselves in manipulating online political discourse in the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline implies that similar groups may very well be involved in the current wave of online climate denialism. Because without any massively public leak and backlash, why stop with only one episode?
Undermining Rather Than Denying
But it isn’t only the migration to social media and the simulation of public backing that characterizes modern climate denialism. Its other defining feature is that, rather than directly rejecting the thesis of human-made climate change, contemporary climate denialism has been increasingly fashioning indirect and tangential ways of undermining calls for significant action on renewables and carbon reduction. Often, these new “indirect” methods amount to little more than nitpicking with how the issue of climate change is being described or presented, or at best, calling into question the political motives of those advocating for action and reform.
As an example, both of these tendencies were on display in an article published by National Review on September 6, only two days after CNN’s Climate Crisis Town Hall television special. Written by Jonah Goldberg of the American Enterprise Institute, it set its sights on disputing whether climate change really constitutes an existential threat, rather than merely a threat to our quality of life, while also criticizing certain Democrats for referring to it as an existential crisis. At the same time, it proffered the argument that Democrats (and likely other climate activists) don’t really care about the issue, and instead “want to use it as an excuse to radically transform the American economy and political system along lines that have less to do with climate change and much to do with their ideological animosity to the status quo.”
It’s interesting to raise the specter of funding here. According to SourceWatch and the investigative news site Sludge, National Review has received numerous donations over the past few years from the Charles Koch Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, both of which are highly active in supporting climate change skepticism. At the same time, it’s worth noting that the American Enterprise Institute — of which author Goldberg holds the “Asness Chair in Applied Liberty” — has also been funded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, with leaked documents revealing that the Institute received nearly $2.5 million from the Foundation between 2011 and 2015 alone.
In other words, Goldberg’s National Review article has the full weight of the fossil fuel lobby behind it, as do similar articles on climate change published in The American Spectator and The Daily Caller, to name two others. Yet aside from the weaponizing of pedantry and the practice of attacking the political motives of reformers, the anti-green lobby has also adopted an even more novel, albeit occasionally more absurd, method.
As witnessed by a ludicrous article published last year by Spiked, this additional tactic entails the argument that rising global temperatures won’t actually be as bad as our best science indicates they’ll be. In this article, author Rob Lyons responds to a recent paper published in PLOS One in which it’s calculated that, in 2050, London’s climate will be comparable to that of Barcelona today. “Given that most Brits spend all year saving up to have a week or two in the sun on the beaches in places like Barcelona,” Lyons opines, “this is hardly the end of the world. In fact, it sounds great. It is a change that we will have to adapt to, of course, but it is surely something that we can cope with.”
Once again, it’s worth pointing out that Spiked has been funded by the Charles Koch Foundation. Likewise, other articles running with the “it-won’t-be-so-bad” theme have also been published in such places as National Affairs and Reason, which have also received significant financial support from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, in the case of National Affairs, as well as the Koch Foundation and the Scaife Foundation, in the case of Reason.
Put simply, despite the fact that the fossil fuel lobby has withdrawn from the increasingly difficult challenge of claiming that climate change isn’t anthropogenic, it’s nevertheless as active and as insidious as it has ever been. Its tactics have changed to become more duplicitous, more indirect, more tendentiously pedantic and more ad hominem (witness the regular personal attacks on climate activist Thunberg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and it’s this change in approach that has enabled it to ramp up its denialism in recent months and years.
Declining Popularity
The question is, are the new methods of the denialism lobby effective? This is a tricky question to answer, because while the global political momentum appears to be moving in favor of those who want action on climate change, the keys to the White House — and to the Environmental Protection Agency — belong to people who either don’t believe in anthropogenic climate disruption, or who simply want to find excuses not to act.
Still, in terms of shaping public opinion, it would appear that the new denialism hasn’t been particularly successful. Data from Google Trends, for instance, reveal that search phrases such as “global warming hoax” and “climate change hoax” aren’t as popular as they were a couple of years ago.
In 2017, the average popularity of “global warming hoax” as a search phrase in the U.S. was 26.9 (100 represents the peak popularity for a term). In 2019, the average for the same phrase was only 12.5, indicating that fewer people are now searching for evidence of a hoax than they were two years ago (in 2015, the average was 28.9, while in 2016 it was 27.7). Similarly, the average popularity of “climate change hoax” was 13.8 in 2017, while in 2019 its average was 12.9. This would indicate that fewer people today suspect or believe that climate change is fake.
This doesn’t look good for the fossil fuel lobby. It would seem that rather than saving money in preparation for its industry’s eventual eclipse, it’s wasting millions (or billions) of dollars on surreptitious campaigns that aren’t really providing polluters with much bang for their buck. It’s likely that with the continuous accumulation of additional evidence of human-made climate change, and with the rising tide of political support for action on the issue, their attempts to covertly sway the public will only become more futile. Of course, as the long history of denialism shows, this won’t stop them from trying to invent new ways of dissuading us from taking action to improve our future.
Unfortunately for such lobbyists and think tanks, it became harder to operate as evidence for the human-made nature of climate change accumulated over the years, and as an increasingly unified scientific consensus solidified around such evidence. The Global Climate Coalition disbanded in 2001, following years of targeted pressure from environmental groups and campaigners, as well as the resulting exits of such members as BP, Shell and Ford. Likewise, the George C. Marshall Institute folded in 2015, having suffered the withdrawal of funding from such backers as Exxon-Mobil, which decided to publicly end its support of the Institute and certain other disinformation groups in 2008.
Superficially, the situation appears even worse for climate change denialism now than it did 20 or even 10 years ago. In July, as a study published in Nature demonstrated that the past few decades have witnessed “unprecedented” global temperature rises, it was estimated by climate researcher John Cook that the scientific consensus on climate change has now likely passed 99 percent. Cook had previously co-authored a famous 2013 article that found that 97 percent of researchers who published work on climate change between 1991 and 2011 agreed that it was being caused by human activity, indicating the increasing coalescence of the science community around objective reality. Given that Cook has now suggested that the consensus is nearly 100 percent, the future doesn’t look bright for any corporation, lobby group, think tank or multimillionaire wanting to prevent the public from seeing the proverbial light.
However, not only is the history of climate denialism long, but it’s also constantly evolving. Because even if it’s no longer viable to openly and directly claim that human activity isn’t heating the Earth, organizations with an interest in maintaining the status quo of fossil fuels have nonetheless been finding more indirect and inventive ways of undermining the world’s growing concern for its own future.
It seems that since the emergence of Extinction Rebellion, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s activism, worldwide climate strikes and an almost-complete scientific consensus, this new form of denialism has become more active than ever. But that’s not to say it’s become more successful, since what little evidence there is indicates a stubborn failure to sway minds.
Send in the Bots
In an age where social media has become the primary medium for the consumption of news and information, it’s no surprise to learn that climate denialism has relocated to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. However, of the three major social media platforms, it’s Twitter that’s the most representative of the new kind of denialism. In contrast to simply offering a space for skeptical videos and content, what sets it apart are the legions of bots and fraudulent accounts it hosts. While Facebook makes it hard to set up a fake user account, Twitter has facilitated the existence of thousands (if not millions) of automated or astroturfed accounts — which in this case, deviously create the illusion of widespread support for the idea that anthropogenic climate change is either a lie or bad science.
In a study published in November 2018, researchers at Brown University found that bots were generating 20 percent of all posts on Twitter related to climate change. They examined a sample of 144,000 accounts discussing climate change on the platform, finding that about 23,000 of these were bots, and while this is already a high number, it’s likely that bot activity has increased in more recent months, as a kind of reactionary counterattack against the growing momentum behind climate activism.
On the one hand, this has been the impression of climate scientists and activists operating on Twitter. Replying to a tweet of a user who’d complained about climate deniers “crawling out from everywhere today,” renowned climatologist Michael E. Mann wrote in August that, “A lot of them are bots and paid trolls. It’s the preferred method of warfare by the climate change denial/delay machine.” Similarly, one active Twitter climate campaigner advised his followers to “be on the lookout for these new, low-follower accounts. There’s been a BIG uptick in them in mid-2019.”
It would of course be rash to place too much faith in these subjective impressions of increased activity, but there have also been more objective measures of surges, which tend to arise whenever the issue of climate change gains more airtime and acceptance. In early September, “climate change” became the most popular term being used by the 100,000 accounts tracked by Bot Sentinel, a tool which monitors suspect and automated Twitter users. It rose in visibility after CNN’s Climate Crisis Town Hall on September 4, appearing in 700 separate mentions within the following 24-hour period.
It’s hard to determine just who or what exactly is responsible for such spikes in activity. However, in speaking with InsideClimate News (which originally broke the story above), climate scientist Mann suggested that the usual suspects are likely pulling the strings of the new legions of climate-denying bots, just as they were with the lobby groups and think tanks of yore. “I believe this is a concerted effort, likely by bad state actors and fossil fuel interests, to create disinformation, discord and division as we approach the all-important UN Summit and children’s youth event later this month,” he said.
Mann provided no evidence for these specific claims, but there is at least an indication that energy companies have in the recent past harnessed bots and fake accounts to manufacture the veneer of public acceptance of their industry. In 2016, DeSmogBlog published an investigative report that concluded that the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN) had created at least 16 suspicious Twitter accounts to propagate a pro-Dakota Access Pipeline message. MAIN’s members include, among others, the North Dakota Petroleum Council, Petroleum Marketers, and the South Dakota Petroleum and Propane Marketers Association, the latter of which currently counts ExxonMobil as an “energy associate.”
The fact that such organizations likely involved themselves in manipulating online political discourse in the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline implies that similar groups may very well be involved in the current wave of online climate denialism. Because without any massively public leak and backlash, why stop with only one episode?
Undermining Rather Than Denying
But it isn’t only the migration to social media and the simulation of public backing that characterizes modern climate denialism. Its other defining feature is that, rather than directly rejecting the thesis of human-made climate change, contemporary climate denialism has been increasingly fashioning indirect and tangential ways of undermining calls for significant action on renewables and carbon reduction. Often, these new “indirect” methods amount to little more than nitpicking with how the issue of climate change is being described or presented, or at best, calling into question the political motives of those advocating for action and reform.
As an example, both of these tendencies were on display in an article published by National Review on September 6, only two days after CNN’s Climate Crisis Town Hall television special. Written by Jonah Goldberg of the American Enterprise Institute, it set its sights on disputing whether climate change really constitutes an existential threat, rather than merely a threat to our quality of life, while also criticizing certain Democrats for referring to it as an existential crisis. At the same time, it proffered the argument that Democrats (and likely other climate activists) don’t really care about the issue, and instead “want to use it as an excuse to radically transform the American economy and political system along lines that have less to do with climate change and much to do with their ideological animosity to the status quo.”
It’s interesting to raise the specter of funding here. According to SourceWatch and the investigative news site Sludge, National Review has received numerous donations over the past few years from the Charles Koch Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, both of which are highly active in supporting climate change skepticism. At the same time, it’s worth noting that the American Enterprise Institute — of which author Goldberg holds the “Asness Chair in Applied Liberty” — has also been funded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, with leaked documents revealing that the Institute received nearly $2.5 million from the Foundation between 2011 and 2015 alone.
In other words, Goldberg’s National Review article has the full weight of the fossil fuel lobby behind it, as do similar articles on climate change published in The American Spectator and The Daily Caller, to name two others. Yet aside from the weaponizing of pedantry and the practice of attacking the political motives of reformers, the anti-green lobby has also adopted an even more novel, albeit occasionally more absurd, method.
As witnessed by a ludicrous article published last year by Spiked, this additional tactic entails the argument that rising global temperatures won’t actually be as bad as our best science indicates they’ll be. In this article, author Rob Lyons responds to a recent paper published in PLOS One in which it’s calculated that, in 2050, London’s climate will be comparable to that of Barcelona today. “Given that most Brits spend all year saving up to have a week or two in the sun on the beaches in places like Barcelona,” Lyons opines, “this is hardly the end of the world. In fact, it sounds great. It is a change that we will have to adapt to, of course, but it is surely something that we can cope with.”
Once again, it’s worth pointing out that Spiked has been funded by the Charles Koch Foundation. Likewise, other articles running with the “it-won’t-be-so-bad” theme have also been published in such places as National Affairs and Reason, which have also received significant financial support from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, in the case of National Affairs, as well as the Koch Foundation and the Scaife Foundation, in the case of Reason.
Put simply, despite the fact that the fossil fuel lobby has withdrawn from the increasingly difficult challenge of claiming that climate change isn’t anthropogenic, it’s nevertheless as active and as insidious as it has ever been. Its tactics have changed to become more duplicitous, more indirect, more tendentiously pedantic and more ad hominem (witness the regular personal attacks on climate activist Thunberg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and it’s this change in approach that has enabled it to ramp up its denialism in recent months and years.
Declining Popularity
The question is, are the new methods of the denialism lobby effective? This is a tricky question to answer, because while the global political momentum appears to be moving in favor of those who want action on climate change, the keys to the White House — and to the Environmental Protection Agency — belong to people who either don’t believe in anthropogenic climate disruption, or who simply want to find excuses not to act.
Still, in terms of shaping public opinion, it would appear that the new denialism hasn’t been particularly successful. Data from Google Trends, for instance, reveal that search phrases such as “global warming hoax” and “climate change hoax” aren’t as popular as they were a couple of years ago.
In 2017, the average popularity of “global warming hoax” as a search phrase in the U.S. was 26.9 (100 represents the peak popularity for a term). In 2019, the average for the same phrase was only 12.5, indicating that fewer people are now searching for evidence of a hoax than they were two years ago (in 2015, the average was 28.9, while in 2016 it was 27.7). Similarly, the average popularity of “climate change hoax” was 13.8 in 2017, while in 2019 its average was 12.9. This would indicate that fewer people today suspect or believe that climate change is fake.
This doesn’t look good for the fossil fuel lobby. It would seem that rather than saving money in preparation for its industry’s eventual eclipse, it’s wasting millions (or billions) of dollars on surreptitious campaigns that aren’t really providing polluters with much bang for their buck. It’s likely that with the continuous accumulation of additional evidence of human-made climate change, and with the rising tide of political support for action on the issue, their attempts to covertly sway the public will only become more futile. Of course, as the long history of denialism shows, this won’t stop them from trying to invent new ways of dissuading us from taking action to improve our future.
Trump just declared war on the Chesapeake Bay
By Sarah Okeson, DCReport @ RawStory
February 19, 2020
Trump once again is trying to cut most of the funding to clean up the polluted Chesapeake Bay even as the Trump EPA undermines the cleanup with legal footnotes and inaction.
Trump’s latest sabotage, for the 2021 budget, would cut more than 91% of the funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program created under President Ronald Reagan who called the bay a “national treasure” and long supported by Republicans and Democrats. The program got $85 million, the most it’s ever received, in the fiscal 2020 budget.
Dana Aunkst, the director of Chesapeake Bay efforts for the EPA, said 2025 pollution goals are “an aspiration,” not an enforceable deadline. The head of EPA’s Office of Water, David Ross, represented the American Farm Bureau Federation in its 2012 lawsuit against the EPA over plans to clean up the bay. Scott Pruitt, Trump’s first pick to head the EPA, also supported polluters in the lawsuit as the attorney general for Oklahoma.
Trump’s latest sabotage, for the 2021 budget, would cut more than 91% of the funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program created under President Ronald Reagan.
“For the head of EPA’s Bay Program to say pollutions limits designed to save the bay are merely aspirational and not legally enforceable should put fear in the hearts of all who care about clean water,” said Will Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
In 2010, under President Barack Obama, six states and the District of Columbia agreed to significantly reduce pollution by 2025. The EPA agreed to step in if that didn’t happen.
More than 100,000 streams and rivers flow into the Chesapeake Bay which is about half freshwater and half saltwater. The second-largest river, the Potomac, flows by Washington, D.C.
Pennsylvania Pollution
Pennsylvania, where Aunkst is from, has been the worst-performing state involved in restoring the bay. Maryland and Virginia also failed to meet 2017 cleanup requirements. Pennsylvania’s most recent plan says the state is about 30% closer to meeting its goal for nitrogen pollution than it was in the 1980s. Pennsylvania has a funding deficit of $324 million a year. The Trump EPA signed off on the plan in any way in December.
The bay has gradually been getting healthier for about three decades. A 2018 report card from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science gave the bay a “C.” The Chesapeake Bay Foundation gave the bay a “D+,” noting that the bay had worse levels of nitrogen and phosphorus and that the water was murkier. Record rainfall from climate change pushed more pollution off farms and streets and into the bay.
Dead Zone
Pollution from fertilizer, sewage and other sources causes a dead zone in the bay each summer like the one in the Gulf of Mexico although much smaller. The dead zone in 2019 was on the high end of the normal range despite the deluge of water from swollen rivers, another indication that things are slowly improving.
The American Farm Bureau Federation and other pro-pollution groups sued over the cleanup. Part of their argument was that the Clean Water Act prohibits the EPA from seeking “reasonable assurance” from states that their plans will work. Judges disagreed.
In its most recent evaluations of state plans, the Trump EPA replaced “reasonable assurance” with the lesser standard of “confidence,” noting in a footnote that the language was changed “to avoid potential confusion.”
Trump’s latest sabotage, for the 2021 budget, would cut more than 91% of the funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program created under President Ronald Reagan who called the bay a “national treasure” and long supported by Republicans and Democrats. The program got $85 million, the most it’s ever received, in the fiscal 2020 budget.
Dana Aunkst, the director of Chesapeake Bay efforts for the EPA, said 2025 pollution goals are “an aspiration,” not an enforceable deadline. The head of EPA’s Office of Water, David Ross, represented the American Farm Bureau Federation in its 2012 lawsuit against the EPA over plans to clean up the bay. Scott Pruitt, Trump’s first pick to head the EPA, also supported polluters in the lawsuit as the attorney general for Oklahoma.
Trump’s latest sabotage, for the 2021 budget, would cut more than 91% of the funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program created under President Ronald Reagan.
“For the head of EPA’s Bay Program to say pollutions limits designed to save the bay are merely aspirational and not legally enforceable should put fear in the hearts of all who care about clean water,” said Will Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
In 2010, under President Barack Obama, six states and the District of Columbia agreed to significantly reduce pollution by 2025. The EPA agreed to step in if that didn’t happen.
More than 100,000 streams and rivers flow into the Chesapeake Bay which is about half freshwater and half saltwater. The second-largest river, the Potomac, flows by Washington, D.C.
Pennsylvania Pollution
Pennsylvania, where Aunkst is from, has been the worst-performing state involved in restoring the bay. Maryland and Virginia also failed to meet 2017 cleanup requirements. Pennsylvania’s most recent plan says the state is about 30% closer to meeting its goal for nitrogen pollution than it was in the 1980s. Pennsylvania has a funding deficit of $324 million a year. The Trump EPA signed off on the plan in any way in December.
The bay has gradually been getting healthier for about three decades. A 2018 report card from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science gave the bay a “C.” The Chesapeake Bay Foundation gave the bay a “D+,” noting that the bay had worse levels of nitrogen and phosphorus and that the water was murkier. Record rainfall from climate change pushed more pollution off farms and streets and into the bay.
Dead Zone
Pollution from fertilizer, sewage and other sources causes a dead zone in the bay each summer like the one in the Gulf of Mexico although much smaller. The dead zone in 2019 was on the high end of the normal range despite the deluge of water from swollen rivers, another indication that things are slowly improving.
The American Farm Bureau Federation and other pro-pollution groups sued over the cleanup. Part of their argument was that the Clean Water Act prohibits the EPA from seeking “reasonable assurance” from states that their plans will work. Judges disagreed.
In its most recent evaluations of state plans, the Trump EPA replaced “reasonable assurance” with the lesser standard of “confidence,” noting in a footnote that the language was changed “to avoid potential confusion.”
America’s 'recycled' plastic waste is clogging landfills, survey finds
Many facilities lack the ability to process ‘mixed plastics’, a category of waste that has virtually no market as new products
Erin McCormick in Berkeley, California
the guardian
Tue 18 Feb 2020 07.00 EST
Fewer than 15% of recycling facilities surveyed could process plastic clamshells, like these. Photograph: Prakaymas vitchitchalao/Alamy
Many plastic items that Americans put in their recycling bins aren’t being recycled at all, according to a major new survey of hundreds of recycling facilities across the US.
The research, conducted by Greenpeace and released on Tuesday, found that out of 367 recycling recovery facilities surveyed none could process coffee pods, fewer than 15% accepted plastic clamshells – such as those used to package fruit, salad or baked goods – and only a tiny percentage took plates, cups, bags and trays.
The findings confirm the results of a Guardian investigation last year, which revealed that numerous types of plastics are being sent straight to landfill in the wake of China’s crackdown on US recycling exports. Greenpeace’s findings also suggest that numerous products labeled as recyclable in fact have virtually no market as new products.
While the report found there is still a strong recycling market for bottles and jugs labeled #1 or #2, such as plastic water bottles and milk containers, the pipeline has bottomed out for many plastics labelled #3-7, which fall into a category dubbed “mixed plastics”. While often marketed by brands as recyclable, these plastics are hard for recyclers to repurpose and are often landfilled, causing confusion for consumers.
“This report shows that one of the best things to do to save recycling is to stop claiming that everything is recyclable,” said John Hocevar, director of Greenpeace’s Oceans Campaign. “We have to talk to companies about not producing so much throw-away plastic that ends up in the ocean or in incinerators.”
In a news release accompanying the report, Greenpeace threatened to file federal complaints against manufacturers who mislead the public about the recyclability of their packaging.
Jan Dell, the founder of the Last Beach Cleanup and the leader of Greenpeace’s survey team, said the point of the report “was not to kill recycling, it was to show which products are recyclable and which are not”.
She emphasized that bottles and jugs are indeed worth recycling, but said “our findings show that many items commonly found in beach cleanups – cups, bags, trays, plates and cutlery – are not recyclable. In America’s municipal recycling system, they are contaminants.”
The US recycling economy was upended in 2018 when China enacted bans on imports of most US recycling, leaving recycling companies at a loose end. The report chronicled how dozens of cities – stretching from Erie, Pennsylvania, to San Carlos, California, – have either stopped taking mixed plastics or are sending them to landfill.
The report noted that recyclers often report “mixed plastics” as having negative value – in other words, they cost money to get rid of. Additionally, it cited federal studies that have estimated that fewer than 5% of these products get reprocessed into new products.
Martin Bourque, the director of the Ecology Center which handles recycling for Berkeley, California, told the Guardian his organization is spending about $50,000 a year attempting to recycle material that largely isn’t recyclable. He pays to send the city’s mixed plastic to an extra sorting facility in southern California – and half of it still gets thrown out, he said.
“Let’s just get real about what is recyclable,” he said. “Now instead of making money [by reclaiming valuable recyclables], we’re paying $75 a ton to subsidize these brands and packagers, who make all this stuff.”
The report claims that advertising this almost-impossible-to-recycle plastic packaging as recyclable violates the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, which state that “marketers must ensure that all reasonable interpretations of their claims are truthful, not misleading, and supported by a reasonable basis”.
Asked to comment on the report’s findings before its release, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, which represents brands trying to improve packaging, acknowledged the recycling industry was facing disruption but said that new US processing capacity was being developed to enhance the recyclability of products.
“I think our industry is rebuilding and adding capacity and that’s a good thing,” said Nina Goodrich, the director of the coalition. “We should be processing our material at home.”
Kelly Cramer, who leads the organization’s efforts to create a standard labeling system for products, said the organization is now advising consumers to “check locally” with their recycling provider to see if packages are recyclable.
Kate Bailey, a manager for Eco-Cycle Solutions which runs the recycling program in Boulder, Colorado, said that her organization has found outlets that will process most of its mixed plastic, because its hi-tech machinery and devoted customer base gives it the ability to sort the material into unusually clean bales. But she said this is a challenge for many recyclers, especially since these materials currently fetch record low prices.
She hopes the problems that China’s decision has caused for the domestic recycling market will lead to long-term improvements in the US.
“The silver lining is that we’re starting to have some conversations about who should be paying for recycling,” she said. “Turning to cities and residents to pay for recycling is not the way it should be going.”
“We [the recyclers] are the scapegoats, but we don’t control how products are made,” she said. “If manufacturers are going to make these products, they should be buying them back. They can be the ones closing the loop.”
RELATED:
The research, conducted by Greenpeace and released on Tuesday, found that out of 367 recycling recovery facilities surveyed none could process coffee pods, fewer than 15% accepted plastic clamshells – such as those used to package fruit, salad or baked goods – and only a tiny percentage took plates, cups, bags and trays.
The findings confirm the results of a Guardian investigation last year, which revealed that numerous types of plastics are being sent straight to landfill in the wake of China’s crackdown on US recycling exports. Greenpeace’s findings also suggest that numerous products labeled as recyclable in fact have virtually no market as new products.
While the report found there is still a strong recycling market for bottles and jugs labeled #1 or #2, such as plastic water bottles and milk containers, the pipeline has bottomed out for many plastics labelled #3-7, which fall into a category dubbed “mixed plastics”. While often marketed by brands as recyclable, these plastics are hard for recyclers to repurpose and are often landfilled, causing confusion for consumers.
“This report shows that one of the best things to do to save recycling is to stop claiming that everything is recyclable,” said John Hocevar, director of Greenpeace’s Oceans Campaign. “We have to talk to companies about not producing so much throw-away plastic that ends up in the ocean or in incinerators.”
In a news release accompanying the report, Greenpeace threatened to file federal complaints against manufacturers who mislead the public about the recyclability of their packaging.
Jan Dell, the founder of the Last Beach Cleanup and the leader of Greenpeace’s survey team, said the point of the report “was not to kill recycling, it was to show which products are recyclable and which are not”.
She emphasized that bottles and jugs are indeed worth recycling, but said “our findings show that many items commonly found in beach cleanups – cups, bags, trays, plates and cutlery – are not recyclable. In America’s municipal recycling system, they are contaminants.”
The US recycling economy was upended in 2018 when China enacted bans on imports of most US recycling, leaving recycling companies at a loose end. The report chronicled how dozens of cities – stretching from Erie, Pennsylvania, to San Carlos, California, – have either stopped taking mixed plastics or are sending them to landfill.
The report noted that recyclers often report “mixed plastics” as having negative value – in other words, they cost money to get rid of. Additionally, it cited federal studies that have estimated that fewer than 5% of these products get reprocessed into new products.
Martin Bourque, the director of the Ecology Center which handles recycling for Berkeley, California, told the Guardian his organization is spending about $50,000 a year attempting to recycle material that largely isn’t recyclable. He pays to send the city’s mixed plastic to an extra sorting facility in southern California – and half of it still gets thrown out, he said.
“Let’s just get real about what is recyclable,” he said. “Now instead of making money [by reclaiming valuable recyclables], we’re paying $75 a ton to subsidize these brands and packagers, who make all this stuff.”
The report claims that advertising this almost-impossible-to-recycle plastic packaging as recyclable violates the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, which state that “marketers must ensure that all reasonable interpretations of their claims are truthful, not misleading, and supported by a reasonable basis”.
Asked to comment on the report’s findings before its release, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, which represents brands trying to improve packaging, acknowledged the recycling industry was facing disruption but said that new US processing capacity was being developed to enhance the recyclability of products.
“I think our industry is rebuilding and adding capacity and that’s a good thing,” said Nina Goodrich, the director of the coalition. “We should be processing our material at home.”
Kelly Cramer, who leads the organization’s efforts to create a standard labeling system for products, said the organization is now advising consumers to “check locally” with their recycling provider to see if packages are recyclable.
Kate Bailey, a manager for Eco-Cycle Solutions which runs the recycling program in Boulder, Colorado, said that her organization has found outlets that will process most of its mixed plastic, because its hi-tech machinery and devoted customer base gives it the ability to sort the material into unusually clean bales. But she said this is a challenge for many recyclers, especially since these materials currently fetch record low prices.
She hopes the problems that China’s decision has caused for the domestic recycling market will lead to long-term improvements in the US.
“The silver lining is that we’re starting to have some conversations about who should be paying for recycling,” she said. “Turning to cities and residents to pay for recycling is not the way it should be going.”
“We [the recyclers] are the scapegoats, but we don’t control how products are made,” she said. “If manufacturers are going to make these products, they should be buying them back. They can be the ones closing the loop.”
RELATED:
- Toxic America Are plastic containers safe for our food?
The plastics industry says its containers are safe but some experts advise consumers to avoid heating them and advocate using glass or metal instead
Are plastic containers safe for our food?
Refineries Are Spewing Cancer-Causing Benzene as Trump Slashes Enforcement
BY Mike Ludwig, Truthout
PUBLISHED February 6, 2020
On a spring evening in 2018, the sky across the New Orleans metro area lit up with fiery light. Friends and neighbors turned to each other with raised eyebrows, anxiety and dark humor. Did a nuclear bomb go off? Is an asteroid about to fall into Lake Pontchartrain? Is this the end?
We would soon learn from the evening news that a massive fireball had erupted from the aging oil refinery in Chalmette, a community on the Mississippi River near New Orleans. When equipment in refineries accidentally come under too much pressure, safety valves release burning gases into the air. The more than 100 refineries across United States release hundreds of flares each year, and many more occur at chemical plants and oil and gas drilling sites, according to environmental groups.
Flares are a common sight in southern Louisiana and other parts of the country dominated by the fossil fuel industry, but the raging fireball released by Chalmette Refining was unusually large. Refinery officials and state regulators rushed to the media and assured the public that the pressure-release system had worked as it should, and no one was hurt. Still, the flare left an awful smell in the air, and nearby residents were unnerved and worried about breathing toxic pollution.
Indeed, refinery flares release a number of climate-warming gases along with toxic and cancer-causing pollutants that contribute to smog and pose health risks to surrounding communities. A 2016 study found that children living near a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, experienced neurological problems, diarrhea, trouble breathing and other health impacts because they were exposed to benzene, a known carcinogen, after a flaring incident.
Across the country, oil refineries are spewing benzene into nearby neighborhoods and endangering the health of residents, according to new federal data compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project and released on Thursday. Chalmette Refining is listed among 10 refineries nationwide where monitors have detected levels of benzene considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be enough of a danger to human health that operators are now required to fix the problem. Several refineries reported benzene concentrations known to contribute to an increased risk of cancer.
Flares are far from the only source of benzene and other harmful pollutants from oil refineries, according to Corey Williams, the research and policy director at Air Alliance Houston in southeast Texas.
“There are many, many, many sources of benzene in addition to flaring, which is considered a ‘point source’ emission because it’s coming from a particular point,” Williams said in an interview. “Then there are also fugitive emissions that could be a result of poor maintenance or old equipment, and that is an ‘area source’ — leaks, essentially, which can be numerous and everywhere.”
Philadelphia Energy Solutions, the largest and oldest refinery on the East Coast, tops the list of refineries exposing the public to benzene. Like many polluters, the refinery is surrounded by lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color. The refinery shut down last June after erupting in explosions and fires, sending thick clouds of toxic black smoke into the air. Refinery operators filed for bankruptcy and want to sell off the property, but the Trump administration is currently lobbying to keep the refinery open.
Stunningly, none of these refineries violated federal law by endangering surrounding communities with benzene emissions, but new federal rules require refinery operators to identify the root cause of — and eventually fix — the problem. That will likely mean updating facilities and installing new equipment — something many older refineries and petrochemical facilities have failed to do, despite high levels of pollution and a long list of deadly accidents, chemical spills and explosions.
Monitors installed at nine additional refineries in Texas, Kansas, Illinois and beyond found that levels of benzene in the air exceeded a federal health standard for short-term exposure by inhalation at least once over a two-week period last year, increasing the risk of cardiovascular problems and developmental delays in children in nearby areas. However, under current federal rules, these nine refineries are not required to take action to reduce the pollution.
“These results highlight refineries that need to do a better job of installing pollution controls and implementing safer workplace practices to reduce the leakage of this cancer-causing pollutant into local communities,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, in a statement. “EPA in 2015 imposed regulations to better monitor benzene and protect people living near refineries, often in working-class neighborhoods. Now, EPA needs to enforce these rules.”
Whether the EPA will hold the polluters to account remains to be seen. Environmental enforcement has tumbled under President Trump, who bills himself as a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. The Trump administration has systematically rolled back environmental regulations, including chemical safety rules governing oil refineries and other petrochemical facilities that were delayed despite horrific accidents and ultimately weakened to favor the industry.
Williams said air pollution from oil refineries and petrochemical plants is particularly severe in the Gulf South, where large numbers of facilities are clustered in various industrial areas near the coast. Benzene leaking into nearby neighborhoods is only part of the problem; other pollutants contribute to smog and health problems across the region.
Of the 19 refineries listed in the Environmental Integrity Project’s report on high benzene emissions, eight are located in eastern Texas and two are located in Louisiana. The oil, gas and petrochemical industry is a wealthy and powerful political force in this part of the country, and regulators are notoriously lax. With Trump in the White House, the fossil fuel industry currently enjoys similar influence over the federal regulators charged with protecting public health and the environment nationwide.
“Anywhere regulations favor industry, industry will take advantage of that,” Williams said.
We would soon learn from the evening news that a massive fireball had erupted from the aging oil refinery in Chalmette, a community on the Mississippi River near New Orleans. When equipment in refineries accidentally come under too much pressure, safety valves release burning gases into the air. The more than 100 refineries across United States release hundreds of flares each year, and many more occur at chemical plants and oil and gas drilling sites, according to environmental groups.
Flares are a common sight in southern Louisiana and other parts of the country dominated by the fossil fuel industry, but the raging fireball released by Chalmette Refining was unusually large. Refinery officials and state regulators rushed to the media and assured the public that the pressure-release system had worked as it should, and no one was hurt. Still, the flare left an awful smell in the air, and nearby residents were unnerved and worried about breathing toxic pollution.
Indeed, refinery flares release a number of climate-warming gases along with toxic and cancer-causing pollutants that contribute to smog and pose health risks to surrounding communities. A 2016 study found that children living near a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, experienced neurological problems, diarrhea, trouble breathing and other health impacts because they were exposed to benzene, a known carcinogen, after a flaring incident.
Across the country, oil refineries are spewing benzene into nearby neighborhoods and endangering the health of residents, according to new federal data compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project and released on Thursday. Chalmette Refining is listed among 10 refineries nationwide where monitors have detected levels of benzene considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be enough of a danger to human health that operators are now required to fix the problem. Several refineries reported benzene concentrations known to contribute to an increased risk of cancer.
Flares are far from the only source of benzene and other harmful pollutants from oil refineries, according to Corey Williams, the research and policy director at Air Alliance Houston in southeast Texas.
“There are many, many, many sources of benzene in addition to flaring, which is considered a ‘point source’ emission because it’s coming from a particular point,” Williams said in an interview. “Then there are also fugitive emissions that could be a result of poor maintenance or old equipment, and that is an ‘area source’ — leaks, essentially, which can be numerous and everywhere.”
Philadelphia Energy Solutions, the largest and oldest refinery on the East Coast, tops the list of refineries exposing the public to benzene. Like many polluters, the refinery is surrounded by lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color. The refinery shut down last June after erupting in explosions and fires, sending thick clouds of toxic black smoke into the air. Refinery operators filed for bankruptcy and want to sell off the property, but the Trump administration is currently lobbying to keep the refinery open.
Stunningly, none of these refineries violated federal law by endangering surrounding communities with benzene emissions, but new federal rules require refinery operators to identify the root cause of — and eventually fix — the problem. That will likely mean updating facilities and installing new equipment — something many older refineries and petrochemical facilities have failed to do, despite high levels of pollution and a long list of deadly accidents, chemical spills and explosions.
Monitors installed at nine additional refineries in Texas, Kansas, Illinois and beyond found that levels of benzene in the air exceeded a federal health standard for short-term exposure by inhalation at least once over a two-week period last year, increasing the risk of cardiovascular problems and developmental delays in children in nearby areas. However, under current federal rules, these nine refineries are not required to take action to reduce the pollution.
“These results highlight refineries that need to do a better job of installing pollution controls and implementing safer workplace practices to reduce the leakage of this cancer-causing pollutant into local communities,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, in a statement. “EPA in 2015 imposed regulations to better monitor benzene and protect people living near refineries, often in working-class neighborhoods. Now, EPA needs to enforce these rules.”
Whether the EPA will hold the polluters to account remains to be seen. Environmental enforcement has tumbled under President Trump, who bills himself as a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. The Trump administration has systematically rolled back environmental regulations, including chemical safety rules governing oil refineries and other petrochemical facilities that were delayed despite horrific accidents and ultimately weakened to favor the industry.
Williams said air pollution from oil refineries and petrochemical plants is particularly severe in the Gulf South, where large numbers of facilities are clustered in various industrial areas near the coast. Benzene leaking into nearby neighborhoods is only part of the problem; other pollutants contribute to smog and health problems across the region.
Of the 19 refineries listed in the Environmental Integrity Project’s report on high benzene emissions, eight are located in eastern Texas and two are located in Louisiana. The oil, gas and petrochemical industry is a wealthy and powerful political force in this part of the country, and regulators are notoriously lax. With Trump in the White House, the fossil fuel industry currently enjoys similar influence over the federal regulators charged with protecting public health and the environment nationwide.
“Anywhere regulations favor industry, industry will take advantage of that,” Williams said.
environment funnies
When your "leader" is a fool!!!
