welcome to reality trivia
environment
The environment is everything that isn't me.
Albert Einstein
jan 14, 2019
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.
*articles*
*EPA To Ease Rules On Power Plants Storing Deadly Coal Ash
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*White House unveils plan for major projects to bypass environmental review
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*CLIMATE WATCHDOG WARNS US FRACKING BOOM LEADING TO 30% RISE IN GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS BY 2025(ARTICLE BELOW)
*AS AMERICANS SEND BACK MILLIONS OF HOLIDAY GIFTS, THERE'S A HIDDEN ENVIRONMENTAL COST(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Looming US Water Crisis
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*State Regulators Prefer Water Standards Best For Bass, Not Children
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*HOW AN ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATOR BECAME KNOWN FOR PROTECTING INDUSTRY
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump Doesn’t Want You To Know How Toxic Your Neighborhood May Be
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A Pesticide the EPA Won’t Ban Is Sickening Low-Income Californians of Color
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Rainwater in parts of US contain high levels of PFAS chemical, says study
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Methane ‘super emitters’ releasing massive plumes after Trump rolled back environmental regulations(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Los Angeles beaches plagued with toxic stormwater, report warns
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Renewables Are Gaining Traction, But We Need to Be Able to Store the Energy
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Climate Change Is Fueling a Farming Boom in Alaska
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EPA Reauthorizes Use of 'Dangerous' 'Cyanide Bombs' That Kill Thousands of Animals Every Year(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Factory Farm Conditions Are Unhealthy for Animals and Bad for People, Too
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EPA WON’T ADDRESS THE TICKING TIME BOMB RIGHT NEXT DOOR
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Tens of thousands of deaths linked to weak US air pollution rules – study
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*AIR POLLUTION NANOPARTICLES LINKED TO BRAIN CANCER FOR FIRST TIME
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*COCA-COLA IS WORLD'S BIGGEST PLASTICS POLLUTER – AGAIN
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Sea levels set to keep rising for centuries even if emissions targets met
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*These are the cities that will drown first as the seas rise
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*OFFSHORE WINDFARMS 'CAN PROVIDE MORE ELECTRICITY THAN THE WORLD NEEDS'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TVS SOLD BY AMAZON AND BEST BUY 'CONTAIN CHEMICALS BANNED IN EUROPE'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TOP U.S. TOXICOLOGIST WAS BARRED FROM SAYING PFAS CAUSE DISEASE IN HUMANS. SHE’S SAYING IT NOW.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*New Data Show Severity of Water Contamination in Poor Neighborhoods
(excerpt BELOW)
*95 PERCENT OF BABY FOODS TESTED CONTAIN TOXIC METALS THAT COULD HARM BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, STUDY FINDS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions
(ARTICLE BELOW)
cartoons(at the end)
EPA To Ease Rules On Power Plants Storing Deadly Coal Ash
Move Is the Latest Trump Administration Effort to Support the Failing Coal Industry
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
1/10/20
Utilities soon could get federal approval for the riskiest way to get rid of coal ash.
The latest Trump EPA proposal to prop up the financially struggling coal industry would make water supplies more vulnerable to the ash, the toxic remnants of burning coal.
A report from the Environmental Integrity Project warns that the enduring legacy of coal ash will be groundwater pollution such as that in Memphis where city water is threatened.
The EPA proposal to set up a permit program to dispose of coal ash applies in Native American territory and states except two. Oklahoma and Georgia have set up their own permit programs. The Oklahoma program, which allows dumping in unlined ponds unless they leak, is being litigated.
Coal-burning power plants produce about 100 million tons of coal ash yearly. Arsenic, lead and mercury lace the ash. Companies mixed the ash with water and stored it in unlined pits called coal ash ponds.
Such carelessness led to catastrophes, including 130 million gallons of coal ash and water being released into the Clinch River near Cleveland, Va., in 1967. The spill killed an estimated 217,000 fish and damaged the river for 35 years. In 2014, a break in a pond at Duke Energy’s plant in Eden, N.C., sent 27 million gallons of sludge into the Dan River.
Jenny Cassel, an attorney for Earthjustice, said the language in the proposed Trump regulations would allow utilities to seek permits to continue to operate coal ash ponds which fail more frequently than landfills.
The Environmental Integrity Project found that 92 percent of plants with regulated ponds have at least one that leaks. Also, 76 percent of plants with regulated landfills have at least one leaking landfill. Researchers found the groundwater often has unsafe levels of four or more pollutants. They included arsenic, which causes cancers, and lithium, which can cause kidney damage and birth defects.
The levels of contamination at many sites are hundreds of times greater than what could be considered safe. For example, some of the wells at New Castle Generating Station in West Pittsburg, part of TaylorTownship, Pa., and Allen Fossil Plant near Memphis, Tenn., have enough arsenic to cause cancer in one out of six people.
The contaminated groundwater near Memphis is connected to the aquifer that supplies the drinking water for Memphis. About a third of coal ash ponds are within five miles of a public drinking water intake or reservoir. About 80 percent are within five miles of a drinking water well.
Obama administration regulations would have allowed unlined ponds to remain open until they showed statistically significant evidence of contamination.
In August 2018, the Court of Appeal for the D.C. Circuit threw out this part of the law, writing that many of the 575 known unlined ponds are likely to contaminate groundwater. The Trump EPA recently proposed that unlined ponds stop accepting coal ash by Aug. 31.
The latest Trump EPA proposal to prop up the financially struggling coal industry would make water supplies more vulnerable to the ash, the toxic remnants of burning coal.
A report from the Environmental Integrity Project warns that the enduring legacy of coal ash will be groundwater pollution such as that in Memphis where city water is threatened.
The EPA proposal to set up a permit program to dispose of coal ash applies in Native American territory and states except two. Oklahoma and Georgia have set up their own permit programs. The Oklahoma program, which allows dumping in unlined ponds unless they leak, is being litigated.
Coal-burning power plants produce about 100 million tons of coal ash yearly. Arsenic, lead and mercury lace the ash. Companies mixed the ash with water and stored it in unlined pits called coal ash ponds.
Such carelessness led to catastrophes, including 130 million gallons of coal ash and water being released into the Clinch River near Cleveland, Va., in 1967. The spill killed an estimated 217,000 fish and damaged the river for 35 years. In 2014, a break in a pond at Duke Energy’s plant in Eden, N.C., sent 27 million gallons of sludge into the Dan River.
Jenny Cassel, an attorney for Earthjustice, said the language in the proposed Trump regulations would allow utilities to seek permits to continue to operate coal ash ponds which fail more frequently than landfills.
The Environmental Integrity Project found that 92 percent of plants with regulated ponds have at least one that leaks. Also, 76 percent of plants with regulated landfills have at least one leaking landfill. Researchers found the groundwater often has unsafe levels of four or more pollutants. They included arsenic, which causes cancers, and lithium, which can cause kidney damage and birth defects.
The levels of contamination at many sites are hundreds of times greater than what could be considered safe. For example, some of the wells at New Castle Generating Station in West Pittsburg, part of TaylorTownship, Pa., and Allen Fossil Plant near Memphis, Tenn., have enough arsenic to cause cancer in one out of six people.
The contaminated groundwater near Memphis is connected to the aquifer that supplies the drinking water for Memphis. About a third of coal ash ponds are within five miles of a public drinking water intake or reservoir. About 80 percent are within five miles of a drinking water well.
Obama administration regulations would have allowed unlined ponds to remain open until they showed statistically significant evidence of contamination.
In August 2018, the Court of Appeal for the D.C. Circuit threw out this part of the law, writing that many of the 575 known unlined ponds are likely to contaminate groundwater. The Trump EPA recently proposed that unlined ponds stop accepting coal ash by Aug. 31.
Environment - the fools in charge!!!
White House unveils plan for major projects to bypass environmental review
Plan would help Trump administration advance projects held up over global heating concerns such as the Keystone XL oil pipeline
Reuters
the guardian
Thu 9 Jan 2020 09.56 EST
The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled a plan to speed permitting for major infrastructure projects such as oil pipelines, including dropping consideration of their potential impact on the climate crisis.
The plan, released by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), would help the administration advance big energy projects such as the Keystone XL oil pipeline that had been tied up over concerns about their effect on global heating.
Donald Trump planned to announce the proposal at the White House at 11am.
The proposal, if enacted, would mark the first overhaul in four decades of the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa), a bedrock environmental regulation. It is part of Trump’s broader effort to cut regulatory red tape to boost industry.
“The proposed rule seeks to reduce unnecessary paperwork and delays, and to promote better decision-making consistent with Nepa’s statutory requirements,” said a CEQ fact sheet about the proposed change seen by Reuters.
The rule says federal agencies would not need to factor in the climate impact of a project, making it easier for major fossil fuel projects to sail through the approval process and avoid legal challenges.
Over the last few years, federal courts have ruled that Nepa requires the federal government to consider a project’s carbon footprint in decisions related to leasing public lands for drilling or building pipelines.
The proposed change also would widen the categories of projects that can be excluded from Nepa altogether. If a type of project got a “categorical exclusion” from one agency in the past, for example, it would automatically be excluded from review by other agencies, according to the plan.
For projects requiring detailed environmental impact assessments, the rule would limit the review period to two years and the length of the report.
According to CEQ, the average length of a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement is currently 600 pages and takes four and a half years to conclude. US federal agencies prepare about 170 such assessments a year.
Trump, a commercial real estate developer before becoming president, frequently complained that the Nepa permitting process took too long.
Some of the country’s biggest industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, also have complained about lengthy permitting delays.
Environmental groups warned the plan will remove a powerful tool to protect local communities from the adverse impacts of a hastily designed and reviewed project.
“Today’s destructive actions by Trump, if not blocked by the courts or immediately reversed by the next president, will have reverberations for decades to come,” said Rebecca Concepcion Apostol, US program director at Oil Change International, an environmental group.
The plan will go through a public comment period before being finalized.
The plan, released by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), would help the administration advance big energy projects such as the Keystone XL oil pipeline that had been tied up over concerns about their effect on global heating.
Donald Trump planned to announce the proposal at the White House at 11am.
The proposal, if enacted, would mark the first overhaul in four decades of the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa), a bedrock environmental regulation. It is part of Trump’s broader effort to cut regulatory red tape to boost industry.
“The proposed rule seeks to reduce unnecessary paperwork and delays, and to promote better decision-making consistent with Nepa’s statutory requirements,” said a CEQ fact sheet about the proposed change seen by Reuters.
The rule says federal agencies would not need to factor in the climate impact of a project, making it easier for major fossil fuel projects to sail through the approval process and avoid legal challenges.
Over the last few years, federal courts have ruled that Nepa requires the federal government to consider a project’s carbon footprint in decisions related to leasing public lands for drilling or building pipelines.
The proposed change also would widen the categories of projects that can be excluded from Nepa altogether. If a type of project got a “categorical exclusion” from one agency in the past, for example, it would automatically be excluded from review by other agencies, according to the plan.
For projects requiring detailed environmental impact assessments, the rule would limit the review period to two years and the length of the report.
According to CEQ, the average length of a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement is currently 600 pages and takes four and a half years to conclude. US federal agencies prepare about 170 such assessments a year.
Trump, a commercial real estate developer before becoming president, frequently complained that the Nepa permitting process took too long.
Some of the country’s biggest industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, also have complained about lengthy permitting delays.
Environmental groups warned the plan will remove a powerful tool to protect local communities from the adverse impacts of a hastily designed and reviewed project.
“Today’s destructive actions by Trump, if not blocked by the courts or immediately reversed by the next president, will have reverberations for decades to come,” said Rebecca Concepcion Apostol, US program director at Oil Change International, an environmental group.
The plan will go through a public comment period before being finalized.
Climate watchdog warns US fracking boom leading to 30% rise in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025
January 8, 2020
By Common Dreams - raw story
“This analysis shows that we’re heading in the wrong direction and really need to slow emissions growth from the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries.”
Planet-heating pollution from the U.S. oil, gas, and petrochemical industries could rise about 30% by 2025 compared with 2018 because of additional drilling and 157 new or expanded projects “fueled by the fracking boom,” an environmental watchdog group warned Wednesday.
That estimated emissions increase is equal to “as much greenhouse gas pollution as 50 new coal-fired power plants,” the U.S.-based Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) explained in a statement announcing the new analysis.
The EIP report—titledGreenhouse Gases from Oil, Gas, and Petrochemical Production (pdf)—details recent and potential future emissions from U.S. petroleum and natural gas systems, chemical manufacturing, and oil refineries based on data reported to the Environmental Protection Agency, fossil fuel production projections from the Department of Energy, and permits that companies are seeking or have acquired.
“Facilities in these sectors reported emitting 764 million tons of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide equivalent tons) in 2018, an eight percent increase since 2016,” the report says. “Expected growth in oil and gas production and large new and expanded oil, gas, and chemical plants have the potential to add up to 227 million additional tons of greenhouse gases by 2025.”
“That could bring total emissions to nearly one billion tons, equivalent to the greenhouse gas output from more than 218 large coal-fired power plants operating around the clock at full capacity,” the report continues, noting that the estimates “likely understate emissions growth from the oil, gas, and petrochemical sectors.”
Aided by both the Obama and Trump administrations, the expansion of the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries in the United States continues despite repeated and increasingly urgent warnings from experts that the U.S. fracking boom is threathening ecosystems and making people sick.
Scientists have called for all countries—but particularly the world’s wealthiest—to rapidly phase out fossil fuels in favor of 100% renewable energy to prevent the worst impacts of the global climate emergency.
“The U.S. is already struggling to meet climate commitments and transition to a low-carbon future,” Courtney Bernhardt, research director at the EIP, said in the group’s statement. “This analysis shows that we’re heading in the wrong direction and really need to slow emissions growth from the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries.”
The report concludes that “the industries responsible for driving fossil fuel extraction and production need to be held more fully accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions.” Its key recommendations are to strengthen permits, improve monitoring and reporting, and increase funding to state environmental agencies.
“Oil and gas production and petrochemical manufacturing are responsible for most of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions today,” EIP executive director Eric Schaeffer said Wednesday. “Unfortunately, the permits being issued by states and EPA for the largest projects do not include cost-effective methods for controlling greenhouse gas pollution, even though this is required by the federal Clean Air Act. Unless you think global warming is a hoax, that needs to change.”
New Orleans-based Mark Schleifstein reported for The Times-Picayune Wednesday that EIP found the contentious $9.4 billion Formosa complex proposed for St. James Parish would have the highest potential yearly greenhouse gas emissions (13.6 million tons) among all the future and petrochemical and plastics projects included in the analysis.
As Common Dreams reported last month, Louisiana residents and environmental justice groups are fighting against construction of the plant in the region nationally known as “Cancer Alley” because of the area’s significant industrial development and the related health impacts on local communities.
Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson Greg Langley told The Guardian Tuesday that the state has issued 16 key air quality permits for the project that that essentially clears the way for Formosa to begin construction on the new facility.
In a statement responding to the development Tuesday, Sharon Lavigne, president of the campaign group Rise St. James, vowed to maintain local resistance to the project. “We are fighting to protect our homes and our families from this monster, Formosa,” she said. “We are not going to stop because of this bad decision by the state to grant air permits.”
Planet-heating pollution from the U.S. oil, gas, and petrochemical industries could rise about 30% by 2025 compared with 2018 because of additional drilling and 157 new or expanded projects “fueled by the fracking boom,” an environmental watchdog group warned Wednesday.
That estimated emissions increase is equal to “as much greenhouse gas pollution as 50 new coal-fired power plants,” the U.S.-based Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) explained in a statement announcing the new analysis.
The EIP report—titledGreenhouse Gases from Oil, Gas, and Petrochemical Production (pdf)—details recent and potential future emissions from U.S. petroleum and natural gas systems, chemical manufacturing, and oil refineries based on data reported to the Environmental Protection Agency, fossil fuel production projections from the Department of Energy, and permits that companies are seeking or have acquired.
“Facilities in these sectors reported emitting 764 million tons of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide equivalent tons) in 2018, an eight percent increase since 2016,” the report says. “Expected growth in oil and gas production and large new and expanded oil, gas, and chemical plants have the potential to add up to 227 million additional tons of greenhouse gases by 2025.”
“That could bring total emissions to nearly one billion tons, equivalent to the greenhouse gas output from more than 218 large coal-fired power plants operating around the clock at full capacity,” the report continues, noting that the estimates “likely understate emissions growth from the oil, gas, and petrochemical sectors.”
Aided by both the Obama and Trump administrations, the expansion of the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries in the United States continues despite repeated and increasingly urgent warnings from experts that the U.S. fracking boom is threathening ecosystems and making people sick.
Scientists have called for all countries—but particularly the world’s wealthiest—to rapidly phase out fossil fuels in favor of 100% renewable energy to prevent the worst impacts of the global climate emergency.
“The U.S. is already struggling to meet climate commitments and transition to a low-carbon future,” Courtney Bernhardt, research director at the EIP, said in the group’s statement. “This analysis shows that we’re heading in the wrong direction and really need to slow emissions growth from the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries.”
The report concludes that “the industries responsible for driving fossil fuel extraction and production need to be held more fully accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions.” Its key recommendations are to strengthen permits, improve monitoring and reporting, and increase funding to state environmental agencies.
“Oil and gas production and petrochemical manufacturing are responsible for most of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions today,” EIP executive director Eric Schaeffer said Wednesday. “Unfortunately, the permits being issued by states and EPA for the largest projects do not include cost-effective methods for controlling greenhouse gas pollution, even though this is required by the federal Clean Air Act. Unless you think global warming is a hoax, that needs to change.”
New Orleans-based Mark Schleifstein reported for The Times-Picayune Wednesday that EIP found the contentious $9.4 billion Formosa complex proposed for St. James Parish would have the highest potential yearly greenhouse gas emissions (13.6 million tons) among all the future and petrochemical and plastics projects included in the analysis.
As Common Dreams reported last month, Louisiana residents and environmental justice groups are fighting against construction of the plant in the region nationally known as “Cancer Alley” because of the area’s significant industrial development and the related health impacts on local communities.
Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson Greg Langley told The Guardian Tuesday that the state has issued 16 key air quality permits for the project that that essentially clears the way for Formosa to begin construction on the new facility.
In a statement responding to the development Tuesday, Sharon Lavigne, president of the campaign group Rise St. James, vowed to maintain local resistance to the project. “We are fighting to protect our homes and our families from this monster, Formosa,” she said. “We are not going to stop because of this bad decision by the state to grant air permits.”
Environment - buying garbage!!!
As Americans send back millions of holiday gifts, there's a hidden environmental cost
More people make ‘free returns’ each year, contributing to greenhouse-gas emissions – and many items end up in landfills
Danielle Renwick
the guardian
Thu 2 Jan 2020 06.00 EST
Millions of Americans will head post office this month, unwanted holiday gifts in hand. But while it may be convenient to return that ugly sweater from your mom, that ease comes at a huge cost to the environment.
The United Parcel Service (UPS) predicts that it will process a record 1.9 million returns on 2 January, which it has dubbed National Returns Day. More than half (55%) of Americans said they planned on returning unwanted holiday gifts within a month of receiving them, according to a survey published by the National Retail Federation.
The spike in returns is largely the result of more Americans doing their holiday shopping online: e-commerce sales were up 19% over last year, according to Mastercard. Amazon, the country’s largest online retailer, saw its stock rise last week after the company reported a “record-breaking” holiday season.
However, what many shoppers may not know is that shipping returned goods contributes to greenhouse-gas emissions – and much of what they send back ends up in landfills. Each year Americans return about 3.5 billion products, and five billion pounds of returned goods ended up in US landfills, according to Optoro, a technology company that helps retailers process returns.
“Our data shows that 88% of consumers think that returns go right back on the shelf and are resold to the next consumer,” says Ann Starodaj, head of sustainability at Optoro. “But in reality, the majority of returned items cannot be resold as new.”
The company says the landfill waste from returns alone contributes 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Clothing sales have a particularly high return rate, between 40 and 50%. That’s because, as one market research firm puts it, “the bedroom is the new fitting room”.
“The easier you make it for the customer to return something, the more likely it is that the customer thinks there’s no cost to the return,” says Miguel Jaller, co-director of the Sustainable Freight Research Center at University of California, Davis. In fact, he says, “There are untold externalities in terms of packaging and resources, just to move the things we don’t like to another home or discarding facility or to another country.”
Companies opt not to return goods to the market for several reasons. In some cases, returned goods have been damaged or are no longer in season – for example, a winter coat returned in July. Often the value of the product is so low that it’s simply cheaper to throw it away than to handle the logistics of resale. Sellers sometimes have contracts with suppliers that prohibit them from selling an item more than once.
Jaller has found that consumers are more than twice as likely to return items bought online than in a store. And returns made in stores typically have less of an environmental impact than those made to e-retailers. “With e-retailers, there’s no store to drive to. A person drives to UPS, the product is then shipped to a warehouse. That return requires several different movements, whereas with a traditional retailer that product will likely stay at the store,” he says. Jaller estimates that between 20 and 25% of e-retailers’ environmental externalities are due to returns.
There are steps governments, retailers, and consumers can take to reduce waste.
Cities and states can impose tolls or congestion pricing on delivery trucks, while local law enforcement can restrict where and for how long trucks are allowed to idle while making deliveries. Earlier this year, the French government banned the destruction of unused consumer goods.
Retailers can minimize packaging, offer clearer descriptions of products, and use energy-efficient warehouses, among other things. They can also increase the number of dropoff sites, like Amazon lockers, that can streamline the returns process. Some companies, like Ikea, are using virtual reality to help customers envision their products in their homes; many clothing brands use TrueFit technology to help consumers more accurately choose their size.
More sellers could also charge for returns, but experts say that is unlikely in the short term as companies compete for market share. “According to our research, 97% of consumers say that a positive returns experience will encourage them to shop at that retailer again,” wrote Starodaj. “Amazon understands that owning and excelling at the returns moment is critical to their customer satisfaction.”
Jaller says that means much of the responsibility for reducing waste will fall to the consumer. He suggests fundamentally rethinking what we purchase in the first place, adding: “If you’re not sure you need it, don’t buy it.”
The United Parcel Service (UPS) predicts that it will process a record 1.9 million returns on 2 January, which it has dubbed National Returns Day. More than half (55%) of Americans said they planned on returning unwanted holiday gifts within a month of receiving them, according to a survey published by the National Retail Federation.
The spike in returns is largely the result of more Americans doing their holiday shopping online: e-commerce sales were up 19% over last year, according to Mastercard. Amazon, the country’s largest online retailer, saw its stock rise last week after the company reported a “record-breaking” holiday season.
However, what many shoppers may not know is that shipping returned goods contributes to greenhouse-gas emissions – and much of what they send back ends up in landfills. Each year Americans return about 3.5 billion products, and five billion pounds of returned goods ended up in US landfills, according to Optoro, a technology company that helps retailers process returns.
“Our data shows that 88% of consumers think that returns go right back on the shelf and are resold to the next consumer,” says Ann Starodaj, head of sustainability at Optoro. “But in reality, the majority of returned items cannot be resold as new.”
The company says the landfill waste from returns alone contributes 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Clothing sales have a particularly high return rate, between 40 and 50%. That’s because, as one market research firm puts it, “the bedroom is the new fitting room”.
“The easier you make it for the customer to return something, the more likely it is that the customer thinks there’s no cost to the return,” says Miguel Jaller, co-director of the Sustainable Freight Research Center at University of California, Davis. In fact, he says, “There are untold externalities in terms of packaging and resources, just to move the things we don’t like to another home or discarding facility or to another country.”
Companies opt not to return goods to the market for several reasons. In some cases, returned goods have been damaged or are no longer in season – for example, a winter coat returned in July. Often the value of the product is so low that it’s simply cheaper to throw it away than to handle the logistics of resale. Sellers sometimes have contracts with suppliers that prohibit them from selling an item more than once.
Jaller has found that consumers are more than twice as likely to return items bought online than in a store. And returns made in stores typically have less of an environmental impact than those made to e-retailers. “With e-retailers, there’s no store to drive to. A person drives to UPS, the product is then shipped to a warehouse. That return requires several different movements, whereas with a traditional retailer that product will likely stay at the store,” he says. Jaller estimates that between 20 and 25% of e-retailers’ environmental externalities are due to returns.
There are steps governments, retailers, and consumers can take to reduce waste.
Cities and states can impose tolls or congestion pricing on delivery trucks, while local law enforcement can restrict where and for how long trucks are allowed to idle while making deliveries. Earlier this year, the French government banned the destruction of unused consumer goods.
Retailers can minimize packaging, offer clearer descriptions of products, and use energy-efficient warehouses, among other things. They can also increase the number of dropoff sites, like Amazon lockers, that can streamline the returns process. Some companies, like Ikea, are using virtual reality to help customers envision their products in their homes; many clothing brands use TrueFit technology to help consumers more accurately choose their size.
More sellers could also charge for returns, but experts say that is unlikely in the short term as companies compete for market share. “According to our research, 97% of consumers say that a positive returns experience will encourage them to shop at that retailer again,” wrote Starodaj. “Amazon understands that owning and excelling at the returns moment is critical to their customer satisfaction.”
Jaller says that means much of the responsibility for reducing waste will fall to the consumer. He suggests fundamentally rethinking what we purchase in the first place, adding: “If you’re not sure you need it, don’t buy it.”
The Looming US Water Crisis
BY Andreea Sterea, Foreign Policy In Focus
PUBLISHED December 30, 2019
According to the World Economic Forum, the global water crisis is the fourth major threat of our civilization. In fact, studies warn that two-thirds of the global population could be living in water-stressed countries by 2025 — just a few short years away.
When we think about water scarcity, many Americans may immediately call to mind countries in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. But Europe and North America are also facing unprecedented water shortage issues — and the United States stands out of the crowd.
One study published in 2019 in the journal Earth’s Future highlights the fact that states like New Mexico, California, Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska will have to make significant changes to counter severe upcoming water shortage problems.
The study also highlights some issues we all need to take into consideration — one of the most critical being the safety of U.S. water.
One would think that the most powerful country in the world would enjoy clean tap water every day. Yet thanks to inequality and infrastructure decay, millions of Americans drink unsafe tap water from systems that violate health standards — in the same vein of the ongoing violations occurring in Flint, Michigan. Investigative journalists found that more than 30 cities botched water quality testing, following the same flawed procedures that led to criminal charges against government employees in Flint.
Ordinary Americans seem to realize this. A 2017 Gallup poll found that 63 percent of Americans worry a great deal about the pollution of drinking water, while 57 percent worry a great deal about pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.
There’s no use hiding it: America is going through a water crisis, and we’re going to face even more dire times if it doesn’t begin to change soon.
How Bad Are Things, Anyway?
While the United States is not yet among the world’s most at-risk countries in terms of water scarcity — certainly not comparable with the situation in Uganda, India, Pakistan, or Qatar for instance — people and authorities cannot ignore the facts anymore.
According to the Water Research Institute, New Mexico faces the most dire situation of any U.S. state, with its water risk rating as “extremely high.” Its rankings put New Mexico on par with the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East and Eritrea in Africa.
California, a state that has its fair share of water problems, comes next. The drought that began sweeping across the U.S. in the 2010s is still causing huge problems, from California on up to southeast Alaska’s rainforest.
What is even more concerning is that U.S. groundwater is facing depletion, with industries and people digging ever deeper for water that used to come easy.
Water shortages occur when the demand outpaces the supply. According to the Earth’s Future study mentioned above, the U.S. population could grow to over 500 million people by 2100. Naturally, population growth is a predictor of water demand growth.
As supply is concerned, however, things don’t look bright. Besides the current concerns related to water pollution and the authorities’ failure to keep water safe, water supplies will undergo significant variations in response to climate change. Out of the 204 water basins supplying most of the country with fresh water, as many as 96 could fail to meet monthly demand starting in 2071.
Fifty-plus years may sound like a reasonable amount of time to come up with a solution. The problem is we don’t have nearly that long. According to the United Nations report published last year, the infamous 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature rise above pre-industrial levels will occur sometime between 2030 and 2052 if we fail to stop the current rate of global warming.
Even if President Trump does not believe in this warming, scientists do. The correlation is simple to understand: Alongside increased demand from a growing population, we’re likely to see less rainfall and significant evaporation caused by global warming.
The first sector affected by this perfect storm is going to be agriculture. Since agriculture often accounts for roughly 75 percent of the annual consumption of basin water in the United States, those shortages will create severe challenges — including food insecurity.
The Climate Is Changing. Can Our Politics?
However, if water scarcity and food insecurity will take another 50 years, drinking water safety cannot wait any longer.
It took the Flint water crisis for the U.S. to open their eyes and realize that the “American Dream” shakes on its feet because the infrastructure cannot support it for much longer. The problem in Flint, Michigan, is still unsolved, even after all these years. A mix of anti-democratic tendencies, negligence, racism, and issues ranging from incompetence to manslaughter caused the Flint crisis. Solving it — and others like it — is going to take a significant movement.
According to the American Water Works Association, the country needs to make massive investments in water infrastructure over the coming decades. But such repairs and replacements would cost at least $1 trillion. And when we talk about money, we also talk about politics. For the first time this year, moderators devoted about 12 minutes to tackle climate and water issues during a single presidential debate. Still, most media outlets seem to ignore the crisis.
And while the EPA says that water problems take priority over even climate change, the agency does little to tackle the problem. Earlier this year in Iowa, for example, private wells used for drinking water faced extensive contamination due to agricultural practices. The EPA, however, actually put a halt on the regulation of ion nitrate fertilizer, one of the substances endangering the 300,000 private wells in the state.
This story is just one of many, unfortunately. Poorly protected or downright disregarded communities across the country— like the poor, small town of Denmark, South Carolina, whose mayor actually tried to prevent scientists from testing the town’s bizarre smelling, off-color water — are having to fight hard to keep their right to clean, safe water.
Meanwhile, according to the Environmental Working Group, over 1,000 locations in 49 states have confirmed cases of contamination by highly toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS. And the Trump administration is pushing ever harder to dismantle protections like the Waters of the U.S. rule — an effort exports have called “the biggest attack on clean water in our generation.”
Fortunately, the U.S. water crisis hasn’t reached the levels seen in more arid regions of the world. But it is a crisis nonetheless — spreading silently and deadly, accelerated by a broken or corrupt political system.
We have a long way ahead of us finding the right political and economic framework to tackle climate change, infrastructure rehabilitation, well water regulations, water contamination, agriculture challenges, and more — not to mention climate justice for all. Speaking truth to power is the first step. But it needs to be all of us, and it needs to be now.
When we think about water scarcity, many Americans may immediately call to mind countries in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. But Europe and North America are also facing unprecedented water shortage issues — and the United States stands out of the crowd.
One study published in 2019 in the journal Earth’s Future highlights the fact that states like New Mexico, California, Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska will have to make significant changes to counter severe upcoming water shortage problems.
The study also highlights some issues we all need to take into consideration — one of the most critical being the safety of U.S. water.
One would think that the most powerful country in the world would enjoy clean tap water every day. Yet thanks to inequality and infrastructure decay, millions of Americans drink unsafe tap water from systems that violate health standards — in the same vein of the ongoing violations occurring in Flint, Michigan. Investigative journalists found that more than 30 cities botched water quality testing, following the same flawed procedures that led to criminal charges against government employees in Flint.
Ordinary Americans seem to realize this. A 2017 Gallup poll found that 63 percent of Americans worry a great deal about the pollution of drinking water, while 57 percent worry a great deal about pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.
There’s no use hiding it: America is going through a water crisis, and we’re going to face even more dire times if it doesn’t begin to change soon.
How Bad Are Things, Anyway?
While the United States is not yet among the world’s most at-risk countries in terms of water scarcity — certainly not comparable with the situation in Uganda, India, Pakistan, or Qatar for instance — people and authorities cannot ignore the facts anymore.
According to the Water Research Institute, New Mexico faces the most dire situation of any U.S. state, with its water risk rating as “extremely high.” Its rankings put New Mexico on par with the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East and Eritrea in Africa.
California, a state that has its fair share of water problems, comes next. The drought that began sweeping across the U.S. in the 2010s is still causing huge problems, from California on up to southeast Alaska’s rainforest.
What is even more concerning is that U.S. groundwater is facing depletion, with industries and people digging ever deeper for water that used to come easy.
Water shortages occur when the demand outpaces the supply. According to the Earth’s Future study mentioned above, the U.S. population could grow to over 500 million people by 2100. Naturally, population growth is a predictor of water demand growth.
As supply is concerned, however, things don’t look bright. Besides the current concerns related to water pollution and the authorities’ failure to keep water safe, water supplies will undergo significant variations in response to climate change. Out of the 204 water basins supplying most of the country with fresh water, as many as 96 could fail to meet monthly demand starting in 2071.
Fifty-plus years may sound like a reasonable amount of time to come up with a solution. The problem is we don’t have nearly that long. According to the United Nations report published last year, the infamous 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature rise above pre-industrial levels will occur sometime between 2030 and 2052 if we fail to stop the current rate of global warming.
Even if President Trump does not believe in this warming, scientists do. The correlation is simple to understand: Alongside increased demand from a growing population, we’re likely to see less rainfall and significant evaporation caused by global warming.
The first sector affected by this perfect storm is going to be agriculture. Since agriculture often accounts for roughly 75 percent of the annual consumption of basin water in the United States, those shortages will create severe challenges — including food insecurity.
The Climate Is Changing. Can Our Politics?
However, if water scarcity and food insecurity will take another 50 years, drinking water safety cannot wait any longer.
It took the Flint water crisis for the U.S. to open their eyes and realize that the “American Dream” shakes on its feet because the infrastructure cannot support it for much longer. The problem in Flint, Michigan, is still unsolved, even after all these years. A mix of anti-democratic tendencies, negligence, racism, and issues ranging from incompetence to manslaughter caused the Flint crisis. Solving it — and others like it — is going to take a significant movement.
According to the American Water Works Association, the country needs to make massive investments in water infrastructure over the coming decades. But such repairs and replacements would cost at least $1 trillion. And when we talk about money, we also talk about politics. For the first time this year, moderators devoted about 12 minutes to tackle climate and water issues during a single presidential debate. Still, most media outlets seem to ignore the crisis.
And while the EPA says that water problems take priority over even climate change, the agency does little to tackle the problem. Earlier this year in Iowa, for example, private wells used for drinking water faced extensive contamination due to agricultural practices. The EPA, however, actually put a halt on the regulation of ion nitrate fertilizer, one of the substances endangering the 300,000 private wells in the state.
This story is just one of many, unfortunately. Poorly protected or downright disregarded communities across the country— like the poor, small town of Denmark, South Carolina, whose mayor actually tried to prevent scientists from testing the town’s bizarre smelling, off-color water — are having to fight hard to keep their right to clean, safe water.
Meanwhile, according to the Environmental Working Group, over 1,000 locations in 49 states have confirmed cases of contamination by highly toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS. And the Trump administration is pushing ever harder to dismantle protections like the Waters of the U.S. rule — an effort exports have called “the biggest attack on clean water in our generation.”
Fortunately, the U.S. water crisis hasn’t reached the levels seen in more arid regions of the world. But it is a crisis nonetheless — spreading silently and deadly, accelerated by a broken or corrupt political system.
We have a long way ahead of us finding the right political and economic framework to tackle climate change, infrastructure rehabilitation, well water regulations, water contamination, agriculture challenges, and more — not to mention climate justice for all. Speaking truth to power is the first step. But it needs to be all of us, and it needs to be now.
State Regulators Prefer Water Standards Best For Bass, Not Children
With the Trump EPA’s Blessings, Missouri Waters Down Obama-Era Quality Requirements for the State’s Lakes
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
12/23/19
Missouri regulators are using fishy science to write water quality standards for its lakes.
Missouri based its regulations—approved by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency—on the health of sport fish like the bass favored by billionaire Trump donor Johnny Morris, not the health of the state’s children who swim in or get their drinking water from lakes.
The Missouri Coalition for the Environment, which thinks calculations about water safety shouldn’t be based on what’s best for fish, sued.
“Human health standards should be based on what’s safe for humans,” says Heather Navarro, executive director of the coalition.
Missouri regulators adopted water standards based on what’s best for fish after groups like Associated Industries of Missouri and Regulatory Environmental Group for Missouri opposed adopting EPA standards that benefit human health. Missouri didn’t set numeric limits for pollutants to try to ensure that the state’s lakes are safe for swimming.
Cattle rancher Michael Parson, a Republican, is Missouri’s governor. Other red states like Arizona and Nebraska have tougher water regulations with rules that screen or limit how much nitrogen or phosphorus can be in the water.
Environmental attorney Albert Ettinger says Missouri’s standards for lakes won’t prevent pollution.
“By the time you can see the cancer, you have a big problem,” Ettinger says.
‘Not Scientifically Defensible’
Nitrogen and phosphorus, found in fertilizer or manure that farmers spread on their fields, contribute to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where fish and other living things must swim away or die. Missouri is one of the worst contributors to this annual dead zone which was larger this year than the state of Hawaii.
Under Obama, the EPA told Missouri that it needed to consider the health of children under six who could be exposed to toxic algae and that its proposed regulations “may not be scientifically defensible.”
About 77% of Missouri’s lakes would be impaired under the stricter EPA standards that the agency wanted to impose under Obama, including Lake of the Ozarks which bills itself as “the Midwest’s premier lake resort destination.”
Pollution-Friendly Commission
Former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, also a Republican, stacked the state commission that helps set clean water standards, the Missouri Clean Water Commission, with pollution-friendly members like Pat Thomas, the treasurer of the Missouri Republican State Committee.
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and other Missouri Republican lawmakers urged former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to use the laxer rule “developed for Missouri waters with Missouri expertise and Missouri-specific data.”
Missouri based its regulations—approved by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency—on the health of sport fish like the bass favored by billionaire Trump donor Johnny Morris, not the health of the state’s children who swim in or get their drinking water from lakes.
The Missouri Coalition for the Environment, which thinks calculations about water safety shouldn’t be based on what’s best for fish, sued.
“Human health standards should be based on what’s safe for humans,” says Heather Navarro, executive director of the coalition.
Missouri regulators adopted water standards based on what’s best for fish after groups like Associated Industries of Missouri and Regulatory Environmental Group for Missouri opposed adopting EPA standards that benefit human health. Missouri didn’t set numeric limits for pollutants to try to ensure that the state’s lakes are safe for swimming.
Cattle rancher Michael Parson, a Republican, is Missouri’s governor. Other red states like Arizona and Nebraska have tougher water regulations with rules that screen or limit how much nitrogen or phosphorus can be in the water.
Environmental attorney Albert Ettinger says Missouri’s standards for lakes won’t prevent pollution.
“By the time you can see the cancer, you have a big problem,” Ettinger says.
‘Not Scientifically Defensible’
Nitrogen and phosphorus, found in fertilizer or manure that farmers spread on their fields, contribute to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where fish and other living things must swim away or die. Missouri is one of the worst contributors to this annual dead zone which was larger this year than the state of Hawaii.
Under Obama, the EPA told Missouri that it needed to consider the health of children under six who could be exposed to toxic algae and that its proposed regulations “may not be scientifically defensible.”
About 77% of Missouri’s lakes would be impaired under the stricter EPA standards that the agency wanted to impose under Obama, including Lake of the Ozarks which bills itself as “the Midwest’s premier lake resort destination.”
Pollution-Friendly Commission
Former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, also a Republican, stacked the state commission that helps set clean water standards, the Missouri Clean Water Commission, with pollution-friendly members like Pat Thomas, the treasurer of the Missouri Republican State Committee.
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and other Missouri Republican lawmakers urged former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to use the laxer rule “developed for Missouri waters with Missouri expertise and Missouri-specific data.”
POLLUTER’S PARADISE
How an Environmental Regulator Became Known for Protecting Industry
In the late 1980s, Louisiana’s governor made environmental protection a priority. He only lasted one term. Now, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality has a reputation for going easy on industry.
by Gordon Russell, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate - pro publica
Dec. 19, 1:30 p.m. EST
The notion that the natural environment should be regulated and protected by the government is a relatively modern one, often ascribed to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring.”
In 1970, President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, marking the beginning of the modern environmental apparatus. State environmental agencies began to pop up, and they were typically given the authority to enforce key federal laws, such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.
Louisiana’s wake-up call came in 1978, when 19-year-old Kirtley Jackson died suddenly when he emptied his 18-wheeler into an unlicensed hazardous waste pit in Iberville Parish and was overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes.
The incident helped spur the creation of Louisiana’s first environmental oversight agencies. In early 1984, the Department of Environmental Quality was established, replacing a hodgepodge of predecessor agencies. Four years later, Gov. Buddy Roemer took office and hired an idealistic environmental scientist, Paul Templet, as secretary of the DEQ. Templet brought in like-minded peers, doubled the agency’s ranks and brought a different attitude to regulation.
During Roemer’s tenure, pollution for the first time was treated as a critical problem facing Louisiana. The first annual national Toxics Release Inventory, which lists the quantity of toxic chemicals released by every major plant, had just been published, and many of the worst offenders were in Louisiana.
Urged on by Templet and Roemer, the Legislature passed a law requiring that toxic pollution statewide be cut in half over a decade, a goal Louisiana industry met and exceeded.
Perhaps most boldly, Templet pioneered a plan to tie tax incentives and other state enticements to a company’s environmental scorecard.
“Why is the state going to give a million-dollar-plus tax exemption to a company that has a six-figure order of violation against them?” Vicki Arroyo, who helped create the policy as Templet’s policy director and now runs the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University, asked rhetorically in a recent interview.
Not surprisingly, industry was cool on Templet and, by extension, Roemer. No one disliked the governor and his DEQ secretary more than Jack Kent, president of Marine Shale Processors, a company based in St. Mary Parish that used an incinerator to turn dangerous industrial waste into a product used in roadbeds and other projects.
Alarmed by a cluster of rare brain cancers among local kids, Templet’s DEQ fined Marine Shale millions of dollars and pushed to revoke its permit in a series of pitched battles.
Kent had his revenge in the 1991 gubernatorial primary. He spent $400,000 on a series of ads attacking Roemer, who wound up finishing third behind the white supremacist David Duke and Edwin Edwards, who had by then served three terms as governor and been indicted once.
Louisiana has not seen a governor make environmental protection a priority since, and several have rowed in the opposite direction. After he beat Duke, for instance, Edwards replaced Templet with Kai Midboe, an attorney who had represented oil and gas interests, and who quickly eased off on some of Templet’s more aggressive policies — including the linkage between tax breaks and environmental performance.
“We don’t take positions based on politics; we take positions based on science,” Midboe told Chemical Week at the time. “We are trying to get away from the confrontational approach of the previous administration.”
In a recent interview, Edwards sounded a similar note. Industry, he said, “thought Roemer was not paying enough attention to them. He took too many steps without consulting them, and without trying to take a balanced approach.”
By contrast, he added: “I was always very close to the petrochemical industry because it’s very important to Louisiana. We had a quarter of a million jobs directly tied to the industry.”
Edwards’ unabashedly pro-industry successor, Gov. Mike Foster, was furious when the Japanese chemical manufacturer Shintech abandoned plans for a $700 million PVC plant in Convent, in St. James Parish. He successfully pushed for new restrictions on Tulane’s environmental law clinic, which had helped locals fight Shintech and other suitors. He also denounced the university and said the state should reconsider Tulane’s tax breaks.
Unlike some of his predecessors, Bobby Jindal, who took office in 2008, didn’t publicly signal plans to chart a new direction at the DEQ. He presented a reorganization plan that envisioned cutting 40 jobs at the agency, but that was far less than the roughly 300 he eventually trimmed.
Since Roemer’s abbreviated tenure, there hasn’t been a governor who has made environmental protection a central issue.
It’s not that it doesn’t matter to voters. A Pew Research Center poll in 2016 found that a slight majority of Louisianans believe stricter environmental regulation is worth the cost, though a substantial minority said environmental regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy.
During the recently concluded campaign for governor, none of the leading candidates, including incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards, made the environment a focus — even though Louisiana is in the middle of an industrial building spree.
To the extent the industrial boom came up in the campaign, the question was whether Louisiana was sufficiently welcoming to big industry — not whether the state was holding polluters to account. Eddie Rispone, the Republican businessman who nearly beat Edwards, complained that Edwards’ curtailment of a generous tax break for industry was driving business away.
Louisiana’s constitutional requirement that environmental decisions take the economy into account is evidence of a long-standing mindset here.
Templet says that mindset can be changed, but it takes a leader willing to make environmental protection a focus.
“The staff at DEQ is capable and willing to lower pollution in Louisiana, but it requires that the DEQ leadership set that as a priority,” he said. “The language in the law balancing the environment and the economy is so vague and difficult to interpret that the DEQ can take almost any direction it wishes to go.
“There are plenty of people in other agencies working to give business an edge. The DEQ should be focusing on the environment.”
In 1970, President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, marking the beginning of the modern environmental apparatus. State environmental agencies began to pop up, and they were typically given the authority to enforce key federal laws, such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.
Louisiana’s wake-up call came in 1978, when 19-year-old Kirtley Jackson died suddenly when he emptied his 18-wheeler into an unlicensed hazardous waste pit in Iberville Parish and was overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes.
The incident helped spur the creation of Louisiana’s first environmental oversight agencies. In early 1984, the Department of Environmental Quality was established, replacing a hodgepodge of predecessor agencies. Four years later, Gov. Buddy Roemer took office and hired an idealistic environmental scientist, Paul Templet, as secretary of the DEQ. Templet brought in like-minded peers, doubled the agency’s ranks and brought a different attitude to regulation.
During Roemer’s tenure, pollution for the first time was treated as a critical problem facing Louisiana. The first annual national Toxics Release Inventory, which lists the quantity of toxic chemicals released by every major plant, had just been published, and many of the worst offenders were in Louisiana.
Urged on by Templet and Roemer, the Legislature passed a law requiring that toxic pollution statewide be cut in half over a decade, a goal Louisiana industry met and exceeded.
Perhaps most boldly, Templet pioneered a plan to tie tax incentives and other state enticements to a company’s environmental scorecard.
“Why is the state going to give a million-dollar-plus tax exemption to a company that has a six-figure order of violation against them?” Vicki Arroyo, who helped create the policy as Templet’s policy director and now runs the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University, asked rhetorically in a recent interview.
Not surprisingly, industry was cool on Templet and, by extension, Roemer. No one disliked the governor and his DEQ secretary more than Jack Kent, president of Marine Shale Processors, a company based in St. Mary Parish that used an incinerator to turn dangerous industrial waste into a product used in roadbeds and other projects.
Alarmed by a cluster of rare brain cancers among local kids, Templet’s DEQ fined Marine Shale millions of dollars and pushed to revoke its permit in a series of pitched battles.
Kent had his revenge in the 1991 gubernatorial primary. He spent $400,000 on a series of ads attacking Roemer, who wound up finishing third behind the white supremacist David Duke and Edwin Edwards, who had by then served three terms as governor and been indicted once.
Louisiana has not seen a governor make environmental protection a priority since, and several have rowed in the opposite direction. After he beat Duke, for instance, Edwards replaced Templet with Kai Midboe, an attorney who had represented oil and gas interests, and who quickly eased off on some of Templet’s more aggressive policies — including the linkage between tax breaks and environmental performance.
“We don’t take positions based on politics; we take positions based on science,” Midboe told Chemical Week at the time. “We are trying to get away from the confrontational approach of the previous administration.”
In a recent interview, Edwards sounded a similar note. Industry, he said, “thought Roemer was not paying enough attention to them. He took too many steps without consulting them, and without trying to take a balanced approach.”
By contrast, he added: “I was always very close to the petrochemical industry because it’s very important to Louisiana. We had a quarter of a million jobs directly tied to the industry.”
Edwards’ unabashedly pro-industry successor, Gov. Mike Foster, was furious when the Japanese chemical manufacturer Shintech abandoned plans for a $700 million PVC plant in Convent, in St. James Parish. He successfully pushed for new restrictions on Tulane’s environmental law clinic, which had helped locals fight Shintech and other suitors. He also denounced the university and said the state should reconsider Tulane’s tax breaks.
Unlike some of his predecessors, Bobby Jindal, who took office in 2008, didn’t publicly signal plans to chart a new direction at the DEQ. He presented a reorganization plan that envisioned cutting 40 jobs at the agency, but that was far less than the roughly 300 he eventually trimmed.
Since Roemer’s abbreviated tenure, there hasn’t been a governor who has made environmental protection a central issue.
It’s not that it doesn’t matter to voters. A Pew Research Center poll in 2016 found that a slight majority of Louisianans believe stricter environmental regulation is worth the cost, though a substantial minority said environmental regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy.
During the recently concluded campaign for governor, none of the leading candidates, including incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards, made the environment a focus — even though Louisiana is in the middle of an industrial building spree.
To the extent the industrial boom came up in the campaign, the question was whether Louisiana was sufficiently welcoming to big industry — not whether the state was holding polluters to account. Eddie Rispone, the Republican businessman who nearly beat Edwards, complained that Edwards’ curtailment of a generous tax break for industry was driving business away.
Louisiana’s constitutional requirement that environmental decisions take the economy into account is evidence of a long-standing mindset here.
Templet says that mindset can be changed, but it takes a leader willing to make environmental protection a focus.
“The staff at DEQ is capable and willing to lower pollution in Louisiana, but it requires that the DEQ leadership set that as a priority,” he said. “The language in the law balancing the environment and the economy is so vague and difficult to interpret that the DEQ can take almost any direction it wishes to go.
“There are plenty of people in other agencies working to give business an edge. The DEQ should be focusing on the environment.”
Trump Doesn’t Want You To Know How Toxic Your Neighborhood May Be
Administration Shuts Down ‘ToxMap’ That Shows Locations of Dangerous Chemicals
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
12/19/19
Former President Ronald Reagan enshrined in law the public’s right to know what dangerous chemicals are in our communities. But Trump Republicans have killed off an online mapping tool that lets us easily do that.
ToxMap, a feature of the National Library of Medicine, which bills itself as “an international leader in health informatics research and development,” went dark Monday.
“Our National Library of Medicine has now joined this administration’s ideologically-driven anti-science crusade, effectively shrinking the public’s access to environmental as well as disease and mortality data,” wrote Chris Sellers, a professor of environmental history and politics at Stony Brook University in New York.
ToxMap started in 2004 to display information the Environmental Protection Agency collects on toxic releases of chemicals. It also included information on nuclear power plants, coal plant emissions, Census figures and health and income data. People with basic computer skills could easily map potential dangers in their communities.
Much of the information fromToxMap is still online but scattered among different web sites, making it more difficult to learn about pollution and the polluters who are Trump’s pals and campaign contributors.
Former EPA officials have described making toxic release information available to anyone who wants it as “among our most potent environmental weapons.”
Shuttering ToxMap is part of Trump’s push to roll back environmental rules and regulations.
The New York Times counted 85 rollbacks or rollbacks in process. These actions, which include canceling a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions and shrinking two national monuments in Utah, could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions. That would lead to thousands of extra deaths each year from poor air.
Reagan signed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act in 1986. Public demand for information about chemical releases had skyrocketed because of a pesticide release at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 that killed thousands and a toxic chemicals release in 1985 from a Union Carbide plant in West Virginia. The law had overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats.
ToxMap, a feature of the National Library of Medicine, which bills itself as “an international leader in health informatics research and development,” went dark Monday.
“Our National Library of Medicine has now joined this administration’s ideologically-driven anti-science crusade, effectively shrinking the public’s access to environmental as well as disease and mortality data,” wrote Chris Sellers, a professor of environmental history and politics at Stony Brook University in New York.
ToxMap started in 2004 to display information the Environmental Protection Agency collects on toxic releases of chemicals. It also included information on nuclear power plants, coal plant emissions, Census figures and health and income data. People with basic computer skills could easily map potential dangers in their communities.
Much of the information fromToxMap is still online but scattered among different web sites, making it more difficult to learn about pollution and the polluters who are Trump’s pals and campaign contributors.
Former EPA officials have described making toxic release information available to anyone who wants it as “among our most potent environmental weapons.”
Shuttering ToxMap is part of Trump’s push to roll back environmental rules and regulations.
The New York Times counted 85 rollbacks or rollbacks in process. These actions, which include canceling a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions and shrinking two national monuments in Utah, could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions. That would lead to thousands of extra deaths each year from poor air.
Reagan signed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act in 1986. Public demand for information about chemical releases had skyrocketed because of a pesticide release at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 that killed thousands and a toxic chemicals release in 1985 from a Union Carbide plant in West Virginia. The law had overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats.
A Pesticide the EPA Won’t Ban Is Sickening Low-Income Californians of Color
December 17, 2019 | Amy Roost - talk poverty
As a child growing up in Arvin, California, Gabriel Duarte played with his brothers in an orchard 15 feet from his family’s front door. Today he plays in a prison yard. Duarte believes these two points on his 20-year timeline are related.
Earlier this year, Duarte contacted me after reading an op-ed I’d written about the widely used pesticide chlorpyrifos. I’d discovered that the likely reason for each of my three children’s brain malformations was due to my acute exposure, in 1989, to a flea “bomb” containing chlorpyrifos. Duarte believes his ADHD and impulsivity issues are the result of his chronic exposure to chlorpyrifos in his home, school and work environments.
Human and animal studies link chlorpyrifos exposure to structural damage to the brain, neurobehavioral deficits, asthma, diminished IQ, and a wide range of developmental disabilities in children. It has also been linked to heart disease, lung cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and the lowering of sperm counts in adults. Based on my investigative research, and interviews with Duarte along with dozens of other residents in the San Joaquin Valley, I’m left to draw the all-too-obvious conclusion that communities with a higher percentage of residents who are low income are at greater risk of being exposed to harmful pesticides and other environmental toxins. And the issue of race is an inextricable co-factor.
Duarte’s alcoholic father abandoned the family when Duarte was nine, about the time his mother was diagnosed with leukemia. (Both pediatric and adult leukemias have also been linked to pesticide exposure.) Duarte, the third of four children, became the man of the house and remembers making meals for his sick mother and biking to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions for his mom and younger brother, who had severe asthma.
Both Duarte and his brother were diagnosed with ADHD by a school psychologist at Di Giorgio Elementary School. Duarte does not recall being provided treatment or support from the school, which likely speaks to Di Giorgio School District being highly under-resourced, given the district’s meager tax base. Like their home on Richardson Road, the school abuts an orchard where pesticides are routinely sprayed.
And if exposure at home and school weren’t enough, before leaving the family, the boys’ father was a fieldworker who would have likely brought home pesticide residue on his clothing and shoes. Duarte himself worked as a field hand as a teenager and also at a golf course collecting stray golf balls. (Chlorpyrifos is widely used in non-agricultural settings like golf courses and golf balls are commonly thought to be a source of pesticide residue.)
The EPA banned chlorpyrifos in household products in 2000. However, its use in agriculture was allowed to continue. It’s often small, rural, low-income communities of color that bear the cumulative impacts of pesticide exposure and environmental degradation.
Nowhere is this more evident than in communities like Arvin, located in Kern County at the southern tip of the San Joaquin Valley — the most productive agricultural region in the country. Millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos are used each year nationwide. In 2016, 1.1 million pounds were used in California; more than a quarter of that total was used in Kern County alone.
According to the 2010 Census — about the time Duarte would have been taking on the man-of-the-house role — Hispanic or Latinx persons made up 92.7 percent of Arvin residents. Arvin’s average per capita income in 2010 was $9,241, or only 19 percent of the U.S. average of $48,880 at the time. Today, the percentage of families living below the poverty line in Arvin is more than double the national average.
That low-income communities of color are disproportionately impacted by the health effects of chemical toxins such as chlorpyrifos is not news, nor is it an accident. People of color disproportionately hold the most physically demanding, unpleasant, and low-paying jobs. The roots of the problem trace back to the legacy of state-sanctioned racial segregation. For instance, communities with high Latinx representation such as Salinas, Visalia, Santa Rosa, and San Luis Obispo, California, rank among the lowest U.S. metropolitan areas in employment opportunity. Not only have low-income families and people of color been segregated according to residence and work, they’ve consequently been forced to play host to the worst kinds of environmental burdens.
Both of Angel Garcia’s parents worked the fields when he was growing up. He is now the head of the Coalition Advocating for Pesticide Safety. “If you drive through the Central Valley from town to town you will realize the proximity of these homes to the fields,” says Garcia. “You can speak to many community residents who will tell you ‘oh, it’s that time of the year where I have to close my windows, shut my door, not let the kids go outside.’ It’s almost normalized but I don’t want to say it’s normalized because I feel like it not normal. It’s just so common.”
Sacrifice zones are hot spots of chemical pollution where residents live or work immediately adjacent to heavily polluted industries or military bases. The Gulf Coast post-Deepwater Horizon, Cancer Alley in Lousiana, a Tesla plant built on a Superfund site in Buffalo, and polluted neighborhoods surrounding Houston’s shipping channel are but a handful of examples of locales where public officials have turned a blind eye to extreme environmental contamination in minority-dominated areas so that society at large can reap the rewards of a robust economy. This pattern of unequal protection constitutes environmental racism.
The San Joaquin Valley in general and Kern County in particular are examples of sacrifice zones. Here, the burden of the vibrant agricultural economy is carried by those predominantly-Latinx workers who pick and pack the fruits and vegetables that feed America. The health risks associated with these jobs and attendant living conditions have been well documented, but perhaps no more strikingly than by the CHARGE study conducted by UC Davis’ MIND Institute, and led by epidemiologist Irva Hertz-Picciotto, PhD.
Dr. Hertz-Picciotto and her team questioned mothers living in California about what their health was like before and during pregnancy, linking this information to another set of data that the state keeps, a pesticide-use reporting system. Their findings — that the incidence of developmental disability increases significantly in areas where pesticides are applied — bolster previous research and have dire implications for families working and living in agricultural communities near where pesticides are applied.
Garcia and others, such as Nayamin Martinez of the Central California Environmental Justice Network, have led recent caravans to Sacramento to lobby their state representatives and organized an environmental bus tour that highlighted hot spots and problem issues throughout the region. To their credit, the tour was attended by the newly appointed Cal EPA director, his director of the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), and a lone local agriculture commissioner.
Garcia and Martinez’s organizations also advocate for larger pesticide-free buffer zones surrounding schools, an Amber Alert-like notification system that would notify residents of pesticide applications in their vicinity, and more sustainable agricultural practices. “We will never stop pushing for greater health protections for low-income people of color,” says Martinez, “but the fact of the matter remains that most of the jobs in this region are agricultural.” Martinez, Garcia, and others in the environmental justice movement recognize they must find a win-win roadmap for both the residents who depend on those jobs and the industry that provides them.
Their largest “victory” to date may provide just such a road map. In April, as a result of the overwhelming scientific evidence and intense lobbying from environmental justice groups, the California Environmental Protection Agency, flying in the face of the federal EPA’s example, directed the state’s DPR to begin the process of banning chlorpyrifos throughout the state. After initial resistance, the chemical industry gave up its fight over the ban, which is now expected to go into effect in early 2020. It is the first time in the history of California that a pesticide’s registration has been revoked. To sweeten the bitter pill that industry is being asked to swallow and to help farmers make the transition away from chlorpyrifos, the state is adding $5.7 million to fund research into safer and more sustainable alternatives.
As for Gabrial Duarte, he is currently awaiting trial at Laredo Pretrial Facility in Kern County on charges stemming from illegal gun possession. He has spent two and a half of the past five years in detention, first in juvenile detention, and currently while awaiting trial. After our first conversation at the prison in July, he asked to be seen by a mental health professional and has since been prescribed medication for his ADHD. He is also attending anger management classes.
“Before, I was a reckless renegade,” he told me over the phone. “Now, I think things through. I ask myself, ‘if I were to do this, how would you view it, how would they view it, and how would I view it’? It [the classes] has helped me to learn empathy.”
Earlier this year, Duarte contacted me after reading an op-ed I’d written about the widely used pesticide chlorpyrifos. I’d discovered that the likely reason for each of my three children’s brain malformations was due to my acute exposure, in 1989, to a flea “bomb” containing chlorpyrifos. Duarte believes his ADHD and impulsivity issues are the result of his chronic exposure to chlorpyrifos in his home, school and work environments.
Human and animal studies link chlorpyrifos exposure to structural damage to the brain, neurobehavioral deficits, asthma, diminished IQ, and a wide range of developmental disabilities in children. It has also been linked to heart disease, lung cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and the lowering of sperm counts in adults. Based on my investigative research, and interviews with Duarte along with dozens of other residents in the San Joaquin Valley, I’m left to draw the all-too-obvious conclusion that communities with a higher percentage of residents who are low income are at greater risk of being exposed to harmful pesticides and other environmental toxins. And the issue of race is an inextricable co-factor.
Duarte’s alcoholic father abandoned the family when Duarte was nine, about the time his mother was diagnosed with leukemia. (Both pediatric and adult leukemias have also been linked to pesticide exposure.) Duarte, the third of four children, became the man of the house and remembers making meals for his sick mother and biking to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions for his mom and younger brother, who had severe asthma.
Both Duarte and his brother were diagnosed with ADHD by a school psychologist at Di Giorgio Elementary School. Duarte does not recall being provided treatment or support from the school, which likely speaks to Di Giorgio School District being highly under-resourced, given the district’s meager tax base. Like their home on Richardson Road, the school abuts an orchard where pesticides are routinely sprayed.
And if exposure at home and school weren’t enough, before leaving the family, the boys’ father was a fieldworker who would have likely brought home pesticide residue on his clothing and shoes. Duarte himself worked as a field hand as a teenager and also at a golf course collecting stray golf balls. (Chlorpyrifos is widely used in non-agricultural settings like golf courses and golf balls are commonly thought to be a source of pesticide residue.)
The EPA banned chlorpyrifos in household products in 2000. However, its use in agriculture was allowed to continue. It’s often small, rural, low-income communities of color that bear the cumulative impacts of pesticide exposure and environmental degradation.
Nowhere is this more evident than in communities like Arvin, located in Kern County at the southern tip of the San Joaquin Valley — the most productive agricultural region in the country. Millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos are used each year nationwide. In 2016, 1.1 million pounds were used in California; more than a quarter of that total was used in Kern County alone.
According to the 2010 Census — about the time Duarte would have been taking on the man-of-the-house role — Hispanic or Latinx persons made up 92.7 percent of Arvin residents. Arvin’s average per capita income in 2010 was $9,241, or only 19 percent of the U.S. average of $48,880 at the time. Today, the percentage of families living below the poverty line in Arvin is more than double the national average.
That low-income communities of color are disproportionately impacted by the health effects of chemical toxins such as chlorpyrifos is not news, nor is it an accident. People of color disproportionately hold the most physically demanding, unpleasant, and low-paying jobs. The roots of the problem trace back to the legacy of state-sanctioned racial segregation. For instance, communities with high Latinx representation such as Salinas, Visalia, Santa Rosa, and San Luis Obispo, California, rank among the lowest U.S. metropolitan areas in employment opportunity. Not only have low-income families and people of color been segregated according to residence and work, they’ve consequently been forced to play host to the worst kinds of environmental burdens.
Both of Angel Garcia’s parents worked the fields when he was growing up. He is now the head of the Coalition Advocating for Pesticide Safety. “If you drive through the Central Valley from town to town you will realize the proximity of these homes to the fields,” says Garcia. “You can speak to many community residents who will tell you ‘oh, it’s that time of the year where I have to close my windows, shut my door, not let the kids go outside.’ It’s almost normalized but I don’t want to say it’s normalized because I feel like it not normal. It’s just so common.”
Sacrifice zones are hot spots of chemical pollution where residents live or work immediately adjacent to heavily polluted industries or military bases. The Gulf Coast post-Deepwater Horizon, Cancer Alley in Lousiana, a Tesla plant built on a Superfund site in Buffalo, and polluted neighborhoods surrounding Houston’s shipping channel are but a handful of examples of locales where public officials have turned a blind eye to extreme environmental contamination in minority-dominated areas so that society at large can reap the rewards of a robust economy. This pattern of unequal protection constitutes environmental racism.
The San Joaquin Valley in general and Kern County in particular are examples of sacrifice zones. Here, the burden of the vibrant agricultural economy is carried by those predominantly-Latinx workers who pick and pack the fruits and vegetables that feed America. The health risks associated with these jobs and attendant living conditions have been well documented, but perhaps no more strikingly than by the CHARGE study conducted by UC Davis’ MIND Institute, and led by epidemiologist Irva Hertz-Picciotto, PhD.
Dr. Hertz-Picciotto and her team questioned mothers living in California about what their health was like before and during pregnancy, linking this information to another set of data that the state keeps, a pesticide-use reporting system. Their findings — that the incidence of developmental disability increases significantly in areas where pesticides are applied — bolster previous research and have dire implications for families working and living in agricultural communities near where pesticides are applied.
Garcia and others, such as Nayamin Martinez of the Central California Environmental Justice Network, have led recent caravans to Sacramento to lobby their state representatives and organized an environmental bus tour that highlighted hot spots and problem issues throughout the region. To their credit, the tour was attended by the newly appointed Cal EPA director, his director of the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), and a lone local agriculture commissioner.
Garcia and Martinez’s organizations also advocate for larger pesticide-free buffer zones surrounding schools, an Amber Alert-like notification system that would notify residents of pesticide applications in their vicinity, and more sustainable agricultural practices. “We will never stop pushing for greater health protections for low-income people of color,” says Martinez, “but the fact of the matter remains that most of the jobs in this region are agricultural.” Martinez, Garcia, and others in the environmental justice movement recognize they must find a win-win roadmap for both the residents who depend on those jobs and the industry that provides them.
Their largest “victory” to date may provide just such a road map. In April, as a result of the overwhelming scientific evidence and intense lobbying from environmental justice groups, the California Environmental Protection Agency, flying in the face of the federal EPA’s example, directed the state’s DPR to begin the process of banning chlorpyrifos throughout the state. After initial resistance, the chemical industry gave up its fight over the ban, which is now expected to go into effect in early 2020. It is the first time in the history of California that a pesticide’s registration has been revoked. To sweeten the bitter pill that industry is being asked to swallow and to help farmers make the transition away from chlorpyrifos, the state is adding $5.7 million to fund research into safer and more sustainable alternatives.
As for Gabrial Duarte, he is currently awaiting trial at Laredo Pretrial Facility in Kern County on charges stemming from illegal gun possession. He has spent two and a half of the past five years in detention, first in juvenile detention, and currently while awaiting trial. After our first conversation at the prison in July, he asked to be seen by a mental health professional and has since been prescribed medication for his ADHD. He is also attending anger management classes.
“Before, I was a reckless renegade,” he told me over the phone. “Now, I think things through. I ask myself, ‘if I were to do this, how would you view it, how would they view it, and how would I view it’? It [the classes] has helped me to learn empathy.”
Pollution
Rainwater in parts of US contain high levels of PFAS chemical, says study
Levels high enough to potentially impact human health and trigger regulatory action, which only targets two of 4,700 variants
Daniel Ross
the guardian
Tue 17 Dec 2019 04.02 EST
New data shows that rainwater in some parts of the US contains high enough levels of potentially toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to possibly affect human health and may, if found in drinking water, in some cases be high enough to trigger regulatory action.
PFAS chemicals appear in an array of everyday items, such as food packaging, clothing and carpeting. Chemicals in this family are the subject of the film Dark Water, which chronicles the real-life efforts of a lawyer seeking to hold a polluting factory to account in West Virginia.
Estimates pin the number of different PFAS variants at more than 4,700 but federal regulations so far target only two of them: PFOS and PFOA. Some of these chemicals have been known to cause serious health issues such as cancer, and immune system and thyroid problems.
Previously it was known that there is widespread PFAS contamination of the nation’s lakes, rivers and groundwater reserves but until recently, researchers were largely in the dark as to whether this family of chemicals could also be ubiquitous in rain.
“There were folks not too long ago who felt the atmospheric transport route was not too important,” says Martin Shafer, principal researcher with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The data belies that statement.”
During the spring and summer of this year, Shafer and his fellow researchers looked at 37 rainwater samples taken over a week from 30 different sites predominantly near the east coast, though as far afield as Alabama and Washington. They found that each sample contained at least one of the 36 different compounds being studied.
While total PFAS concentrations were generally less than 1 nanogram per liter (ng/l), the highest total concentration was nearly 5.5 ng/l in a single sample from Massachusetts. Several samples contained total PFAS levels at or about 4 ng/l.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established a health advisory level of 70 ng/l for combined PFOS and PFOA in drinking water. But many states have either proposed or already set significantly lower drinking water standards. Wisconsin, for example, has proposed a preventative action limit of 2 ng/l for combined PFOS and PFOA.
Shafer says he suspects PFAS chemicals are entering rainwater through a variety of avenues, like direct industrial emissions and evaporation from PFAS-laden fire-fighting foams. Still, “there’s a dearth of knowledge about what’s supporting the atmospheric concentrations and ultimately deposition of PFAS”, he says.
This isn’t the only recent such study of rainwater in the US. Last year, the North Carolina division of air quality began testing near the Chemours facility, which produces the PFAS GenX, and in February of this year, detected levels of GenX in rainwater higher than 500 ng/l. The state subsequently gave the plant the go-ahead to install equipment to significantly reduce air emissions.
More than a localized problem, PFAS compounds “are transported significant distances”, explains Brooks Avery, a professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina, which is conducting its own study of PFAS in air and rainwater. Indeed, these compounds have appeared in the Arctic and in populations of Alaska natives.
According to Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, more rainwater research is needed, as well as on “what we are inhaling and ingesti[ng] from house and office dust” contaminated by PFAS. These issues have “not been looked at until very recently”, she says.
PFAS chemicals appear in an array of everyday items, such as food packaging, clothing and carpeting. Chemicals in this family are the subject of the film Dark Water, which chronicles the real-life efforts of a lawyer seeking to hold a polluting factory to account in West Virginia.
Estimates pin the number of different PFAS variants at more than 4,700 but federal regulations so far target only two of them: PFOS and PFOA. Some of these chemicals have been known to cause serious health issues such as cancer, and immune system and thyroid problems.
Previously it was known that there is widespread PFAS contamination of the nation’s lakes, rivers and groundwater reserves but until recently, researchers were largely in the dark as to whether this family of chemicals could also be ubiquitous in rain.
“There were folks not too long ago who felt the atmospheric transport route was not too important,” says Martin Shafer, principal researcher with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The data belies that statement.”
During the spring and summer of this year, Shafer and his fellow researchers looked at 37 rainwater samples taken over a week from 30 different sites predominantly near the east coast, though as far afield as Alabama and Washington. They found that each sample contained at least one of the 36 different compounds being studied.
While total PFAS concentrations were generally less than 1 nanogram per liter (ng/l), the highest total concentration was nearly 5.5 ng/l in a single sample from Massachusetts. Several samples contained total PFAS levels at or about 4 ng/l.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established a health advisory level of 70 ng/l for combined PFOS and PFOA in drinking water. But many states have either proposed or already set significantly lower drinking water standards. Wisconsin, for example, has proposed a preventative action limit of 2 ng/l for combined PFOS and PFOA.
Shafer says he suspects PFAS chemicals are entering rainwater through a variety of avenues, like direct industrial emissions and evaporation from PFAS-laden fire-fighting foams. Still, “there’s a dearth of knowledge about what’s supporting the atmospheric concentrations and ultimately deposition of PFAS”, he says.
This isn’t the only recent such study of rainwater in the US. Last year, the North Carolina division of air quality began testing near the Chemours facility, which produces the PFAS GenX, and in February of this year, detected levels of GenX in rainwater higher than 500 ng/l. The state subsequently gave the plant the go-ahead to install equipment to significantly reduce air emissions.
More than a localized problem, PFAS compounds “are transported significant distances”, explains Brooks Avery, a professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina, which is conducting its own study of PFAS in air and rainwater. Indeed, these compounds have appeared in the Arctic and in populations of Alaska natives.
According to Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, more rainwater research is needed, as well as on “what we are inhaling and ingesti[ng] from house and office dust” contaminated by PFAS. These issues have “not been looked at until very recently”, she says.
Methane ‘super emitters’ releasing massive plumes after Trump rolled back environmental regulations
Mark Sumner
Daily Kos Staff
Saturday December 14, 2019 · 8:58 AM PST
Methane is many times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. It’s not mentioned as often when considering the greenhouse effect behind the climate crisis because it’s released in comparatively low volumes and will gradually degrade over time. But methane’s potency means that even at low volumes it definitely makes a significant contribution to global warming. That was a big part of the reason that, under President Obama, regulations were set in place to limit the amount of methane that oil and gas companies were allowed to emit, especially by venting wells in areas where capturing all the methane doesn’t happen to be convenient.
But those regulations were some of the first to be rolled back under Donald Trump. Trump proudly took all caps off the ability of fossil fuel producers to vent methane into the atmosphere. Producers and their supporters in Congress have tried to wave away any potential impact from venting — after all, methane is natural gas, and natural gas has value, so how much could companies really be spilling? The answer, as revealed in a report from The New York Times, is absolutely staggering.
In just a few hours of flying over Texas sites with a small plane, the Times identified hundreds of sites whose level of methane production puts them in the category of “super emitters.” The leaks came not just from wells, but from storage facilities, pipelines, and every stage of natural gas production. Since fracking generated a surprise boom in natural gas production two decades ago, the level of methane in the atmosphere has been increasing. Even though that change corresponded almost exactly with increased production, oil and gas companies have pretended to ignorance over the source of the methane. But it’s clear that methane is leaking in massive amounts.
In fact, so much methane is being leaked at such rates that it could be argued that the move from coal to natural gas as the largest source of electricity in the United States has actually created more damage to the climate. But it’s hard to be sure, because so little of this loss is actually measured. And if Trump gets his way, companies will not longer be required to even monitor for methane loss.
While scientists can easily detect that overall methane levels are rising, tracking that methane back to sources can be very difficult. Even when satellite data or information from aircraft helps to identify a methane “plume” on the surface, the source of that gas can be any one of thousands of wells, hundreds of storage facilities, or anywhere in miles of pipeline. Tracking the methane to a specific source can be all but impossible, especially in areas of high production.
Producers are supposed to seek permission and obtain permits before releasing significant quantities of methane. But, safe in the knowledge that tracking back a massive one-time release is almost impossible, many companies simply skip that step. They know they can release a blast that’s equivalent to the environmental impact of running a city, and feign ignorance if anyone comes knocking. That’s why the critical factor is forcing companies to measure the methane themselves by requiring monitors on wells, takes, and other facilities. Only by having those monitors on site, and having them regularly inspected, can there be any hope of identifying both accidental leaks and intentional venting.
Naturally, that’s exactly the requirement that Trump has already weakened, and is seeking to remove completely. Lobbyists for oil and gas were some of the biggest contributors to Trump’s campaign, his inaugural slush fund, and his 2020 PAC. It was no coincidence that his first Secretary of State came straight from the offices of Exxon.
But gas companies aren’t all like Gordon Sondland. They don’t care of their contributions earn them keen ambassadorships. They just want to be left to make maximum money … by doing maximum damage.
But those regulations were some of the first to be rolled back under Donald Trump. Trump proudly took all caps off the ability of fossil fuel producers to vent methane into the atmosphere. Producers and their supporters in Congress have tried to wave away any potential impact from venting — after all, methane is natural gas, and natural gas has value, so how much could companies really be spilling? The answer, as revealed in a report from The New York Times, is absolutely staggering.
In just a few hours of flying over Texas sites with a small plane, the Times identified hundreds of sites whose level of methane production puts them in the category of “super emitters.” The leaks came not just from wells, but from storage facilities, pipelines, and every stage of natural gas production. Since fracking generated a surprise boom in natural gas production two decades ago, the level of methane in the atmosphere has been increasing. Even though that change corresponded almost exactly with increased production, oil and gas companies have pretended to ignorance over the source of the methane. But it’s clear that methane is leaking in massive amounts.
In fact, so much methane is being leaked at such rates that it could be argued that the move from coal to natural gas as the largest source of electricity in the United States has actually created more damage to the climate. But it’s hard to be sure, because so little of this loss is actually measured. And if Trump gets his way, companies will not longer be required to even monitor for methane loss.
While scientists can easily detect that overall methane levels are rising, tracking that methane back to sources can be very difficult. Even when satellite data or information from aircraft helps to identify a methane “plume” on the surface, the source of that gas can be any one of thousands of wells, hundreds of storage facilities, or anywhere in miles of pipeline. Tracking the methane to a specific source can be all but impossible, especially in areas of high production.
Producers are supposed to seek permission and obtain permits before releasing significant quantities of methane. But, safe in the knowledge that tracking back a massive one-time release is almost impossible, many companies simply skip that step. They know they can release a blast that’s equivalent to the environmental impact of running a city, and feign ignorance if anyone comes knocking. That’s why the critical factor is forcing companies to measure the methane themselves by requiring monitors on wells, takes, and other facilities. Only by having those monitors on site, and having them regularly inspected, can there be any hope of identifying both accidental leaks and intentional venting.
Naturally, that’s exactly the requirement that Trump has already weakened, and is seeking to remove completely. Lobbyists for oil and gas were some of the biggest contributors to Trump’s campaign, his inaugural slush fund, and his 2020 PAC. It was no coincidence that his first Secretary of State came straight from the offices of Exxon.
But gas companies aren’t all like Gordon Sondland. They don’t care of their contributions earn them keen ambassadorships. They just want to be left to make maximum money … by doing maximum damage.
Los Angeles
Los Angeles beaches plagued with toxic stormwater, report warns
Officials are doing little to reduce the biggest source of pollutants in local water, researchers find
Sam Levin in Los Angeles
the guardian
Wed 11 Dec 2019 17.23 EST
Signs warn the public to stay out of the water in an area harboring high bacteria levels in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images
Los Angeles beaches are plagued by stormwater pollution that can make people sick and damage ecosystems, and local governments are largely failing to address the hazards, according to a new report.
The LA region has made little progress toward reducing pollution from stormwater, which is the single greatest source of pollutants in local rivers, lakes and the ocean, according to researchers with Heal the Bay, a not-for-profit environmental organization.
The report was released this week following days of much-needed rain in southern California. While winter rains in LA are critical to reducing wildfire risks and supporting the state’s water supply, the runoff can cause serious public and environmental health problems.
LA’s storm drainage is separate from its sewer system, meaning that while sewage is cleaned before it is discharged, stormwater flows over streets, through storm drains and into bodies of water, Heal the Bay explained.
Water quality is significantly worse for 72 hours after a major rain event in LA county. The recent storms, for example, sent debris to LA beaches, prompting county officials to issue a health warning against swimming, surfing and playing in ocean waters around discharging storm drains, creeks and rivers.
Heal the Bay analyzed watershed management data from 2012 to 2018, finding that local municipalities were only about 9% of the way toward completing their stormwater pollution reduction goals.
At the current rate, the LA area won’t meet its collective reduction objectives until 2082, many local municipalities will miss their own established deadlines, and some cities and counties will be in violation of federal clean water regulations, the group said.
Meanwhile, environmental contamination and health hazards will continue to escalate.
“Our beaches are a destination for people from all over the world,” said Annelisa Moe, a Heal the Bay water quality scientist and lead author of the stormwater report. “While we’re allowing contaminated water to flow to these beaches, we’re endangering every person visiting.”
Swimmers can get stomach flus, rashes and other illnesses, and tourists may not be aware of the risks of swimming soon after heavy rains.
“We need to be very careful about when and where we enter the water,” said Moe. “We can have a huge storm, and then the next day it can be sunny, 85F [29C] and gorgeous. If you don’t wait to swim … you’re at risk.”
There are 208 bodies of water in the LA area “impaired by multiple pollutants”, the group said, including bacteria, heavy metals, nutrients, pesticides and trash.
The local pollution reduction plans stem from clean water regulations passed in 1990, meaning the local cities and counties have had three decades to create and implement solutions. Since 2012, localities have been adopting more collaborative plans to tackle pollution, but they have made “shockingly minimal progress in cleaning up LA’s stormwater”, Heal the Bay said.
Heal the Bay examined data from 12 local watershed management groups, which are collaborations involving a range of local governments. Some of the groups have 2021 deadlines to meet their reduction goals and aren’t close to achieving them. The Santa Monica group, for example, is only 6.5% of the way to completing its 2021 goal, in terms of the amount of stormwater its management projects can currently capture.
Heal the Bay’s report called for stronger regulatory guidelines and increased transparency in reporting data. A new LA county clean water program is also expected to increase funding for stormwater projects by roughly $280m a year starting in spring 2020, the group said, which could speed up progress.
“We need to step up clean-up efforts if we are to see water quality improvements in our lifetimes,” Moe wrote. “We should not have to wait 60 years for clean water.”
Spokespeople for the LA county health department and state water boards did not immediately respond to inquiries about the report.
The LA region has made little progress toward reducing pollution from stormwater, which is the single greatest source of pollutants in local rivers, lakes and the ocean, according to researchers with Heal the Bay, a not-for-profit environmental organization.
The report was released this week following days of much-needed rain in southern California. While winter rains in LA are critical to reducing wildfire risks and supporting the state’s water supply, the runoff can cause serious public and environmental health problems.
LA’s storm drainage is separate from its sewer system, meaning that while sewage is cleaned before it is discharged, stormwater flows over streets, through storm drains and into bodies of water, Heal the Bay explained.
Water quality is significantly worse for 72 hours after a major rain event in LA county. The recent storms, for example, sent debris to LA beaches, prompting county officials to issue a health warning against swimming, surfing and playing in ocean waters around discharging storm drains, creeks and rivers.
Heal the Bay analyzed watershed management data from 2012 to 2018, finding that local municipalities were only about 9% of the way toward completing their stormwater pollution reduction goals.
At the current rate, the LA area won’t meet its collective reduction objectives until 2082, many local municipalities will miss their own established deadlines, and some cities and counties will be in violation of federal clean water regulations, the group said.
Meanwhile, environmental contamination and health hazards will continue to escalate.
“Our beaches are a destination for people from all over the world,” said Annelisa Moe, a Heal the Bay water quality scientist and lead author of the stormwater report. “While we’re allowing contaminated water to flow to these beaches, we’re endangering every person visiting.”
Swimmers can get stomach flus, rashes and other illnesses, and tourists may not be aware of the risks of swimming soon after heavy rains.
“We need to be very careful about when and where we enter the water,” said Moe. “We can have a huge storm, and then the next day it can be sunny, 85F [29C] and gorgeous. If you don’t wait to swim … you’re at risk.”
There are 208 bodies of water in the LA area “impaired by multiple pollutants”, the group said, including bacteria, heavy metals, nutrients, pesticides and trash.
The local pollution reduction plans stem from clean water regulations passed in 1990, meaning the local cities and counties have had three decades to create and implement solutions. Since 2012, localities have been adopting more collaborative plans to tackle pollution, but they have made “shockingly minimal progress in cleaning up LA’s stormwater”, Heal the Bay said.
Heal the Bay examined data from 12 local watershed management groups, which are collaborations involving a range of local governments. Some of the groups have 2021 deadlines to meet their reduction goals and aren’t close to achieving them. The Santa Monica group, for example, is only 6.5% of the way to completing its 2021 goal, in terms of the amount of stormwater its management projects can currently capture.
Heal the Bay’s report called for stronger regulatory guidelines and increased transparency in reporting data. A new LA county clean water program is also expected to increase funding for stormwater projects by roughly $280m a year starting in spring 2020, the group said, which could speed up progress.
“We need to step up clean-up efforts if we are to see water quality improvements in our lifetimes,” Moe wrote. “We should not have to wait 60 years for clean water.”
Spokespeople for the LA county health department and state water boards did not immediately respond to inquiries about the report.
Renewables Are Gaining Traction, But We Need to Be Able to Store the Energy
BY Elliott Negin, Truthout
PUBLISHED December 10, 2019
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ recent decision to award the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to scientists who developed rechargeable lithium-ion batteries reminded the world just how transformative they have been. Without them, we wouldn’t have smartphones or electric cars. But it’s their potential to store electricity generated by the sun and the wind at their peak that promises to be even more revolutionary, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and protecting the planet from the worst consequences of climate change.
For that to happen, support for batteries needs to match the support renewable energy has received over the last few decades, shielding the industry from the Trump administration’s continuing attempts to short-circuit it.
No matter how much President Trump “digs” coal, for instance, it can no longer compete economically. Since 2010, at least 289 coal plants have closed, comprising 40 percent of U.S. coal power capacity, and 50 of those plants have shut down since Trump took office.
Meanwhile, renewable electricity generation has nearly doubled over the last decade, and close to 90 percent of that expansion has come from wind and solar, which jumped more than fivefold. This April, wind, solar and hydroelectric power produced more electricity than coal for the first time ever.
That’s all good news. If wind and solar maintain their exponential growth rate, the United States is on track to get all of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2050. Fulfilling that potential, however, will require two major advances: updating the rickety U.S. electricity grid and developing energy storage technologies that can enable the grid to incorporate more wind and solar power.
Updating an Antiquated System
Currently, 29 states and the District of Columbia require utilities to increase the amount of electricity they generate from renewable resources over time. California, Hawaii, Maine, Vermont and Washington, D.C., are leading the pack with a target of 100 percent by mid century.
These renewable electricity standards have proven to be one of the most effective ways to curb U.S. global warming emissions. According to a 2016 Energy Department report, these standards cut carbon pollution nationally by 59 million metric tons in 2013 alone, akin to closing 15 average-sized coal-fired power plants. It would be even more effective to have a national standard, and Sen. Tom Udall (D-New Mexico) has proposed one of 50 percent by 2035. But ratcheting up renewable electricity requirements can go only so far without modernizing the grid and increasing storage capacity.
While today’s smartphones boast more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer on board Apollo 11, most of the power plants, transmission lines, transformers and poles that comprise the grid are at least 40 to 50 years old, built during the expansion of the electric power sector in the decades following World War II. With its aging equipment, capacity bottlenecks and vulnerability to climate impacts, today’s grid gets a barely passing grade of D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The grid was designed to transmit electricity from large, centralized plants, but power today flows from other sources, including solar and wind facilities. Rooftop solar panels and other “distributed” generation systems reduce the distance electricity has to travel, potentially increasing efficiency, but they also increase the complexity of transmitting electricity, and the amount generated from hour to hour varies. Investing in grid infrastructure would enable utilities to incorporate modern technology, making the grid more resilient and flexible, better able to integrate variable energy sources, and capable of providing real-time information so consumers can manage their energy use and save money.
100 Percent Clean Energy Is Possible — With Storage
A modernized electricity grid would have the capacity to store large amounts of excess electricity. Today, utilities have to produce the exact amount of electricity needed at a specific time to meet demand. With advanced storage technology, it doesn’t have to be that way.
“Our electricity grid is where our food distribution system was before refrigeration,” says Mike Jacobs, a senior energy analyst at my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “Up until the 1920s, when the refrigerator became widely available, most people had to eat fresh food right away because they had no good way to keep it cold. A grid with storage capacity would allow consumers to light their homes at night with the extra energy from solar panels during the day.”
One storage technology — pumped hydroelectric — has been around since the 1890s, and there has been increased interest in it in recent years because it can be paired with variable renewable sources. Hydroelectric plants pump water to elevated reservoirs and release it through turbines to generate electricity when demand is high. With 23 gigawatts of capacity, pumped hydro is currently the largest type of energy storage in the United States. That said, it represents less than 2 percent of U.S. generating capacity and is unlikely to grow much more due to the cost of building such facilities.
The ideal solution would be rechargeable, factory-size batteries that can store massive amounts of energy for days or even weeks. Today’s grid-scale batteries can store only a few hours’ worth of energy before they need to be recharged. That’s enough to accommodate solar or wind power variability but not nearly enough to completely switch from fossil fuels to renewables.
Money is the main issue. Billions of private-sector dollars are now pouring into research and development for electric vehicle batteries, but they are only trickling in for grid batteries because the market is still in its infancy. That makes funding dependent on the U.S. government, which historically has supported cutting-edge research before the private sector was ready to invest. But federal funding for grid battery R&D has been deficient, and the United States is falling behind China, Japan and South Korea in the global battery market.
Bipartisan Support in Congress
Deploying batteries to store electricity generated when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing would enable the grid to handle more renewable energy. Fortunately, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle recognize that potential.
There are a handful of bipartisan energy storage bills now pending in the Senate. One bill, introduced by Senators Angus King (I-Maine) and Martha McSally (R-Arizona), would provide $500 million over five years for a joint Energy and Defense department energy storage demonstration program. In September, the King-McSally proposal was folded into a bill proposed by King’s fellow Mainer, Republican Sen. Susan Collins, which would dedicate $330 million over the next five years for storage R&D to help lower battery costs, which already have dropped nearly 40 percent since 2015. The Department of Energy supports a number of the proposed research efforts, which is not surprising, given Energy Secretary Rick Perry has called storage the “holy grail” of U.S. energy.
The House is also jumping on the bandwagon. In June, it passed an appropriations bill that boosts the Energy Department’s energy storage budget by nearly 35 percent, and the budget of its Advanced Research Projects Agency — which has invested as much as 15 percent of its funding in electricity storage projects — by 17 percent. More recently, Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee proposed legislation in November that would provide tax incentives for a range of clean energy technologies, including energy storage.
“Energy storage technology was developed right here in the United States, but we are losing out to other countries,” says Rob Cowin, director of government affairs for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Increasing federal funding for energy storage R&D will pay big dividends for the U.S. economy and national security. Taking the right steps now will make our electricity grid cleaner, more reliable, and more affordable.”
For that to happen, support for batteries needs to match the support renewable energy has received over the last few decades, shielding the industry from the Trump administration’s continuing attempts to short-circuit it.
No matter how much President Trump “digs” coal, for instance, it can no longer compete economically. Since 2010, at least 289 coal plants have closed, comprising 40 percent of U.S. coal power capacity, and 50 of those plants have shut down since Trump took office.
Meanwhile, renewable electricity generation has nearly doubled over the last decade, and close to 90 percent of that expansion has come from wind and solar, which jumped more than fivefold. This April, wind, solar and hydroelectric power produced more electricity than coal for the first time ever.
That’s all good news. If wind and solar maintain their exponential growth rate, the United States is on track to get all of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2050. Fulfilling that potential, however, will require two major advances: updating the rickety U.S. electricity grid and developing energy storage technologies that can enable the grid to incorporate more wind and solar power.
Updating an Antiquated System
Currently, 29 states and the District of Columbia require utilities to increase the amount of electricity they generate from renewable resources over time. California, Hawaii, Maine, Vermont and Washington, D.C., are leading the pack with a target of 100 percent by mid century.
These renewable electricity standards have proven to be one of the most effective ways to curb U.S. global warming emissions. According to a 2016 Energy Department report, these standards cut carbon pollution nationally by 59 million metric tons in 2013 alone, akin to closing 15 average-sized coal-fired power plants. It would be even more effective to have a national standard, and Sen. Tom Udall (D-New Mexico) has proposed one of 50 percent by 2035. But ratcheting up renewable electricity requirements can go only so far without modernizing the grid and increasing storage capacity.
While today’s smartphones boast more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer on board Apollo 11, most of the power plants, transmission lines, transformers and poles that comprise the grid are at least 40 to 50 years old, built during the expansion of the electric power sector in the decades following World War II. With its aging equipment, capacity bottlenecks and vulnerability to climate impacts, today’s grid gets a barely passing grade of D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The grid was designed to transmit electricity from large, centralized plants, but power today flows from other sources, including solar and wind facilities. Rooftop solar panels and other “distributed” generation systems reduce the distance electricity has to travel, potentially increasing efficiency, but they also increase the complexity of transmitting electricity, and the amount generated from hour to hour varies. Investing in grid infrastructure would enable utilities to incorporate modern technology, making the grid more resilient and flexible, better able to integrate variable energy sources, and capable of providing real-time information so consumers can manage their energy use and save money.
100 Percent Clean Energy Is Possible — With Storage
A modernized electricity grid would have the capacity to store large amounts of excess electricity. Today, utilities have to produce the exact amount of electricity needed at a specific time to meet demand. With advanced storage technology, it doesn’t have to be that way.
“Our electricity grid is where our food distribution system was before refrigeration,” says Mike Jacobs, a senior energy analyst at my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “Up until the 1920s, when the refrigerator became widely available, most people had to eat fresh food right away because they had no good way to keep it cold. A grid with storage capacity would allow consumers to light their homes at night with the extra energy from solar panels during the day.”
One storage technology — pumped hydroelectric — has been around since the 1890s, and there has been increased interest in it in recent years because it can be paired with variable renewable sources. Hydroelectric plants pump water to elevated reservoirs and release it through turbines to generate electricity when demand is high. With 23 gigawatts of capacity, pumped hydro is currently the largest type of energy storage in the United States. That said, it represents less than 2 percent of U.S. generating capacity and is unlikely to grow much more due to the cost of building such facilities.
The ideal solution would be rechargeable, factory-size batteries that can store massive amounts of energy for days or even weeks. Today’s grid-scale batteries can store only a few hours’ worth of energy before they need to be recharged. That’s enough to accommodate solar or wind power variability but not nearly enough to completely switch from fossil fuels to renewables.
Money is the main issue. Billions of private-sector dollars are now pouring into research and development for electric vehicle batteries, but they are only trickling in for grid batteries because the market is still in its infancy. That makes funding dependent on the U.S. government, which historically has supported cutting-edge research before the private sector was ready to invest. But federal funding for grid battery R&D has been deficient, and the United States is falling behind China, Japan and South Korea in the global battery market.
Bipartisan Support in Congress
Deploying batteries to store electricity generated when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing would enable the grid to handle more renewable energy. Fortunately, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle recognize that potential.
There are a handful of bipartisan energy storage bills now pending in the Senate. One bill, introduced by Senators Angus King (I-Maine) and Martha McSally (R-Arizona), would provide $500 million over five years for a joint Energy and Defense department energy storage demonstration program. In September, the King-McSally proposal was folded into a bill proposed by King’s fellow Mainer, Republican Sen. Susan Collins, which would dedicate $330 million over the next five years for storage R&D to help lower battery costs, which already have dropped nearly 40 percent since 2015. The Department of Energy supports a number of the proposed research efforts, which is not surprising, given Energy Secretary Rick Perry has called storage the “holy grail” of U.S. energy.
The House is also jumping on the bandwagon. In June, it passed an appropriations bill that boosts the Energy Department’s energy storage budget by nearly 35 percent, and the budget of its Advanced Research Projects Agency — which has invested as much as 15 percent of its funding in electricity storage projects — by 17 percent. More recently, Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee proposed legislation in November that would provide tax incentives for a range of clean energy technologies, including energy storage.
“Energy storage technology was developed right here in the United States, but we are losing out to other countries,” says Rob Cowin, director of government affairs for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Increasing federal funding for energy storage R&D will pay big dividends for the U.S. economy and national security. Taking the right steps now will make our electricity grid cleaner, more reliable, and more affordable.”
Climate Change Is Fueling a Farming Boom in Alaska
It’s becoming easier for the northern state to grow its own food—and more necessary.
BY YERETH ROSEN - in these times
12/9/19
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—Snow is on the mountains. There’s a nip in the October air. Patches of dirt are freezing. But reminders of the past summer’s heat are poking out of the ground at the tiny Grow North Farm.
The dried stalks are leftovers of what might seem an unlikely Alaska crop: dodo plants, a member of the amaranth family, which produces leafy, collard-like greens and grains in sub-Saharan Africa and South America.
These plants were cultivated by a Congolese family that, after three years in Anchorage, wanted to bring a taste of home. The crop was wildly successful during Anchorage’s sweltering summer, during which temperatures hit 90 degrees for the first time on record, says Nick Bachman of Anchorage Community Land Trust, the nonprofit that operates Grow North Farm.
“What we found with the dodo was: Just add water,” Bachman says.
This 28,000-square-foot urban farm is surrounded by a gas station, a strip mall, a middle school and rows of apartments. It was carved from a lot that once held an RV park, a remediation and construction project that took years. The farm, with more than 20 independent growers operating plots, opened this spring.
It is not the only new farm in Alaska.
From 2012 to 2017, the number of farms increased by 30% while total U.S. farms dropped by more than 3%, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2017 Census of Agriculture. Alaska’s growth is largely in small farms of 1 to 9 acres—up 73% those same years. The value of farm goods sold directly to consumers doubled from $2.2 million to $4.4 million in that time—still less than almost any other state, but growing fast.
Like much of the country, Alaska is gripped by a local-food movement with a range of benefits, including economic opportunities for immigrants and newly settled refugees. Many of the new arrivals were smallscale farmers in their home countries, Bachman says.
But there is a special force behind Alaska’s farming boomlet: climate change.
Alaska is warming twice as fast as the global rate, and changes in the state are accelerating. Of Alaska’s 10 warmest years since the late 1800s, eight have occurred since 2000, according to the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. That doesn’t include 2019, which has smashed heat records.
As Alaska warms, its growing season has lengthened—in Fairbanks, for example, by 45% since 1900, according to a 2009 study—enabling the cultivation of new crops such as corn, cherries and dodo.
Climate change also makes Alaskan farming more urgent.
In May, the Anchorage city government adopted a climate action plan warning that extreme weather events will delay food imports, on which Alaskans have near-total reliance. The plan encourages urban farming and gardening.
Local farming also reduces carbon footprints. Almost all of the small-scale farmers who use the Grow North site, Bachman says, walk there or use public transit. After harvest, farmers sell from the open-air sales stand at the entrance—no fossil-fuel vehicles required.
The farming trend extends to rural Alaska, where there is a higher Native Alaskan population and traditional wild foods are becoming more difficult to obtain. The overheated waters of western Alaska caused mass die-offs of salmon this year, for example, and thinning ice on the rivers and seas makes hunting far more treacherous. Though agriculture is not generally part of indigenous tradition, farms and gardens are now helping fill the gaps.
Farming does have some Alaska-specific challenges. Ashley Taborsky, of the blog Alaska Urban Hippie, has converted her south Anchorage yard to a miniature farm with fencing to moose-proof her young apple and cherry trees. So far, unlike some Alaskan farmers, she has not had bears successfully raid her chicken coop.
There are also advantages.
Alaska, for now, lacks many of the pests that plague southern farms. Relatively cool temperatures and extended summer daylight stimulate sugar production in root vegetables (Alaska carrots are famous for their sweetness) and, sometimes, immense proportions: a giant cabbage weigh—off is a revered ritual at the Alaska State Fair in the Matanuska Valley town of Palmer, with a world-record 138.25-pound specimen winning in 2012.
Matanuska became Alaska’s farming heartland in the 1930s, thanks to a New Deal program that lured Midwestern farmers north. But the 1970s oil boom, combined with the rise of agribusiness in the lower 48, put the farming sector in a slump. Alaskan farmers struggled to compete with imported, massproduced foods and struggled to resist the temptation to cash in, selling off farmland to accommodate the oil-fueled population influx.
Today, Alaska’s oil production is about a quarter of its 1980s peak.
“If oil is declining, then what’s next?” Bachman says. “I think there is a unique opportunity to allow local foods … to become a larger wedge of the economy.”
Bob Shumaker, owner of Black Bear Farms in Palmer and a former president of the Alaska Farmers Union, hopes agriculture expands with a revived northward migration of farmers.
“Everybody down south who’s too hot—move to Alaska,” he says. “It’s great.”
The dried stalks are leftovers of what might seem an unlikely Alaska crop: dodo plants, a member of the amaranth family, which produces leafy, collard-like greens and grains in sub-Saharan Africa and South America.
These plants were cultivated by a Congolese family that, after three years in Anchorage, wanted to bring a taste of home. The crop was wildly successful during Anchorage’s sweltering summer, during which temperatures hit 90 degrees for the first time on record, says Nick Bachman of Anchorage Community Land Trust, the nonprofit that operates Grow North Farm.
“What we found with the dodo was: Just add water,” Bachman says.
This 28,000-square-foot urban farm is surrounded by a gas station, a strip mall, a middle school and rows of apartments. It was carved from a lot that once held an RV park, a remediation and construction project that took years. The farm, with more than 20 independent growers operating plots, opened this spring.
It is not the only new farm in Alaska.
From 2012 to 2017, the number of farms increased by 30% while total U.S. farms dropped by more than 3%, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2017 Census of Agriculture. Alaska’s growth is largely in small farms of 1 to 9 acres—up 73% those same years. The value of farm goods sold directly to consumers doubled from $2.2 million to $4.4 million in that time—still less than almost any other state, but growing fast.
Like much of the country, Alaska is gripped by a local-food movement with a range of benefits, including economic opportunities for immigrants and newly settled refugees. Many of the new arrivals were smallscale farmers in their home countries, Bachman says.
But there is a special force behind Alaska’s farming boomlet: climate change.
Alaska is warming twice as fast as the global rate, and changes in the state are accelerating. Of Alaska’s 10 warmest years since the late 1800s, eight have occurred since 2000, according to the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. That doesn’t include 2019, which has smashed heat records.
As Alaska warms, its growing season has lengthened—in Fairbanks, for example, by 45% since 1900, according to a 2009 study—enabling the cultivation of new crops such as corn, cherries and dodo.
Climate change also makes Alaskan farming more urgent.
In May, the Anchorage city government adopted a climate action plan warning that extreme weather events will delay food imports, on which Alaskans have near-total reliance. The plan encourages urban farming and gardening.
Local farming also reduces carbon footprints. Almost all of the small-scale farmers who use the Grow North site, Bachman says, walk there or use public transit. After harvest, farmers sell from the open-air sales stand at the entrance—no fossil-fuel vehicles required.
The farming trend extends to rural Alaska, where there is a higher Native Alaskan population and traditional wild foods are becoming more difficult to obtain. The overheated waters of western Alaska caused mass die-offs of salmon this year, for example, and thinning ice on the rivers and seas makes hunting far more treacherous. Though agriculture is not generally part of indigenous tradition, farms and gardens are now helping fill the gaps.
Farming does have some Alaska-specific challenges. Ashley Taborsky, of the blog Alaska Urban Hippie, has converted her south Anchorage yard to a miniature farm with fencing to moose-proof her young apple and cherry trees. So far, unlike some Alaskan farmers, she has not had bears successfully raid her chicken coop.
There are also advantages.
Alaska, for now, lacks many of the pests that plague southern farms. Relatively cool temperatures and extended summer daylight stimulate sugar production in root vegetables (Alaska carrots are famous for their sweetness) and, sometimes, immense proportions: a giant cabbage weigh—off is a revered ritual at the Alaska State Fair in the Matanuska Valley town of Palmer, with a world-record 138.25-pound specimen winning in 2012.
Matanuska became Alaska’s farming heartland in the 1930s, thanks to a New Deal program that lured Midwestern farmers north. But the 1970s oil boom, combined with the rise of agribusiness in the lower 48, put the farming sector in a slump. Alaskan farmers struggled to compete with imported, massproduced foods and struggled to resist the temptation to cash in, selling off farmland to accommodate the oil-fueled population influx.
Today, Alaska’s oil production is about a quarter of its 1980s peak.
“If oil is declining, then what’s next?” Bachman says. “I think there is a unique opportunity to allow local foods … to become a larger wedge of the economy.”
Bob Shumaker, owner of Black Bear Farms in Palmer and a former president of the Alaska Farmers Union, hopes agriculture expands with a revived northward migration of farmers.
“Everybody down south who’s too hot—move to Alaska,” he says. “It’s great.”
another stupid idea from stupid people!!!
EPA Reauthorizes Use of 'Dangerous' 'Cyanide Bombs' That Kill Thousands of Animals Every Year
Aristos Georgiou - newsweek
12/6/19
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that it will reauthorize the use of sodium cyanide in wildlife-killing devices known as M-44s, or "cyanide bombs."
The devices are designed to kill certain animals for predator control purposes. They use a smelly bait to lure in wildlife before releasing deadly sodium cyanide into the mouth of any animal that takes a bite.
But critics say that the traps "inhumanely and indiscriminately" kill thousands of animals every year, posing a danger to endangered species, domestic pets and even humans.
In a statement published on Thursday, the EPA announced a "revised interim decision on sodium cyanide that includes new requirements to ensure continued safe use of the device." But campaigners have described these restrictions as "minor" and limited.
"This appalling decision leaves cyanide traps lurking in the wild to threaten people, pets and imperiled animals," Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. "The EPA imposed a few minor restrictions, but these deadly devices have just wreaked too much havoc to remain in use. To truly protect humans and wildlife from these poisonous contraptions, we need a nationwide ban."
The M-44s are used by Wildlife Services—a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) agency that kills millions of animals every year using a variety of methods, ostensibly to protect livestock, according to the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).
The spring-loaded traps are also authorized for use by state agencies in South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico and Texas.
The USDA's own data suggests that these spring-loaded traps killed 6,579 animals in 2018—the majority of which were coyotes and foxes. At least 200 of these deaths were non-target animals—such as bears, skunks and opossums—although the real figure is likely higher, the CBD says, accusing the agency of poor data collection. According to Adkins, M-44s are dangerous to wildlife and harmful to ecosystems.
"Numerous endangered species have been killed by the devices, as anything that tugs on [them] will be shot with the poison," Adkins said in a statement provided to Newsweek. "The animals targeted by cyanide bombs—canids like wolves, coyotes and foxes—play important ecosystem roles as top carnivores, controlling prey populations. For example, coyotes control rodents that spread disease and damage crops."
Furthermore, the traps pose a risk to humans and their pets, with several recorded instances of people being harmed, Adkins said.
"In 2017, an Idaho teenager, Canyon Mansfield, hiking with his dog on the hill behind his home was temporarily blinded and watched his dog die after he grabbed an unmarked device," Adkins said.
In August, the EPA announced that it would reauthorize the use of the traps on an interim basis—albeit with certain restrictions that were put in place in response to pressure from environmental groups. But just a week later, the EPA withdrew this decision to hold further discussions with Wildlife Services on the most appropriate language for the M-44 labels. Thursday's decision now reauthorizes the use of the devices on an interim basis again.
As part of the reauthorization, the EPA has added some new restrictions. For example, the traps cannot be placed within 600 feet of a residence—unless the property owner has given written permission—or 300 feet from designated public paths and roads. The latter restriction is an increase from 100 feet.
Furthermore, the new interim decision requires that the traps must be accompanied by two elevated warning signs within 15 feet, which face in the two most likely directions of approach. Currently, only one sign is required at a distance of 25 feet from the device.
However, critics say that these kinds of restrictions will do little to mitigate the risks posed by these devices and fails to meaningfully address the problem.
"None of the restrictions will prevent non-target wildlife deaths," Adkins said. "We know from past experience that buffers and signs don't work: 1) these restrictions are often not followed—as in the Mansfield case where the device was illegally placed and without a sign; and 2) these restrictions don't eliminate the harm—people and dogs stray from the path when hiking and a couple of signs won't be visible from all directions or can blow over, et cetera."
Meanwhile, Cathy Liss, president of the Animal Welfare Institute, said in a statement: "The EPA's minor revisions do little to reduce the risks sodium cyanide bombs pose to people, fail entirely to address risks to wildlife, including endangered species, and make clear the agency is prioritizing livestock interests over human safety and the environment. The simple solution to preventing further tragedies caused by these inherently dangerous devices is a nationwide ban."
Campaigners say that such a ban would have the overwhelming support of the public. An analysis conducted by the CBD and Western Environmental Law Center found that more than 99.9 percent of the roughly 22,400 people who submitted comments regarding the previous proposal to reauthorize cyanide bombs asked the EPA to ban them.
Following the Mansfield incident, the state of Idaho imposed a moratorium on the use of M-44s on public lands. Meanwhile, the state of Oregon passed legislation this year banning them in the state. Furthermore, a federal court also recently approved a ban on the use of M-44s by Wildlife Services across more than 10 million acres of public land in Wyoming—the result of an agreement that followed a lawsuit brought by the CBD and other advocacy groups.
Supporters of the use of M-44s, such as the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA,) say that the traps play an important role in protecting livestock.
"NASDA appreciates the EPA's continued steps to prioritize public safety and support American ranchers, as M-44 is an essential tool for guarding our nation's livestock," NASDA CEO Barbara Glenn said in a statement accompanying yesterday's EPA announcement. "NASDA members hold highly the responsibility of ensuring the viability of American ranches, therefore, improved guidelines for safety measures are always welcomed."
But according to Adkins, there are safer alternatives that will also be more effective in achieving this aim.
"Killing of wildlife for conflicts with wildlife rarely works because other animals move into the vacant territories and begin breeding," she said. "Instead, prevention is key, using methods like guard dogs, fencing, flashing lights etc. to deter predators. If the predator must be killed, it is better to use a more targeted method like shooting, rather than indiscriminately killing with a poison."
"We're not giving up our fight. We'll continue to push for state and federal legislation to ban cyanide bombs," she said.
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The devices are designed to kill certain animals for predator control purposes. They use a smelly bait to lure in wildlife before releasing deadly sodium cyanide into the mouth of any animal that takes a bite.
But critics say that the traps "inhumanely and indiscriminately" kill thousands of animals every year, posing a danger to endangered species, domestic pets and even humans.
In a statement published on Thursday, the EPA announced a "revised interim decision on sodium cyanide that includes new requirements to ensure continued safe use of the device." But campaigners have described these restrictions as "minor" and limited.
"This appalling decision leaves cyanide traps lurking in the wild to threaten people, pets and imperiled animals," Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. "The EPA imposed a few minor restrictions, but these deadly devices have just wreaked too much havoc to remain in use. To truly protect humans and wildlife from these poisonous contraptions, we need a nationwide ban."
The M-44s are used by Wildlife Services—a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) agency that kills millions of animals every year using a variety of methods, ostensibly to protect livestock, according to the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).
The spring-loaded traps are also authorized for use by state agencies in South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico and Texas.
The USDA's own data suggests that these spring-loaded traps killed 6,579 animals in 2018—the majority of which were coyotes and foxes. At least 200 of these deaths were non-target animals—such as bears, skunks and opossums—although the real figure is likely higher, the CBD says, accusing the agency of poor data collection. According to Adkins, M-44s are dangerous to wildlife and harmful to ecosystems.
"Numerous endangered species have been killed by the devices, as anything that tugs on [them] will be shot with the poison," Adkins said in a statement provided to Newsweek. "The animals targeted by cyanide bombs—canids like wolves, coyotes and foxes—play important ecosystem roles as top carnivores, controlling prey populations. For example, coyotes control rodents that spread disease and damage crops."
Furthermore, the traps pose a risk to humans and their pets, with several recorded instances of people being harmed, Adkins said.
"In 2017, an Idaho teenager, Canyon Mansfield, hiking with his dog on the hill behind his home was temporarily blinded and watched his dog die after he grabbed an unmarked device," Adkins said.
In August, the EPA announced that it would reauthorize the use of the traps on an interim basis—albeit with certain restrictions that were put in place in response to pressure from environmental groups. But just a week later, the EPA withdrew this decision to hold further discussions with Wildlife Services on the most appropriate language for the M-44 labels. Thursday's decision now reauthorizes the use of the devices on an interim basis again.
As part of the reauthorization, the EPA has added some new restrictions. For example, the traps cannot be placed within 600 feet of a residence—unless the property owner has given written permission—or 300 feet from designated public paths and roads. The latter restriction is an increase from 100 feet.
Furthermore, the new interim decision requires that the traps must be accompanied by two elevated warning signs within 15 feet, which face in the two most likely directions of approach. Currently, only one sign is required at a distance of 25 feet from the device.
However, critics say that these kinds of restrictions will do little to mitigate the risks posed by these devices and fails to meaningfully address the problem.
"None of the restrictions will prevent non-target wildlife deaths," Adkins said. "We know from past experience that buffers and signs don't work: 1) these restrictions are often not followed—as in the Mansfield case where the device was illegally placed and without a sign; and 2) these restrictions don't eliminate the harm—people and dogs stray from the path when hiking and a couple of signs won't be visible from all directions or can blow over, et cetera."
Meanwhile, Cathy Liss, president of the Animal Welfare Institute, said in a statement: "The EPA's minor revisions do little to reduce the risks sodium cyanide bombs pose to people, fail entirely to address risks to wildlife, including endangered species, and make clear the agency is prioritizing livestock interests over human safety and the environment. The simple solution to preventing further tragedies caused by these inherently dangerous devices is a nationwide ban."
Campaigners say that such a ban would have the overwhelming support of the public. An analysis conducted by the CBD and Western Environmental Law Center found that more than 99.9 percent of the roughly 22,400 people who submitted comments regarding the previous proposal to reauthorize cyanide bombs asked the EPA to ban them.
Following the Mansfield incident, the state of Idaho imposed a moratorium on the use of M-44s on public lands. Meanwhile, the state of Oregon passed legislation this year banning them in the state. Furthermore, a federal court also recently approved a ban on the use of M-44s by Wildlife Services across more than 10 million acres of public land in Wyoming—the result of an agreement that followed a lawsuit brought by the CBD and other advocacy groups.
Supporters of the use of M-44s, such as the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA,) say that the traps play an important role in protecting livestock.
"NASDA appreciates the EPA's continued steps to prioritize public safety and support American ranchers, as M-44 is an essential tool for guarding our nation's livestock," NASDA CEO Barbara Glenn said in a statement accompanying yesterday's EPA announcement. "NASDA members hold highly the responsibility of ensuring the viability of American ranches, therefore, improved guidelines for safety measures are always welcomed."
But according to Adkins, there are safer alternatives that will also be more effective in achieving this aim.
"Killing of wildlife for conflicts with wildlife rarely works because other animals move into the vacant territories and begin breeding," she said. "Instead, prevention is key, using methods like guard dogs, fencing, flashing lights etc. to deter predators. If the predator must be killed, it is better to use a more targeted method like shooting, rather than indiscriminately killing with a poison."
"We're not giving up our fight. We'll continue to push for state and federal legislation to ban cyanide bombs," she said.
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
wonder if your food has shit in it???
Factory Farm Conditions Are Unhealthy for Animals and Bad for People, Too
BY Tia Schwab, Truthout
PUBLISHED December 1, 2019
In 2014, the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, commissioned by the U.K. government and Wellcome Trust, estimated that 700,000 people around the world die each year due to drug-resistant infections. A follow-up report two years later showed no change in this estimate of casualties. Without action, that number could grow to 10 million per year by 2050. A leading cause of antibiotic resistance? The misuse and overuse of antibiotics on factory farms.
Flourishing antibiotic resistance is just one of the many public health crises produced by factory farming. Other problems include foodborne illness, flu epidemics, the fallout from poor air and water quality, and chronic disease. All of it can be traced to the current industrial approach to raising animals for food, which puts a premium on “high stocking density,” wherein productivity is measured by how many animals are crammed into a feeding facility.
Oversight for the way factory farms operate and manage waste is minimal at best. No federal agency collects consistent and reliable information on the number, size and location of large-scale agricultural operations, nor the pollution they’re emitting. There are also no federal laws governing the conditions in which farm animals are raised, and most state anti-cruelty laws do not apply to farm animals.
For example, Texas, Iowa and Nebraska have excluded livestock from their animal cruelty statute and instead created specific legislation aimed at farm animal abuse that makes accepted or customary husbandry practices the animal welfare standard.
After New Jersey created similar legislation, the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sued the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, claiming that “routine husbandry practices” was too vague. The New Jersey Society won, and as a result, the state’s Department of Agriculture has created more specific regulations.
In North Carolina, any person or organization can file a lawsuit if they suspect animal cruelty, even if that person does not have “possessory or ownership rights in an animal.” In this way, the state has “a civil remedy” for farm animal cruelty.
Still, the general lack of governmental oversight of factory farms results in cramped and filthy conditions, stressed-out animals and workers, and an ideal setup for the rampant spread of disease among animals, between animals and workers, and into the surrounding environment through animal waste.
Antibiotic Resistance
The problem: In 2017, nearly 11 million kilograms of antibiotics — including 5.6 million kilograms of medically important antibiotics — were sold in the U.S. for factory-farmed animals. Factory farms use antibiotics to make livestock grow faster and control the spread of disease in cramped and unhealthy living conditions. While antibiotics do kill some bacteria in animals, resistant bacteria can, and often do, survive and multiply, contaminating meat and animal products during slaughter and processing.
What it means for you: People can be exposed to antibiotic-resistant bacteria by handling or eating contaminated animal products, coming into contact with contaminated water or touching farm animals, which of course makes a farmworker’s job especially hazardous. Even if you don’t eat much meat or dairy, you’re vulnerable: Resistant pathogens can enter water streams through animal manure and contaminate irrigated produce.
Developments: The European Union has been much more aggressive than the U.S. in regulating antibiotic use on factory farms, banning the use of all antibiotics for growth promotion in 2006. But the U.S. is making some progress, too. Under new rules issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which went into effect in January 2017, antibiotics that are important for human medicine can no longer be used for growth promotion or feed efficiency in cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other animals raised for food.
Additionally, 95 percent of medically important antibiotics used in animal water and feed for therapeutic purposes were reclassified so they can no longer be purchased over the counter, and a veterinarian would have to sign off for their use in animals. As a result, domestic sales and distribution of medically important antimicrobials approved for use in factory farmed animals decreased by 43 percent from 2015 (the year of peak sales) through 2017, reports the FDA.
However, the agency still allows routine antibiotic use in factory farms for disease prevention in crowded and stressed animals, so these new rules aren’t nearly enough, says Matthew Wellington, antibiotics program director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund.
“The FDA should implement ambitious reduction targets for antibiotic use in the meat industry, and ensure that these medicines are used to treat sick animals or control a verified disease outbreak, not for routine disease prevention,” Wellington said in a statement, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
National Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney Avinash Kar agrees. “Far more antibiotics important to humans still go to cows and pigs — usually when they’re not sick — than to people, putting the health of every single one of us in jeopardy.”
Water and Pollution
The problem: Livestock in this country produce between 3 and 20 times more waste than people in the U.S. produce, according to a 2005 report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That’s as much as 1.2-1.37 billion tons of manure a year. Some estimates are even higher.
Manure can contain “pathogens such as E. coli, growth hormones, antibiotics, chemicals used as additives to the manure or to clean equipment, animal blood, silage leachate from corn feed, or copper sulfate used in footbaths for cows,” according to a 2010 report by the National Association of Local Boards of Health. Though sewage treatment plants are required for human waste, no such treatment facility exists for livestock waste.
Since this amount far exceeds what can be used as fertilizer, animal waste from factory farms typically enters massive, open-air waste lagoons, which spread airborne pathogens to people who live nearby. If animal waste is applied as fertilizer and exceeds the soil’s capacity for absorption, or if there is a leak or break in the manure storage or containment unit, the animal waste runs off into oceans, lakes, rivers, streams and groundwater.
Extreme weather increases the possibility of such breaks. Hurricane Florence, for example, flooded at least 50 hog lagoons when it struck the Carolinas last year, and satellite photos captured the damage.
Whether or not the manure is contained or spread as fertilizer, it can release many different types of harmful gases, including ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, as well as particulate matter comprised of fecal matter, feed materials, pollen, bacteria, fungi, skin cells and silicates, into the air.
What it means for you: Pathogens can cause diarrhea and severe illness or even death for those with weakened immune systems, and nitrates in drinking water have been connected to neural tube defects and limb deficiencies in newborns (among other things), as well as miscarriages and poor general health. For infants, it can mean blue baby syndrome and even death.
Gases like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide can cause dizziness, eye irritation, respiratory illness, nausea, sore throats, seizures, comas and death. Particulate matter in the air can lead to chronic bronchitis, chronic respiratory symptoms, declines in lung function and organic dust toxic syndrome. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that children raised in communities near factory farms are more likely to develop asthma or bronchitis, and that people who live near factory farms may experience mental health deterioration and increased sensitization to smells.
Developments: It is difficult to hold factory farms accountable for polluting surrounding air and water, largely for political reasons. The GOP-controlled Congress and the Trump administration excused big livestock farms from reporting air emissions, for instance, following a decade-long push for special treatment by the livestock industry.
The exemption indicates “further denial of the impact that these [emissions] are having, whether it’s on climate or whether it’s on public health,” says Carrie Apfel, an attorney for Earthjustice. In a 2017 report from the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General, the agency admitted it has not found a good way to track emissions from factory farms and know whether the farms are complying with the Clean Air Act.
No federal agency even has reliable information on the number and locations of factory farms, which of course makes accountability even harder to establish.
Foodborne Illness
The problem: The United States has “shockingly high levels of foodborne illness,” according to an investigation jointly conducted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Guardian, and unsanitary conditions at factory farms are a leading contributor.
Studying 47 meat plants across the U.S., investigators found that hygiene incidents occur at rates experts described as “deeply worrying.” One dataset covered 13 large red meat and poultry plants between 2015 and 2017 and found an average of more than 150 violations a week, and 15,000 violations over the entire period. Violations included unsanitary factory conditions and meat contaminated with blood, septicemic disease and feces.
“The rates at which outbreaks of infectious food poisoning occur in the U.S. are significantly higher than in the UK, or the EU,” Erik Millstone, a food safety expert at Sussex University told the Guardian.
Poor sanitary practices allow bacteria like E. coli and Salmonella, which live in the intestinal tracts of infected livestock, to contaminate meat or animal products during slaughter or processing. Contamination occurs at higher rates on factory farms because crowded and unclean living conditions increase the likelihood of transmission between animals.
It also stresses out animals, which suppresses their immune response, making them more susceptible to disease. The grain-based diets used to fatten cattle can also quickly increase the risk of E. coli infection. In poultry, the practice of processing dead hens into “spent hen meal” to be fed to live hens has increased the spread of Salmonella.
What it means for you: According to the CDC, roughly 48 million people in the U.S. suffer from foodborne illnesses annually, with 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths each year. Salmonella accounts for approximately 11 percent of infections, and kills more people every year than any other bacterial foodborne illness.
Developments: In January 2011, President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the first major piece of federal legislation addressing food safety since 1938. FSMA grants the FDA new authority to regulate the way food is grown, harvested and processed, and new powers such as mandatory recall authority.
The FSMA “basically codified this principle that everybody responsible for producing food should be doing what the best science says is appropriate to prevent hazards and reduce the risk of illness,” according to Mike Taylor, co-chairman of Stop Foodborne Illness and a former deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine at the FDA. “So we’re moving in the right direction.”
However, almost a decade later, the FSMA is still being phased in, due to a shortage of trained food-inspectors and a lack of funding. “Congress has gotten about halfway to what it said was needed to successfully implement” the Act, Taylor said.
The Flu
The problem: Both the number and density of animals on factory farms increase the risk of new virulent pathogens, according to the U.S. Council for Agriculture, Science and Technology. In addition, transporting animals over long distances to processing facilities brings different influenza strains into contact with each other so they combine and spread quickly.
Pigs — susceptible to both avian and human flu viruses — can serve as ground zero for all sorts of new strains. Because of intensive pig farming practices, “the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fast track, churning out variants every year,” according to a report published in the journal Science.
What it means for you: These viruses can become pandemics. In fact, viral geneticists link the genetic lineage of H1N1, a kind of swine flu, to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory pig farms. The CDC has estimated that between 151,700 and 575,400 people worldwide died from the 2009 H1N1 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated.
Breast, Prostate and Colon Cancer
The problem: Factory farms in the U.S. use hormones to stimulate growth in an estimated two-thirds of beef cattle. On dairy farms, around 54 percent of cows are injected with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a growth hormone that increases milk production.
What it means for you: The health effects of consuming animal products treated with these growth hormones is an ongoing international debate. Some studies have linked growth hormone residues in meat to reproductive issues and breast, prostate and colon cancer, and IGF-1, an insulin-like growth hormone, has been linked to colon and breast cancer. However, the FDA, the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization have independently found that dairy products and meat from cows treated with rBGH are safe for human consumption.
Because risk assessments vary, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel and Argentina have banned the use of rBGH as a precautionary measure. The EU has also banned the use of six hormones in cattle and imported beef.
Developments: U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines allow beef products to be labeled with “no hormones administered” and dairy products to be labeled “from cows not treated with rBST/rBGH” if the producer provides sufficient documentation that this is true. Consumers can use this information to make their own decisions about the risks associated with hormone-treated animal products.[...]
Flourishing antibiotic resistance is just one of the many public health crises produced by factory farming. Other problems include foodborne illness, flu epidemics, the fallout from poor air and water quality, and chronic disease. All of it can be traced to the current industrial approach to raising animals for food, which puts a premium on “high stocking density,” wherein productivity is measured by how many animals are crammed into a feeding facility.
Oversight for the way factory farms operate and manage waste is minimal at best. No federal agency collects consistent and reliable information on the number, size and location of large-scale agricultural operations, nor the pollution they’re emitting. There are also no federal laws governing the conditions in which farm animals are raised, and most state anti-cruelty laws do not apply to farm animals.
For example, Texas, Iowa and Nebraska have excluded livestock from their animal cruelty statute and instead created specific legislation aimed at farm animal abuse that makes accepted or customary husbandry practices the animal welfare standard.
After New Jersey created similar legislation, the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sued the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, claiming that “routine husbandry practices” was too vague. The New Jersey Society won, and as a result, the state’s Department of Agriculture has created more specific regulations.
In North Carolina, any person or organization can file a lawsuit if they suspect animal cruelty, even if that person does not have “possessory or ownership rights in an animal.” In this way, the state has “a civil remedy” for farm animal cruelty.
Still, the general lack of governmental oversight of factory farms results in cramped and filthy conditions, stressed-out animals and workers, and an ideal setup for the rampant spread of disease among animals, between animals and workers, and into the surrounding environment through animal waste.
Antibiotic Resistance
The problem: In 2017, nearly 11 million kilograms of antibiotics — including 5.6 million kilograms of medically important antibiotics — were sold in the U.S. for factory-farmed animals. Factory farms use antibiotics to make livestock grow faster and control the spread of disease in cramped and unhealthy living conditions. While antibiotics do kill some bacteria in animals, resistant bacteria can, and often do, survive and multiply, contaminating meat and animal products during slaughter and processing.
What it means for you: People can be exposed to antibiotic-resistant bacteria by handling or eating contaminated animal products, coming into contact with contaminated water or touching farm animals, which of course makes a farmworker’s job especially hazardous. Even if you don’t eat much meat or dairy, you’re vulnerable: Resistant pathogens can enter water streams through animal manure and contaminate irrigated produce.
Developments: The European Union has been much more aggressive than the U.S. in regulating antibiotic use on factory farms, banning the use of all antibiotics for growth promotion in 2006. But the U.S. is making some progress, too. Under new rules issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which went into effect in January 2017, antibiotics that are important for human medicine can no longer be used for growth promotion or feed efficiency in cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other animals raised for food.
Additionally, 95 percent of medically important antibiotics used in animal water and feed for therapeutic purposes were reclassified so they can no longer be purchased over the counter, and a veterinarian would have to sign off for their use in animals. As a result, domestic sales and distribution of medically important antimicrobials approved for use in factory farmed animals decreased by 43 percent from 2015 (the year of peak sales) through 2017, reports the FDA.
However, the agency still allows routine antibiotic use in factory farms for disease prevention in crowded and stressed animals, so these new rules aren’t nearly enough, says Matthew Wellington, antibiotics program director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund.
“The FDA should implement ambitious reduction targets for antibiotic use in the meat industry, and ensure that these medicines are used to treat sick animals or control a verified disease outbreak, not for routine disease prevention,” Wellington said in a statement, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
National Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney Avinash Kar agrees. “Far more antibiotics important to humans still go to cows and pigs — usually when they’re not sick — than to people, putting the health of every single one of us in jeopardy.”
Water and Pollution
The problem: Livestock in this country produce between 3 and 20 times more waste than people in the U.S. produce, according to a 2005 report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That’s as much as 1.2-1.37 billion tons of manure a year. Some estimates are even higher.
Manure can contain “pathogens such as E. coli, growth hormones, antibiotics, chemicals used as additives to the manure or to clean equipment, animal blood, silage leachate from corn feed, or copper sulfate used in footbaths for cows,” according to a 2010 report by the National Association of Local Boards of Health. Though sewage treatment plants are required for human waste, no such treatment facility exists for livestock waste.
Since this amount far exceeds what can be used as fertilizer, animal waste from factory farms typically enters massive, open-air waste lagoons, which spread airborne pathogens to people who live nearby. If animal waste is applied as fertilizer and exceeds the soil’s capacity for absorption, or if there is a leak or break in the manure storage or containment unit, the animal waste runs off into oceans, lakes, rivers, streams and groundwater.
Extreme weather increases the possibility of such breaks. Hurricane Florence, for example, flooded at least 50 hog lagoons when it struck the Carolinas last year, and satellite photos captured the damage.
Whether or not the manure is contained or spread as fertilizer, it can release many different types of harmful gases, including ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, as well as particulate matter comprised of fecal matter, feed materials, pollen, bacteria, fungi, skin cells and silicates, into the air.
What it means for you: Pathogens can cause diarrhea and severe illness or even death for those with weakened immune systems, and nitrates in drinking water have been connected to neural tube defects and limb deficiencies in newborns (among other things), as well as miscarriages and poor general health. For infants, it can mean blue baby syndrome and even death.
Gases like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide can cause dizziness, eye irritation, respiratory illness, nausea, sore throats, seizures, comas and death. Particulate matter in the air can lead to chronic bronchitis, chronic respiratory symptoms, declines in lung function and organic dust toxic syndrome. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that children raised in communities near factory farms are more likely to develop asthma or bronchitis, and that people who live near factory farms may experience mental health deterioration and increased sensitization to smells.
Developments: It is difficult to hold factory farms accountable for polluting surrounding air and water, largely for political reasons. The GOP-controlled Congress and the Trump administration excused big livestock farms from reporting air emissions, for instance, following a decade-long push for special treatment by the livestock industry.
The exemption indicates “further denial of the impact that these [emissions] are having, whether it’s on climate or whether it’s on public health,” says Carrie Apfel, an attorney for Earthjustice. In a 2017 report from the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General, the agency admitted it has not found a good way to track emissions from factory farms and know whether the farms are complying with the Clean Air Act.
No federal agency even has reliable information on the number and locations of factory farms, which of course makes accountability even harder to establish.
Foodborne Illness
The problem: The United States has “shockingly high levels of foodborne illness,” according to an investigation jointly conducted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Guardian, and unsanitary conditions at factory farms are a leading contributor.
Studying 47 meat plants across the U.S., investigators found that hygiene incidents occur at rates experts described as “deeply worrying.” One dataset covered 13 large red meat and poultry plants between 2015 and 2017 and found an average of more than 150 violations a week, and 15,000 violations over the entire period. Violations included unsanitary factory conditions and meat contaminated with blood, septicemic disease and feces.
“The rates at which outbreaks of infectious food poisoning occur in the U.S. are significantly higher than in the UK, or the EU,” Erik Millstone, a food safety expert at Sussex University told the Guardian.
Poor sanitary practices allow bacteria like E. coli and Salmonella, which live in the intestinal tracts of infected livestock, to contaminate meat or animal products during slaughter or processing. Contamination occurs at higher rates on factory farms because crowded and unclean living conditions increase the likelihood of transmission between animals.
It also stresses out animals, which suppresses their immune response, making them more susceptible to disease. The grain-based diets used to fatten cattle can also quickly increase the risk of E. coli infection. In poultry, the practice of processing dead hens into “spent hen meal” to be fed to live hens has increased the spread of Salmonella.
What it means for you: According to the CDC, roughly 48 million people in the U.S. suffer from foodborne illnesses annually, with 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths each year. Salmonella accounts for approximately 11 percent of infections, and kills more people every year than any other bacterial foodborne illness.
Developments: In January 2011, President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the first major piece of federal legislation addressing food safety since 1938. FSMA grants the FDA new authority to regulate the way food is grown, harvested and processed, and new powers such as mandatory recall authority.
The FSMA “basically codified this principle that everybody responsible for producing food should be doing what the best science says is appropriate to prevent hazards and reduce the risk of illness,” according to Mike Taylor, co-chairman of Stop Foodborne Illness and a former deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine at the FDA. “So we’re moving in the right direction.”
However, almost a decade later, the FSMA is still being phased in, due to a shortage of trained food-inspectors and a lack of funding. “Congress has gotten about halfway to what it said was needed to successfully implement” the Act, Taylor said.
The Flu
The problem: Both the number and density of animals on factory farms increase the risk of new virulent pathogens, according to the U.S. Council for Agriculture, Science and Technology. In addition, transporting animals over long distances to processing facilities brings different influenza strains into contact with each other so they combine and spread quickly.
Pigs — susceptible to both avian and human flu viruses — can serve as ground zero for all sorts of new strains. Because of intensive pig farming practices, “the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fast track, churning out variants every year,” according to a report published in the journal Science.
What it means for you: These viruses can become pandemics. In fact, viral geneticists link the genetic lineage of H1N1, a kind of swine flu, to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory pig farms. The CDC has estimated that between 151,700 and 575,400 people worldwide died from the 2009 H1N1 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated.
Breast, Prostate and Colon Cancer
The problem: Factory farms in the U.S. use hormones to stimulate growth in an estimated two-thirds of beef cattle. On dairy farms, around 54 percent of cows are injected with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a growth hormone that increases milk production.
What it means for you: The health effects of consuming animal products treated with these growth hormones is an ongoing international debate. Some studies have linked growth hormone residues in meat to reproductive issues and breast, prostate and colon cancer, and IGF-1, an insulin-like growth hormone, has been linked to colon and breast cancer. However, the FDA, the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization have independently found that dairy products and meat from cows treated with rBGH are safe for human consumption.
Because risk assessments vary, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel and Argentina have banned the use of rBGH as a precautionary measure. The EU has also banned the use of six hormones in cattle and imported beef.
Developments: U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines allow beef products to be labeled with “no hormones administered” and dairy products to be labeled “from cows not treated with rBST/rBGH” if the producer provides sufficient documentation that this is true. Consumers can use this information to make their own decisions about the risks associated with hormone-treated animal products.[...]
EPA Won’t Address The Ticking Time Bomb Right Next Door
Forty-Seven U.S. Refineries, Many in Urban Areas, Use Deadly Hydrofluoric Acid. An Accidental Release Could Kill Thousands.
By Sarah Okeson - dc reports
11/21/19
Tens of thousands of people in our nation could die in a Bhopal-like catastrophe far worse than the 9/11 death toll of nearly 3,000 Americans. The reason is hydrofluoric acid, a chemical so dangerous that it can seep through skin and dissolve bones. Oil refineries use the acid to make gasoline.
The Trump EPA refused to use its authority under the Toxic Substances Control Act to ban oil refineries from using this chemical. Forty-seven of our nation’s approximately 135 oil refineries use hydrofluoric acid, including refineries near Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Memphis.
“An HF release in an urban area, such as Torrance near downtown LA, could become a mass-casualty event, with the potential for tens of thousands of deaths,” said Jeff Ruch, the Pacific director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Alexandra Dapolito Dunn, the EPA assistant administrator for chemical safety, said the petition from PEER didn’t have enough facts to show the rule was necessary.
“EPA appears to be saying that it will not act until there is a body count,” said former EPA enforcement attorney Tim Whitehouse, now the executive director of PEER.
Hydrofluoric acid has been used in oil refining since the 1940s. The acid boils at 67 degrees, producing a toxic vapor that stays low and can kill up to five miles away from where it’s released.
In June, 5,239 pounds of hydrofluoric acid was released in a series of explosions and a fire that burned for more than 24 hours at a refinery owned by Philadelphia Energy Solutions, the largest refinery on the East Coast.
The ExxonMobile Torrance Refinery is 14 miles from Downtown Los Angeles (Google maps)
The force of the explosion sent the acid high enough in the air that there were no serious injuries or fatalities. About 1,968 pounds of the released acid was contained by a water spray, and the refinery used a safety system that drained a tank of hydrofluoric acid.
In October 1987, more than 1,000 people were treated for injuries after a Marathon refinery in Texas City, Texas, released a cloud of hydrofluoric acid.
The oil industry whose lobbyists include Jeff Miller, once the vice finance chair of Trump’s inauguration committee, would rather risk mass casualties than cut profits. Husky Energy plans to spend more than $400 million to rebuild its refinery in Superior, Wis., after an explosion and fire in April 2018 injured 36 people. It will continue to use hydrofluoric acid. Wisconsin state regulators approved those plans.
The American Chemistry Council, the corporate apologist for hydrofluoric acid, once employed David Fischer, now the deputy assistant administrator in the Trump EPA chemical safety office, and his predecessor, Nancy Beck.
PEER, which asked the EPA to ban hydrofluoric acid under the Toxic Substances Control Act, wanted the agency to use the Clean Air Act to ban the chemical.
The Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency, asked the EPA to update its 1993 study of hydrofluoric acid to determine whether refinery plans are adequate to prevent catastrophic releases and whether there are commercially viable, safer alternatives.
Refineries have added chemicals to hydrofluoric acid such as sulfolane to try to limit its danger, but it’s unclear how effective these are. Alternatives do exist such as sulfuric acid which burns but doesn’t form killer vapor clouds.
Chevron is converting its refinery in Salt Lake City to a method called ionic liquids alkylation technology, the first such unit in our country. It is scheduled to start in 2020. The technology has been used in China.
The Trump EPA refused to use its authority under the Toxic Substances Control Act to ban oil refineries from using this chemical. Forty-seven of our nation’s approximately 135 oil refineries use hydrofluoric acid, including refineries near Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Memphis.
“An HF release in an urban area, such as Torrance near downtown LA, could become a mass-casualty event, with the potential for tens of thousands of deaths,” said Jeff Ruch, the Pacific director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Alexandra Dapolito Dunn, the EPA assistant administrator for chemical safety, said the petition from PEER didn’t have enough facts to show the rule was necessary.
“EPA appears to be saying that it will not act until there is a body count,” said former EPA enforcement attorney Tim Whitehouse, now the executive director of PEER.
Hydrofluoric acid has been used in oil refining since the 1940s. The acid boils at 67 degrees, producing a toxic vapor that stays low and can kill up to five miles away from where it’s released.
In June, 5,239 pounds of hydrofluoric acid was released in a series of explosions and a fire that burned for more than 24 hours at a refinery owned by Philadelphia Energy Solutions, the largest refinery on the East Coast.
The ExxonMobile Torrance Refinery is 14 miles from Downtown Los Angeles (Google maps)
The force of the explosion sent the acid high enough in the air that there were no serious injuries or fatalities. About 1,968 pounds of the released acid was contained by a water spray, and the refinery used a safety system that drained a tank of hydrofluoric acid.
In October 1987, more than 1,000 people were treated for injuries after a Marathon refinery in Texas City, Texas, released a cloud of hydrofluoric acid.
The oil industry whose lobbyists include Jeff Miller, once the vice finance chair of Trump’s inauguration committee, would rather risk mass casualties than cut profits. Husky Energy plans to spend more than $400 million to rebuild its refinery in Superior, Wis., after an explosion and fire in April 2018 injured 36 people. It will continue to use hydrofluoric acid. Wisconsin state regulators approved those plans.
The American Chemistry Council, the corporate apologist for hydrofluoric acid, once employed David Fischer, now the deputy assistant administrator in the Trump EPA chemical safety office, and his predecessor, Nancy Beck.
PEER, which asked the EPA to ban hydrofluoric acid under the Toxic Substances Control Act, wanted the agency to use the Clean Air Act to ban the chemical.
The Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency, asked the EPA to update its 1993 study of hydrofluoric acid to determine whether refinery plans are adequate to prevent catastrophic releases and whether there are commercially viable, safer alternatives.
Refineries have added chemicals to hydrofluoric acid such as sulfolane to try to limit its danger, but it’s unclear how effective these are. Alternatives do exist such as sulfuric acid which burns but doesn’t form killer vapor clouds.
Chevron is converting its refinery in Salt Lake City to a method called ionic liquids alkylation technology, the first such unit in our country. It is scheduled to start in 2020. The technology has been used in China.
Air pollution
Tens of thousands of deaths linked to weak US air pollution rules – study
Researchers linked nine causes of death with a certain type pollution when reviewing medical records of deceased veterans
Emily Holden in Washington
the guardian
Wed 20 Nov 2019 11.00 EST
US air pollution rules could be hugely insufficient in preventing deaths, experts are concluding from a new study of the likely causes of death of 4.5 million veterans.
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Jama, the research finds that 99% of deaths from illnesses linked to a certain type of air pollution occur in people who are exposed to lower levels than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently deems acceptable.
But Donald Trump’s EPA could be set to maintain the current standard – thus leading to continued air pollution-associated deaths. The agency is also reconsidering the established science linking particle pollution from fossil fuels and other sources with a host of illnesses.
About 200,000 Americans are thought to die from air pollution each year, but scientists previously couldn’t pinpoint the specific causes of death for almost half of those people.
The new research reviewed the medical records of veterans who died and compared them with the air pollution levels in their zip codes. They focused on PM 2.5, or inhalable particulate matter pollution that is 2.5 micrometers or smaller – a fraction of the width of a human hair.
They linked nine causes of death with the pollution: cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer and pneumonia.
Three of those conditions were newly identified associations: chronic kidney disease, hypertension and dementia.
Miles Keogh, the executive director of a group that represents state and local air regulators, said: “We know people are harmed from exposure levels lower than the [current standards].
“The question is whether the trade-offs for society are worth it. If only a few people are harmed, maybe society accepts the risk,” Keogh said. “But when a study shows 99% of death occurring at exposure levels below that threshold, that should make us look much harder at whether the threshold protects people effectively enough.”
Because scientists cannot ethically expose subjects to air pollution and test the results, they must rely on existing epidemiological data. Veterans offered a massive source of detailed records held by the federal government.
“The skeptics will always tell you this is correlation and correlation is not causation, but in environmental epidemiology, that’s really the best you could do,” said co-author Dr Ziyad Al-Aly, who directs the clinical epidemiology center at Washington University in St Louis and is chief of research at Veterans Affairs St Louis Health Care System.
Al-Aly explained that researchers examining only death records could only see “the tip of the iceberg”. His team reviewed the illnesses people struggled with before death to get a clearer picture of their overall health.
The research also confirmed striking inequities in how air pollution hurts black Americans more than white Americans. Black Americans were more likely to be exposed to higher levels of PM 2.5. But they also got sicker than white people even when they were breathing the same air. That could be because of socio-economic factors, such as poverty and access to healthcare.
“I went into it thinking pollution is color blind … it turns out to be it’s not true,” Al-Aly said. “Actually, pollution itself does discriminate. For the same level of pollution, black people tend to be affected more. And on top of that, black people get exposed to more pollution than white people.
“It’s kind of like a double-whammy,” he said. “It’s really unfair.”
New research is consistently revealing broad health threats from air pollution. Another study published on Wednesday in Brain further confirmed the links between air pollution and cognitive problems. Women in their 70s and 80s who were exposed to higher levels of air pollution experienced greater declines in memory and more Alzheimer’s-like brain atrophy, according to researchers at the University of South Carolina.
“This is the first study to really show, in a statistical model, that air pollution was associated with changes in people’s brains and that those changes were then connected with declines in memory performance,” said Andrew Petkus, an assistant professor of clinical neurology.
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Jama, the research finds that 99% of deaths from illnesses linked to a certain type of air pollution occur in people who are exposed to lower levels than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently deems acceptable.
But Donald Trump’s EPA could be set to maintain the current standard – thus leading to continued air pollution-associated deaths. The agency is also reconsidering the established science linking particle pollution from fossil fuels and other sources with a host of illnesses.
About 200,000 Americans are thought to die from air pollution each year, but scientists previously couldn’t pinpoint the specific causes of death for almost half of those people.
The new research reviewed the medical records of veterans who died and compared them with the air pollution levels in their zip codes. They focused on PM 2.5, or inhalable particulate matter pollution that is 2.5 micrometers or smaller – a fraction of the width of a human hair.
They linked nine causes of death with the pollution: cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer and pneumonia.
Three of those conditions were newly identified associations: chronic kidney disease, hypertension and dementia.
Miles Keogh, the executive director of a group that represents state and local air regulators, said: “We know people are harmed from exposure levels lower than the [current standards].
“The question is whether the trade-offs for society are worth it. If only a few people are harmed, maybe society accepts the risk,” Keogh said. “But when a study shows 99% of death occurring at exposure levels below that threshold, that should make us look much harder at whether the threshold protects people effectively enough.”
Because scientists cannot ethically expose subjects to air pollution and test the results, they must rely on existing epidemiological data. Veterans offered a massive source of detailed records held by the federal government.
“The skeptics will always tell you this is correlation and correlation is not causation, but in environmental epidemiology, that’s really the best you could do,” said co-author Dr Ziyad Al-Aly, who directs the clinical epidemiology center at Washington University in St Louis and is chief of research at Veterans Affairs St Louis Health Care System.
Al-Aly explained that researchers examining only death records could only see “the tip of the iceberg”. His team reviewed the illnesses people struggled with before death to get a clearer picture of their overall health.
The research also confirmed striking inequities in how air pollution hurts black Americans more than white Americans. Black Americans were more likely to be exposed to higher levels of PM 2.5. But they also got sicker than white people even when they were breathing the same air. That could be because of socio-economic factors, such as poverty and access to healthcare.
“I went into it thinking pollution is color blind … it turns out to be it’s not true,” Al-Aly said. “Actually, pollution itself does discriminate. For the same level of pollution, black people tend to be affected more. And on top of that, black people get exposed to more pollution than white people.
“It’s kind of like a double-whammy,” he said. “It’s really unfair.”
New research is consistently revealing broad health threats from air pollution. Another study published on Wednesday in Brain further confirmed the links between air pollution and cognitive problems. Women in their 70s and 80s who were exposed to higher levels of air pollution experienced greater declines in memory and more Alzheimer’s-like brain atrophy, according to researchers at the University of South Carolina.
“This is the first study to really show, in a statistical model, that air pollution was associated with changes in people’s brains and that those changes were then connected with declines in memory performance,” said Andrew Petkus, an assistant professor of clinical neurology.
Air pollution nanoparticles linked to brain cancer for first time
Exclusive: tiny particles produced by motor traffic can invade the brain and carry carcinogens
Damian Carrington Environment editor
the guardian
Wed 13 Nov 2019 05.57 EST
New research has linked air pollution nanoparticles to brain cancer for the first time.
The ultra-fine particles (UFPs) are produced by fuel burning, particularly in diesel vehicles, and higher exposures significantly increase people’s chances of getting the deadly cancer. Previous work has shown that nanoparticles can get into the brain and that they can carry carcinogenic chemicals.
Brain cancers are rare, and the scientists have calculated that an increase in pollution exposure roughly equivalent to moving from a quiet city street to a busy one leads to one extra case of brain cancer for every 100,000 people exposed.
“Environmental risks like air pollution are not large in magnitude – their importance comes because everyone in the population is exposed,” said Scott Weichenthal, at McGill University in Canada, who led the study. “So when you multiply these small risks by lots of people, all of sudden there can be lots of cases. In a large city, it could be a meaningful number, particularly given the fact that these tumours are often fatal.”
The research analysed the medical records and pollution exposure of 1.9 million adult Canadians from 1991 to 2016. Such large studies provide strong evidence, though not a causal link. Weichenthal said the correlation seen between brain cancer and nanoparticles was “surprisingly consistent”, but as this is the first study, it is important that other researchers replicate it.
The discovery of abundant toxic nanoparticles from air pollution in human brains was made in 2016. A comprehensive global review earlier in 2019 concluded that air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the human body.
Toxic air has been linked to other effects on the brain, including huge reductions in intelligence, dementia and mental health problems in both adults and children. The World Health Organization says air pollution is a “silent public health emergency”.
The new study, published in the journal Epidemiology, found that a one-year increase in pollution exposure of 10,000 nanoparticles per cubic centimetre – the approximate difference between quiet and busy city streets – increased the risk of brain cancer by more than 10%.
The pollution levels in the cities studied – Toronto and Montreal – ranged from 6,000/cm3 to 97,000/cm3. Weichenthal said people living with pollution of 50,000/cm3 have a 50% higher risk of brain cancer than those living with 15,000/cm3.
“I think [Toronto and Montreal] are typical of major cities,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect the nanoparticles to be any less harmful anywhere else.” The analysis by the researchers took account of factors including income, smoking and obesity, and whether people moved house.
“We don’t know a lot about the causes of brain tumours, so any environmental factors we can identify are helpful in increasing understanding,” Weichenthal said. The team only had air pollution data for the more recent period of the study and assumed the differences between different streets and districts were the same in the past. “We think this is reasonable because major highways don’t move around,” he said.
Prof Jordi Sunyer, at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health in Spain, who was not involved in the new research, said: “This is an important finding, given that UFPs are directly emitted by combustion cars and several studies in animals have shown UFPs could be more toxic than larger particles.”
Prof Barbara Maher, at the University of Lancaster, UK, said iron-rich nanoparticles from traffic pollution were likely to be carcinogenic and were therefore a plausible possible cause of brain cancer. She said nanoparticles were not regulated and were rarely even measured.
The ultra-fine particles (UFPs) are produced by fuel burning, particularly in diesel vehicles, and higher exposures significantly increase people’s chances of getting the deadly cancer. Previous work has shown that nanoparticles can get into the brain and that they can carry carcinogenic chemicals.
Brain cancers are rare, and the scientists have calculated that an increase in pollution exposure roughly equivalent to moving from a quiet city street to a busy one leads to one extra case of brain cancer for every 100,000 people exposed.
“Environmental risks like air pollution are not large in magnitude – their importance comes because everyone in the population is exposed,” said Scott Weichenthal, at McGill University in Canada, who led the study. “So when you multiply these small risks by lots of people, all of sudden there can be lots of cases. In a large city, it could be a meaningful number, particularly given the fact that these tumours are often fatal.”
The research analysed the medical records and pollution exposure of 1.9 million adult Canadians from 1991 to 2016. Such large studies provide strong evidence, though not a causal link. Weichenthal said the correlation seen between brain cancer and nanoparticles was “surprisingly consistent”, but as this is the first study, it is important that other researchers replicate it.
The discovery of abundant toxic nanoparticles from air pollution in human brains was made in 2016. A comprehensive global review earlier in 2019 concluded that air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the human body.
Toxic air has been linked to other effects on the brain, including huge reductions in intelligence, dementia and mental health problems in both adults and children. The World Health Organization says air pollution is a “silent public health emergency”.
The new study, published in the journal Epidemiology, found that a one-year increase in pollution exposure of 10,000 nanoparticles per cubic centimetre – the approximate difference between quiet and busy city streets – increased the risk of brain cancer by more than 10%.
The pollution levels in the cities studied – Toronto and Montreal – ranged from 6,000/cm3 to 97,000/cm3. Weichenthal said people living with pollution of 50,000/cm3 have a 50% higher risk of brain cancer than those living with 15,000/cm3.
“I think [Toronto and Montreal] are typical of major cities,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect the nanoparticles to be any less harmful anywhere else.” The analysis by the researchers took account of factors including income, smoking and obesity, and whether people moved house.
“We don’t know a lot about the causes of brain tumours, so any environmental factors we can identify are helpful in increasing understanding,” Weichenthal said. The team only had air pollution data for the more recent period of the study and assumed the differences between different streets and districts were the same in the past. “We think this is reasonable because major highways don’t move around,” he said.
Prof Jordi Sunyer, at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health in Spain, who was not involved in the new research, said: “This is an important finding, given that UFPs are directly emitted by combustion cars and several studies in animals have shown UFPs could be more toxic than larger particles.”
Prof Barbara Maher, at the University of Lancaster, UK, said iron-rich nanoparticles from traffic pollution were likely to be carcinogenic and were therefore a plausible possible cause of brain cancer. She said nanoparticles were not regulated and were rarely even measured.
Plastics
Coca-Cola is world's biggest plastics polluter – again
Volunteers in 51 countries collected plastic waste and the soft drink manufacturer’s products cropped up the most often
Mona Chalabi in New York
the guardian
Sat 9 Nov 2019 05.00 EST
Coca-Cola has been named the world’s largest polluter of plastics for the second year in a row, according to an audit conducted by Break Free From Plastic.
The environmental justice group asked 72,541 volunteers in 51 countries to collect plastic waste. Almost half (43%) of what they found were clearly marked consumer brands. Coca-Cola was named the world’s number one global plastic polluter, followed by Nestlé and Pepsico.
Volunteers were able to select the locations for their clean-up efforts and so the final results may not be a perfect representation of global trends. Nonetheless, almost 12,000 Coca-Cola products were found in 37 countries across the world.
There were some regional trends too. In the US, the biggest producers of plastic pollution were Nestlé, followed by Solo Cup Company and Starbucks. In Europe, Heineken was the third-largest plastic polluter.
Volunteers found more than 59,000 plastic bags, 53,000 sachets and 29,000 plastic bottles. No one really knows how long plastics will take to decompose in our oceans but estimates suggest that it takes up to 450 years for a plastic bottle to break down.
“Any time our packaging ends up in our oceans – or anywhere that it doesn’t belong – is unacceptable to us,” Coca-Cola said in a statement to the Intercept. “In partnership with others, we are working to address this critical global issue, both to help turn off the tap in terms of plastic waste entering our oceans and to help clean up the existing pollution.”
The environmental justice group asked 72,541 volunteers in 51 countries to collect plastic waste. Almost half (43%) of what they found were clearly marked consumer brands. Coca-Cola was named the world’s number one global plastic polluter, followed by Nestlé and Pepsico.
Volunteers were able to select the locations for their clean-up efforts and so the final results may not be a perfect representation of global trends. Nonetheless, almost 12,000 Coca-Cola products were found in 37 countries across the world.
There were some regional trends too. In the US, the biggest producers of plastic pollution were Nestlé, followed by Solo Cup Company and Starbucks. In Europe, Heineken was the third-largest plastic polluter.
Volunteers found more than 59,000 plastic bags, 53,000 sachets and 29,000 plastic bottles. No one really knows how long plastics will take to decompose in our oceans but estimates suggest that it takes up to 450 years for a plastic bottle to break down.
“Any time our packaging ends up in our oceans – or anywhere that it doesn’t belong – is unacceptable to us,” Coca-Cola said in a statement to the Intercept. “In partnership with others, we are working to address this critical global issue, both to help turn off the tap in terms of plastic waste entering our oceans and to help clean up the existing pollution.”
Sea levels set to keep rising for centuries even if emissions targets met
Generations yet unborn will face rising oceans and coastal inundations into the 2300s even if governments meet climate commitments, researchers find
Oliver Milman in New York
the guardian
Wed 6 Nov 2019 05.00 EST
A potential scenario of future sea level rise in South Beach, Miami, Florida, with a global temperature rise of 2C. Photograph: Nickolay Lamm/Courtesy Climate Central
Sea level rise is set to challenge human civilization for centuries to come, even if internationally agreed climate goals are met and planet-warming emissions are then immediately eliminated, researchers have found.
The lag time between rising global temperatures and the knock-on impact of coastal inundation means that the world will be dealing with ever-rising sea levels into the 2300s, regardless of prompt action to address the climate crisis, according to the new study.
Even if governments meet their commitments from the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, the first 15-year period of the deal will still result in enough emissions that would cause sea levels to increase by around 20cm by the year 2300.
This scenario, modeled by researchers, assumes that all countries make their promised emissions reductions by 2030 and then abruptly eliminate all planet-warming gases from that point onwards. In reality, only a small number of countries are on track to meet the Paris target of limiting global heating to 2C above the pre-industrial era.
“Even with the Paris pledges there will be a large amount of sea level rise,” said Peter Clark, an Oregon State University climate scientist and co-author of the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Sea level rise is going to be an ongoing problem for centuries to come, we will have to keep on adapting over and over again. It’s going to be a whole new expensive lifestyle, costing trillions of dollars.
“Sea level has a very long memory, so even if we start cooling temperatures the seas will continue to rise. It’s a bit like trying to turn the Titanic around, rather than a speedboat.”
Researchers used a computer model that simulates sea level rise in response to various emissions levels, looking both at historical emissions since 1750 and also what the emissions scenario would be from 2015 to 2030 if countries met their Paris agreement obligations.
About half of the 20cm sea level rise can be attributed to the world’s top five greenhouse gas polluters – the US, China, India, Russia and the European Union – according to the researchers. The US was a key architect of the Paris deal but this week Donald Trump formally triggered its exit from the agreement.
“Our results show that what we do today will have a huge effect in 2300. Twenty centimetres is very significant; it is basically as much sea-level rise as we’ve observed over the entire 20th century,” said Climate Analytics’ Alexander Nauels, lead author of the study. “To cause that with only 15 years of emissions is quite staggering.”
The results reveal the daunting prospect of a near-endless advance of the seas, forcing countries to invest huge resources in defending key infrastructure or ceding certain areas to the tides. Many coastal cities around the world are already facing this challenge, with recent research finding that land currently home to 300 million people will flood at least once a year by 2050 unless carbon emissions are drastically slashed.
As the world heats up, ocean water is expanding while land-based glaciers and the two great polar ice caps are melting away, causing the oceans to swell.
According to the UN’s climate science panel, the global sea level rise could reach as much as 1.1 metres by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed. Clark pointed out the real situation could be even worse if the melting of the Antarctic turns out to be on the dire end of the spectrum of uncertainty.
“People are going to become less inclined to live by the coast and there are going to be sea level rise refugees,” Clark said. “More severe cuts in emissions are certainly going to be required but the current Paris pledges aren’t enough to prevent the seas from rising for a long, long time.”
The lag time between rising global temperatures and the knock-on impact of coastal inundation means that the world will be dealing with ever-rising sea levels into the 2300s, regardless of prompt action to address the climate crisis, according to the new study.
Even if governments meet their commitments from the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, the first 15-year period of the deal will still result in enough emissions that would cause sea levels to increase by around 20cm by the year 2300.
This scenario, modeled by researchers, assumes that all countries make their promised emissions reductions by 2030 and then abruptly eliminate all planet-warming gases from that point onwards. In reality, only a small number of countries are on track to meet the Paris target of limiting global heating to 2C above the pre-industrial era.
“Even with the Paris pledges there will be a large amount of sea level rise,” said Peter Clark, an Oregon State University climate scientist and co-author of the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Sea level rise is going to be an ongoing problem for centuries to come, we will have to keep on adapting over and over again. It’s going to be a whole new expensive lifestyle, costing trillions of dollars.
“Sea level has a very long memory, so even if we start cooling temperatures the seas will continue to rise. It’s a bit like trying to turn the Titanic around, rather than a speedboat.”
Researchers used a computer model that simulates sea level rise in response to various emissions levels, looking both at historical emissions since 1750 and also what the emissions scenario would be from 2015 to 2030 if countries met their Paris agreement obligations.
About half of the 20cm sea level rise can be attributed to the world’s top five greenhouse gas polluters – the US, China, India, Russia and the European Union – according to the researchers. The US was a key architect of the Paris deal but this week Donald Trump formally triggered its exit from the agreement.
“Our results show that what we do today will have a huge effect in 2300. Twenty centimetres is very significant; it is basically as much sea-level rise as we’ve observed over the entire 20th century,” said Climate Analytics’ Alexander Nauels, lead author of the study. “To cause that with only 15 years of emissions is quite staggering.”
The results reveal the daunting prospect of a near-endless advance of the seas, forcing countries to invest huge resources in defending key infrastructure or ceding certain areas to the tides. Many coastal cities around the world are already facing this challenge, with recent research finding that land currently home to 300 million people will flood at least once a year by 2050 unless carbon emissions are drastically slashed.
As the world heats up, ocean water is expanding while land-based glaciers and the two great polar ice caps are melting away, causing the oceans to swell.
According to the UN’s climate science panel, the global sea level rise could reach as much as 1.1 metres by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed. Clark pointed out the real situation could be even worse if the melting of the Antarctic turns out to be on the dire end of the spectrum of uncertainty.
“People are going to become less inclined to live by the coast and there are going to be sea level rise refugees,” Clark said. “More severe cuts in emissions are certainly going to be required but the current Paris pledges aren’t enough to prevent the seas from rising for a long, long time.”
These are the cities that will drown first as the seas rise
2% of Earth's human population lives on land that may be submerged within 31 years
NICOLE KARLIS - salon
OCTOBER 30, 2019 11:18PM (UTC)
Earth's average temperature has increased by about 2 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, which is causing a whole slew of problems from intensifying wildfires to melting ice sheets to ocean levels rising. Scientists have urged that humanity must limit further warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is the goal set in the Paris Agreement, or risk catastrophe. While cities drowning due to sea levels rise is sometimes discussed as a worst-case scenario, new research says such doomsday scenarios are all but certain.
A new study published in Nature Communications this week states that an estimated 150 million people are living on land that will be below the high tide line by 2050. That estimate was previously believed to be around 38 million people.
A handful of major cities around the world could be plagued by annual flooding events as soon as 2050, too.
150 million people represents 2% of Earth's current population, meaning one in fifty humans on Earth live on land that may be submerged within 31 years. Such a migration event would constitute the greatest refugee crises in the history of the planet, dwarfing the refugee crisis resultant of the second world war.
The new estimates were made by scientists at Climate Central, a science organization based in New Jersey. The study states that 70 percent of the total number of people around the world living on vulnerable land are in just eight Asian countries: China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan. Specifically, six Asian nations — China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand — are predicted to be the most vulnerable. The peer-reviewed study states that 237 million people in these countries occupy areas that are highly likely to experience coastal flooding once or multiple times per year by 2050.
This estimate quadruples previous ones used with older elevation data. Traditional elevation measurements use satellites and often struggle to account the difference between the true ground level and the tops of buildings, trees and other elevated structures. Researchers at Climate Central used artificial intelligence to make more accurate predictions.
Even more concerning, the predictions don’t include future population growth or land lost to coastal erosion. In Vietnam, previous estimates showed some scattered parts of southern Vietnam being submerged by a high tide. The latest predictions by Climate Central predict that the entire half of the country will be submerged. Much of Ho Chi Minh City, which is a major economic hub and home to nearly 9 million people, is part of what is expected to submerge.
In Thailand, Bangkok is especially threatened, according to the study. The Pearl River Delta, in China, Bangladesh and Jakarta, Indonesia, are too. Jakarta has been dubbed the “fastest sinking city in the world,” by the BBC, which has reported how the Indonesian capital of Jakarta is sinking by an average of one to 15 centimeters a year.
Much of Mumbai, India, is at risk of being wiped out as well. Previously, estimates suggested that 5 million people in India would face challenges by sea levels rising, but the new ones suggest it would be around 36 million people.
The study notes that some of the coastal cities will likely see larger proportions of their populations being displaced. Even with lower carbon emissions and stable Antarctic ice sheets, these cities are still expected to be impacted.
We find that the global impacts of sea-level rise and coastal flooding this century will likely be far greater than indicated by the most pessimistic past analyses relying on [shuttle radar topography],” the study states. “These results point to great need for the development and public release of improved terrain elevation datasets for coastal areas, for example via the high-resolution imagery and lidar point clouds increasingly collected by satellite today.”
As Salon has previously reported, the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic has declined by 95 percent over the past three decades.
As scientists at various agencies including NASA have warned, even if humanity stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would still happen for decades and even centuries.
“That’s because it takes a while for the planet (for example, the oceans) to respond, and because carbon dioxide — the predominant heat-trapping gas — lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years,” NASA states.
Responding to climate change, according to NASA, requires a two-tier approach: mitigation and adaptation. Now that the sea level rise is inevitable, adaptation is the only possible reaction to our soon-to-be-submerged cities.
A new study published in Nature Communications this week states that an estimated 150 million people are living on land that will be below the high tide line by 2050. That estimate was previously believed to be around 38 million people.
A handful of major cities around the world could be plagued by annual flooding events as soon as 2050, too.
150 million people represents 2% of Earth's current population, meaning one in fifty humans on Earth live on land that may be submerged within 31 years. Such a migration event would constitute the greatest refugee crises in the history of the planet, dwarfing the refugee crisis resultant of the second world war.
The new estimates were made by scientists at Climate Central, a science organization based in New Jersey. The study states that 70 percent of the total number of people around the world living on vulnerable land are in just eight Asian countries: China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan. Specifically, six Asian nations — China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand — are predicted to be the most vulnerable. The peer-reviewed study states that 237 million people in these countries occupy areas that are highly likely to experience coastal flooding once or multiple times per year by 2050.
This estimate quadruples previous ones used with older elevation data. Traditional elevation measurements use satellites and often struggle to account the difference between the true ground level and the tops of buildings, trees and other elevated structures. Researchers at Climate Central used artificial intelligence to make more accurate predictions.
Even more concerning, the predictions don’t include future population growth or land lost to coastal erosion. In Vietnam, previous estimates showed some scattered parts of southern Vietnam being submerged by a high tide. The latest predictions by Climate Central predict that the entire half of the country will be submerged. Much of Ho Chi Minh City, which is a major economic hub and home to nearly 9 million people, is part of what is expected to submerge.
In Thailand, Bangkok is especially threatened, according to the study. The Pearl River Delta, in China, Bangladesh and Jakarta, Indonesia, are too. Jakarta has been dubbed the “fastest sinking city in the world,” by the BBC, which has reported how the Indonesian capital of Jakarta is sinking by an average of one to 15 centimeters a year.
Much of Mumbai, India, is at risk of being wiped out as well. Previously, estimates suggested that 5 million people in India would face challenges by sea levels rising, but the new ones suggest it would be around 36 million people.
The study notes that some of the coastal cities will likely see larger proportions of their populations being displaced. Even with lower carbon emissions and stable Antarctic ice sheets, these cities are still expected to be impacted.
We find that the global impacts of sea-level rise and coastal flooding this century will likely be far greater than indicated by the most pessimistic past analyses relying on [shuttle radar topography],” the study states. “These results point to great need for the development and public release of improved terrain elevation datasets for coastal areas, for example via the high-resolution imagery and lidar point clouds increasingly collected by satellite today.”
As Salon has previously reported, the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic has declined by 95 percent over the past three decades.
As scientists at various agencies including NASA have warned, even if humanity stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would still happen for decades and even centuries.
“That’s because it takes a while for the planet (for example, the oceans) to respond, and because carbon dioxide — the predominant heat-trapping gas — lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years,” NASA states.
Responding to climate change, according to NASA, requires a two-tier approach: mitigation and adaptation. Now that the sea level rise is inevitable, adaptation is the only possible reaction to our soon-to-be-submerged cities.
too bad america has fools for leaders!!!
Offshore windfarms 'can provide more electricity than the world needs'
Supplies from turbines will prove to be the next great energy revolution, IEA predicts
Jillian Ambrose Energy correspondent
the guardian
Fri 25 Oct 2019 04.23 EDT
A sailing boat passes the Kentish Flats offshore windfarm. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA
Erecting wind turbines on the world’s best offshore sites could provide more than enough clean energy to meet global electricity demand, according to a report.
A detailed study of the world’s coastlines has found that offshore windfarms alone could provide more electricity than the world needs – even if they are only built in windy regions in shallow waters near the shore.
Analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) revealed that if windfarms were built across all useable sites which are no further than 60km (37 miles) off the coast, and where coastal waters are no deeper than 60 metres, they could generate 36,000 terawatt hours of renewable electricity a year. This would easily meeting the current global demand for electricity of 23,000 terawatt hours.
“Offshore wind currently provides just 0.3% of global power generation, but its potential is vast,” the IEA’s executive director, Fatih Birol, said.
The study predicts offshore wind generation will grow 15-fold to emerge as a $1tn (£780bn) industry in the next 20 years and will prove to be the next great energy revolution.
The IEA said earlier this week that global supplies of renewable electricity were growing faster than expected and could expand by 50% in the next five years, driven by a resurgence in solar energy. Offshore wind power would drive the world’s growth in clean power due to plummeting costs and new technological breakthroughs, including turbines close to the height of the Eiffel Tower and floating installations that can harness wind speeds further from the coast.
The next generation of floating turbines capable of operating further from the shore could generate enough energy to meet the world’s total electricity demand 11 times over in 2040, according to IEA estimates.
The report predicts that the EU’s offshore wind capacity will grow from almost 20 gigawatts today to nearly 130 gigawatts by 2040, and could reach 180 gigawatts with stronger climate commitments.
In China, the growth of offshore wind generation is likely to be even more rapid, the IEA said. Its offshore wind capacity is forecast to grow from 4 gigawatts to 110 gigawatts by 2040 or 170 gigawatts if it adopts tougher climate targets.
Birol said offshore wind would not only contribute to generating clean electricity, but could also offer a major opportunity in the production of hydrogen, which can be used instead of fossil fuel gas for heating and in heavy industry.
The process of making hydrogen from water uses huge amounts of electricity but abundant, cheap offshore wind power could help produce a low-cost, zero-carbon alternative to gas.
In the North Sea, energy companies are already planning to use the electricity generated by giant offshore windfarms to turn seawater into hydrogen on a floating “green hydrogen” project, backed by the UK government. The clean-burning gas could be pumped back to shore to heat millions of homes by the 2030s. The UK has committed to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The overlap between the UK’s declining oil and gas industry and the burgeoning offshore wind sector could offer major economic benefits for the UK, Birol said.
“Offshore wind provides a huge new business portfolio for major engineering firms and established oil and gas companies which have a strong offshore production experience,” he said. “Our analysis shows that 40% of the work in offshore wind construction and maintenance has synergies with oil and gas practises.”
A detailed study of the world’s coastlines has found that offshore windfarms alone could provide more electricity than the world needs – even if they are only built in windy regions in shallow waters near the shore.
Analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) revealed that if windfarms were built across all useable sites which are no further than 60km (37 miles) off the coast, and where coastal waters are no deeper than 60 metres, they could generate 36,000 terawatt hours of renewable electricity a year. This would easily meeting the current global demand for electricity of 23,000 terawatt hours.
“Offshore wind currently provides just 0.3% of global power generation, but its potential is vast,” the IEA’s executive director, Fatih Birol, said.
The study predicts offshore wind generation will grow 15-fold to emerge as a $1tn (£780bn) industry in the next 20 years and will prove to be the next great energy revolution.
The IEA said earlier this week that global supplies of renewable electricity were growing faster than expected and could expand by 50% in the next five years, driven by a resurgence in solar energy. Offshore wind power would drive the world’s growth in clean power due to plummeting costs and new technological breakthroughs, including turbines close to the height of the Eiffel Tower and floating installations that can harness wind speeds further from the coast.
The next generation of floating turbines capable of operating further from the shore could generate enough energy to meet the world’s total electricity demand 11 times over in 2040, according to IEA estimates.
The report predicts that the EU’s offshore wind capacity will grow from almost 20 gigawatts today to nearly 130 gigawatts by 2040, and could reach 180 gigawatts with stronger climate commitments.
In China, the growth of offshore wind generation is likely to be even more rapid, the IEA said. Its offshore wind capacity is forecast to grow from 4 gigawatts to 110 gigawatts by 2040 or 170 gigawatts if it adopts tougher climate targets.
Birol said offshore wind would not only contribute to generating clean electricity, but could also offer a major opportunity in the production of hydrogen, which can be used instead of fossil fuel gas for heating and in heavy industry.
The process of making hydrogen from water uses huge amounts of electricity but abundant, cheap offshore wind power could help produce a low-cost, zero-carbon alternative to gas.
In the North Sea, energy companies are already planning to use the electricity generated by giant offshore windfarms to turn seawater into hydrogen on a floating “green hydrogen” project, backed by the UK government. The clean-burning gas could be pumped back to shore to heat millions of homes by the 2030s. The UK has committed to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The overlap between the UK’s declining oil and gas industry and the burgeoning offshore wind sector could offer major economic benefits for the UK, Birol said.
“Offshore wind provides a huge new business portfolio for major engineering firms and established oil and gas companies which have a strong offshore production experience,” he said. “Our analysis shows that 40% of the work in offshore wind construction and maintenance has synergies with oil and gas practises.”
Toxic America
TVs sold by Amazon and Best Buy 'contain chemicals banned in Europe'
Several TV lines on sale in the US contain flame retardants linked to potential health problems, tests by public health campaigners find
Oliver Milman in New York
the guardian
Thu 24 Oct 2019 06.01 EDT
Popular brands of televisions sold by Amazon and Best Buy in the US contain potentially hazardous flame retardants linked to health problems including cancers and learning difficulties, according to a new report.
Six Toshiba and Insignia brand TVs, made in partnership with Amazon and Best Buy respectively, sampled by public health campaign groups contained organohalogens, which are flame retardant chemicals recently banned by the European commission over safety concerns.
Organohalogens are considered toxic and have been linked to certain cancers, harm to the nervous system and learning difficulties. The European ban, which encompasses other display-based appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines – will come into force in 2021.
There is no such wide ban in the US, although deca-BDE, a type of organohalogen flame retardant, is banned in five states. The TVs tested by a coalition of public health advocates found that the Insignia TVs contained deca-BDE.
Mike Schade, Mind the Store campaign director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, said it was “critical that large companies step up and safeguard their customers. If government won’t act, it’s up to the business community to mind the store.
“Why are Best Buy and Amazon allowing these dangerous, old-school flame retardants to be used in televisions that are supposed to be top-of-the-line? Safer alternatives exist, so organohalogen flame retardants have no place in our homes in 2019.”
In a statement, Best Buy defended its “long track record as a steward of the environment” and said it “fully supported the responsible use of chemicals above what is legally required”. It said the units in this report included recycled materials which it said regulators recognize as “important” and “allow for trace amounts of some chemicals in electronics housings”. It added that the units tested were not from its newer lines.
Chemicals from the casings of TVs can leak into the air or into dust that accumulates around the home, causing a gradual buildup in people’s bodies. While it is difficult to blame the flame retardants on any specific case of illness, campaigners say that enough concern has been raised in studies over potential links that a ban is justified.
The sampling of the TVs – on behalf of a coalition of campaign groups including Toxic Free Future, Mind the Store and Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families – involved removing small pieces of the plastic casings and sending them to a lab in the Netherlands for testing. The Insignia TVs were purchased from a Best Buy in the Seattle area, while the Amazon sets were bought online.
The testing found that all six TVs contained organohalogens as their primary flame retardants, with all three Insignia TVs containing the deca-BDE chemical.
In 2017, the US Consumer Product Safety Commissioned urged electronics manufactures to reduce use of organohalogens in plastic casings, as well as in other products such as furniture and mattresses.
A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the agency proposed a rule in June that would ban the manufacture and distribution of deca-BDE and products that contain it, including TVs, bar a few exceptions. Campaigners say that the agency should hurry up and implement a full ban.
“I don’t anticipate any quick move to address the problem of toxic chemicals – it’s mainly been left down to the states to act,” said Erika Schreder, science director with Toxic Free Future. “As a consumer there’s no way to choose a TV that is safer. People are being put at unnecessary risk given that there are safer alternatives available.”
Amazon did not respond to a request to comment.
Best Buy said it had “a restricted substances list that our suppliers must adhere to”. It added: “For organizations to assert otherwise is both inaccurate and irresponsible.
“Regulatory bodies recognize the importance of recycling and allow for trace amounts of some chemicals in electronics housings made from recycled material. The units in this report – which haven’t been part of our new product assortment for some time – do include recycled material.”
Six Toshiba and Insignia brand TVs, made in partnership with Amazon and Best Buy respectively, sampled by public health campaign groups contained organohalogens, which are flame retardant chemicals recently banned by the European commission over safety concerns.
Organohalogens are considered toxic and have been linked to certain cancers, harm to the nervous system and learning difficulties. The European ban, which encompasses other display-based appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines – will come into force in 2021.
There is no such wide ban in the US, although deca-BDE, a type of organohalogen flame retardant, is banned in five states. The TVs tested by a coalition of public health advocates found that the Insignia TVs contained deca-BDE.
Mike Schade, Mind the Store campaign director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, said it was “critical that large companies step up and safeguard their customers. If government won’t act, it’s up to the business community to mind the store.
“Why are Best Buy and Amazon allowing these dangerous, old-school flame retardants to be used in televisions that are supposed to be top-of-the-line? Safer alternatives exist, so organohalogen flame retardants have no place in our homes in 2019.”
In a statement, Best Buy defended its “long track record as a steward of the environment” and said it “fully supported the responsible use of chemicals above what is legally required”. It said the units in this report included recycled materials which it said regulators recognize as “important” and “allow for trace amounts of some chemicals in electronics housings”. It added that the units tested were not from its newer lines.
Chemicals from the casings of TVs can leak into the air or into dust that accumulates around the home, causing a gradual buildup in people’s bodies. While it is difficult to blame the flame retardants on any specific case of illness, campaigners say that enough concern has been raised in studies over potential links that a ban is justified.
The sampling of the TVs – on behalf of a coalition of campaign groups including Toxic Free Future, Mind the Store and Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families – involved removing small pieces of the plastic casings and sending them to a lab in the Netherlands for testing. The Insignia TVs were purchased from a Best Buy in the Seattle area, while the Amazon sets were bought online.
The testing found that all six TVs contained organohalogens as their primary flame retardants, with all three Insignia TVs containing the deca-BDE chemical.
In 2017, the US Consumer Product Safety Commissioned urged electronics manufactures to reduce use of organohalogens in plastic casings, as well as in other products such as furniture and mattresses.
A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the agency proposed a rule in June that would ban the manufacture and distribution of deca-BDE and products that contain it, including TVs, bar a few exceptions. Campaigners say that the agency should hurry up and implement a full ban.
“I don’t anticipate any quick move to address the problem of toxic chemicals – it’s mainly been left down to the states to act,” said Erika Schreder, science director with Toxic Free Future. “As a consumer there’s no way to choose a TV that is safer. People are being put at unnecessary risk given that there are safer alternatives available.”
Amazon did not respond to a request to comment.
Best Buy said it had “a restricted substances list that our suppliers must adhere to”. It added: “For organizations to assert otherwise is both inaccurate and irresponsible.
“Regulatory bodies recognize the importance of recycling and allow for trace amounts of some chemicals in electronics housings made from recycled material. The units in this report – which haven’t been part of our new product assortment for some time – do include recycled material.”
TOP U.S. TOXICOLOGIST WAS BARRED FROM SAYING PFAS CAUSE DISEASE IN HUMANS. SHE’S SAYING IT NOW.
Sharon Lerner - the intercept
October 24 2019, 9:01 a.m.
THE WIDESPREAD ENVIRONMENTAL contaminants known as PFAS cause multiple health problems in people, according to Linda Birnbaum, who retired as director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program earlier this month.
The statement may come as little surprise to those following the medical literature on the industrial chemicals that have been used to make nonstick coatings, firefighting foam, and host of other products. Thousands of scholarly articles have linked the chemicals to at least 800 health effects. Some of the health problems found in humans — including elevated cholesterol levels, liver dysfunction, weight gain, reproductive problems and kidney cancer — have been shown to increase along with the levels of the chemicals in blood. Extensive research also shows that children with higher levels of PFAS have weakened immune responses.
Yet while she was leading the NIEHS, a division of the National Institutes of Health, whose mission is “to discover how the environment affects people, in order to promote healthier lives,” Birnbaum was not allowed to use the word “cause” when referring to the health effects from PFAS or other chemicals.
“I was banned from doing it,” said Birnbaum. “I had to use ‘association’ all the time. If I was talking about human data or impacts on people, I had to always say there was an association with a laundry list of effects.” Birnbaum said this restriction “was coming from the office of the deputy director. His job hinged on controlling me.” Birnbaum also said that the Trump administration has recently begun coordinating its messaging on PFAS.
Association, the coincidence of a chemical exposure and disease, and causation, in which a health problem happens as the result of the exposure, are different. Because many factors, including chance and genetics and exposures to other substances, can influence the development of disease, the term “cause” is used rarely and cautiously in the field of environmental health.
But Birnbaum, who has studied PFAS compounds for decades, believes the global contaminants have cleared that high bar. “In my mind, PFAS cause health effects because you have the same kind of effects reported in multiple studies in multiple populations,” she said in a phone interview. Birnbaum pointed in particular to longitudinal studies, which follow populations’ exposures and health over time. “You have longitudinal studies showing the same effects in multiple populations done by multiple investigators and you have animal models showing the same impact,” said Birnbaum. In addition, she pointed to studies that show the mechanism through which PFAS chemicals cause harm in people.
“That is pretty good evidence that PFAS or certain PFAS can cause health effects in people. It is not as strong for every effect, but there are quite a number of effects where they’re strong enough to say ‘caused,’” Birnbaum said. She pointed in particular to the relationship between the chemicals and immune response, kidney cancer, and cholesterol in humans, saying, “That data is very clear.”
Birnbaum has been targeted by the chemical industry and politicians beholden to it on several occasions during her nearly 40-year career as a federal scientist, which included 19 years at the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2012, Republicans on the House Science Committee went after Birnbaum for writing that endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment were responsible for “a staggering increase in several diseases.”
She also faced backlash after the National Toxicology Program conducted screenings of formulations containing glyphosate, the main active ingredient in Monsanto’s popular weedkiller Roundup. “There were huge attacks on the institute and on me personally related to glyphosate,” said Birnbaum, whose office was flooded with FOIA requests that she said came from law firms. “I had to hire four to six people to work on the FOIA issue. We were up to having about 140 to 150 backlogged FOIA requests. You couldn’t deal with them quickly enough.”
Her run-in with Republicans on the House Science Committee last year may have had the most severe consequences. Reps. Andy Biggs and Lamar Smith accused Birnbaum of lobbying based on an editorial in the journal PLOS Biology. In it, Birnbaum wrote that “U.S. policy has not accounted for evidence that chemicals in widespread use can cause cancer and other chronic diseases, damage reproductive systems, and harm developing brains at low levels of exposure once believed to be harmless.” She called for more research on the risks posed by chemicals and noted that “closing the gap between evidence and policy will require that engaged citizens — both scientists and non-scientists — work to ensure that our government officials pass health-protective policies based on the best available scientific evidence.”
After that, “everything was scrutinized that I did. Everything I did required clearance. Even in my lab,” said Birnbaum. “All of a sudden, everything had to go up at least to building 1,” she said, referring to the Bethesda building that serves as the administrative center for the National Institutes of Health. Birnbaum was also denied a salary increase after the incident and became aware that her job was at stake. “I was told that they were trying to fire to me.”
At the same time, PFAS compounds were becoming the focus of intense scrutiny from both state regulatory agencies and Congress. As contamination from the chemicals was being discovered around the country, it became clear that both the companies that made and used the PFAS compounds and the military, which used firefighting foam that contained them, could face billions of dollars of liability.
Proving a causal connection between the chemicals and disease will be central to holding them accountable. In litigation over PFOA contamination in West Virginia, DuPont’s lawyers were forbidden from questioning the causal relationship between exposure to the chemical and six different diseases, including testicular cancer and kidney cancer. The company has paid out over $1 billion in that case and subsequently spun off its division that makes PFAS compounds to a new company, Chemours.
Despite the voluminous research on the health effects of the chemicals, 3M, the company that first developed both PFOA and PFOS and sold PFOA to DuPont for many years, still argues that the compounds do not cause health problems. In her testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in September, Denise Rutherford, 3M’s senior vice president of corporate affairs, said that “the weight of scientific evidence has not established that PFOS, PFOA, or other PFAS cause adverse human health effects.” The company also requested that The Intercept remove the word “cause” in a recent article about PFAS. That request was denied.
Even though she knew she was being closely watched, Birnbaum felt it was important to continue to make her institute’s science public. At a meeting this summer, she reported on the results of rat studies done by the National Toxicology Program that linked exposure of very low doses of PFOA to pancreatic cancer. Birnbaum said that, based on that data, a safe dose of the chemical would be about .1 parts-per-trillion, 700 times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold, as The Intercept reported at the time.
The gulf between the threshold suggested by the new cancer data and the actual number published by the EPA pointed to a schism between the federal agencies — and reveals the inadequacy of the government response to the threats posed by the chemicals. Along with the delay of a report on PFAS by the Agencies for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which also proposed lower safety thresholds than those set by the EPA, Birnbaum’s public discussion of the alarming rat study may be part of the reason that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget began holding regular meetings of federal agencies working on PFAS in recent months. According to Birnbaum, two groups of federal scientists have been gathering to coordinate the government’s science, policy, and messaging around PFAS. The White House office did not respond to inquiries about the group.
For her part, Birnbaum is now enjoying being able to speak about science free of the constraints that came with her job, which had worsened in recent years. By the end, “I couldn’t even give a welcome at a meeting without approval,” she said. Asked what she would have done differently had she not been under such intense pressure, Birnbaum responded that “I would have used the word ‘cause.’”
The statement may come as little surprise to those following the medical literature on the industrial chemicals that have been used to make nonstick coatings, firefighting foam, and host of other products. Thousands of scholarly articles have linked the chemicals to at least 800 health effects. Some of the health problems found in humans — including elevated cholesterol levels, liver dysfunction, weight gain, reproductive problems and kidney cancer — have been shown to increase along with the levels of the chemicals in blood. Extensive research also shows that children with higher levels of PFAS have weakened immune responses.
Yet while she was leading the NIEHS, a division of the National Institutes of Health, whose mission is “to discover how the environment affects people, in order to promote healthier lives,” Birnbaum was not allowed to use the word “cause” when referring to the health effects from PFAS or other chemicals.
“I was banned from doing it,” said Birnbaum. “I had to use ‘association’ all the time. If I was talking about human data or impacts on people, I had to always say there was an association with a laundry list of effects.” Birnbaum said this restriction “was coming from the office of the deputy director. His job hinged on controlling me.” Birnbaum also said that the Trump administration has recently begun coordinating its messaging on PFAS.
Association, the coincidence of a chemical exposure and disease, and causation, in which a health problem happens as the result of the exposure, are different. Because many factors, including chance and genetics and exposures to other substances, can influence the development of disease, the term “cause” is used rarely and cautiously in the field of environmental health.
But Birnbaum, who has studied PFAS compounds for decades, believes the global contaminants have cleared that high bar. “In my mind, PFAS cause health effects because you have the same kind of effects reported in multiple studies in multiple populations,” she said in a phone interview. Birnbaum pointed in particular to longitudinal studies, which follow populations’ exposures and health over time. “You have longitudinal studies showing the same effects in multiple populations done by multiple investigators and you have animal models showing the same impact,” said Birnbaum. In addition, she pointed to studies that show the mechanism through which PFAS chemicals cause harm in people.
“That is pretty good evidence that PFAS or certain PFAS can cause health effects in people. It is not as strong for every effect, but there are quite a number of effects where they’re strong enough to say ‘caused,’” Birnbaum said. She pointed in particular to the relationship between the chemicals and immune response, kidney cancer, and cholesterol in humans, saying, “That data is very clear.”
Birnbaum has been targeted by the chemical industry and politicians beholden to it on several occasions during her nearly 40-year career as a federal scientist, which included 19 years at the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2012, Republicans on the House Science Committee went after Birnbaum for writing that endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment were responsible for “a staggering increase in several diseases.”
She also faced backlash after the National Toxicology Program conducted screenings of formulations containing glyphosate, the main active ingredient in Monsanto’s popular weedkiller Roundup. “There were huge attacks on the institute and on me personally related to glyphosate,” said Birnbaum, whose office was flooded with FOIA requests that she said came from law firms. “I had to hire four to six people to work on the FOIA issue. We were up to having about 140 to 150 backlogged FOIA requests. You couldn’t deal with them quickly enough.”
Her run-in with Republicans on the House Science Committee last year may have had the most severe consequences. Reps. Andy Biggs and Lamar Smith accused Birnbaum of lobbying based on an editorial in the journal PLOS Biology. In it, Birnbaum wrote that “U.S. policy has not accounted for evidence that chemicals in widespread use can cause cancer and other chronic diseases, damage reproductive systems, and harm developing brains at low levels of exposure once believed to be harmless.” She called for more research on the risks posed by chemicals and noted that “closing the gap between evidence and policy will require that engaged citizens — both scientists and non-scientists — work to ensure that our government officials pass health-protective policies based on the best available scientific evidence.”
After that, “everything was scrutinized that I did. Everything I did required clearance. Even in my lab,” said Birnbaum. “All of a sudden, everything had to go up at least to building 1,” she said, referring to the Bethesda building that serves as the administrative center for the National Institutes of Health. Birnbaum was also denied a salary increase after the incident and became aware that her job was at stake. “I was told that they were trying to fire to me.”
At the same time, PFAS compounds were becoming the focus of intense scrutiny from both state regulatory agencies and Congress. As contamination from the chemicals was being discovered around the country, it became clear that both the companies that made and used the PFAS compounds and the military, which used firefighting foam that contained them, could face billions of dollars of liability.
Proving a causal connection between the chemicals and disease will be central to holding them accountable. In litigation over PFOA contamination in West Virginia, DuPont’s lawyers were forbidden from questioning the causal relationship between exposure to the chemical and six different diseases, including testicular cancer and kidney cancer. The company has paid out over $1 billion in that case and subsequently spun off its division that makes PFAS compounds to a new company, Chemours.
Despite the voluminous research on the health effects of the chemicals, 3M, the company that first developed both PFOA and PFOS and sold PFOA to DuPont for many years, still argues that the compounds do not cause health problems. In her testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in September, Denise Rutherford, 3M’s senior vice president of corporate affairs, said that “the weight of scientific evidence has not established that PFOS, PFOA, or other PFAS cause adverse human health effects.” The company also requested that The Intercept remove the word “cause” in a recent article about PFAS. That request was denied.
Even though she knew she was being closely watched, Birnbaum felt it was important to continue to make her institute’s science public. At a meeting this summer, she reported on the results of rat studies done by the National Toxicology Program that linked exposure of very low doses of PFOA to pancreatic cancer. Birnbaum said that, based on that data, a safe dose of the chemical would be about .1 parts-per-trillion, 700 times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold, as The Intercept reported at the time.
The gulf between the threshold suggested by the new cancer data and the actual number published by the EPA pointed to a schism between the federal agencies — and reveals the inadequacy of the government response to the threats posed by the chemicals. Along with the delay of a report on PFAS by the Agencies for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which also proposed lower safety thresholds than those set by the EPA, Birnbaum’s public discussion of the alarming rat study may be part of the reason that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget began holding regular meetings of federal agencies working on PFAS in recent months. According to Birnbaum, two groups of federal scientists have been gathering to coordinate the government’s science, policy, and messaging around PFAS. The White House office did not respond to inquiries about the group.
For her part, Birnbaum is now enjoying being able to speak about science free of the constraints that came with her job, which had worsened in recent years. By the end, “I couldn’t even give a welcome at a meeting without approval,” she said. Asked what she would have done differently had she not been under such intense pressure, Birnbaum responded that “I would have used the word ‘cause.’”
New Data Show Severity of Water Contamination in Poor Neighborhoods
BY Daniel Ross, Truthout
PUBLISHED October 23, 2019
Curious to know exactly what’s in the water that flows from your taps? Then simply plug your zip code into the latest iteration of the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) Tap Water Database.
The database provides an analysis of the water springing from the nation’s faucets, with updated information pertaining to issues like the water quality impacts from agricultural runoff, lead contamination stemming from aging infrastructure, as well as the growing human health and environmental threats posed by Per- and Polyfluorinated Alkyl Substances, otherwise known as PFASs. As of October 2019, 1,026 sites in 49 states are known to be impacted by this potentially toxic family of chemical, according to the EWG.
The database also serves to highlight a glaring injustice inherent in U.S. drinking water systems: low-income communities are more likely than their wealthier neighbors to be served drinking water that is of poorer quality, with higher levels of potentially toxic contaminants.
“The relationship between social and economic indicators and water quality is well established,” Olga Naidenko, vice president of science investigations for EWG — an environmental health nonprofit — told Truthout. “Poor people always have the short end of the stick.”
The EWG database update published this week comprises drinking water results taken between 2012 and 2017 from nearly 50,000 local utilities in 50 states. The information included is more detailed than that found in Consumer Confidence Reports — an annual federally mandated report in which only the levels of regulated contaminants are required to be reported. By comparison, listed in the EWG database are 278 contaminants detected by local utilities, more than 160 of which have no federal standard. Even if a contaminant falls under state or federal regulations, the permitted thresholds may be at levels authoritative scientific studies have found to be potentially unsafe for humans.
At Truthout’s request, EWG researchers ran the numbers on the latest database to look at some of the ways in which the socioeconomic disparities in drinking water quality play out.
Looking specifically at arsenic, a known carcinogen, smaller drinking water systems tend to have higher arsenic levels in drinking water than larger water systems, the EWG told Truthout. Smaller water utilities, which commonly struggle with underfunding and aging systems, are more likely than their larger cousins to serve low-income, disadvantaged communities.
Looking at the bigger picture, while the list of contaminants tends to be similar in both smaller and larger systems, the levels of these contaminants differ, with higher levels found in smaller systems, according to EWG science analyst Sydney Evans. She added that, like arsenic, carcinogenic nitrates are typically discovered at higher concentrations in smaller systems as compared to larger ones.
Of the more than 150,000 operational public water systems in the U.S., 97 percent of them are considered small, meaning they serve 10,000 or fewer people. These small systems serve 21 percent of the population receiving drinking water from public water utilities.
Growing Awareness of Causes
The correlation between disadvantaged communities and poor drinking water quality is indeed well established, as Naidenko points out. Last year, for example, the National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report into national drinking water standards going back decades.
The National Academy of Sciences found that every year between 1982 and 2015, between 9 and 45 million people were served water that had violated federal health-based water quality standards. In 2015 alone, nearly 10 percent of community water systems serving nearly 21 million Americans had violated these standards. Tellingly, the report found that some of the most vulnerable populations were those from low-income rural areas, with parts of Oklahoma and West Texas among the worst community water system serial violators.
Those links between poor tap water and poor communities again came to the fore in the findings of another recent and comprehensive study, titled “Watered Down Justice,” put together by three environmental advocacy organizations: the Natural Resources Defense Council, Coming Clean and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance.
The report used Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data from between 2016 and 2019. It found that socioeconomic indicators like race, ethnicity, language spoken and access to transportation had the strongest relationship to ineffective enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the nation’s signature drinking water law, and higher instances of serious violations.
Community water systems notorious for being serial violators were 40 percent more likely to be found in communities with higher percentages of people of color, the report found, while small systems were responsible for more than 80 percent of all violations. All told, nearly 130 million Americans were served drinking water that violated federal standards during the period reviewed in the report.
A well-established correlation? Sure. But it hasn’t always been an issue that has enjoyed much of a public airing. That said, recent high-profile events have helped to reshape the narrative, like the disaster in Flint, Michigan, where in early 2016, a federal emergency was declared after it came to light that a cost-cutting change in water source led to widespread high blood lead concentrations among those served. Currently, about 54 percent of Flint’s residents are African American -- of those, 41 percent live below the poverty line.
Moreover, there is growing understanding of the underlying political, economic and cultural causes propping up this status quo, and more of the long-term human health implications are coming to light, as well.
The American Society of Civil Engineers already scores the nation’s infrastructure a miserable D+, while in its own 2016 report, the EPA admitted that aging and underfunded water infrastructure heavily contributes to issues of poor drinking water quality. Which water systems are least likely to receive the funding needed to produce safe drinking water? Those serving disadvantaged communities and people of color.
As to the potential long-term human health effects from living with poor drinking water, the “Watered Down Justice” report points to cancer, developmental, fertility and nervous system issues, along with gastrointestinal disease — problems that can pose the greatest threat to vulnerable members of the community, such as the elderly and people with chronic health problems.
In that respect, many experts are looking to California to lead the charge toward reform, thanks to the “Human Right to Water” bill signed into law back in 2012 by then-California Gov. Jerry Brown.[...]
The database provides an analysis of the water springing from the nation’s faucets, with updated information pertaining to issues like the water quality impacts from agricultural runoff, lead contamination stemming from aging infrastructure, as well as the growing human health and environmental threats posed by Per- and Polyfluorinated Alkyl Substances, otherwise known as PFASs. As of October 2019, 1,026 sites in 49 states are known to be impacted by this potentially toxic family of chemical, according to the EWG.
The database also serves to highlight a glaring injustice inherent in U.S. drinking water systems: low-income communities are more likely than their wealthier neighbors to be served drinking water that is of poorer quality, with higher levels of potentially toxic contaminants.
“The relationship between social and economic indicators and water quality is well established,” Olga Naidenko, vice president of science investigations for EWG — an environmental health nonprofit — told Truthout. “Poor people always have the short end of the stick.”
The EWG database update published this week comprises drinking water results taken between 2012 and 2017 from nearly 50,000 local utilities in 50 states. The information included is more detailed than that found in Consumer Confidence Reports — an annual federally mandated report in which only the levels of regulated contaminants are required to be reported. By comparison, listed in the EWG database are 278 contaminants detected by local utilities, more than 160 of which have no federal standard. Even if a contaminant falls under state or federal regulations, the permitted thresholds may be at levels authoritative scientific studies have found to be potentially unsafe for humans.
At Truthout’s request, EWG researchers ran the numbers on the latest database to look at some of the ways in which the socioeconomic disparities in drinking water quality play out.
Looking specifically at arsenic, a known carcinogen, smaller drinking water systems tend to have higher arsenic levels in drinking water than larger water systems, the EWG told Truthout. Smaller water utilities, which commonly struggle with underfunding and aging systems, are more likely than their larger cousins to serve low-income, disadvantaged communities.
Looking at the bigger picture, while the list of contaminants tends to be similar in both smaller and larger systems, the levels of these contaminants differ, with higher levels found in smaller systems, according to EWG science analyst Sydney Evans. She added that, like arsenic, carcinogenic nitrates are typically discovered at higher concentrations in smaller systems as compared to larger ones.
Of the more than 150,000 operational public water systems in the U.S., 97 percent of them are considered small, meaning they serve 10,000 or fewer people. These small systems serve 21 percent of the population receiving drinking water from public water utilities.
Growing Awareness of Causes
The correlation between disadvantaged communities and poor drinking water quality is indeed well established, as Naidenko points out. Last year, for example, the National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report into national drinking water standards going back decades.
The National Academy of Sciences found that every year between 1982 and 2015, between 9 and 45 million people were served water that had violated federal health-based water quality standards. In 2015 alone, nearly 10 percent of community water systems serving nearly 21 million Americans had violated these standards. Tellingly, the report found that some of the most vulnerable populations were those from low-income rural areas, with parts of Oklahoma and West Texas among the worst community water system serial violators.
Those links between poor tap water and poor communities again came to the fore in the findings of another recent and comprehensive study, titled “Watered Down Justice,” put together by three environmental advocacy organizations: the Natural Resources Defense Council, Coming Clean and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance.
The report used Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data from between 2016 and 2019. It found that socioeconomic indicators like race, ethnicity, language spoken and access to transportation had the strongest relationship to ineffective enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the nation’s signature drinking water law, and higher instances of serious violations.
Community water systems notorious for being serial violators were 40 percent more likely to be found in communities with higher percentages of people of color, the report found, while small systems were responsible for more than 80 percent of all violations. All told, nearly 130 million Americans were served drinking water that violated federal standards during the period reviewed in the report.
A well-established correlation? Sure. But it hasn’t always been an issue that has enjoyed much of a public airing. That said, recent high-profile events have helped to reshape the narrative, like the disaster in Flint, Michigan, where in early 2016, a federal emergency was declared after it came to light that a cost-cutting change in water source led to widespread high blood lead concentrations among those served. Currently, about 54 percent of Flint’s residents are African American -- of those, 41 percent live below the poverty line.
Moreover, there is growing understanding of the underlying political, economic and cultural causes propping up this status quo, and more of the long-term human health implications are coming to light, as well.
The American Society of Civil Engineers already scores the nation’s infrastructure a miserable D+, while in its own 2016 report, the EPA admitted that aging and underfunded water infrastructure heavily contributes to issues of poor drinking water quality. Which water systems are least likely to receive the funding needed to produce safe drinking water? Those serving disadvantaged communities and people of color.
As to the potential long-term human health effects from living with poor drinking water, the “Watered Down Justice” report points to cancer, developmental, fertility and nervous system issues, along with gastrointestinal disease — problems that can pose the greatest threat to vulnerable members of the community, such as the elderly and people with chronic health problems.
In that respect, many experts are looking to California to lead the charge toward reform, thanks to the “Human Right to Water” bill signed into law back in 2012 by then-California Gov. Jerry Brown.[...]
95 percent of baby foods tested contain toxic metals that could harm brain development, study finds
Experts tell Salon parents how to navigate these possibly harmful toxins with healthier diet choices and screenings
SHIRA TARLO - salon
OCTOBER 19, 2019 9:30PM (UTC)
Sleep deprivation, diaper changes and late-night feedings are a few of the many common challenges faced by parents with a new baby at home. To ease the transition, parents often rely on the convenience of store-brand baby foods to provide the nutrients their children need in order to develop into healthy toddlers, young adults, teenagers and eventually adults. But there is a strong likelihood that nearly every can, jar and pouch of store-bought baby food contains traces of toxic heavy metals, including arsenic and lead, according to a new study.
The research, commissioned by Healthy Babies Bright Futures (HBBF) and detailed in a report published Thursday, tested 168 baby foods from major manufacturers in the U.S. for the presence of four heavy metals: arsenic, lead, mercury and cadmium.
The study found that 95 percent of the baby foods tested were contaminated by at least one of the four heavy metals, and 25 percent contained all four metals. Only nine of the 168 baby foods tested were not found to contain detectable traces of any of the four metals.
"Any amount of heavy metal can be potentially dangerous to a growing and developing baby," Dr. Jen Trachtenberg, MD, a nationally-recognized parenting expert, explained to Salon. "There is metal contaminants everywhere in the environment, water air and soil.”
Among the popular baby foods estimated to pose the highest risk are fruit juices, as well as rice-based products, including puff snacks and rice cereals. Rice is especially effective at absorbing arsenic, a common pesticide, as it grows. Four of seven infant rice cereals tested contained inorganic arsenic, which is the most toxic form of the metal, in levels exceeding the Food and Drug Administration’s proposed limit of 100 parts per billion.
Because rice is grown in water, the plant and grain tend to absorb higher levels of inorganic arsenic than other foods, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Leafy greens and root crops like sweet potatoes and carrots also retain higher levels of heavy metals than other vegetables. Organic products are not reliable either, according to the study.
"One of the best thing to do is to give baby a wide variety of different foods right from the start instead of relying on old recommendations of rice cereal, for example," Trachtenberg said. "As this study indicates, rice and fruit juices are high in heavy metals, so it’s just another reason why parents should avoid them as daily first baby foods. Rather, use oatmeal or other mixed grains and after six months of age introduce water in addition to breast milk or formula."
The study included 61 brands and 13 types of foods, including infant formula, teething biscuits, cereals and fruit juices. Baby food from various stores across the country — supermarkets, dollar stores, baby stores, super stores — and two online-only retailers was purchased and assessed.
In spite of these results, there are preventative measures parents can take in order to help their children avoid contamination from heavy metals.
“Parents can help their children absorb less lead and other heavy metals by giving their children a well-balanced diet that includes a variety of foods that are high in calcium and iron and by reducing the amount of fruit juice they drink," Dr. Scott Jelinek, MD, MPH, a pediatric resident physician at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital, told Salon.
Moreover, there is no need for parents to serve their children juice, a beverage which offers no nutritional benefits to children under age one, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Juice lacks dietary fiber and also carries the risk of tooth decay and excessive weight gain.
"There is no need for young children to drink juice,” Trachtenbergs said. “Offer different types of fruits and vegetable which can help improve picky eating by frequent exposures leading to better nutrition in the long term.”
Among the metals, lead was found most frequently, appearing in 94 percent of the baby foods tested. Cadmium and arsenic followed, showing up in approximately three-quarters of the baby foods tested. Mercury was the least common, found in roughly one-third of the baby foods tested. All of the metals except mercury are known as potent human carcinogens.
The four metals are also neurotoxic, and thus may pose serious threats to a child's brain development. And while many factors can contribute to a child's IQ — from nutrition and genetics to environmental toxins like heavy metals — the levels of arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead found in baby food "constitute both a significant and a solvable problem," the report noted.
"Even in the trace amounts found in baby food, these contaminants can alter the developing brain and erode a child's IQ," the report continued. “The impacts add up with each meal or snack a baby eats.”
A data analysis also commissioned by HBBF estimated that children ages 0 to 24 months have already lost more than 11 million IQ points from exposure to arsenic and lead in food. Just 15 foods contribute to more than half of this IQ loss, with rice-based foods alone making up 20 percent of it.
Additional impacts of heavy metal exposure include attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as learning and behavioral impacts.
The results underscored that while reports of heavy metals in baby food span nearly a decade, the problem remains unsolved.
To reduce the level of heavy metals in baby foods, the FDA should establish regulations, the report recommended. For nearly 90 percent of the baby foods tested, the FDA did not set standards for the maximum safe limit of heavy medals.
The researchers also recommended that the FDA implement a testing program for heavy metals in foods consumed by babies and toddlers. Notably, the AAP recommends all children receive a lead risk assessment at six months, nine months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, and at three, four, five and six years of age. If the risk assessment comes back positive, AAP recommends a blood lead level test is conducted.
Dr. Jelinek praised the study for drawing attention to the issue of screening for such toxins.
“Lead exposure is a preventable environmental threat to children’s neurocognitive development and this study draws attention to the importance of screening all children during pediatric visits for their risk of lead exposure," he said.
The research, commissioned by Healthy Babies Bright Futures (HBBF) and detailed in a report published Thursday, tested 168 baby foods from major manufacturers in the U.S. for the presence of four heavy metals: arsenic, lead, mercury and cadmium.
The study found that 95 percent of the baby foods tested were contaminated by at least one of the four heavy metals, and 25 percent contained all four metals. Only nine of the 168 baby foods tested were not found to contain detectable traces of any of the four metals.
"Any amount of heavy metal can be potentially dangerous to a growing and developing baby," Dr. Jen Trachtenberg, MD, a nationally-recognized parenting expert, explained to Salon. "There is metal contaminants everywhere in the environment, water air and soil.”
Among the popular baby foods estimated to pose the highest risk are fruit juices, as well as rice-based products, including puff snacks and rice cereals. Rice is especially effective at absorbing arsenic, a common pesticide, as it grows. Four of seven infant rice cereals tested contained inorganic arsenic, which is the most toxic form of the metal, in levels exceeding the Food and Drug Administration’s proposed limit of 100 parts per billion.
Because rice is grown in water, the plant and grain tend to absorb higher levels of inorganic arsenic than other foods, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Leafy greens and root crops like sweet potatoes and carrots also retain higher levels of heavy metals than other vegetables. Organic products are not reliable either, according to the study.
"One of the best thing to do is to give baby a wide variety of different foods right from the start instead of relying on old recommendations of rice cereal, for example," Trachtenberg said. "As this study indicates, rice and fruit juices are high in heavy metals, so it’s just another reason why parents should avoid them as daily first baby foods. Rather, use oatmeal or other mixed grains and after six months of age introduce water in addition to breast milk or formula."
The study included 61 brands and 13 types of foods, including infant formula, teething biscuits, cereals and fruit juices. Baby food from various stores across the country — supermarkets, dollar stores, baby stores, super stores — and two online-only retailers was purchased and assessed.
In spite of these results, there are preventative measures parents can take in order to help their children avoid contamination from heavy metals.
“Parents can help their children absorb less lead and other heavy metals by giving their children a well-balanced diet that includes a variety of foods that are high in calcium and iron and by reducing the amount of fruit juice they drink," Dr. Scott Jelinek, MD, MPH, a pediatric resident physician at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital, told Salon.
Moreover, there is no need for parents to serve their children juice, a beverage which offers no nutritional benefits to children under age one, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Juice lacks dietary fiber and also carries the risk of tooth decay and excessive weight gain.
"There is no need for young children to drink juice,” Trachtenbergs said. “Offer different types of fruits and vegetable which can help improve picky eating by frequent exposures leading to better nutrition in the long term.”
Among the metals, lead was found most frequently, appearing in 94 percent of the baby foods tested. Cadmium and arsenic followed, showing up in approximately three-quarters of the baby foods tested. Mercury was the least common, found in roughly one-third of the baby foods tested. All of the metals except mercury are known as potent human carcinogens.
The four metals are also neurotoxic, and thus may pose serious threats to a child's brain development. And while many factors can contribute to a child's IQ — from nutrition and genetics to environmental toxins like heavy metals — the levels of arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead found in baby food "constitute both a significant and a solvable problem," the report noted.
"Even in the trace amounts found in baby food, these contaminants can alter the developing brain and erode a child's IQ," the report continued. “The impacts add up with each meal or snack a baby eats.”
A data analysis also commissioned by HBBF estimated that children ages 0 to 24 months have already lost more than 11 million IQ points from exposure to arsenic and lead in food. Just 15 foods contribute to more than half of this IQ loss, with rice-based foods alone making up 20 percent of it.
Additional impacts of heavy metal exposure include attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as learning and behavioral impacts.
The results underscored that while reports of heavy metals in baby food span nearly a decade, the problem remains unsolved.
To reduce the level of heavy metals in baby foods, the FDA should establish regulations, the report recommended. For nearly 90 percent of the baby foods tested, the FDA did not set standards for the maximum safe limit of heavy medals.
The researchers also recommended that the FDA implement a testing program for heavy metals in foods consumed by babies and toddlers. Notably, the AAP recommends all children receive a lead risk assessment at six months, nine months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, and at three, four, five and six years of age. If the risk assessment comes back positive, AAP recommends a blood lead level test is conducted.
Dr. Jelinek praised the study for drawing attention to the issue of screening for such toxins.
“Lead exposure is a preventable environmental threat to children’s neurocognitive development and this study draws attention to the importance of screening all children during pediatric visits for their risk of lead exposure," he said.
Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions
New data shows how fossil fuel companies have driven climate crisis despite industry knowing dangers
by Matthew Taylor and Jonathan Watts - the guardian
Wed 9 Oct 2019 07.00 EDT
The Guardian today reveals the 20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.
New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the industry’s devastating impact on the planet.
The analysis, by Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in the US, the world’s leading authority on big oil’s role in the escalating climate emergency, evaluates what the global corporations have extracted from the ground, and the subsequent emissions these fossil fuels are responsible for since 1965 – the point at which experts say the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by both industry leaders and politicians.
The top 20 companies on the list have contributed to 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane worldwide, totalling 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) since 1965.
Twelve of the top 20 companies are state-owned and together their extractions are responsible for 20% of total emissions in the same period. The leading state-owned polluter is Saudi Aramco, which has produced 4.38% of the global total on its own.
Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, said the findings shone a light on the role of fossil fuel companies and called on politicians at the forthcoming climate talks in Chile in December to take urgent measures to rein in their activities.
“The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that seven and a half billion people must pay the price – in the form of a degraded planet – so that a couple of dozen polluting interests can continue to make record profits. It is a great moral failing of our political system that we have allowed this to happen.”
The global polluters list uses company-reported annual production of oil, natural gas, and coal and then calculates how much of the carbon and methane in the produced fuels is emitted to the atmosphere throughout the supply chain, from extraction to end use.
It found that 90% of the emissions attributed to the top 20 climate culprits was from use of their products, such as petrol, jet fuel, natural gas, and thermal coal. One-tenth came from extracting, refining, and delivering the finished fuels.
The Guardian approached the 20 companies named in the polluters list. Seven of them replied. Some argued that they were not directly responsible for how the oil, gas or coal they extracted were used by consumers. Several disputed claims that the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known as far back as the late 1950s or that the industry collectively had worked to delay action.
Most explicitly said they accepted the climate science and some claimed to support the targets set out in the Paris agreement to reduce emissions and keep global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
All pointed out efforts they were making to invest in renewable or low carbon energy sources and said fossil fuel companies had an important role to play in addressing the climate crisis. PetroChina said it was a separate company from its predecessor, China National Petroleum, so had no influence over, or responsibility for, its historical emissions. The companies’ replies can be read in full here.
The latest study builds on previous work by Heede and his team that has looked at the historical role of fossil fuel companies in the escalating climate crisis.
The impact of emissions from coal, oil and gas produced by fossil fuel companies has been huge. According to research published in 2017 by Peter Frumhoff at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US and colleagues, CO2 and methane emissions from the 90 biggest industrial carbon producers were responsible for almost half the rise in global temperature and close to a third of the sea level rise between 1880 and 2010. The scientists said such work furthered the “consideration of [companies’] historical responsibilities for climate change”.
Heede said: “These companies and their products are substantially responsible for the climate emergency, have collectively delayed national and global action for decades, and can no longer hide behind the smokescreen that consumers are the responsible parties.
“Oil, gas, and coal executives derail progress and offer platitudes when their vast capital, technical expertise, and moral obligation should enable rather than thwart the shift to a low-carbon future.”
Heede said 1965 was chosen as the start point for this new data because recent research had revealed that by that stage the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by industry leaders and politicians, particularly in the US.
In November 1965, the president, Lyndon Johnson, released a report authored by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, which set out the likely impact of continued fossil fuel production on global heating.
In the same year, the president of the American Petroleum Institute told its annual gathering: “One of the most important predictions of the [president’s report] is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at such a rate by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.”
Heede added: “Leading companies and industry associations were aware of, or wilfully ignored, the threat of climate change from continued use of their products since the late 1950s.”
The research aims to hold to account those companies most responsible for carbon emissions, and shift public and political debate away from a focus just on individual responsibility. It follows a warning from the UN in 2018 that the world has just 12 years to avoid the worst consequences of runaway global heating and restrict temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
The study shows that many of the worst offenders are investor-owned companies that are household names around the world and spend billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.
A study earlier this year found that the largest five stock-market-listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m each year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change.
Heede said the companies had a “significant moral, financial, and legal responsibility for the climate crisis, and a commensurate burden to help address the problem”.
He added: “Even though global consumers from individuals to corporations are the ultimate emitters of carbon dioxide, the Climate Accountability Institute focuses its work on the fossil fuel companies that, in our view, have their collective hand on the throttle and the tiller determining the rate of carbon emissions and the shift to non-carbon fuels.”
CLICK HERE FOR LIST OF COMPANIES.
RELATED: Richmond v Chevron The California city taking on its most powerful polluter
RELATED: Global polluters: What do we know about the worst 20? its most
New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the industry’s devastating impact on the planet.
The analysis, by Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in the US, the world’s leading authority on big oil’s role in the escalating climate emergency, evaluates what the global corporations have extracted from the ground, and the subsequent emissions these fossil fuels are responsible for since 1965 – the point at which experts say the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by both industry leaders and politicians.
The top 20 companies on the list have contributed to 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane worldwide, totalling 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) since 1965.
Twelve of the top 20 companies are state-owned and together their extractions are responsible for 20% of total emissions in the same period. The leading state-owned polluter is Saudi Aramco, which has produced 4.38% of the global total on its own.
Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, said the findings shone a light on the role of fossil fuel companies and called on politicians at the forthcoming climate talks in Chile in December to take urgent measures to rein in their activities.
“The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that seven and a half billion people must pay the price – in the form of a degraded planet – so that a couple of dozen polluting interests can continue to make record profits. It is a great moral failing of our political system that we have allowed this to happen.”
The global polluters list uses company-reported annual production of oil, natural gas, and coal and then calculates how much of the carbon and methane in the produced fuels is emitted to the atmosphere throughout the supply chain, from extraction to end use.
It found that 90% of the emissions attributed to the top 20 climate culprits was from use of their products, such as petrol, jet fuel, natural gas, and thermal coal. One-tenth came from extracting, refining, and delivering the finished fuels.
The Guardian approached the 20 companies named in the polluters list. Seven of them replied. Some argued that they were not directly responsible for how the oil, gas or coal they extracted were used by consumers. Several disputed claims that the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known as far back as the late 1950s or that the industry collectively had worked to delay action.
Most explicitly said they accepted the climate science and some claimed to support the targets set out in the Paris agreement to reduce emissions and keep global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
All pointed out efforts they were making to invest in renewable or low carbon energy sources and said fossil fuel companies had an important role to play in addressing the climate crisis. PetroChina said it was a separate company from its predecessor, China National Petroleum, so had no influence over, or responsibility for, its historical emissions. The companies’ replies can be read in full here.
The latest study builds on previous work by Heede and his team that has looked at the historical role of fossil fuel companies in the escalating climate crisis.
The impact of emissions from coal, oil and gas produced by fossil fuel companies has been huge. According to research published in 2017 by Peter Frumhoff at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US and colleagues, CO2 and methane emissions from the 90 biggest industrial carbon producers were responsible for almost half the rise in global temperature and close to a third of the sea level rise between 1880 and 2010. The scientists said such work furthered the “consideration of [companies’] historical responsibilities for climate change”.
Heede said: “These companies and their products are substantially responsible for the climate emergency, have collectively delayed national and global action for decades, and can no longer hide behind the smokescreen that consumers are the responsible parties.
“Oil, gas, and coal executives derail progress and offer platitudes when their vast capital, technical expertise, and moral obligation should enable rather than thwart the shift to a low-carbon future.”
Heede said 1965 was chosen as the start point for this new data because recent research had revealed that by that stage the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by industry leaders and politicians, particularly in the US.
In November 1965, the president, Lyndon Johnson, released a report authored by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, which set out the likely impact of continued fossil fuel production on global heating.
In the same year, the president of the American Petroleum Institute told its annual gathering: “One of the most important predictions of the [president’s report] is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at such a rate by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.”
Heede added: “Leading companies and industry associations were aware of, or wilfully ignored, the threat of climate change from continued use of their products since the late 1950s.”
The research aims to hold to account those companies most responsible for carbon emissions, and shift public and political debate away from a focus just on individual responsibility. It follows a warning from the UN in 2018 that the world has just 12 years to avoid the worst consequences of runaway global heating and restrict temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
The study shows that many of the worst offenders are investor-owned companies that are household names around the world and spend billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.
A study earlier this year found that the largest five stock-market-listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m each year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change.
Heede said the companies had a “significant moral, financial, and legal responsibility for the climate crisis, and a commensurate burden to help address the problem”.
He added: “Even though global consumers from individuals to corporations are the ultimate emitters of carbon dioxide, the Climate Accountability Institute focuses its work on the fossil fuel companies that, in our view, have their collective hand on the throttle and the tiller determining the rate of carbon emissions and the shift to non-carbon fuels.”
CLICK HERE FOR LIST OF COMPANIES.
RELATED: Richmond v Chevron The California city taking on its most powerful polluter
RELATED: Global polluters: What do we know about the worst 20? its most
When your "leader" is a fool!!!
environment funnies
