welcome to reality trivia
environment
The environment is everything that isn't me.
Albert Einstein
february 2023
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
THANKS TO THE GREED AND IGNORANCE OF THE POLITICAL LEADERS, OIL, GAS , CHEMICAL, AND PESTICIDE INDUSTRIES THE HUMAN RACE IS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES.
THIS IS WHAT TRUMP HAS WROUGHT...SAME AS HILLARY
Cattledog - demo. underground
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24 rollbacks are in progress
Clean Power Plan Paris climate agreement Wetland and tributary protections Car and truck fuel-efficiency standards Status of 10 national monuments Status of 12 marine areas Limits on toxic discharge from power plants Coal ash discharge regulations Emissions standards for new, modified and reconstructed power plants Emissions rules for power plant start-up and shutdown Sage grouse habitat protections Fracking regulations on public lands Regulations on oil and gas drilling in some national parks Oil rig safety regulations Regulations for offshore oil and gas exploration by floating vessels Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge Hunting method regulations in Alaska Requirement for tracking emissions on federal highways Emissions standards for trailers and glider kits Limits on methane emissions on public lands Permitting process for air-polluting plants Offshore oil and gas leasing Use of birds in subsistence handicrafts Coal dust rule |
29 rules have been overturned
Flood building standards Proposed ban on a potentially harmful pesticide Freeze on new coal leases on public lands Methane reporting requirement Anti-dumping rule for coal companies Decision on Keystone XL pipeline Decision on Dakota Access pipeline Third-party settlement funds Offshore drilling ban in the Atlantic and Arctic Ban on seismic air gun testing in the Atlantic Northern Bering Sea climate resilience plan Royalty regulations for oil, gas and coal Inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews Permit-issuing process for new infrastructure projects Green Climate Fund contributions Mining restrictions in Bristol Bay, Alaska Endangered species listings Hunting ban on wolves and grizzly bears in Alaska Protections for whales and sea turtles Reusable water bottles rule for national parks National parks climate order Environmental mitigation for federal projects Calculation for “social cost” of carbon Planning rule for public lands Copper filter cake listing as hazardous waste Mine cleanup rule Sewage treatment pollution regulations Ban on use of lead ammunition on federal lands Restrictions on fishing |
7 rollbacks are in limbo
Methane emission limits at new oil and gas wells
Limits on landfill emissions
Mercury emission limits for power plants
Hazardous chemical facility regulations
Groundwater protections for uranium mines
Efficiency standards for federal buildings
Rule helping consumers buy fuel-efficient tires
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/climate/trump-environment-rules-reversed.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Methane emission limits at new oil and gas wells
Limits on landfill emissions
Mercury emission limits for power plants
Hazardous chemical facility regulations
Groundwater protections for uranium mines
Efficiency standards for federal buildings
Rule helping consumers buy fuel-efficient tires
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/climate/trump-environment-rules-reversed.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
*articles*
*RENEWABLES WILL BE WORLD’S TOP ELECTRICITY SOURCE BY 2025, ENERGY AGENCY SAYS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*LIVING NEAR FRACKING SITES RAISES RISK OF PREMATURE DEATH FOR ELDERLY, US STUDY FINDS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic, study finds
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US PLASTICS INDUSTRY WILL HAVE MORE EMISSIONS THAN COAL BY 2030, NEW REPORT SAYS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*DRASTIC MEASURES NEEDED TO CURB PLASTIC POLLUTION IN OCEANS BY 2050
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*REGULATING DANGEROUS PESTICIDES: NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘FOREVER CHEMICALS’ FOUND IN HOME FERTILIZER MADE FROM SEWAGE SLUDGE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*100 COMPANIES MAKE 90% OF PLASTIC WASTE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TWENTY FIRMS PRODUCE 55% OF WORLD’S PLASTIC WASTE, REPORT REVEALS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*AIR POLLUTION FROM LIVESTOCK AND FERTILIZERS KILLS NEARLY 18,000 PEOPLE YEARLY
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*CARBON DIOXIDE LEVELS ARE AT A 3.6 MILLION YEAR HIGH
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*1% OF PEOPLE CAUSE HALF OF GLOBAL AVIATION EMISSIONS – STUDY
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*FRACKING ISN’T JUST BAD FOR THE CLIMATE. IT’S BAD FOR MENTAL HEALTH TOO
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP’S EPA GIVES OKLAHOMA CONTROL OVER TRIBAL LANDS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*IF WE DON’T ACT NOW, THE ENTIRE US COULD BECOME A “CANCER ALLEY”
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A JUDGE JUST DISMISSED EFFORTS TO STOP PESTICIDES AND GMO CROPS FROM BEING USED IN WILDLIFE REFUGES(ARTICLE BELOW)
*MOST PLASTIC WILL NEVER BE RECYCLED – AND THE MANUFACTURERS COULDN’T CARE LESS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Clean Electricity Plan Would Free US Economy of Carbon Dependence in 15 Years
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP’S EPA GIVES POWER PLANTS A PASS ON DEADLY COAL ASH
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE LATEST AMERICAN NATURAL WONDER ON THE TRUMP HIT LIST
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US rivers and lakes are shrinking for a surprising reason: cows
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WHOLE FOODS HIGH LEVELS OF ARSENIC FOUND IN US WHOLE FOODS’ BOTTLED WATER BRAND
(ARTICLE BELOW)
cartoons(at the end)
Renewables Will Be World’s Top Electricity Source by 2025, Energy Agency Says
The International Energy Agency expects global electricity generated via renewables to increase to 35 percent in 2025.
By Brett Wilkins , COMMONDREAMS - truthout
Published February 10, 2023
Renewable energy will become the world’s number one electricity source by 2025 thanks largely to a surge in wind and solar, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday, a development welcomed by climate advocates.
The IEA’s Electricity Markets Report 2023 states that “renewables are set to dominate the growth of the world’s electricity supply over the next three years as together with nuclear power they meet the vast majority of the increase in global demand through to 2025, making significant rises in the power sector’s carbon emissions unlikely.”
The share of the world’s electricity generated via renewables will increase from 29% in 2022 to 35% in 2025, with coal and gas-fired power generation declining and renewables passing coal by mid-decade, the report forecasts.
More than 70% of the increase in worldwide electricity demand over the next three years is expected to come from China, India, and Southeast Asia. By 2025, China is expected to consume one-third of the world’s electricity.
In the United States, the IEA expects solar power generation to soar 56% by 2025, with wind increasing by 19%. These increases are due in significant part to the historic climate and energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Democrats last year.
“The world’s growing demand for electricity is set to accelerate, adding more than double Japan’s current electricity consumption over the next three years,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “The good news is that renewables and nuclear power are growing quickly enough to meet almost all this additional appetite, suggesting we are close to a tipping point for power sector emissions. Governments now need to enable low-emissions sources to grow even faster and drive down emissions so that the world can ensure secure electricity supplies while reaching climate goals.”
The report asserts that “in a decarbonized electricity sector, dispatchable renewables, such as hydro reservoir, geothermal, and biomass plants, will be essential for complementing” wind and solar. However, Mark Z. Jacobson — a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University in California and author of No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air — argues that “we have 95% of the technologies we need” to transition to fossil-free electricity.
“So, if we have almost all that we need, why do we need ‘miracle technologies’ being proposed ad nauseam to solve these problems?” Jacobson asked in a Guardian opinion article published Tuesday. “We don’t.”
Jacobson continued:
We do not need carbon capture and storage or use, direct air capture storage or use, blue hydrogen, new nuclear power, or bioenergy. Carbon capture equipment extracts carbon dioxide from power plants or other industrial sources. Direct air capture equipment extracts carbon dioxide directly from the air. Blue hydrogen is hydrogen produced from natural gas with carbon capture equipment added to remove the resulting carbon dioxide. These three technologies, which all require equipment and energy, merely increase air pollution, fuel mining and fossil-fuel infrastructure, thus energy insecurity, while hardly reducing carbon dioxide.
“In addition,” he added, “new nuclear suffers from a 10- to 21-year time lag between planning and operation (too long to be useful for immediately addressing the climate crisis), costs that are five to eight times those of new wind and solar per unit energy, weapons proliferation risk, meltdown risk, waste risk, underground uranium mining health risk, and carbon dioxide emissions that are nine to 37 times those of onshore wind.”
University College London professor of energy and environmental systems and modeling Mark Barrett earlier this week told Beyond Nuclear International that “our careful modeling utilizing 35 years of weather data shows that nuclear power is more expensive and slow to build than renewables.”
“Renewables do not pose waste and security problems as do nuclear,” he added.
The IEA’s Electricity Markets Report 2023 states that “renewables are set to dominate the growth of the world’s electricity supply over the next three years as together with nuclear power they meet the vast majority of the increase in global demand through to 2025, making significant rises in the power sector’s carbon emissions unlikely.”
The share of the world’s electricity generated via renewables will increase from 29% in 2022 to 35% in 2025, with coal and gas-fired power generation declining and renewables passing coal by mid-decade, the report forecasts.
More than 70% of the increase in worldwide electricity demand over the next three years is expected to come from China, India, and Southeast Asia. By 2025, China is expected to consume one-third of the world’s electricity.
In the United States, the IEA expects solar power generation to soar 56% by 2025, with wind increasing by 19%. These increases are due in significant part to the historic climate and energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Democrats last year.
“The world’s growing demand for electricity is set to accelerate, adding more than double Japan’s current electricity consumption over the next three years,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “The good news is that renewables and nuclear power are growing quickly enough to meet almost all this additional appetite, suggesting we are close to a tipping point for power sector emissions. Governments now need to enable low-emissions sources to grow even faster and drive down emissions so that the world can ensure secure electricity supplies while reaching climate goals.”
The report asserts that “in a decarbonized electricity sector, dispatchable renewables, such as hydro reservoir, geothermal, and biomass plants, will be essential for complementing” wind and solar. However, Mark Z. Jacobson — a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University in California and author of No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air — argues that “we have 95% of the technologies we need” to transition to fossil-free electricity.
“So, if we have almost all that we need, why do we need ‘miracle technologies’ being proposed ad nauseam to solve these problems?” Jacobson asked in a Guardian opinion article published Tuesday. “We don’t.”
Jacobson continued:
We do not need carbon capture and storage or use, direct air capture storage or use, blue hydrogen, new nuclear power, or bioenergy. Carbon capture equipment extracts carbon dioxide from power plants or other industrial sources. Direct air capture equipment extracts carbon dioxide directly from the air. Blue hydrogen is hydrogen produced from natural gas with carbon capture equipment added to remove the resulting carbon dioxide. These three technologies, which all require equipment and energy, merely increase air pollution, fuel mining and fossil-fuel infrastructure, thus energy insecurity, while hardly reducing carbon dioxide.
“In addition,” he added, “new nuclear suffers from a 10- to 21-year time lag between planning and operation (too long to be useful for immediately addressing the climate crisis), costs that are five to eight times those of new wind and solar per unit energy, weapons proliferation risk, meltdown risk, waste risk, underground uranium mining health risk, and carbon dioxide emissions that are nine to 37 times those of onshore wind.”
University College London professor of energy and environmental systems and modeling Mark Barrett earlier this week told Beyond Nuclear International that “our careful modeling utilizing 35 years of weather data shows that nuclear power is more expensive and slow to build than renewables.”
“Renewables do not pose waste and security problems as do nuclear,” he added.
Environment
Living near fracking sites raises risk of premature death for elderly, US study finds
Findings are result of first major study into link between premature death in older people and unconventional drilling
Nina Lakhani Climate justice reporter
the guardian
Thu 27 Jan 2022 11.00 EST
Elderly people living near or downwind from unconventional oil and gas wells such as fracking sites are more likely to die prematurely, according to a major new US study.
Extracting oil and gas through newer or unconventional methods like fracking has expanded rapidly across America over the past two decades with at least 17.6 million people now living within one kilometer of an active well.
Compared with traditional drilling, unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) is linked to higher levels of exposure to toxic air pollution and poor water quality, as well as noise and light pollution which can be harmful to human health. The impact of fossil fuel extraction – including by unconventional methods – has disproportionately affected low income communities and people of color.
Researchers from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health studied the health records of 15 million people on Medicare, the health insurance program that includes at least 95% of Americans aged 65 and older, living in all significant drilling regions from 2001 to 2015. They also gathered data on about 2.5m oil and gas wells covering leading exploration states, from Montana to Texas and Pennsylvania.
The closer people live to an oil and gas operation, the higher the risk of dying prematurely, even after accounting for socioeconomic, environmental and demographic factors such as gender and race, according to the study published in Nature Energy.
Residents most adversely affected are those living nearby and downwind, suggesting toxic airborne contaminants emitted from UOGD sites probably contributed to higher mortality rates. Exposure to toxins associated with unconventional drilling such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrogen oxides and radioactive materials are linked to a wide range of life-threatening medical conditions.
“Our findings suggest the importance of considering the potential health dangers of situating UOGD near or upwind of people’s homes,” said Longxiang Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Health and the study’s lead author.
Overall, elderly residents living near these wells have about 2.5% higher mortality rates than those living far away compared with 3.5% for those who are also downwind. This would mean thousands of premature deaths linked to the oil and gas boom, though the peer-reviewed study does not include estimates of lives lost.
This is the first major study into the link between premature death in older people and unconventional oil and gas drilling activities, and the first to examine the importance of wind direction. As of 2015, more than 100,000 onshore UOGD wells have been drilled, with many clustered around densely populated residential areas.
“Although UOGD is a major industrial activity in the US, very little is known about its public health impacts. Our study is the first to link mortality to UOGD-related air pollutant exposures,” said Petros Koutrakis, professor of environmental sciences and senior author of the study.
It builds on previous studies that have found residents living near these sites are significantly more likely to suffer prenatal complications, cancers and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
As unconventional oil and gas exploration continues apace further research is needed to understand the causal links between living nearby or downwind and adverse health effects, the authors conclude.
Extracting oil and gas through newer or unconventional methods like fracking has expanded rapidly across America over the past two decades with at least 17.6 million people now living within one kilometer of an active well.
Compared with traditional drilling, unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) is linked to higher levels of exposure to toxic air pollution and poor water quality, as well as noise and light pollution which can be harmful to human health. The impact of fossil fuel extraction – including by unconventional methods – has disproportionately affected low income communities and people of color.
Researchers from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health studied the health records of 15 million people on Medicare, the health insurance program that includes at least 95% of Americans aged 65 and older, living in all significant drilling regions from 2001 to 2015. They also gathered data on about 2.5m oil and gas wells covering leading exploration states, from Montana to Texas and Pennsylvania.
The closer people live to an oil and gas operation, the higher the risk of dying prematurely, even after accounting for socioeconomic, environmental and demographic factors such as gender and race, according to the study published in Nature Energy.
Residents most adversely affected are those living nearby and downwind, suggesting toxic airborne contaminants emitted from UOGD sites probably contributed to higher mortality rates. Exposure to toxins associated with unconventional drilling such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrogen oxides and radioactive materials are linked to a wide range of life-threatening medical conditions.
“Our findings suggest the importance of considering the potential health dangers of situating UOGD near or upwind of people’s homes,” said Longxiang Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Health and the study’s lead author.
Overall, elderly residents living near these wells have about 2.5% higher mortality rates than those living far away compared with 3.5% for those who are also downwind. This would mean thousands of premature deaths linked to the oil and gas boom, though the peer-reviewed study does not include estimates of lives lost.
This is the first major study into the link between premature death in older people and unconventional oil and gas drilling activities, and the first to examine the importance of wind direction. As of 2015, more than 100,000 onshore UOGD wells have been drilled, with many clustered around densely populated residential areas.
“Although UOGD is a major industrial activity in the US, very little is known about its public health impacts. Our study is the first to link mortality to UOGD-related air pollutant exposures,” said Petros Koutrakis, professor of environmental sciences and senior author of the study.
It builds on previous studies that have found residents living near these sites are significantly more likely to suffer prenatal complications, cancers and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
As unconventional oil and gas exploration continues apace further research is needed to understand the causal links between living nearby or downwind and adverse health effects, the authors conclude.
Plastics
Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic, study finds
Surprising discovery shows scale of plastic pollution and reveals enzymes that could boost recycling
Damian Carrington Environment editor
THE GUARDIAN
Tue 14 Dec 2021 08.52 EST
Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study.
The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.
The study is the first large-scale global assessment of the plastic-degrading potential of bacteria and found that one in four of the organisms analysed carried a suitable enzyme. The researchers found that the number and type of enzymes they discovered matched the amount and type of plastic pollution in different locations.
The results “provide evidence of a measurable effect of plastic pollution on the global microbial ecology”, the scientists said.
Millions of tonnes of plastic are dumped in the environment every year, and the pollution now pervades the planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. Reducing the amount of plastic used is vital, as is the proper collection and treatment of waste.
But many plastics are currently hard to degrade and recycle. Using enzymes to rapidly break down plastics into their building blocks would enable new products to be made from old ones, cutting the need for virgin plastic production. The new research provides many new enzymes to be investigated and adapted for industrial use.
“We found multiple lines of evidence supporting the fact that the global microbiome’s plastic-degrading potential correlates strongly with measurements of environmental plastic pollution – a significant demonstration of how the environment is responding to the pressures we are placing on it,” said Prof Aleksej Zelezniak, at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
Jan Zrimec, also at Chalmers University, said: “We did not expect to find such a large number of enzymes across so many different microbes and environmental habitats. This is a surprising discovery that really illustrates the scale of the issue.”
The explosion of plastic production in the past 70 years, from 2m tonnes to 380m tonnes a year, had given microbes time to evolve to deal with plastic, the researchers said. The study, published in the journal Microbial Ecology, started by compiling a dataset of 95 microbial enzymes already known to degrade plastic, often found in bacteria in rubbish dumps and similar places rife with plastic.
The team then looked for similar enzymes in environmental DNA samples taken by other researchers from 236 different locations around the world. Importantly, the researchers ruled out potential false positives by comparing the enzymes initially identified with enzymes from the human gut, which is not known to have any plastic-degrading enzymes.
About 12,000 of the new enzymes were found in ocean samples, taken at 67 locations and at three different depths. The results showed consistently higher levels of degrading enzymes at deeper levels, matching the higher levels of plastic pollution known to exist at lower depths.
The soil samples were taken from 169 locations in 38 countries and 11 different habitats and contained 18,000 plastic-degrading enzymes. Soils are known to contain more plastics with phthalate additives than the oceans and the researchers found more enzymes that attack these chemicals in the land samples.
Nearly 60% of the new enzymes did not fit into any known enzyme classes, the scientists said, suggesting these molecules degrade plastics in ways that were previously unknown.
“The next step would be to test the most promising enzyme candidates in the lab to closely investigate their properties and the rate of plastic degradation they can achieve,” said Zelezniak. “From there you could engineer microbial communities with targeted degrading functions for specific polymer types.”
The first bug that eats plastic was discovered in a Japanese waste dump in 2016. Scientists then tweaked it in 2018 to try to learn more about how it evolved, but inadvertently created an enzyme that was even better at breaking down plastic bottles. Further tweaks in 2020 increased the speed of degradation sixfold.
Another mutant enzyme was created in 2020 by the company Carbios that breaks down plastic bottles for recycling in hours. German scientists have also discovered a bacterium that feeds on the toxic plastic polyurethane, which is usually dumped in landfills.
Last week, scientists revealed that the levels of microplastics known to be eaten by people via their food caused damage to human cells in the laboratory.
The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.
The study is the first large-scale global assessment of the plastic-degrading potential of bacteria and found that one in four of the organisms analysed carried a suitable enzyme. The researchers found that the number and type of enzymes they discovered matched the amount and type of plastic pollution in different locations.
The results “provide evidence of a measurable effect of plastic pollution on the global microbial ecology”, the scientists said.
Millions of tonnes of plastic are dumped in the environment every year, and the pollution now pervades the planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. Reducing the amount of plastic used is vital, as is the proper collection and treatment of waste.
But many plastics are currently hard to degrade and recycle. Using enzymes to rapidly break down plastics into their building blocks would enable new products to be made from old ones, cutting the need for virgin plastic production. The new research provides many new enzymes to be investigated and adapted for industrial use.
“We found multiple lines of evidence supporting the fact that the global microbiome’s plastic-degrading potential correlates strongly with measurements of environmental plastic pollution – a significant demonstration of how the environment is responding to the pressures we are placing on it,” said Prof Aleksej Zelezniak, at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
Jan Zrimec, also at Chalmers University, said: “We did not expect to find such a large number of enzymes across so many different microbes and environmental habitats. This is a surprising discovery that really illustrates the scale of the issue.”
The explosion of plastic production in the past 70 years, from 2m tonnes to 380m tonnes a year, had given microbes time to evolve to deal with plastic, the researchers said. The study, published in the journal Microbial Ecology, started by compiling a dataset of 95 microbial enzymes already known to degrade plastic, often found in bacteria in rubbish dumps and similar places rife with plastic.
The team then looked for similar enzymes in environmental DNA samples taken by other researchers from 236 different locations around the world. Importantly, the researchers ruled out potential false positives by comparing the enzymes initially identified with enzymes from the human gut, which is not known to have any plastic-degrading enzymes.
About 12,000 of the new enzymes were found in ocean samples, taken at 67 locations and at three different depths. The results showed consistently higher levels of degrading enzymes at deeper levels, matching the higher levels of plastic pollution known to exist at lower depths.
The soil samples were taken from 169 locations in 38 countries and 11 different habitats and contained 18,000 plastic-degrading enzymes. Soils are known to contain more plastics with phthalate additives than the oceans and the researchers found more enzymes that attack these chemicals in the land samples.
Nearly 60% of the new enzymes did not fit into any known enzyme classes, the scientists said, suggesting these molecules degrade plastics in ways that were previously unknown.
“The next step would be to test the most promising enzyme candidates in the lab to closely investigate their properties and the rate of plastic degradation they can achieve,” said Zelezniak. “From there you could engineer microbial communities with targeted degrading functions for specific polymer types.”
The first bug that eats plastic was discovered in a Japanese waste dump in 2016. Scientists then tweaked it in 2018 to try to learn more about how it evolved, but inadvertently created an enzyme that was even better at breaking down plastic bottles. Further tweaks in 2020 increased the speed of degradation sixfold.
Another mutant enzyme was created in 2020 by the company Carbios that breaks down plastic bottles for recycling in hours. German scientists have also discovered a bacterium that feeds on the toxic plastic polyurethane, which is usually dumped in landfills.
Last week, scientists revealed that the levels of microplastics known to be eaten by people via their food caused damage to human cells in the laboratory.
US Plastics Industry Will Have More Emissions Than Coal by 2030, New Report Says
BY Elizabeth Gribkoff, Environmental Health News
PUBLISHED October 23, 2021
With dozens of new plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities in the works, the U.S. plastics industry will release more greenhouse gas emissions than coal-fired power plants by 2030, say the authors of a new report.
Emissions from the plastics sector equaled that of 116 coal-fired power plants last year, according to the report out Thursday from Bennington College’s Beyond Plastics project. Meanwhile, 42 plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities have opened, or are in the process of being built or permitted, since 2019.
“As the world transitions away from fossil fuels for electricity generation and for transportation, the petrochemical industry has found a new market for fossil fuels: plastics,” Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, told reporters on Thursday.
With the U.S. coal industry in decline, the report authors say policymakers at home and at the upcoming COP26 climate summit, a conference happening at the end of month where world leaders will hash out the details of climate pledges, need to factor the climate toll of plastics into emissions reductions efforts.
“Leaving out plastics is leaving out a giant piece of the problem,” Enck said. “We would like the national leaders that are gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, to take the plastics issue just as seriously as they are taking transportation and electricity generation.”
Climate Costs of U.S. Plastics
The report authors calculated emissions from 10 stages of plastics production, from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for the raw material — ethane in natural gas — all the way up to burning waste in incinerators.
Cracker plants, where natural gas is heated at such high temperatures that it fractures into plastic building blocks like ethylene, have the heaviest emissions toll, producing around 70 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants, which is equal to the emissions of 35 coal-fired power plants. Because the report looks at emissions from a range of greenhouse gases, the authors converted the warming potential of all the pollutants into an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.
The authors say that emissions reports from the plastics industry are incomplete as they don’t adequately account for leaks of methane—a greenhouse gas that’s 84 times more climate-warming than carbon dioxide in the short-term—and other gases from the transport and production of plastics feedstocks.
They note that while so-called “chemical recycling,” which uses large amounts of energy to melt used plastics into building blocks for fuel and other products, is uncommon now, new plants could add up to 18 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants by 2025. Enck referred to chemical recycling as plastics’ “new deception” now that Americans are aware that less than 9% of plastics are recycled.
Shipping resins and other plastics building blocks overseas accounts for a significant amount of emissions as well, said Jim Vallette, president of Material Research, the firm that Beyond Plastics hired to do the report analysis. “Plastic is very much like the new coal because the coal industry also is counting on exports to stay alive,” he added.
Harmful Plastics Pollution
Plastics facilities don’t just create planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. They also release benzene, formaldehyde, and the carcinogen ethylene oxide, among other harmful pollutants. The plastics industry has come under fire in recent years for building its polluting plants in poorer parts of the country: 90% of the climate pollution from U.S. plastics plants occurs in just 18 communities that are mostly in Texas and Louisiana, according to the report.
“The health impacts of the emissions are disproportionately borne by low-income communities and communities of color, making this a major environmental justice issue,” Enck said.
Emissions from the plastics sector equaled that of 116 coal-fired power plants last year, according to the report out Thursday from Bennington College’s Beyond Plastics project. Meanwhile, 42 plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities have opened, or are in the process of being built or permitted, since 2019.
“As the world transitions away from fossil fuels for electricity generation and for transportation, the petrochemical industry has found a new market for fossil fuels: plastics,” Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, told reporters on Thursday.
With the U.S. coal industry in decline, the report authors say policymakers at home and at the upcoming COP26 climate summit, a conference happening at the end of month where world leaders will hash out the details of climate pledges, need to factor the climate toll of plastics into emissions reductions efforts.
“Leaving out plastics is leaving out a giant piece of the problem,” Enck said. “We would like the national leaders that are gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, to take the plastics issue just as seriously as they are taking transportation and electricity generation.”
Climate Costs of U.S. Plastics
The report authors calculated emissions from 10 stages of plastics production, from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for the raw material — ethane in natural gas — all the way up to burning waste in incinerators.
Cracker plants, where natural gas is heated at such high temperatures that it fractures into plastic building blocks like ethylene, have the heaviest emissions toll, producing around 70 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants, which is equal to the emissions of 35 coal-fired power plants. Because the report looks at emissions from a range of greenhouse gases, the authors converted the warming potential of all the pollutants into an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.
The authors say that emissions reports from the plastics industry are incomplete as they don’t adequately account for leaks of methane—a greenhouse gas that’s 84 times more climate-warming than carbon dioxide in the short-term—and other gases from the transport and production of plastics feedstocks.
They note that while so-called “chemical recycling,” which uses large amounts of energy to melt used plastics into building blocks for fuel and other products, is uncommon now, new plants could add up to 18 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants by 2025. Enck referred to chemical recycling as plastics’ “new deception” now that Americans are aware that less than 9% of plastics are recycled.
Shipping resins and other plastics building blocks overseas accounts for a significant amount of emissions as well, said Jim Vallette, president of Material Research, the firm that Beyond Plastics hired to do the report analysis. “Plastic is very much like the new coal because the coal industry also is counting on exports to stay alive,” he added.
Harmful Plastics Pollution
Plastics facilities don’t just create planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. They also release benzene, formaldehyde, and the carcinogen ethylene oxide, among other harmful pollutants. The plastics industry has come under fire in recent years for building its polluting plants in poorer parts of the country: 90% of the climate pollution from U.S. plastics plants occurs in just 18 communities that are mostly in Texas and Louisiana, according to the report.
“The health impacts of the emissions are disproportionately borne by low-income communities and communities of color, making this a major environmental justice issue,” Enck said.
Drastic Measures Needed to Curb Plastic Pollution in Oceans by 2050
BY Matthew Rozsa, Salon
PUBLISHED July 20, 2021
Speaking to Salon in April, John Hocevar — the Oceans Campaign Director for Greenpeace USA — brought the horrors of plastic pollution to vivid life by describing one of its more heartbreaking consequences: the suffering it inflicts on innocent sea creatures.
“We’ve seen pictures of whales washed up on beaches with their stomachs full of plastic bags or sea turtles with straws up their noses or albatrosses dead with stomachs full of bottle caps and lighters and other bits of plastic,” Hocevar explained. “Sharks and turtles will take a bite out of a plastic bottle at sea or sea turtles often might be entangled in plastic bags or choke on them because plastic bags can resemble a jellyfish, a major source of food.”
Now, a report on plastic pollution, written by Pew Charitable Trusts and endorsed by the U.N. undersecretary-general, says the world needs to implement drastic measures to make sure no new plastic enters the ocean as of 2050, which is a major goal of 19 countries and the European Union. The report was released in tandem with a peer-reviewed analysis of an “evidence-based, comprehensive, integrated, and economically attractive pathway to greatly reduce plastic pollution entering our ocean” which was published in Science. The report describes itself as a “roadmap” to reduce plastic pollution on a global scale to the extent that the oceans suffer no more of it.
Sadly, humanity is nowhere near achieving that objective, the report claims, and offers eight steps to turn things around. Those steps include “reduce growth in plastic consumption,” “substitute plastics with suitable alternative materials,” “design products and packaging for recycling,” “expand waste collection rates in the Global South,” “increase mechanical recycling capacity globally,” “scale up global capacity of chemical conversion,” “build safe waste disposal facilities” and “reduce plastic waste exports.”
Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who chairs the Environment and Public Works subcommittee that oversees environmental justice, waste management and chemical safety, introduced the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act earlier this year in order to put America on the road to a sustainable future. He later explained to Salon that he is pushing for this legislation because “if we keep proceeding with business as usual, the air we breathe, the soil we use to grow our food, and the waters that countless communities rely on will only become more and more polluted —putting Americans’ health, particularly in communities of color and low-income communities, at serious risk.”
Beyond the effect of plastic pollution on large marine animals, plastic pollution has myriad other consequences for human health and wildlife. The prevalence of synthetic polymers, both on land and in the ocean, has been linked to dropping sperm counts as well as incidences of cancer and immune diseases. Studies have found that there are more microplastics than zooplankton (a vital part of the ocean food chain) in the ocean. A 2016 report from the World Economic Forum even projected that there would be more plastic waste than fish in our oceans by 2050.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest threat presented by plastic pollution to humans is dropping sperm counts. Synthetic polymers include a number of chemicals that serve as so-called “endocrine disruptors,” meaning they interfere with the healthy functioning of the glands that produce hormones. These endocrine disruptors are linked to dropping sperm counts that have continued since the 1970s and which, if they continue unabated, could cause human males to become infertile.
“We’ve seen pictures of whales washed up on beaches with their stomachs full of plastic bags or sea turtles with straws up their noses or albatrosses dead with stomachs full of bottle caps and lighters and other bits of plastic,” Hocevar explained. “Sharks and turtles will take a bite out of a plastic bottle at sea or sea turtles often might be entangled in plastic bags or choke on them because plastic bags can resemble a jellyfish, a major source of food.”
Now, a report on plastic pollution, written by Pew Charitable Trusts and endorsed by the U.N. undersecretary-general, says the world needs to implement drastic measures to make sure no new plastic enters the ocean as of 2050, which is a major goal of 19 countries and the European Union. The report was released in tandem with a peer-reviewed analysis of an “evidence-based, comprehensive, integrated, and economically attractive pathway to greatly reduce plastic pollution entering our ocean” which was published in Science. The report describes itself as a “roadmap” to reduce plastic pollution on a global scale to the extent that the oceans suffer no more of it.
Sadly, humanity is nowhere near achieving that objective, the report claims, and offers eight steps to turn things around. Those steps include “reduce growth in plastic consumption,” “substitute plastics with suitable alternative materials,” “design products and packaging for recycling,” “expand waste collection rates in the Global South,” “increase mechanical recycling capacity globally,” “scale up global capacity of chemical conversion,” “build safe waste disposal facilities” and “reduce plastic waste exports.”
Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who chairs the Environment and Public Works subcommittee that oversees environmental justice, waste management and chemical safety, introduced the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act earlier this year in order to put America on the road to a sustainable future. He later explained to Salon that he is pushing for this legislation because “if we keep proceeding with business as usual, the air we breathe, the soil we use to grow our food, and the waters that countless communities rely on will only become more and more polluted —putting Americans’ health, particularly in communities of color and low-income communities, at serious risk.”
Beyond the effect of plastic pollution on large marine animals, plastic pollution has myriad other consequences for human health and wildlife. The prevalence of synthetic polymers, both on land and in the ocean, has been linked to dropping sperm counts as well as incidences of cancer and immune diseases. Studies have found that there are more microplastics than zooplankton (a vital part of the ocean food chain) in the ocean. A 2016 report from the World Economic Forum even projected that there would be more plastic waste than fish in our oceans by 2050.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest threat presented by plastic pollution to humans is dropping sperm counts. Synthetic polymers include a number of chemicals that serve as so-called “endocrine disruptors,” meaning they interfere with the healthy functioning of the glands that produce hormones. These endocrine disruptors are linked to dropping sperm counts that have continued since the 1970s and which, if they continue unabated, could cause human males to become infertile.
Regulating Dangerous Pesticides: New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
The Biden Administration Defends Some of Trump Administration Pesticide Decisions
JOHNATHAN HETTINGER - dc report
July 10, 2021
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden promised to review dozens of Trump-era rollbacks of environmental policies. In the executive order, Biden pledged “to limit exposure to dangerous chemicals and pesticides.”
But months into the new presidency, the Biden administration has chosen to defend some of the Trump administration’s decisions on pesticides.
These include:
Another stark example is the endangered species assessment of malathion (pronounced mal-uh-thigh-on), a toxic pesticide widely used on crops and to deter mosquitoes.
In 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized a draft biological opinion that assessed the harm malathion would have on plants and animals protected by the Endangered Species Act. That assessment, which took years of work by the nation’s wildlife experts, found the continued use of malathion would “jeopardize the continued existence” of 1,284 endangered species, more than four of out five protected species.
However, after learning about the findings but before they were made public, then-Deputy Secretary of Interior David Bernhardt — who was later named U.S. Secretary of the Interior — intervened to block the report’s release and changed the methodology behind the document, according to an investigation by The New York Times.
Using the new methodology, the agency came up with a new biological opinion: Malathion is likely to “jeopardize the continued existence” of 78 endangered species — an extremely high number compared to previous agency findings but much less significant than the original.
The determination with the decreased number of endangered species was recently published by the Biden administration. It’s a demonstration of the potential long-ranging impact the Trump administration might have on how the federal government interprets the Endangered Species Act, often considered the nation’s strongest environmental protection law.
“This is (the Biden Administration) perpetuating (Bernhardt’s) radical anti-ESA agenda,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. The center sued the federal government to develop the biological opinion, after what it said were decades of inaction on endangered species by federal regulators.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the pesticide decisions.
Laury Marshall, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in an emailed statement that the draft biological opinion for malathion “is a big step forward in our continued understanding of the impacts of malathion use on listed species and critical habitats.
“It will help EPA meet its obligations under the Endangered Species Act and reflects thorough analysis by wildlife experts,” she continued. “Our dedicated experts have ensured the utmost scientific integrity guided their methodology and scientific process.”
An Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson reiterated Biden’s executive order, saying the new administration has a “renewed commitment to protecting human health and the environment” but still defended each of the decisions regarding the three pesticides.
The Trump-era decision on dicamba that the Biden administration is defending was “supported by the agency’s career scientists, and includes measures that are protective of the environment,” the spokesperson said. (The decision that was the subject of the Inspector General did not have staff support, the spokesperson said.)
Also, the decision to register the bee-killing sulfoxaflor was “backed by substantial data,” the spokesperson said.
The Trump administration had close ties with the pesticide industry. Dow Chemical, the maker of malathion, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee in 2017 and subsequently asked the Trump administration to shelve the endangered species assessments.
Trump also nominated Aurelia Skipwith, a former Monsanto employee, to be the director of the FWS, which oversees endangered species.
Recently, the service announced that it would restore six major rules the Trump administration changed to weaken the Endangered Species Act.
But, with malathion, the Biden administration used the Trump-era methodology, publishing the findings in a recent draft biological opinion. The administration recently took public comment on the decision and will later issue a final decision.
“There’s nothing in here that indicates we’re in a new administration that believes in following science and the law,” Burd said.[...]
But months into the new presidency, the Biden administration has chosen to defend some of the Trump administration’s decisions on pesticides.
These include:
- The Trump administration’s five-year registration of dicamba, despite Biden administration officials declaring in an Inspector General report that there was undue political influence in past dicamba decisions.
- The 11th-hour Trump approval of aldicarb, a highly toxic pesticide banned in more than a hundred countries by international treaty because of its harm to humans. The C. District Court recently ruled the EPA violated the law in approving it.
- The expanded use of the pesticide sulfoxaflor, which has been previously banned by courts because of its link to killing bees.
- And the Trump administration’s approval of flea and tick collars containing tetrachlorvinphos, which the Obama-era EPA linked to brain damage in children.
Another stark example is the endangered species assessment of malathion (pronounced mal-uh-thigh-on), a toxic pesticide widely used on crops and to deter mosquitoes.
In 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized a draft biological opinion that assessed the harm malathion would have on plants and animals protected by the Endangered Species Act. That assessment, which took years of work by the nation’s wildlife experts, found the continued use of malathion would “jeopardize the continued existence” of 1,284 endangered species, more than four of out five protected species.
However, after learning about the findings but before they were made public, then-Deputy Secretary of Interior David Bernhardt — who was later named U.S. Secretary of the Interior — intervened to block the report’s release and changed the methodology behind the document, according to an investigation by The New York Times.
Using the new methodology, the agency came up with a new biological opinion: Malathion is likely to “jeopardize the continued existence” of 78 endangered species — an extremely high number compared to previous agency findings but much less significant than the original.
The determination with the decreased number of endangered species was recently published by the Biden administration. It’s a demonstration of the potential long-ranging impact the Trump administration might have on how the federal government interprets the Endangered Species Act, often considered the nation’s strongest environmental protection law.
“This is (the Biden Administration) perpetuating (Bernhardt’s) radical anti-ESA agenda,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. The center sued the federal government to develop the biological opinion, after what it said were decades of inaction on endangered species by federal regulators.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the pesticide decisions.
Laury Marshall, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in an emailed statement that the draft biological opinion for malathion “is a big step forward in our continued understanding of the impacts of malathion use on listed species and critical habitats.
“It will help EPA meet its obligations under the Endangered Species Act and reflects thorough analysis by wildlife experts,” she continued. “Our dedicated experts have ensured the utmost scientific integrity guided their methodology and scientific process.”
An Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson reiterated Biden’s executive order, saying the new administration has a “renewed commitment to protecting human health and the environment” but still defended each of the decisions regarding the three pesticides.
The Trump-era decision on dicamba that the Biden administration is defending was “supported by the agency’s career scientists, and includes measures that are protective of the environment,” the spokesperson said. (The decision that was the subject of the Inspector General did not have staff support, the spokesperson said.)
Also, the decision to register the bee-killing sulfoxaflor was “backed by substantial data,” the spokesperson said.
The Trump administration had close ties with the pesticide industry. Dow Chemical, the maker of malathion, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee in 2017 and subsequently asked the Trump administration to shelve the endangered species assessments.
Trump also nominated Aurelia Skipwith, a former Monsanto employee, to be the director of the FWS, which oversees endangered species.
Recently, the service announced that it would restore six major rules the Trump administration changed to weaken the Endangered Species Act.
But, with malathion, the Biden administration used the Trump-era methodology, publishing the findings in a recent draft biological opinion. The administration recently took public comment on the decision and will later issue a final decision.
“There’s nothing in here that indicates we’re in a new administration that believes in following science and the law,” Burd said.[...]
Environment
‘Forever chemicals’ found in home fertilizer made from sewage sludge
Alarming toxic PFAS levels revealed in new report raise concerns that the chemicals are contaminating vegetables
Tom Perkins - the guardian
Fri 28 May 2021 05.00 EDT
Sewage sludge that wastewater treatment districts across America package and sell as home fertilizer contain alarming levels of toxic PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”, a new report has revealed.
Sludge, which is lightly treated and marketed as “biosolids”, is used by consumers to fertilize home gardens, and the PFAS levels raise concerns that the chemicals are contaminating vegetables and harming those who eat them.
“Spreading biosolids or sewage sludge where we grow food means some PFAS will get in the soil, some will be taken up by plants, and if the plants are eaten, then that’s a direct route into the body,” said Gillian Miller, a co-author and senior scientist with the Michigan-based Ecology Center.
The testing, conducted with Sierra Club, found the chemicals in each of nine brands of biosolids it checked, and at levels that exceed standards set for two common types of PFAS. The biosolid brands are sold at stores like Home Depot, Lowes, Menards and Ace Hardware.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used across dozens of industries to make products water, stain and grease resistant. They’re also linked to a range of serious health problems like cancer, birth defects, endocrine disruption, and liver disease. They are known as forever chemicals due to their longevity in the environment once introduced.
Industries that use or produce PFAS often discharge the chemicals into public sewer systems where they travel to wastewater treatment plants, along with other industrial and human waste. Water is extracted from the waste, treated and released back into waterways. What remains in the treatment plants is a semi-solid mass of sludge that’s expensive for water treatment facilities to dispose of in landfills.
Sludge holds nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients that help crops grow, so with increasing frequency in recent years it’s treated and sold as home fertilizer, or given away to farmers. In 2019, about 60% of sewage sludge produced by treatment facilities was spread on farmland and gardens, as well as schoolyards and lawns.
“It’s not widely known that sewage sludge is spread [on gardens and agricultural land] as fertilizer, but that’s where a lot of our waste from water treatment plants ends up,” Miller said. “There are lots of nutrients in it, but, unfortunately, it also recycles our industrial and synthetic waste.”
Human excrement from which sludge derives has mixed with any number of 80,000 manmade chemicals that are discharged from industry’s pipes or otherwise pumped into the sewer system. Though the treatment process kills most living organisms in biosolids, and treatment plants screen sludge for heavy metals, it can still teem with pharmaceuticals, PCBs, PFAS and other toxic chemicals that aren’t removed.
The EPA Office of Inspector General in 2018 identified more than 350 pollutants in a sludge sample, including 61 that it classifies “as acutely hazardous, hazardous or priority pollutants”. That’s prompted calls for a ban or much stricter regulation of sludge, and public health advocates say recent testing is further evidence that biosolids are unsafe.
The new study is not peer reviewed, but independent researchers who checked it for The Guardian said its methodology is sound. The study’s authors checked for 33 individual PFAS compounds and found each biosolid product contained between 14 and 20.
Among the few standards for PFAS in sludge are in Maine, where the state government set screening levels for PFOA and PFOS, two common types of PFAS. It developed the standards after milk from cows on a dairy farm that spread sludge were found to be contaminated with high levels of PFAS. The cows had to be killed, and the farmers found extremely high PFAS levels in their blood.
Of the nine biosolid brands that the report’s authors studied, eight exceeded Maine’s standards. Though PFAS tests used by regulators check for up to 33 individual compounds, thousands exist. The authors also used a different test method to check for the total level of organic fluorine, which is an indicator of PFAS, and will provide a more accurate reading of levels. Those results found up to 233 parts per billion of fluorine, which the authors wrote is “similar to concentrations found in fish collected in highly polluted areas and thousands of times higher than the amounts that are regulated in drinking water”.
Though multiple studies have found that plants and vegetables uptake PFAS, there are no standards for PFAS in food. Still, the chemicals can be harmful at low levels, and public health advocates recommend limiting exposure. Humans are also regularly exposed to PFAS in food packaging, water and home products.
Many of the biosolid brands market the products as “eco”, “natural”, “reclaimed” or “organic”, which Miller characterized as “comforting” but misleading.
“These are words that can have some truth but there’s no legal definition for them,” she added. While some brands state that the product is made with biosolids, packaging doesn’t explicitly say that it’s a combination of human and industrial sewage waste.
The study’s authors call for stricter regulation of sludge, industry to address its PFAS waste, and for regulators to impose limits for the entire class of PFAS compounds instead of just a few. Though Michigan and Maine have taken some steps to regulate PFAS in sludge, they only screen for two out of thousands of compounds.
A spokesman from the Water Environment Federation, a trade group that represents wastewater districts, called for stricter regulation of PFAS, increased funding for plants to remove the chemicals, and for industry to address its PFAS waste.
“Water facilities are receivers of PFAS,” he said. “The best way to reduce PFAS is to stop the pollution at the source by prohibiting use in commerce, stopping industrial discharges and cleaning up contaminated sites.”
Sludge, which is lightly treated and marketed as “biosolids”, is used by consumers to fertilize home gardens, and the PFAS levels raise concerns that the chemicals are contaminating vegetables and harming those who eat them.
“Spreading biosolids or sewage sludge where we grow food means some PFAS will get in the soil, some will be taken up by plants, and if the plants are eaten, then that’s a direct route into the body,” said Gillian Miller, a co-author and senior scientist with the Michigan-based Ecology Center.
The testing, conducted with Sierra Club, found the chemicals in each of nine brands of biosolids it checked, and at levels that exceed standards set for two common types of PFAS. The biosolid brands are sold at stores like Home Depot, Lowes, Menards and Ace Hardware.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used across dozens of industries to make products water, stain and grease resistant. They’re also linked to a range of serious health problems like cancer, birth defects, endocrine disruption, and liver disease. They are known as forever chemicals due to their longevity in the environment once introduced.
Industries that use or produce PFAS often discharge the chemicals into public sewer systems where they travel to wastewater treatment plants, along with other industrial and human waste. Water is extracted from the waste, treated and released back into waterways. What remains in the treatment plants is a semi-solid mass of sludge that’s expensive for water treatment facilities to dispose of in landfills.
Sludge holds nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients that help crops grow, so with increasing frequency in recent years it’s treated and sold as home fertilizer, or given away to farmers. In 2019, about 60% of sewage sludge produced by treatment facilities was spread on farmland and gardens, as well as schoolyards and lawns.
“It’s not widely known that sewage sludge is spread [on gardens and agricultural land] as fertilizer, but that’s where a lot of our waste from water treatment plants ends up,” Miller said. “There are lots of nutrients in it, but, unfortunately, it also recycles our industrial and synthetic waste.”
Human excrement from which sludge derives has mixed with any number of 80,000 manmade chemicals that are discharged from industry’s pipes or otherwise pumped into the sewer system. Though the treatment process kills most living organisms in biosolids, and treatment plants screen sludge for heavy metals, it can still teem with pharmaceuticals, PCBs, PFAS and other toxic chemicals that aren’t removed.
The EPA Office of Inspector General in 2018 identified more than 350 pollutants in a sludge sample, including 61 that it classifies “as acutely hazardous, hazardous or priority pollutants”. That’s prompted calls for a ban or much stricter regulation of sludge, and public health advocates say recent testing is further evidence that biosolids are unsafe.
The new study is not peer reviewed, but independent researchers who checked it for The Guardian said its methodology is sound. The study’s authors checked for 33 individual PFAS compounds and found each biosolid product contained between 14 and 20.
Among the few standards for PFAS in sludge are in Maine, where the state government set screening levels for PFOA and PFOS, two common types of PFAS. It developed the standards after milk from cows on a dairy farm that spread sludge were found to be contaminated with high levels of PFAS. The cows had to be killed, and the farmers found extremely high PFAS levels in their blood.
Of the nine biosolid brands that the report’s authors studied, eight exceeded Maine’s standards. Though PFAS tests used by regulators check for up to 33 individual compounds, thousands exist. The authors also used a different test method to check for the total level of organic fluorine, which is an indicator of PFAS, and will provide a more accurate reading of levels. Those results found up to 233 parts per billion of fluorine, which the authors wrote is “similar to concentrations found in fish collected in highly polluted areas and thousands of times higher than the amounts that are regulated in drinking water”.
Though multiple studies have found that plants and vegetables uptake PFAS, there are no standards for PFAS in food. Still, the chemicals can be harmful at low levels, and public health advocates recommend limiting exposure. Humans are also regularly exposed to PFAS in food packaging, water and home products.
Many of the biosolid brands market the products as “eco”, “natural”, “reclaimed” or “organic”, which Miller characterized as “comforting” but misleading.
“These are words that can have some truth but there’s no legal definition for them,” she added. While some brands state that the product is made with biosolids, packaging doesn’t explicitly say that it’s a combination of human and industrial sewage waste.
The study’s authors call for stricter regulation of sludge, industry to address its PFAS waste, and for regulators to impose limits for the entire class of PFAS compounds instead of just a few. Though Michigan and Maine have taken some steps to regulate PFAS in sludge, they only screen for two out of thousands of compounds.
A spokesman from the Water Environment Federation, a trade group that represents wastewater districts, called for stricter regulation of PFAS, increased funding for plants to remove the chemicals, and for industry to address its PFAS waste.
“Water facilities are receivers of PFAS,” he said. “The best way to reduce PFAS is to stop the pollution at the source by prohibiting use in commerce, stopping industrial discharges and cleaning up contaminated sites.”
100 companies make 90% of plastic waste
A new study reveals that only 20 corporations are behind the majority of single-use plastic pollution
MATTHEW ROZSA - salon
5/20/2021
A tiny number of companies are responsible for the majority of plastic pollution. A new study reveals that only 20 corporations are behind the majority of single-use plastic pollution
A new report by the Minderoo Foundation, a philanthropic group in Australia, found that 100 companies create more than 90% of the world's single-use plastic waste. Indeed, just 20 of those 100 companies are responsible for more than half of the planet's single-use plastic waste.
The shocking report confirms the view of environmental activists who have for years combatted individualistic environmentalist narratives that posit that consumers' individual actions can stop pollution more so than systemic private sector regulation.
Roughly 98% of this single-use plastic waste is made from fossil fuel-based feedstocks rather than recycled products, meaning they exacerbate global warming. The worst offenders include Exxon Mobil (which told NPR that it is trying to environmentally responsible), Dow Chemical Co. and the Chinese company Sinopec. Those three companies alone create more than one-seventh of all waste from single-use plastics, including food packaging, bags and bottles.
The Minderoo Foundation, which worked with other groups like the London School of Economics and Stockholm Environment Institute, says that pollution has been getting worse. The world's largest manufacturers of single-use plastic are planning on ramping up production because they see high demand throughout the world (the COVID-19 outbreak has certainly increased that demand, although it existed before the pandemic). As a result, the Minderoo Foundation projects that an additional one trillion plastic bags will be created, used and thrown away just by 2025. By 2050, single-use plastic manufacturing will drive between 5% and 10% of climate change.
Former Vice President Al Gore, who penned the foreword to the study, wrote that plastic pollution poses an "existential" threat to humanity for reasons beyond global warming. Because of its prevalence in our environment — from countless everyday products that we use to so-called "microplastics" that have seeped into our food, water and air — chemicals in certain types of plastics have been linked to everything from dangerously dropping fertility rates to cancer. Plastic pollution also clogs up our oceans, waterways and wilderness, destroying ecosystems that we need economically and for our very survival.
"Only a fraction of the tens of thousands of tons of plastic waste that end up in blue bins across the country actually get recycled, while the majority of it is buried, burned, or borne out to sea," Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon who has sponsored legislation to address this crisis, told Salon in April. "If we keep proceeding with business as usual, the air we breathe, the soil we use to grow our food, and the waters that countless communities rely on will only become more and more polluted — putting Americans' health, particularly in communities of color and low-income communities, at serious risk."
The Minderoo Foundation study builds on previous research that finds that a small number of corporations are responsible for the vast majority of pollution. A 2017 study that found that 71% of global emissions were caused by just 100 companies.
A new report by the Minderoo Foundation, a philanthropic group in Australia, found that 100 companies create more than 90% of the world's single-use plastic waste. Indeed, just 20 of those 100 companies are responsible for more than half of the planet's single-use plastic waste.
The shocking report confirms the view of environmental activists who have for years combatted individualistic environmentalist narratives that posit that consumers' individual actions can stop pollution more so than systemic private sector regulation.
Roughly 98% of this single-use plastic waste is made from fossil fuel-based feedstocks rather than recycled products, meaning they exacerbate global warming. The worst offenders include Exxon Mobil (which told NPR that it is trying to environmentally responsible), Dow Chemical Co. and the Chinese company Sinopec. Those three companies alone create more than one-seventh of all waste from single-use plastics, including food packaging, bags and bottles.
The Minderoo Foundation, which worked with other groups like the London School of Economics and Stockholm Environment Institute, says that pollution has been getting worse. The world's largest manufacturers of single-use plastic are planning on ramping up production because they see high demand throughout the world (the COVID-19 outbreak has certainly increased that demand, although it existed before the pandemic). As a result, the Minderoo Foundation projects that an additional one trillion plastic bags will be created, used and thrown away just by 2025. By 2050, single-use plastic manufacturing will drive between 5% and 10% of climate change.
Former Vice President Al Gore, who penned the foreword to the study, wrote that plastic pollution poses an "existential" threat to humanity for reasons beyond global warming. Because of its prevalence in our environment — from countless everyday products that we use to so-called "microplastics" that have seeped into our food, water and air — chemicals in certain types of plastics have been linked to everything from dangerously dropping fertility rates to cancer. Plastic pollution also clogs up our oceans, waterways and wilderness, destroying ecosystems that we need economically and for our very survival.
"Only a fraction of the tens of thousands of tons of plastic waste that end up in blue bins across the country actually get recycled, while the majority of it is buried, burned, or borne out to sea," Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon who has sponsored legislation to address this crisis, told Salon in April. "If we keep proceeding with business as usual, the air we breathe, the soil we use to grow our food, and the waters that countless communities rely on will only become more and more polluted — putting Americans' health, particularly in communities of color and low-income communities, at serious risk."
The Minderoo Foundation study builds on previous research that finds that a small number of corporations are responsible for the vast majority of pollution. A 2017 study that found that 71% of global emissions were caused by just 100 companies.
Twenty firms produce 55% of world’s plastic waste, report reveals
Plastic Waste Makers index identifies those driving climate crisis with virgin polymer production
Sandra Laville - the guardian
Mon 17 May 2021 20.00 EDT
Twenty companies are responsible for producing more than half of all the single-use plastic waste in the world, fuelling the climate crisis and creating an environmental catastrophe, new research reveals.
Among the global businesses responsible for 55% of the world’s plastic packaging waste are both state-owned and multinational corporations, including oil and gas giants and chemical companies, according to a comprehensive new analysis.
It also reveals Australia leads a list of countries for generating the most single-use plastic waste on a per capita basis, ahead of the United States, South Korea and Britain.
ExxonMobil is the greatest single-use plastic waste polluter in the world, contributing 5.9m tonnes to the global waste mountain, concludes the analysis by the Minderoo Foundation of Australia with partners including Wood Mackenzie, the London School of Economics and Stockholm Environment Institute. The largest chemicals company in the world, Dow, which is based in the US, created 5.5m tonnes of plastic waste, while China’s oil and gas enterprise, Sinopec, created 5.3m tonnes.
Eleven of the companies are based in Asia, four in Europe, three in North America, one in Latin America, and one in the Middle East. Their plastic production is funded by leading banks, chief among which are Barclays, HSBC, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.
The enormous plastic waste footprint of the top 20 global companies amounts to more than half of the 130m metric tonnes of single-use plastic thrown away in 2019, the analysis says.
Single-use plastics are made almost exclusively from fossil fuels, driving the climate crisis, and because they are some of the hardest items to recycle, they end up creating global waste mountains. Just 10%-15% of single-use plastic is recycled globally each year.
The analysis provides an unprecedented glimpse into the small number of petrochemicals companies, and their financial backers, which generate almost all single-use plastic waste across the world.
Al Gore, the environmentalist and former US vice-president, said the groundbreaking analysis exposed how fossil fuel companies were rushing to switch to plastic production as two of their main markets – transport and electricity generation – were being decarbonised.
“Since most plastic is made from oil and gas – especially fracked gas – the production and consumption of plastic are becoming a significant driver of the climate crisis,” said Gore.
The plastic waste crisis grows every year. In the next five years, global capacity to produce virgin polymers for single-use plastics could grow by more than 30%.
“Moreover, the plastic waste that results – particularly from single-use plastics – is piling up in landfills, along roadsides, and in rivers that carry vast amounts into the ocean.”
By 2050 plastic is expected to account for 5%-10% of greenhouse gas emissions.
“An environmental catastrophe beckons: much of the resulting single-use plastic waste will end up as pollution in developing countries with poor waste management systems,” the report’s authors said. “The projected rate of growth in the supply of these virgin polymers … will likely keep new, circular models of production and reuse ‘out of the money’ without regulatory stimulus.”
The report said the plastics industry across the world had been allowed to operate with minimal regulation and limited transparency for decades. “These companies are the source of the single-use plastic crisis: their production of new ‘virgin’ polymers from oil, gas and coal feedstocks perpetuates the take-make-waste dynamic of the plastics economy.”
The report said this undermines the shift to a circular economy, including the production of recycled polymers from plastic waste, reusing plastic and using substitute materials. Just 2% of single-use plastic was made from recycled polymers in 2019.
“Plastic pollution is one of the greatest and most critical threats facing our planet,” said Dr Andrew Forrest AO, chairman of the Minderoo Foundation. “The current outlook is set to get worse and we simply cannot allow these producers of fossil fuel-derived plastics to continue as they have done without check. With our oceans choking and plastic impacting our health, we need to see firm intervention from producers, governments and the world of finance to break the cycle of inaction.”
Among the global businesses responsible for 55% of the world’s plastic packaging waste are both state-owned and multinational corporations, including oil and gas giants and chemical companies, according to a comprehensive new analysis.
It also reveals Australia leads a list of countries for generating the most single-use plastic waste on a per capita basis, ahead of the United States, South Korea and Britain.
ExxonMobil is the greatest single-use plastic waste polluter in the world, contributing 5.9m tonnes to the global waste mountain, concludes the analysis by the Minderoo Foundation of Australia with partners including Wood Mackenzie, the London School of Economics and Stockholm Environment Institute. The largest chemicals company in the world, Dow, which is based in the US, created 5.5m tonnes of plastic waste, while China’s oil and gas enterprise, Sinopec, created 5.3m tonnes.
Eleven of the companies are based in Asia, four in Europe, three in North America, one in Latin America, and one in the Middle East. Their plastic production is funded by leading banks, chief among which are Barclays, HSBC, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.
The enormous plastic waste footprint of the top 20 global companies amounts to more than half of the 130m metric tonnes of single-use plastic thrown away in 2019, the analysis says.
Single-use plastics are made almost exclusively from fossil fuels, driving the climate crisis, and because they are some of the hardest items to recycle, they end up creating global waste mountains. Just 10%-15% of single-use plastic is recycled globally each year.
The analysis provides an unprecedented glimpse into the small number of petrochemicals companies, and their financial backers, which generate almost all single-use plastic waste across the world.
Al Gore, the environmentalist and former US vice-president, said the groundbreaking analysis exposed how fossil fuel companies were rushing to switch to plastic production as two of their main markets – transport and electricity generation – were being decarbonised.
“Since most plastic is made from oil and gas – especially fracked gas – the production and consumption of plastic are becoming a significant driver of the climate crisis,” said Gore.
The plastic waste crisis grows every year. In the next five years, global capacity to produce virgin polymers for single-use plastics could grow by more than 30%.
“Moreover, the plastic waste that results – particularly from single-use plastics – is piling up in landfills, along roadsides, and in rivers that carry vast amounts into the ocean.”
By 2050 plastic is expected to account for 5%-10% of greenhouse gas emissions.
“An environmental catastrophe beckons: much of the resulting single-use plastic waste will end up as pollution in developing countries with poor waste management systems,” the report’s authors said. “The projected rate of growth in the supply of these virgin polymers … will likely keep new, circular models of production and reuse ‘out of the money’ without regulatory stimulus.”
The report said the plastics industry across the world had been allowed to operate with minimal regulation and limited transparency for decades. “These companies are the source of the single-use plastic crisis: their production of new ‘virgin’ polymers from oil, gas and coal feedstocks perpetuates the take-make-waste dynamic of the plastics economy.”
The report said this undermines the shift to a circular economy, including the production of recycled polymers from plastic waste, reusing plastic and using substitute materials. Just 2% of single-use plastic was made from recycled polymers in 2019.
“Plastic pollution is one of the greatest and most critical threats facing our planet,” said Dr Andrew Forrest AO, chairman of the Minderoo Foundation. “The current outlook is set to get worse and we simply cannot allow these producers of fossil fuel-derived plastics to continue as they have done without check. With our oceans choking and plastic impacting our health, we need to see firm intervention from producers, governments and the world of finance to break the cycle of inaction.”
Air Pollution From Livestock and Fertilizers Kills Nearly 18,000 People Yearly
BY Chris Walker, Truthout
PUBLISHED May 11, 2021
Anew study from a group of agricultural researchers found that nearly 18,000 deaths occur annually in the United States due to air pollution coming from farms.
The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that gases associated with manure and animal feed are producing particles that are able to drift hundreds of miles away from their source. Most of the deaths attributable to farm pollution, however, come from animal-based agriculture, accounting for 80 percent of the deaths the study uncovered.
Chronic exposure to increased levels of fine particulate matter (sometimes shortened to PM2.5) that is released from farms “increases the risk of heart disease, cancer, and stroke,” an analysis of the study noted.
Notably, deaths associated with farm pollution are more localized than deaths that occur with greenhouse gas pollution. Communities upwind from farms discharging the pollutants are at greatest risk, said Jason Hill, University of Minnesota professor and a lead author of the study. In other words, the health effects from agriculture-based air pollution tend to be more localized, dependent upon local weather patterns and other factors.
While that reduces the risk from these pollutants at the national and global levels (areas most affected by this type of pollution are in eastern North Carolina, California’s Central Valley and the Upper Midwest), the annual number of deaths caused by farm pollution now exceed deaths caused by pollution from coal power plants in the U.S.
The biggest culprit behind the deaths from farm pollution, in the study’s estimation, is ammonia, a chemical that’s released by manure and fertilizer, and which often combines with other pollutants found on farms, including nitrogen and sulfur. Hill, speaking with The Washington Post about the study, pointed out that animal waste is often stored in “lagoons” on farms, where huge amounts of ammonia are generated by the breakdown of animal feces. Ammonia is also created when farmers apply too much fertilizer on crops.
According to the study, livestock waste and fertilizer overuse likely accounted for about 12,400 deaths per year. While particulate matter emanating from “dust from tillage, livestock dust, field burning, and fuel combustion in agricultural equipment use” accounted for around 4,800 more deaths annually.
Agriculture industry leaders were quick to push back against the study’s findings. “U.S. pork producers have a strong track record of environmental stewardship,” claimed Jim Monroe, a spokesperson for the National Pork Producers Council.
A spokesperson for Smithfield Foods, which runs industrial hog operations in North Carolina, agreed with Monroe’s contentions, citing a study from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, which said it didn’t find air quality problems in the areas where they had farms. But that study has some noteworthy flaws, including the fact that monitors used to detect ammonia levels were set up far away from the farms themselves.
Ammonia is a reactive chemical, and is difficult to detect unless a significant amount is released at one time.
In spite of this pushback, the study on agricultural air pollution noted there are potential solutions to the problem that could reduce yearly deaths in the U.S.
“Air quality–related health benefits … can be achieved through the actions of food producers and consumers,” the study’s authors said. Reducing particulate-related emissions, promoting dietary shifts in animals, reducing food loss and waste, and other methods are cited in the study as helpful to reducing the number of deaths from agricultural air pollution.
“The greatest benefits are from changes in livestock waste management and fertilizer application practices,” the study said. “Producer-side interventions in the 10 percent of counties with the highest mitigation potential alone could prevent 3,600 deaths per year.”
Methods based out of regenerative agriculture — described as “a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm” by the Climate Reality Project — could also be beneficial for scaling back farm-based air pollution, particularly in California, where such efforts could potentially reduce the impact of wildfires in the state. Such methods (including encouraging animals to graze natural plants, shrubs, or grass on the land, rather than animal feed, and engaging in no-till farming strategies to increase moisture levels in the soil) have been cited by farmer Alexis Koefoed as helping her family’s farm survive a wildfire last year.
“I think what the fire reinforced for me is that regenerative agriculture, managing the soil, using animals as grazers to build healthy soil is absolutely the direction to go in,” Koefoed said.
Beyond saving family farms, reducing the impact of wildfires could result in better health outcomes for nearby areas, particularly since smoke from those fires has been found to be 10 times more harmful than from other sources, including car exhaust.
The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that gases associated with manure and animal feed are producing particles that are able to drift hundreds of miles away from their source. Most of the deaths attributable to farm pollution, however, come from animal-based agriculture, accounting for 80 percent of the deaths the study uncovered.
Chronic exposure to increased levels of fine particulate matter (sometimes shortened to PM2.5) that is released from farms “increases the risk of heart disease, cancer, and stroke,” an analysis of the study noted.
Notably, deaths associated with farm pollution are more localized than deaths that occur with greenhouse gas pollution. Communities upwind from farms discharging the pollutants are at greatest risk, said Jason Hill, University of Minnesota professor and a lead author of the study. In other words, the health effects from agriculture-based air pollution tend to be more localized, dependent upon local weather patterns and other factors.
While that reduces the risk from these pollutants at the national and global levels (areas most affected by this type of pollution are in eastern North Carolina, California’s Central Valley and the Upper Midwest), the annual number of deaths caused by farm pollution now exceed deaths caused by pollution from coal power plants in the U.S.
The biggest culprit behind the deaths from farm pollution, in the study’s estimation, is ammonia, a chemical that’s released by manure and fertilizer, and which often combines with other pollutants found on farms, including nitrogen and sulfur. Hill, speaking with The Washington Post about the study, pointed out that animal waste is often stored in “lagoons” on farms, where huge amounts of ammonia are generated by the breakdown of animal feces. Ammonia is also created when farmers apply too much fertilizer on crops.
According to the study, livestock waste and fertilizer overuse likely accounted for about 12,400 deaths per year. While particulate matter emanating from “dust from tillage, livestock dust, field burning, and fuel combustion in agricultural equipment use” accounted for around 4,800 more deaths annually.
Agriculture industry leaders were quick to push back against the study’s findings. “U.S. pork producers have a strong track record of environmental stewardship,” claimed Jim Monroe, a spokesperson for the National Pork Producers Council.
A spokesperson for Smithfield Foods, which runs industrial hog operations in North Carolina, agreed with Monroe’s contentions, citing a study from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, which said it didn’t find air quality problems in the areas where they had farms. But that study has some noteworthy flaws, including the fact that monitors used to detect ammonia levels were set up far away from the farms themselves.
Ammonia is a reactive chemical, and is difficult to detect unless a significant amount is released at one time.
In spite of this pushback, the study on agricultural air pollution noted there are potential solutions to the problem that could reduce yearly deaths in the U.S.
“Air quality–related health benefits … can be achieved through the actions of food producers and consumers,” the study’s authors said. Reducing particulate-related emissions, promoting dietary shifts in animals, reducing food loss and waste, and other methods are cited in the study as helpful to reducing the number of deaths from agricultural air pollution.
“The greatest benefits are from changes in livestock waste management and fertilizer application practices,” the study said. “Producer-side interventions in the 10 percent of counties with the highest mitigation potential alone could prevent 3,600 deaths per year.”
Methods based out of regenerative agriculture — described as “a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm” by the Climate Reality Project — could also be beneficial for scaling back farm-based air pollution, particularly in California, where such efforts could potentially reduce the impact of wildfires in the state. Such methods (including encouraging animals to graze natural plants, shrubs, or grass on the land, rather than animal feed, and engaging in no-till farming strategies to increase moisture levels in the soil) have been cited by farmer Alexis Koefoed as helping her family’s farm survive a wildfire last year.
“I think what the fire reinforced for me is that regenerative agriculture, managing the soil, using animals as grazers to build healthy soil is absolutely the direction to go in,” Koefoed said.
Beyond saving family farms, reducing the impact of wildfires could result in better health outcomes for nearby areas, particularly since smoke from those fires has been found to be 10 times more harmful than from other sources, including car exhaust.
Carbon dioxide levels are at a 3.6 million year high
Despite the lockdown resulting in a slight reduction in emissions, Earth is now at a geological highpoint for CO2
By MATTHEW ROZSA - salon
APRIL 9, 2021 11:00AM (UTC)
Because the COVID-19 pandemic caused a massive economic slowdown, experts had hoped that the decline in transportation and manufacturing might slow greenhouse gas emissions at least a little.
Unfortunately, a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reveals that one of the major gases behind climate change has reached its highest level in 3.6 million years.
The NOAA reports that the average amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was 412.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2020, an increase by 2.6 ppm through the course of the year.
Climate scientists generally agree that in order for life on Earth to be minimally interrupted, Earth's carbon dioxide levels should remain under 350 parts per million. Yet since NOAA begin recording atmospheric composition data in 1960, there has not been a year in which carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere did not increase.
Likewise, in 2020, overall carbon dioxide emissions increased at the fifth-highest rate in the 63 years that NOAA has been recording. It was only surpassed by the rates of increase in 1987, 1998, 2015 and 2016.
A senior scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, Pieter Tans, said that if there had not been an economic slowdown, it would have been the highest increase on record. As things current stand, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at a point comparable to the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when the temperature was 7 degrees hotter and the sea level was roughly 78 feet higher than today.
Another organization, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, released similar results on Wednesday, announcing that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 417.4 ppm at their monitoring station in Hawaii.
The NOAA also reported a "significant jump" in the atmospheric burden of methane in 2020, with the annual amount increasing by 14.7 parts per billion (ppb) in 2020. Not only is this the biggest jump since methane levels began to be systematically measured in 1983, but it is also troubling because of how effective methane is at trapping heat. Although there is much less methane than carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, it is 28 times more potent at trapping heat over the course of a century.
Still, the COVID-19 lockdowns had a minor effect on emissions.
"The estimates vary among the different groups doing these sorts of calculations, but the consensus seems to be about a 7% decrease [in greenhouse gas emissions] relative to 2019 levels," Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, wrote to Salon in December.
If climate change is not halted and/or reversed in the near future, experts agree that there will be serious and negative repercussions for all life on Earth, including humans. There will be an increase in extreme weather events like hurricanes and blizzards, an increase in the amount of wildfires and a reduction in the amount of land that can be used to produce food. All of this will lead to fierce competition for resources and mass population displacements, even as an increasing amount of the world's surface either too hot or too dry to be inhabitable.
President Joe Biden has said that he will prioritize fighting climate change in his presidency. Shortly after taking office, he said in a statement that "environmental justice will be at the center of all we do."
Unfortunately, a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reveals that one of the major gases behind climate change has reached its highest level in 3.6 million years.
The NOAA reports that the average amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was 412.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2020, an increase by 2.6 ppm through the course of the year.
Climate scientists generally agree that in order for life on Earth to be minimally interrupted, Earth's carbon dioxide levels should remain under 350 parts per million. Yet since NOAA begin recording atmospheric composition data in 1960, there has not been a year in which carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere did not increase.
Likewise, in 2020, overall carbon dioxide emissions increased at the fifth-highest rate in the 63 years that NOAA has been recording. It was only surpassed by the rates of increase in 1987, 1998, 2015 and 2016.
A senior scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, Pieter Tans, said that if there had not been an economic slowdown, it would have been the highest increase on record. As things current stand, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at a point comparable to the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when the temperature was 7 degrees hotter and the sea level was roughly 78 feet higher than today.
Another organization, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, released similar results on Wednesday, announcing that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 417.4 ppm at their monitoring station in Hawaii.
The NOAA also reported a "significant jump" in the atmospheric burden of methane in 2020, with the annual amount increasing by 14.7 parts per billion (ppb) in 2020. Not only is this the biggest jump since methane levels began to be systematically measured in 1983, but it is also troubling because of how effective methane is at trapping heat. Although there is much less methane than carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, it is 28 times more potent at trapping heat over the course of a century.
Still, the COVID-19 lockdowns had a minor effect on emissions.
"The estimates vary among the different groups doing these sorts of calculations, but the consensus seems to be about a 7% decrease [in greenhouse gas emissions] relative to 2019 levels," Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, wrote to Salon in December.
If climate change is not halted and/or reversed in the near future, experts agree that there will be serious and negative repercussions for all life on Earth, including humans. There will be an increase in extreme weather events like hurricanes and blizzards, an increase in the amount of wildfires and a reduction in the amount of land that can be used to produce food. All of this will lead to fierce competition for resources and mass population displacements, even as an increasing amount of the world's surface either too hot or too dry to be inhabitable.
President Joe Biden has said that he will prioritize fighting climate change in his presidency. Shortly after taking office, he said in a statement that "environmental justice will be at the center of all we do."
Airline industry
1% of people cause half of global aviation emissions – study
Exclusive: Researchers say Covid-19 hiatus is moment to tackle elite ‘super emitters’
Damian Carrington Environment editor
THE GUARDIAN
Tue 17 Nov 2020 06.50 EST
Frequent-flying “‘super emitters” who represent just 1% of the world’s population caused half of aviation’s carbon emissions in 2018, according to a study.
Airlines produced a billion tonnes of CO2 and benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, the researchers estimated. The analysis draws together data to give the clearest global picture of the impact of frequent fliers.
Only 11% of the world’s population took a flight in 2018 and 4% flew abroad. US air passengers have by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries. Its aviation emissions are bigger than the next 10 countries combined, including the UK, Japan, Germany and Australia, the study reports.
The researchers said the study showed that an elite group enjoying frequent flights had a big impact on the climate crisis that affected everyone.
They said the 50% drop in passenger numbers in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic should be an opportunity to make the aviation industry fairer and more sustainable. This could be done by putting green conditions on the huge bailouts governments were giving the industry, as had happened in France.
Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic, with emissions jumping by 32% from 2013-18. Flight numbers in 2020 have fallen by half but the industry expects to return to previous levels by 2024.
“If you want to resolve climate change and we need to redesign [aviation], then we should start at the top, where a few ‘super emitters’ contribute massively to global warming,” said Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, who led the new study.
“The rich have had far too much freedom to design the planet according to their wishes. We should see the crisis as an opportunity to slim the air transport system.”
Dan Rutherford, at the International Council on Clean Transportation and not part of the research team, said the analysis raised the question of equality.
“The benefits of aviation are more inequitably shared across the world than probably any other major emission source,” he said. “So there’s a clear risk that the special treatment enjoyed by airlines just protects the economic interests of the globally wealthy.”
The frequent flyers identified in the study travelled about 35,000 miles (56,000km) a year, Gössling said, equivalent to three long-haul flights a year, one short-haul flight per month, or some combination of the two.
The research, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, collated a range of data and found large proportions of people in every country did not fly at all each year – 53% in the US, 65% in Germany and 66% in Taiwan. In the UK, separate data shows 48% of people did not fly abroad in 2018.
The analysis showed the US produced the most emissions among rich nations. China was the biggest among other countries but it does not make data available. However, Gössling thinks its aviation footprint is probably only a fifth of that of the US.
On average, North Americans flew 50 times more kilometres than Africans in 2018, 10 times more than those in the Asia-Pacific region and 7.5 times more than Latin Americans. Europeans and those in the Middle East flew 25 times further than Africans and five times more than Asians.
The data also showed a large growth in international flights from 1990-2017, with numbers tripling from Australia and doubling from the UK.
The researchers estimated the cost of the climate damage caused by aviation’s emissions at $100bn in 2018. The absence of payments to cover this damage “represents a major subsidy to the most affluent”, the researchers said. “This highlights the need to scrutinise the sector, and in particular the super emitters.”
The figure for the social cost of carbon emissions was actually a bit conservative, Rutherford said.
A levy on frequent fliers is one proposal to discourage flights. “Somebody will need to pay to decarbonise flight – why shouldn’t it be frequent flyers?” Rutherford said. But Gössling was less enthusiastic, pointing out that frequent flyers were usually very wealthy, meaning higher ticket prices may not deter them.
“Perhaps a more productive way is to ask airlines to increase the share of [low carbon] synthetic fuels mix every year up to 100% by 2050,” Gössling said. A mandate for sustainable aviation fuel starting in 2025 is backed by some in the industry.
A spokesman for the International Air Transport Association (Iata), which represents the world’s airlines, said: “The charge of elitism may have had some foundation in the 1950s and 1960s. But today air travel is a necessity for millions.”
He said the airline industry paid $94bn in direct taxes, such as income tax in 2019 and $42bn in indirect taxes such as VAT.
“We remain committed to our environmental goals,” the Iata spokesman said. “This year – in the teeth of the greatest crisis ever facing our industry – airlines agreed to explore pathways to how we could move to net zero emissions by around 2060.”
A key pillar of the industry’s plans is the carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation, produced by the UN’s air transport body. But this was heavily criticised in June when revisions were seen as watering down an already weak scheme, with experts estimating that airlines would not have to offset any emissions until 2024. “I think they have a zero interest in climate change,” Gössling said.
Other research by Gössling found that half of leisure flights were not considered important by the traveller. “A lot of travel is going on just because it’s cheap.”
He stopped flying for holidays in 1995 and more recently stopped going to academic conferences and taking long-haul flights. “I’m not saying I’ll never fly again. But if I can avoid it, I really, really try,” Gössling said.
Airlines produced a billion tonnes of CO2 and benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, the researchers estimated. The analysis draws together data to give the clearest global picture of the impact of frequent fliers.
Only 11% of the world’s population took a flight in 2018 and 4% flew abroad. US air passengers have by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries. Its aviation emissions are bigger than the next 10 countries combined, including the UK, Japan, Germany and Australia, the study reports.
The researchers said the study showed that an elite group enjoying frequent flights had a big impact on the climate crisis that affected everyone.
They said the 50% drop in passenger numbers in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic should be an opportunity to make the aviation industry fairer and more sustainable. This could be done by putting green conditions on the huge bailouts governments were giving the industry, as had happened in France.
Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic, with emissions jumping by 32% from 2013-18. Flight numbers in 2020 have fallen by half but the industry expects to return to previous levels by 2024.
“If you want to resolve climate change and we need to redesign [aviation], then we should start at the top, where a few ‘super emitters’ contribute massively to global warming,” said Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, who led the new study.
“The rich have had far too much freedom to design the planet according to their wishes. We should see the crisis as an opportunity to slim the air transport system.”
Dan Rutherford, at the International Council on Clean Transportation and not part of the research team, said the analysis raised the question of equality.
“The benefits of aviation are more inequitably shared across the world than probably any other major emission source,” he said. “So there’s a clear risk that the special treatment enjoyed by airlines just protects the economic interests of the globally wealthy.”
The frequent flyers identified in the study travelled about 35,000 miles (56,000km) a year, Gössling said, equivalent to three long-haul flights a year, one short-haul flight per month, or some combination of the two.
The research, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, collated a range of data and found large proportions of people in every country did not fly at all each year – 53% in the US, 65% in Germany and 66% in Taiwan. In the UK, separate data shows 48% of people did not fly abroad in 2018.
The analysis showed the US produced the most emissions among rich nations. China was the biggest among other countries but it does not make data available. However, Gössling thinks its aviation footprint is probably only a fifth of that of the US.
On average, North Americans flew 50 times more kilometres than Africans in 2018, 10 times more than those in the Asia-Pacific region and 7.5 times more than Latin Americans. Europeans and those in the Middle East flew 25 times further than Africans and five times more than Asians.
The data also showed a large growth in international flights from 1990-2017, with numbers tripling from Australia and doubling from the UK.
The researchers estimated the cost of the climate damage caused by aviation’s emissions at $100bn in 2018. The absence of payments to cover this damage “represents a major subsidy to the most affluent”, the researchers said. “This highlights the need to scrutinise the sector, and in particular the super emitters.”
The figure for the social cost of carbon emissions was actually a bit conservative, Rutherford said.
A levy on frequent fliers is one proposal to discourage flights. “Somebody will need to pay to decarbonise flight – why shouldn’t it be frequent flyers?” Rutherford said. But Gössling was less enthusiastic, pointing out that frequent flyers were usually very wealthy, meaning higher ticket prices may not deter them.
“Perhaps a more productive way is to ask airlines to increase the share of [low carbon] synthetic fuels mix every year up to 100% by 2050,” Gössling said. A mandate for sustainable aviation fuel starting in 2025 is backed by some in the industry.
A spokesman for the International Air Transport Association (Iata), which represents the world’s airlines, said: “The charge of elitism may have had some foundation in the 1950s and 1960s. But today air travel is a necessity for millions.”
He said the airline industry paid $94bn in direct taxes, such as income tax in 2019 and $42bn in indirect taxes such as VAT.
“We remain committed to our environmental goals,” the Iata spokesman said. “This year – in the teeth of the greatest crisis ever facing our industry – airlines agreed to explore pathways to how we could move to net zero emissions by around 2060.”
A key pillar of the industry’s plans is the carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation, produced by the UN’s air transport body. But this was heavily criticised in June when revisions were seen as watering down an already weak scheme, with experts estimating that airlines would not have to offset any emissions until 2024. “I think they have a zero interest in climate change,” Gössling said.
Other research by Gössling found that half of leisure flights were not considered important by the traveller. “A lot of travel is going on just because it’s cheap.”
He stopped flying for holidays in 1995 and more recently stopped going to academic conferences and taking long-haul flights. “I’m not saying I’ll never fly again. But if I can avoid it, I really, really try,” Gössling said.
Fracking Isn’t Just Bad for the Climate. It’s Bad for Mental Health Too
BY Stephanie Malin, The Conversation
PUBLISHED October 25, 2020
Hydraulic fracturing has boomed in the U.S. over the past decade, but unless you live near it, you may not realize just how close fracking wells can be to homes and schools. In Colorado, the wellbore – the hole drilled to extract oil or gas – can be 500 feet from someone’s house under current state rules. In some states, like Texas, drilling can be even closer.
For people living in these areas, that means noise, pollution and other stressors that can harm physical and mental health.
People with homes near fracking operations describe vibrations that can make sleep difficult and disturb their pets. Truck traffic around wellpads adds to the noise, dust and other airborne pollutants, creating another layer of industrial disruption.
One woman I spoke with had a 30-foot-high sound wall put up around her property, but the parade of semitrucks at all hours still rattled her home, and the sound wall couldn’t keep out the noise. When she opened her bedroom curtains, all she saw was a brown wall where she used to have mountain views.
As a social scientist who studies extractive industries and their environmental justice and health impacts, I have spent years in communities with unconventional oil and gas activity, visiting homes and well sites.
My research shows that living near fracking sites can lead to chronic stress and self-reported depression. These effects often relate to systemic problems associated with the industry.
Consequences of the Fracking Boom
The boom in hydraulic fracturing started around 2010 and made the U.S. the No. 1 producer of hydrocarbons globally. In Colorado, fracking has since helped quadruple oil production and increased natural gas production.
But that growth has come with consequences. By 2017, researchers estimated 4.7 million people lived within 1 mile of an unconventional oil or gas well in the U.S.
Health studies have found respiratory difficulties like coughing and wheezing in people living and working near fracking sites. Other studies have found increases in endocrine-disrupting chemicals that can affect pregnant women and children, including raising the risks of birth defects and childhood cancers.
Emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change, have also spiked around oil and gas activity.
Less well understood have been the effects on mental health.
In a new study on the mental health effects, I examined multiple communities across northern Colorado, surveyed hundreds of households and visited people’s homes, schools and wellpads.
Two drivers of stress and mental health harm stood out:
Previous studies have suggested links to depression and lower quality of life, as well as social psychological impacts, such as increased tensions within communities, but these studies typically used surveys or government data. This new research looked closer at people’s experiences.
Fearing the Unknown
Imagine you live in northern Colorado. A company notifies you that it will start drilling in the open space in your subdivision that you can see from your backyard or deck. You try to find information about the health or environmental risks, but that information is locked behind a publisher’s paywall or it is buried in hundreds of pages full of technical language.
One of the people I interviewed, a 45-year-old teacher who has lived in his community his entire life, talked about stress from the uncertainties of living near fracking: “What’s stressful is the unknowns and how this industry is operating behind a curtain all the time. … When you don’t know the chemicals they’re pumping down. You don’t know where they’re getting the water. You don’t know how much these tanks are leaking. … To me, that is stressful, the not knowing.”
Other people reported feeling stress over uncertainties about long-term impacts. A retired former city worker said: “We’re lab rats right now. They’re learning about it as they’re going. … We don’t know what the impacts are going to be 20 years down the line.”
Many people feel powerless to do anything about it. In Colorado, people typically have only three minutes to talk during public meetings, while the companies have more time to present their cases.
A middle-aged woman living with a wellpad about 1,000 feet from her deck explained why public meetings felt so exclusive: “This was a public hearing … and they turned it over to [an oil company] to give their slideshow. … [The oil company] proceeded to do about a two-hour presentation, so there was no time for public input. So four or five people out of a hundred people who wanted to protest got a chance to talk. It’s very hard to be heard.”
These patterns emerged across my data.
About 90% of the people I interviewed reported increased, chronic stress related to nearby fracking operations, and 75% reported feeling long-term depression – particularly because of the uncertainty about the impacts and feeling powerless to stop it.
What Can Be Done About It?
Governments could help address some of these systemic problems fairly quickly.
The first step is to provide easy-to-understand, accurate information about the environmental and public health risks, as well as the economic risks and benefits.
Governments can also give people more meaningful opportunities to participate in zoning and other decisions about how, when and where hydraulic fracturing takes place.
Fixing the health and environment risks that underlie the stress is more challenging. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is expected in early November to finalize new drilling rules that include a 2,000-foot setback from homes, the widest statewide rule in the country, but wells could still be built closer.
People I’ve interviewed have reported feeling a sense of empowerment by organizing with others to fight for more local control. But solutions aren’t only the responsibility of governments or the public; companies must be accountable, too.
For people living in these areas, that means noise, pollution and other stressors that can harm physical and mental health.
People with homes near fracking operations describe vibrations that can make sleep difficult and disturb their pets. Truck traffic around wellpads adds to the noise, dust and other airborne pollutants, creating another layer of industrial disruption.
One woman I spoke with had a 30-foot-high sound wall put up around her property, but the parade of semitrucks at all hours still rattled her home, and the sound wall couldn’t keep out the noise. When she opened her bedroom curtains, all she saw was a brown wall where she used to have mountain views.
As a social scientist who studies extractive industries and their environmental justice and health impacts, I have spent years in communities with unconventional oil and gas activity, visiting homes and well sites.
My research shows that living near fracking sites can lead to chronic stress and self-reported depression. These effects often relate to systemic problems associated with the industry.
Consequences of the Fracking Boom
The boom in hydraulic fracturing started around 2010 and made the U.S. the No. 1 producer of hydrocarbons globally. In Colorado, fracking has since helped quadruple oil production and increased natural gas production.
But that growth has come with consequences. By 2017, researchers estimated 4.7 million people lived within 1 mile of an unconventional oil or gas well in the U.S.
Health studies have found respiratory difficulties like coughing and wheezing in people living and working near fracking sites. Other studies have found increases in endocrine-disrupting chemicals that can affect pregnant women and children, including raising the risks of birth defects and childhood cancers.
Emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change, have also spiked around oil and gas activity.
Less well understood have been the effects on mental health.
In a new study on the mental health effects, I examined multiple communities across northern Colorado, surveyed hundreds of households and visited people’s homes, schools and wellpads.
Two drivers of stress and mental health harm stood out:
- First, people report chronic stress and depression related to their uncertainty about environmental and public health risks – and inadequate access to useful information about it.
- Second, stress and depression relate to people’s experiences of political powerlessness – particularly their inability to control the activity, where it occurs, and how it is regulated.
Previous studies have suggested links to depression and lower quality of life, as well as social psychological impacts, such as increased tensions within communities, but these studies typically used surveys or government data. This new research looked closer at people’s experiences.
Fearing the Unknown
Imagine you live in northern Colorado. A company notifies you that it will start drilling in the open space in your subdivision that you can see from your backyard or deck. You try to find information about the health or environmental risks, but that information is locked behind a publisher’s paywall or it is buried in hundreds of pages full of technical language.
One of the people I interviewed, a 45-year-old teacher who has lived in his community his entire life, talked about stress from the uncertainties of living near fracking: “What’s stressful is the unknowns and how this industry is operating behind a curtain all the time. … When you don’t know the chemicals they’re pumping down. You don’t know where they’re getting the water. You don’t know how much these tanks are leaking. … To me, that is stressful, the not knowing.”
Other people reported feeling stress over uncertainties about long-term impacts. A retired former city worker said: “We’re lab rats right now. They’re learning about it as they’re going. … We don’t know what the impacts are going to be 20 years down the line.”
Many people feel powerless to do anything about it. In Colorado, people typically have only three minutes to talk during public meetings, while the companies have more time to present their cases.
A middle-aged woman living with a wellpad about 1,000 feet from her deck explained why public meetings felt so exclusive: “This was a public hearing … and they turned it over to [an oil company] to give their slideshow. … [The oil company] proceeded to do about a two-hour presentation, so there was no time for public input. So four or five people out of a hundred people who wanted to protest got a chance to talk. It’s very hard to be heard.”
These patterns emerged across my data.
About 90% of the people I interviewed reported increased, chronic stress related to nearby fracking operations, and 75% reported feeling long-term depression – particularly because of the uncertainty about the impacts and feeling powerless to stop it.
What Can Be Done About It?
Governments could help address some of these systemic problems fairly quickly.
The first step is to provide easy-to-understand, accurate information about the environmental and public health risks, as well as the economic risks and benefits.
Governments can also give people more meaningful opportunities to participate in zoning and other decisions about how, when and where hydraulic fracturing takes place.
Fixing the health and environment risks that underlie the stress is more challenging. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is expected in early November to finalize new drilling rules that include a 2,000-foot setback from homes, the widest statewide rule in the country, but wells could still be built closer.
People I’ve interviewed have reported feeling a sense of empowerment by organizing with others to fight for more local control. But solutions aren’t only the responsibility of governments or the public; companies must be accountable, too.
ANYTHING TO BUY VOTES AND CONTINUE THE THIEF OF RESOURCES AND GENOCIDE OF THE REAL AMERICANS!!!
Trump’s EPA Gives Oklahoma Control Over Tribal Lands
Agency Reverses Tribal Sovereignty Recognized in Recent Supreme Court Ruling
By Ti-Hua Chang, TYT Investigates DC REPORTS
10/8/2020
The Environmental Protection Agency has granted the state of Oklahoma regulatory control over environmental issues on nearly all tribal lands there, TYT has learned.
This strips from 38 tribes in Oklahoma their sovereignty over environmental issues. It also establishes a legal and administrative pathway to potential environmental abuses on tribal land, including dumping hazardous chemicals like cancer-causing PCBs and petroleum spills, with no legal recourse by the tribes, according to a former high-level official of the EPA.
This also includes hazardous chemicals that are byproducts of petroleum procurement and refining. In 2019, Oklahoma had the fourth largest petroleum industry in our country.
TYT has obtained a copy of the letter EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler sent to Gov. J. Kevin Stitt (R-Ok.) on Oct. 1. The end of the opening paragraph states simply, “EPA hereby approves Oklahoma’s request.”
TYT previously revealed that on July 22, Stitt requested control of environmental regulations on tribal land involving a wide range of issues. All of Stitt’s requests in his letter were granted by the EPA. They include:
The EPA has now granted the State of Oklahoma the same authority it had before McGirt on environmental issues, especially on petroleum. It can do this because federal legislation can nullify Supreme Court rulings. In 2005, a midnight rider attached to a transportation bill took away environmental regulatory control by Oklahoma tribes if requested by the state as it has now done. The Oklahoma state government is pro-fossil fuel and pro-big agribusiness.
Pro Fossil Fuel Interests
This return to previous pro-fossil fuel regulations may be one factor in the multi-billion dollar merger of Oklahoma’s Devon Energy with WPX Energy. As previously reported by TYT, the Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma knew about Governor Stitt’s letter to the EPA on July 22, the day it was sent. This was close to one month before the tribal governments were told.
The EPA action infuriated Oklahoma’s Ponca Tribe. Casey Camp-Horinek, Environmental Ambassador & Elder & Hereditary Drumkeeper Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, which provided the following statement:
“After over 500 years of oppression, lies, genocide, ecocide, and broken treaties, we should have expected the EPA ruling in favor of racist Governor Stitt of Oklahoma, yet it still stings. Under the Trump administration, destroying all environmental protection has been ramped up to give the fossil fuel industry life support as it takes its last dying breath. Who suffers the results? Everyone and everything! Who benefits? Trump and his cronies, climate change deniers like Governor Stitt, Senators Inhofe and Langford, who are financially supported by big oil and gas. I am convinced that we must fight back against this underhanded ruling. In the courts, on the frontlines and in the international courts, LIFE itself is at stake.”
Summary Report
TYT also obtained the EPA Summary Report sent Sept. 29 to Oklahoma’s tribes. In it, the EPA writes that the agency will keep Oklahoma’s environmental actions within federal law. But this is the same EPA that has rolled back 100 of the agency’s previous regulations protecting the environment and has pushed for a rule which would bar the agency from relying on scientific studies that have granted confidentiality to the people tested.
In a seminar Sept. 21 at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank funded by fossil fuel companies, Wheeler concluded that he had fulfilled President Trump’s requests to him. Wheeler said, “[Trump] asked me to continue to clean up the air, continue to clean up the water and continue to deregulate and help create more jobs…”
The EPA not only granted all of Oklahoma’s requests, it added additional ones such as regulatory control over underground storage (the state has one of the largest oil storage facilities in the country), air pollution, pesticides, lead-based paints, and asbestos in schools.
The EPA Summary report says it consulted with 13 Oklahoma tribes in September. The report says that all the tribes questioned the limited consultation and short time of it, saying, “Comments submitted state that the length of the consultation period was too short, that the consultation should have been extended to tribes beyond Oklahoma…”
The EPA report also acknowledged that the Oklahoma tribes said the agency’s decision was contrary to the principles contained within the EPA Policy for the Administration of Environmental Programs on Indian Reservations (1984 Indian Policy). That policy requires a government-to-government negotiation.
The summary report concluded, “However, EPA is also bound to apply the clear and express mandate of Section 10211(a) of SAFETEA, a duly enacted Act of Congress, that specifically allows environmental regulation under EPA administered statutes by the State in areas of Indian country, and that requires EPA to approve a request of the State to so regulate notwithstanding any other provision of law…” Section 10211 (a), the federal law giving Oklahoma the legal right to take over environmental regulations on Tribal land, is a mere two-paragraph rider on page 795 of the 836-page SAFETEA transportation bill. In 2005, this midnight rider was maneuvered into this massive transportation bill by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Ok.). Inhofe is a staunch fossil fuel advocate and climate-change denier. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler worked for Inhofe for 14 years.
The former high-level official worked in the EPA’s office of general counsel. The former official told TYT, “EPA overstates when it claims ‘[t]he statute provides EPA no discretion to weigh additional factors in rendering its decision.’ The statute says that Oklahoma need not make any further demonstration of authority than it already did when it sought approval from EPA to administer the same programs elsewhere in the state. But the position EPA takes in the letter — that it lacks discretion entirely — departs from earlier statements made by EPA in Oklahoma Dept. of Environmental Quality v. EPA, where it interpreted SAETEA as still allowing it to attach conditions to its approval of Oklahoma programs implemented in Indian Country.”
Who will benefit from the state of Oklahoma taking over environmental regulations on tribal lands there? Fossil fuel companies, big agriculture, and livestock companies. This is based on what a former high-level EPA official said after reviewing Governor Stitt’s letter to the EPA requesting jurisdiction.
As for the future of Oklahoma’s environmental control, the EPA Summary Report includes one paragraph that suggests a pro-environment president and Congress could have impact, but only if new federal legislation is passed:
“EPA has found no evidence, nor has any been provided by tribes, that indicates section 10211 has sunset and is therefore no longer valid. Should Congress elect to repeal this provision after EPA approves the State’s request, EPA would address any effect on its approval of the State’s request at that time.”
U.S. Attorney General William Barr has now joined other Republican officials trying to nullify the McGirt v. Oklahoma ruling that much of the eastern portion of the state is tribal land. The Associated Press and a local Cherokee Radio station report that during a Sept. 30 visit to the Cherokee Nation headquarters, Barr said that he is working with Oklahoma’s federal congressional delegation to devise a “legislative approach” to address the McGirt decision. Both Governor Stitt and Senator Inhofe have called for a federal “legislative solution.”
As TYT has reported, Stitt and Inhofe have pushed for federal legislation to take over not only environmental regulatory control of Tribal lands but all regulatory control, which would return Oklahoma back legally to pre-McGirt status.
In six emails between the EPA’s public relations office and TYT, the agency has not denied the accuracy of TYT’s main points or the Wheeler letter and Summary Report.
This strips from 38 tribes in Oklahoma their sovereignty over environmental issues. It also establishes a legal and administrative pathway to potential environmental abuses on tribal land, including dumping hazardous chemicals like cancer-causing PCBs and petroleum spills, with no legal recourse by the tribes, according to a former high-level official of the EPA.
This also includes hazardous chemicals that are byproducts of petroleum procurement and refining. In 2019, Oklahoma had the fourth largest petroleum industry in our country.
TYT has obtained a copy of the letter EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler sent to Gov. J. Kevin Stitt (R-Ok.) on Oct. 1. The end of the opening paragraph states simply, “EPA hereby approves Oklahoma’s request.”
TYT previously revealed that on July 22, Stitt requested control of environmental regulations on tribal land involving a wide range of issues. All of Stitt’s requests in his letter were granted by the EPA. They include:
- Hazardous waste dumping on tribal lands which could be any of the hundreds of hazardous chemicals listed by the EPA, including formaldehyde, mercury, lead, asbestos, toxic air pollutants, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), pesticide chemicals, glyphosate and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
- Underground Injection Control, an EPA program used to permit fracking. Fracking uses large amounts of high-pressured water to remove oil and gas from shale rock. It is a contributor to climate change and is known to leave behind contaminated water and toxic pollution.
- Protecting large agricultural polluters in industrial-sized livestock operations, most often dairy cows, hogs or chickens. These mega-farms produce enormous amounts of waste, according to the Sierra Club, which estimates that “the quantity of urine and feces from even the smallest CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation] is equivalent to the urine and feces produced by 16,000 humans.” In his letter, Wheeler acknowledges that the U.S. Supreme Court decision McGirt v. Oklahoma precipitated this EPA action. The McGirt ruling found that, by treaty, much of eastern Oklahoma is still Native American territory, which could mean under five tribes’ jurisdiction including for taxation and regulation. In anticipation of the decision, the Seminole tribe in 2018 issued an 8% tax on oil and gas wells on its reservation land.
The EPA has now granted the State of Oklahoma the same authority it had before McGirt on environmental issues, especially on petroleum. It can do this because federal legislation can nullify Supreme Court rulings. In 2005, a midnight rider attached to a transportation bill took away environmental regulatory control by Oklahoma tribes if requested by the state as it has now done. The Oklahoma state government is pro-fossil fuel and pro-big agribusiness.
Pro Fossil Fuel Interests
This return to previous pro-fossil fuel regulations may be one factor in the multi-billion dollar merger of Oklahoma’s Devon Energy with WPX Energy. As previously reported by TYT, the Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma knew about Governor Stitt’s letter to the EPA on July 22, the day it was sent. This was close to one month before the tribal governments were told.
The EPA action infuriated Oklahoma’s Ponca Tribe. Casey Camp-Horinek, Environmental Ambassador & Elder & Hereditary Drumkeeper Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, which provided the following statement:
“After over 500 years of oppression, lies, genocide, ecocide, and broken treaties, we should have expected the EPA ruling in favor of racist Governor Stitt of Oklahoma, yet it still stings. Under the Trump administration, destroying all environmental protection has been ramped up to give the fossil fuel industry life support as it takes its last dying breath. Who suffers the results? Everyone and everything! Who benefits? Trump and his cronies, climate change deniers like Governor Stitt, Senators Inhofe and Langford, who are financially supported by big oil and gas. I am convinced that we must fight back against this underhanded ruling. In the courts, on the frontlines and in the international courts, LIFE itself is at stake.”
Summary Report
TYT also obtained the EPA Summary Report sent Sept. 29 to Oklahoma’s tribes. In it, the EPA writes that the agency will keep Oklahoma’s environmental actions within federal law. But this is the same EPA that has rolled back 100 of the agency’s previous regulations protecting the environment and has pushed for a rule which would bar the agency from relying on scientific studies that have granted confidentiality to the people tested.
In a seminar Sept. 21 at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank funded by fossil fuel companies, Wheeler concluded that he had fulfilled President Trump’s requests to him. Wheeler said, “[Trump] asked me to continue to clean up the air, continue to clean up the water and continue to deregulate and help create more jobs…”
The EPA not only granted all of Oklahoma’s requests, it added additional ones such as regulatory control over underground storage (the state has one of the largest oil storage facilities in the country), air pollution, pesticides, lead-based paints, and asbestos in schools.
The EPA Summary report says it consulted with 13 Oklahoma tribes in September. The report says that all the tribes questioned the limited consultation and short time of it, saying, “Comments submitted state that the length of the consultation period was too short, that the consultation should have been extended to tribes beyond Oklahoma…”
The EPA report also acknowledged that the Oklahoma tribes said the agency’s decision was contrary to the principles contained within the EPA Policy for the Administration of Environmental Programs on Indian Reservations (1984 Indian Policy). That policy requires a government-to-government negotiation.
The summary report concluded, “However, EPA is also bound to apply the clear and express mandate of Section 10211(a) of SAFETEA, a duly enacted Act of Congress, that specifically allows environmental regulation under EPA administered statutes by the State in areas of Indian country, and that requires EPA to approve a request of the State to so regulate notwithstanding any other provision of law…” Section 10211 (a), the federal law giving Oklahoma the legal right to take over environmental regulations on Tribal land, is a mere two-paragraph rider on page 795 of the 836-page SAFETEA transportation bill. In 2005, this midnight rider was maneuvered into this massive transportation bill by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Ok.). Inhofe is a staunch fossil fuel advocate and climate-change denier. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler worked for Inhofe for 14 years.
The former high-level official worked in the EPA’s office of general counsel. The former official told TYT, “EPA overstates when it claims ‘[t]he statute provides EPA no discretion to weigh additional factors in rendering its decision.’ The statute says that Oklahoma need not make any further demonstration of authority than it already did when it sought approval from EPA to administer the same programs elsewhere in the state. But the position EPA takes in the letter — that it lacks discretion entirely — departs from earlier statements made by EPA in Oklahoma Dept. of Environmental Quality v. EPA, where it interpreted SAETEA as still allowing it to attach conditions to its approval of Oklahoma programs implemented in Indian Country.”
Who will benefit from the state of Oklahoma taking over environmental regulations on tribal lands there? Fossil fuel companies, big agriculture, and livestock companies. This is based on what a former high-level EPA official said after reviewing Governor Stitt’s letter to the EPA requesting jurisdiction.
As for the future of Oklahoma’s environmental control, the EPA Summary Report includes one paragraph that suggests a pro-environment president and Congress could have impact, but only if new federal legislation is passed:
“EPA has found no evidence, nor has any been provided by tribes, that indicates section 10211 has sunset and is therefore no longer valid. Should Congress elect to repeal this provision after EPA approves the State’s request, EPA would address any effect on its approval of the State’s request at that time.”
U.S. Attorney General William Barr has now joined other Republican officials trying to nullify the McGirt v. Oklahoma ruling that much of the eastern portion of the state is tribal land. The Associated Press and a local Cherokee Radio station report that during a Sept. 30 visit to the Cherokee Nation headquarters, Barr said that he is working with Oklahoma’s federal congressional delegation to devise a “legislative approach” to address the McGirt decision. Both Governor Stitt and Senator Inhofe have called for a federal “legislative solution.”
As TYT has reported, Stitt and Inhofe have pushed for federal legislation to take over not only environmental regulatory control of Tribal lands but all regulatory control, which would return Oklahoma back legally to pre-McGirt status.
In six emails between the EPA’s public relations office and TYT, the agency has not denied the accuracy of TYT’s main points or the Wheeler letter and Summary Report.
OP-ED ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH
If We Don’t Act Now, the Entire US Could Become a “Cancer Alley”
BY Sharon Lavigne, Truthout
PUBLISHED October 3, 2020
People across the country are waking up to structural racism and coping with police brutality and civil unrest while also living through the nightmare of the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re mourning losses and longing for life to get back to normal.
But in St. James Parish, Louisiana, where I’m from — a predominantly Black and low-income community nicknamed “Cancer Alley” — racism, brutality, loss and unrest are normal. In fact, a new plastics complex and President Trump’s decision to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) stand to make things even worse.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden mentioned St. James Parish in his clean energy plan speech because we’re notorious for having the country’s highest concentration of chemical plants and refineries, the highest cancer rates, the worst particulate pollution and one of the highest mortality rates per capita from COVID-19 in the nation. For those of us living here, it’s not just Cancer Alley; it’s death row.
Imagine living in a hotspot like this, which has had standout rates of illness and death for 40 years. Now imagine a foreign company seeking to redouble the pollution and health risks you’re already facing, wipe out your local history and target those who object for arrest on draconian charges. Then imagine on top of all this that Washington is gutting the law that contained the few environmental protections that remained to help communities like yours. That’s exactly what’s happening in St. James Parish now.
Formosa Plastics Corporation is a Taiwan-based company whose Texas plant illegally dumped massive amounts of plastic pellets (or “nurdles”) into the Gulf of Mexico, and the company paid the largest fine of any suit against an industrial polluter brought by a private citizen in U.S. history.
Formosa’s new project was considered too polluting for Taiwan, so it chose to site it in Cancer Alley instead, calling it — get this — “the Sunshine Project.” It obtained Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards’s blessing and environmental permits to build a giant, $9.4 billion, 14-plant complex — one of the largest plastic plants in the world — on 2,500 acres in St. James Parish.
The plant would more than double the area’s already heavy toxic air pollution; more than triple exposure to cancer-causing chemicals, including emitting more carcinogenic ethylene oxide than anywhere else in the U.S.; and discharge more waste into the St. James Canal and the Mississippi River.
The Formosa project is part of a larger, industry-wide push to vastly expand plastic production and consumption. The feedstocks (or unprocessed material) for plastics are the petrochemical byproducts of fossil fuel production. But as demand for fossil fuel energy falls, the industry plans to keep expanding fracking, drilling and refining by building hundreds more plants to extract more ethane, the main ingredient in plastic, and producing and selling more plastic. That stokes climate pollution and plastic pollution, both of which are already choking the planet. In fence-line communities of color like mine, where the plants are overwhelmingly located, it’s killing people.
These facts have been hushed-up and spun by the plastic and petrochemical industries, but it’s increasingly coming out. The true extent of the plastic crisis is exposed in the documentary film The Story of Plastic, where Ronnie Hamrick, who worked at the Formosa Plastics plant in Texas, says, “I worked 25 years at the plant as a supervisor, but I had to get out of there because I got tired of the bullcrap — lying for them — because that’s all you do out there at that plant is lie.”
Plastic industry executives doubled down on lies and spin in the COVID-19 crisis, using it as an excuse to roll back plastics bans and pretend more single-use plastic is needed to ensure public health during the pandemic. But at a briefing of the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment in July, titled, “Plastic Production, Pollution and Waste in the Time of COVID-19: The Life-Threatening Impact of Single-Use Plastic on Human Health,” experts refuted this, testifying how petroleum and chemical plants are making COVID-19 worse, and how they destroy African American communities.
“What’s left are the gravesites of these communities,” said Monique Harden, assistant director of law and policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, “and over those gravesites the towering smokestacks, storage tanks, and processing units of petrochemical facilities.”
In St. James Parish, the Formosa project site includes at least one African American graveyard from around 1877, and probably others. The company knew it, and planned to build a pipeline through it but didn’t even tell Parish officials until community groups like mine exposed them. Formosa claimed we couldn’t prove the graves were there, and we had to go to court to get a restraining order just to go to the site, which the company tried to block.
On Juneteenth, the day that commemorates emancipation from slavery in the U.S., members of my organization, RISE St. James, went there to honor our ancestors. Formosa and local officials, meanwhile, celebrated by charging two peaceful activists from the community group Louisiana Bucket Brigade with “terrorizing,” because they had left a box of nurdles Formosa had illegally dumped on the lawn of an industry lobbyist in December 2019. Now these activists face possible jail sentences of up to 15 years.
I’ve been warned that other activists like me face arrest, too. But we’re not cowed, we’re not going to stop fighting, and we’re getting traction. We’ve sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for improperly approving the Formosa project, and obtained a stop-work order that blocks the company from building the complex while the lawsuit plays out. U.S., Taiwanese and Vietnamese groups in the #StopFormosa campaign even went to Taiwan recently to protest at the Formosa shareholders meeting.
We may yet defeat the Formosa plant, like we defeated the Wanhua Chemical plant before it. But our fight in Cancer Alley is now the whole country’s fight. The plastic industry plans hundreds of new plants in the U.S., and worldwide. In July, the Trump administration rolled back protections and disclosure requirements in NEPA that have made our work possible, with the express intention of making more projects like these harder to fight.
Here in St. James Parish, almost no family has escaped from illnesses caused by industrial pollution, including mine. I have autoimmune hepatitis and aluminum in my body. Our cancer rates and COVID-19 rates are among the highest in the country. But we’re not just an outlier; we’re the canary in the coal mine. If Trump and the plastic industry get their way, what’s “normal” here in Cancer Alley could soon become normal in the rest of the country.
But in St. James Parish, Louisiana, where I’m from — a predominantly Black and low-income community nicknamed “Cancer Alley” — racism, brutality, loss and unrest are normal. In fact, a new plastics complex and President Trump’s decision to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) stand to make things even worse.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden mentioned St. James Parish in his clean energy plan speech because we’re notorious for having the country’s highest concentration of chemical plants and refineries, the highest cancer rates, the worst particulate pollution and one of the highest mortality rates per capita from COVID-19 in the nation. For those of us living here, it’s not just Cancer Alley; it’s death row.
Imagine living in a hotspot like this, which has had standout rates of illness and death for 40 years. Now imagine a foreign company seeking to redouble the pollution and health risks you’re already facing, wipe out your local history and target those who object for arrest on draconian charges. Then imagine on top of all this that Washington is gutting the law that contained the few environmental protections that remained to help communities like yours. That’s exactly what’s happening in St. James Parish now.
Formosa Plastics Corporation is a Taiwan-based company whose Texas plant illegally dumped massive amounts of plastic pellets (or “nurdles”) into the Gulf of Mexico, and the company paid the largest fine of any suit against an industrial polluter brought by a private citizen in U.S. history.
Formosa’s new project was considered too polluting for Taiwan, so it chose to site it in Cancer Alley instead, calling it — get this — “the Sunshine Project.” It obtained Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards’s blessing and environmental permits to build a giant, $9.4 billion, 14-plant complex — one of the largest plastic plants in the world — on 2,500 acres in St. James Parish.
The plant would more than double the area’s already heavy toxic air pollution; more than triple exposure to cancer-causing chemicals, including emitting more carcinogenic ethylene oxide than anywhere else in the U.S.; and discharge more waste into the St. James Canal and the Mississippi River.
The Formosa project is part of a larger, industry-wide push to vastly expand plastic production and consumption. The feedstocks (or unprocessed material) for plastics are the petrochemical byproducts of fossil fuel production. But as demand for fossil fuel energy falls, the industry plans to keep expanding fracking, drilling and refining by building hundreds more plants to extract more ethane, the main ingredient in plastic, and producing and selling more plastic. That stokes climate pollution and plastic pollution, both of which are already choking the planet. In fence-line communities of color like mine, where the plants are overwhelmingly located, it’s killing people.
These facts have been hushed-up and spun by the plastic and petrochemical industries, but it’s increasingly coming out. The true extent of the plastic crisis is exposed in the documentary film The Story of Plastic, where Ronnie Hamrick, who worked at the Formosa Plastics plant in Texas, says, “I worked 25 years at the plant as a supervisor, but I had to get out of there because I got tired of the bullcrap — lying for them — because that’s all you do out there at that plant is lie.”
Plastic industry executives doubled down on lies and spin in the COVID-19 crisis, using it as an excuse to roll back plastics bans and pretend more single-use plastic is needed to ensure public health during the pandemic. But at a briefing of the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment in July, titled, “Plastic Production, Pollution and Waste in the Time of COVID-19: The Life-Threatening Impact of Single-Use Plastic on Human Health,” experts refuted this, testifying how petroleum and chemical plants are making COVID-19 worse, and how they destroy African American communities.
“What’s left are the gravesites of these communities,” said Monique Harden, assistant director of law and policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, “and over those gravesites the towering smokestacks, storage tanks, and processing units of petrochemical facilities.”
In St. James Parish, the Formosa project site includes at least one African American graveyard from around 1877, and probably others. The company knew it, and planned to build a pipeline through it but didn’t even tell Parish officials until community groups like mine exposed them. Formosa claimed we couldn’t prove the graves were there, and we had to go to court to get a restraining order just to go to the site, which the company tried to block.
On Juneteenth, the day that commemorates emancipation from slavery in the U.S., members of my organization, RISE St. James, went there to honor our ancestors. Formosa and local officials, meanwhile, celebrated by charging two peaceful activists from the community group Louisiana Bucket Brigade with “terrorizing,” because they had left a box of nurdles Formosa had illegally dumped on the lawn of an industry lobbyist in December 2019. Now these activists face possible jail sentences of up to 15 years.
I’ve been warned that other activists like me face arrest, too. But we’re not cowed, we’re not going to stop fighting, and we’re getting traction. We’ve sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for improperly approving the Formosa project, and obtained a stop-work order that blocks the company from building the complex while the lawsuit plays out. U.S., Taiwanese and Vietnamese groups in the #StopFormosa campaign even went to Taiwan recently to protest at the Formosa shareholders meeting.
We may yet defeat the Formosa plant, like we defeated the Wanhua Chemical plant before it. But our fight in Cancer Alley is now the whole country’s fight. The plastic industry plans hundreds of new plants in the U.S., and worldwide. In July, the Trump administration rolled back protections and disclosure requirements in NEPA that have made our work possible, with the express intention of making more projects like these harder to fight.
Here in St. James Parish, almost no family has escaped from illnesses caused by industrial pollution, including mine. I have autoimmune hepatitis and aluminum in my body. Our cancer rates and COVID-19 rates are among the highest in the country. But we’re not just an outlier; we’re the canary in the coal mine. If Trump and the plastic industry get their way, what’s “normal” here in Cancer Alley could soon become normal in the rest of the country.
A judge just dismissed efforts to stop pesticides and GMO crops from being used in wildlife refuges
Salon spoke with experts who discussed the ecological consequences of the federal court's decision
MATTHEW ROZSA - salon
SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 10:26PM (UTC)
A Washington federal court last week dismissed a lawsuit against the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service after a pair of nonprofit groups sued the agency for reversing previous bans on specific insecticides and genetically modified organisms (GMO) in national wildlife refuges.
"It's incredibly disappointing, but this case was intended to look at this issue at a national level, and what the court said is you need to go and look at it at a case specific level," Hannah Connor, Senior Attorney at the Environmental Health Program, told Salon. "So as it's done individually, and that means that there's going to be a limited review of the actual impacts of this decision across the refuge system, which will only detriment wildlife and the habitat that they crave to be able to survive."
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) and Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) filed their lawsuit against the agency in 2018 after the decision was made to reverse a 2014 policy phasing out GMO seeds, according to Bloomberg. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs failed to show that they would be harmed by the policy reversal, adding that the alleged injuries put forward by individual members are speculative and therefore do not establish standing.
"Unfortunately, as a result of dismissal, we expect and we've already seen that different refuges around the country will start implementing this reversal policy, meaning they're gonna start approving genetically engineered crops to be planted and neonicotinoid pesticides to be used," Sylvia Wu, a senior attorney for the Center for Food Safety, told Salon. Neonicotinoid pesticides, whose active ingredient is a nicotine-like molecule, are largely accepted by scientists to have been responsible for a massive decline in bee populations that threatened the human food supply. Those same pesticides are now being linked to bird deaths, too.
"Our next step is to monitor these developments as we had done before the lawsuit, to continue to engage with refuge managers and the public, hopefully to educate them about the harms of these uses, but you know, if these harmful uses are implemented, we will continue to monitor them and take legal action as appropriate," Wu continued.
Wu elaborated on the original 2014 memo issued by the agency, noting that when it banned certain GMOs from refuges, "the majority of genetically engineered crops that are grown in the U.S, as well as back then on refugee lands — we're talking genetically engineered corn and soy — the majority were specifically engineered to resist the use of pesticides, with many of them like the herbicide Roundup containing glyphosate. These are crops that are designed to withstand multiple applications of the pesticide glyphosate. This technology has made glyphosate the most-used pesticide in the United States."
She added, "We know there have been a lot of lawsuits filed specifically about the harm of glyphosate. The World Health Organization identified it as a possible carcinogen. Our EPA unfortunately has refused to follow suit. As a result there have been multiple lawsuits filed against Bayer — which now owns Monsanto, the manufacturer of Roundup — and the folks that have developed cancer and various health illnesses, farm workers and farmers, that have been impacted by the use of glyphosate."
Wu pointed out that the same 2014 memo also banned neonicotinoids. She noted that they affect not merely bees, but also "sensitive protected insects species, like the Monarch butterfly."
Indeed, numerous animal and plant species are threatened by the use of pesticides and GMOs in wildlife refuges.
Connor discussed a few examples, including whooping cranes.
"Whooping cranes are migratory, which means that they will go across large spots of the country and in that progress will make a stop so that they can recharge themselves, so they can get some kind of forage, some kind of food," Connor told Salon. "And when they do that, if they stop at a wildlife refuge, the expectation is that that forage is not going to be something that's really detrimental to them. But whooping cranes are ingesting pesticides, and that is really problematic for an already imperiled species."
Connor also mentioned Monarch butterflies, which are declining because of the "80% decline in milkweed" that's "largely attributed to glyphosate use."
Mussels, too, she said were threatened by the use of pesticides in wildlife refuges.
"There are such a wide diversity of [mussels] that formerly existed in waterways with some of the most charming names you've ever heard, like the pocketbook mussel or the orange-footed pearly mussel, and so many of them have ended up on the endangered species list in part because of pesticides," Connor explained.
"It's incredibly disappointing, but this case was intended to look at this issue at a national level, and what the court said is you need to go and look at it at a case specific level," Hannah Connor, Senior Attorney at the Environmental Health Program, told Salon. "So as it's done individually, and that means that there's going to be a limited review of the actual impacts of this decision across the refuge system, which will only detriment wildlife and the habitat that they crave to be able to survive."
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) and Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) filed their lawsuit against the agency in 2018 after the decision was made to reverse a 2014 policy phasing out GMO seeds, according to Bloomberg. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs failed to show that they would be harmed by the policy reversal, adding that the alleged injuries put forward by individual members are speculative and therefore do not establish standing.
"Unfortunately, as a result of dismissal, we expect and we've already seen that different refuges around the country will start implementing this reversal policy, meaning they're gonna start approving genetically engineered crops to be planted and neonicotinoid pesticides to be used," Sylvia Wu, a senior attorney for the Center for Food Safety, told Salon. Neonicotinoid pesticides, whose active ingredient is a nicotine-like molecule, are largely accepted by scientists to have been responsible for a massive decline in bee populations that threatened the human food supply. Those same pesticides are now being linked to bird deaths, too.
"Our next step is to monitor these developments as we had done before the lawsuit, to continue to engage with refuge managers and the public, hopefully to educate them about the harms of these uses, but you know, if these harmful uses are implemented, we will continue to monitor them and take legal action as appropriate," Wu continued.
Wu elaborated on the original 2014 memo issued by the agency, noting that when it banned certain GMOs from refuges, "the majority of genetically engineered crops that are grown in the U.S, as well as back then on refugee lands — we're talking genetically engineered corn and soy — the majority were specifically engineered to resist the use of pesticides, with many of them like the herbicide Roundup containing glyphosate. These are crops that are designed to withstand multiple applications of the pesticide glyphosate. This technology has made glyphosate the most-used pesticide in the United States."
She added, "We know there have been a lot of lawsuits filed specifically about the harm of glyphosate. The World Health Organization identified it as a possible carcinogen. Our EPA unfortunately has refused to follow suit. As a result there have been multiple lawsuits filed against Bayer — which now owns Monsanto, the manufacturer of Roundup — and the folks that have developed cancer and various health illnesses, farm workers and farmers, that have been impacted by the use of glyphosate."
Wu pointed out that the same 2014 memo also banned neonicotinoids. She noted that they affect not merely bees, but also "sensitive protected insects species, like the Monarch butterfly."
Indeed, numerous animal and plant species are threatened by the use of pesticides and GMOs in wildlife refuges.
Connor discussed a few examples, including whooping cranes.
"Whooping cranes are migratory, which means that they will go across large spots of the country and in that progress will make a stop so that they can recharge themselves, so they can get some kind of forage, some kind of food," Connor told Salon. "And when they do that, if they stop at a wildlife refuge, the expectation is that that forage is not going to be something that's really detrimental to them. But whooping cranes are ingesting pesticides, and that is really problematic for an already imperiled species."
Connor also mentioned Monarch butterflies, which are declining because of the "80% decline in milkweed" that's "largely attributed to glyphosate use."
Mussels, too, she said were threatened by the use of pesticides in wildlife refuges.
"There are such a wide diversity of [mussels] that formerly existed in waterways with some of the most charming names you've ever heard, like the pocketbook mussel or the orange-footed pearly mussel, and so many of them have ended up on the endangered species list in part because of pesticides," Connor explained.
Most plastic will never be recycled – and the manufacturers couldn’t care less
Oil and gas companies make far more money churning out new plastic than reusing old. Meanwhile, the public gets the blame
Arwa Mahdawi -the guardian
9/15/2020
Plastic recycling is a scam. You diligently sort your rubbish, you dutifully wash your plastic containers, then everything gets tossed in a landfill or thrown in the ocean anyway. OK, maybe not everything – but the vast majority of it. According to one analysis, only 9% of all plastic ever made has likely been recycled. Here’s the kicker: the companies making all that plastic have spent millions on advertising campaigns lecturing us about recycling while knowing full well that most plastic will never be recycled.
A new investigation by National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reports that the large oil and gas companies that manufacture plastics have known for decades that recycling plastic was unlikely to ever happen on a broad scale because of the high costs involved. “They were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material,” Larry Thomas, former president of one of the plastic industry’s most powerful trade groups, told NPR. There is a lot more money to be made in selling new plastic than reusing the old stuff. But, in order to keep selling new plastic, the industry had to clean up its wasteful image. “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Thomas noted. And so a huge amount of resources were diverted into intricate “sustainability theatre”.
Multinationals misleading people for profit? Hold the front page! While the plastics industry’s greenwashing will come as no surprise to anyone, the extent of the deception alleged in NPR’s investigation is truly shocking. (I should state for the record that an industry representative interviewed by NPR contested the idea that the public was intentionally misled, although he does “understand the scepticism”.)
The subterfuge around recycling plastic is also an important reminder of just how cynically and successfully big companies have shifted the burden of combating the climate crisis on to individuals. This might be best encapsulated in a famous ad campaign that aired in the US during the 1970s with the slogan “People Start Pollution. People can stop it.” The campaign was created by a non-profit group called Keep America Beautiful, which happened to be heavily funded by beverage and packaging companies with a vested interest in convincing people that they were the ones to blame for a polluted planet, not capitalism.
Perhaps one of the most effective bits of propaganda that big business has come up with to shift the burden of combating the climate crisis on to individuals is the idea of the “carbon footprint”. BP popularised the term in the early noughties, in what has been called one of the most “successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever”. While oil companies were telling us to fret about our carbon usage they were doing whatever the hell they liked: 20 fossil fuel companies can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, an analysis by leading climate researchers found last year. Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell are behind more than 10% of the world’s climate emissions since 1965 – but we have been successfully convinced that people start pollution and people can stop it. That if we just fly less and recycle more the planet will be OK. To some degree that is right: there must be a level of personal responsibility when it comes to the climate emergency. We all have to do our part. But individual action is a tiny drop in a heavily polluted ocean; we need systemic change to make a real difference. And, more than anything, we need to change what we value. What frustrates me most about BP’s “carbon footprint” propaganda is how clever it is. There is so much human ingenuity in the world, but it is all directed towards the wrong things.
A new investigation by National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reports that the large oil and gas companies that manufacture plastics have known for decades that recycling plastic was unlikely to ever happen on a broad scale because of the high costs involved. “They were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material,” Larry Thomas, former president of one of the plastic industry’s most powerful trade groups, told NPR. There is a lot more money to be made in selling new plastic than reusing the old stuff. But, in order to keep selling new plastic, the industry had to clean up its wasteful image. “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Thomas noted. And so a huge amount of resources were diverted into intricate “sustainability theatre”.
Multinationals misleading people for profit? Hold the front page! While the plastics industry’s greenwashing will come as no surprise to anyone, the extent of the deception alleged in NPR’s investigation is truly shocking. (I should state for the record that an industry representative interviewed by NPR contested the idea that the public was intentionally misled, although he does “understand the scepticism”.)
The subterfuge around recycling plastic is also an important reminder of just how cynically and successfully big companies have shifted the burden of combating the climate crisis on to individuals. This might be best encapsulated in a famous ad campaign that aired in the US during the 1970s with the slogan “People Start Pollution. People can stop it.” The campaign was created by a non-profit group called Keep America Beautiful, which happened to be heavily funded by beverage and packaging companies with a vested interest in convincing people that they were the ones to blame for a polluted planet, not capitalism.
Perhaps one of the most effective bits of propaganda that big business has come up with to shift the burden of combating the climate crisis on to individuals is the idea of the “carbon footprint”. BP popularised the term in the early noughties, in what has been called one of the most “successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever”. While oil companies were telling us to fret about our carbon usage they were doing whatever the hell they liked: 20 fossil fuel companies can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, an analysis by leading climate researchers found last year. Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell are behind more than 10% of the world’s climate emissions since 1965 – but we have been successfully convinced that people start pollution and people can stop it. That if we just fly less and recycle more the planet will be OK. To some degree that is right: there must be a level of personal responsibility when it comes to the climate emergency. We all have to do our part. But individual action is a tiny drop in a heavily polluted ocean; we need systemic change to make a real difference. And, more than anything, we need to change what we value. What frustrates me most about BP’s “carbon footprint” propaganda is how clever it is. There is so much human ingenuity in the world, but it is all directed towards the wrong things.
if we only had a real government!!!
Clean Electricity Plan Would Free US Economy of Carbon Dependence in 15 Years
BY Peter Montague, Truthout
PUBLISHED September 10, 2020
A detailed new engineering study reveals that, if the U.S. converted all its fossil-fueled technologies to clean electric power (mainly solar and wind) in the next 15 years, it would create 25 million new jobs over the next three to five years at its peak. This total would eventually taper off to 5 million permanent new jobs (over and above existing energy-sector jobs).
There’s no surprise here: Clean renewable energy, such as solar panels and electric vehicles, simply requires more manufacturing, installation and maintenance compared to fossil fuels. These would be good, well-paid jobs in every zip code — jobs that could not be outsourced to China or Mexico. Most of the jobs would be in the trades — electrical, plumbing and construction, many of them in parts of the country neglected during the past 40 years. All it would take is government leadership, organization and commitment.
The new engineering study, produced by Rewiring America, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to converting the U.S. economy to clean electric power, uses conservative assumptions. For example, it assumes using only technologies that are commercially available today; no technical or price breakthroughs are presumed. The study also assumes no behavioral changes by the public. Further, the study assumes that no assets, like coal power plants, will be shut down before their original capital costs have been amortized (no “early retirement” of fossil-fuel assets). It also posits no special efficiency measures besides the inherent efficiency of clean electricity vs. fossil fuels, and no carbon capture and storage. Lastly, it assumes a technology transition no faster than the U.S. has achieved in the past — the authors call it “the maximum feasible transition,” based on the history of U.S. industrial mobilization organized by the government between 1940 and 1945.
The new study was conducted by Saul Griffith and Sam Calisch (both with advanced degrees from MIT) and Alex Laskey, co-founder of Rewiring America.
The study — in the form of a 30-page white paper, plus a short book available free in PDF — began in 2018 when Griffith (a MacArthur “genius” awardee) worked under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy, creating a detailed database of every publicly documented energy flow in the U.S. economy, from supply to demand.
The present study builds on that database using a “machines up” approach — examining every machine involved in every energy flow: lights, heat and motors throughout every sector of the economy, including transportation, buildings, industry and power generation. The study assumes that, at the end of every fossil-fueled machine’s normal lifetime, it will be replaced by an equivalent electric-powered machine. A gas stove gets replaced by an induction cooktop, a gasoline car by an electric car, a natural-gas furnace by a heat pump, an incandescent light bulb by an LED. In many buildings, a new breaker box would be required. The difference in cost between the old machines and the new ones installed, added up across the economy, is the cost of the transition. The number of jobs created by this expenditure is then calculated from reliable databases showing jobs created per million dollars invested.
Most households and many businesses cannot afford to make a lump-sum investment in new technologies, so the government would need to invent a low-interest loan program (“climate loans”) to make the transition possible. Griffith and his colleagues calculate the transition would cost the federal government $300 billion per year for 10 years, about 1.5 percent of current gross domestic product, less than half of what the U.S. currently spends on the military.
The benefits of the plan would be enormous. First, of course, the world’s other major manufacturing nations (China, Germany, Japan and South Korea) would see the economic benefits of replicating our transition, so the world could avoid the worst of the climate emergency. In 2017, climate disruption was costing the U.S. about $240 billion each year, according to a study led by Robert Watson, former chair of the International Panel on Climate Change. With more fires, floods, record-breaking heat waves and destructive wind storms, the annual cost of climate change is likely higher today, and rising.
The Griffith plan, with its conservative assumptions, says it is consistent with holding global average temperature rise to about 1.75 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit), if the world’s other major emitters adopt a similar plan within 10 years. To hit the stricter 1.5°C/2.7°F target established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would require early retirement of some large fossil-fueled machines, such as coal power plants. The federal government could buy them out and retire them, as part of its overall effort. To go further and hit the 1.0°C/1.8°F target that likely could prevent long-term melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice would require removal of carbon dioxide directly from the air, an expensive and nascent technology. The Griffith study says what’s most important is to ramp up rapidly now what we already know how to do. The climate emergency is truly an emergency.
Second, the average U.S. household would save between $1,000 and $2,000 each year on its energy bill, the Griffith study shows, because electric power is simply more efficient than fossil-fueled sources, doing more work with less energy. After the transition, the U.S. economy as a whole would use 50 to 60 percent less energy than today. And then there are the jobs. In addition to jobs in manufacturing and the trades, there would be jobs in education and training, plus finance jobs to manage the large volume of financial transactions required during the transition. Third, as a technology leader and early adopter, the U.S. could export both its technology and its clean energy.
The clean energy would come 85 percent from wind turbines and solar-panel arrays. Some nuclear power would be “very useful” but “not necessary,” the study says, though it still assumes 100 gigawatts (GW) of new nuclear power. Nuclear currently produces about 20 percent of U.S. electricity; the study says the cost of a new nuclear plant is double the cost per watt of solar or wind. The study also includes some biofuels for long-distance aviation and certain industrial processes, plus 100 GW of new hydropower.
The U.S. currently has roughly 300 GW of carbon-free electricity-generating capacity. In the Griffith plan, this would grow sixfold to about 1,800 GW by 2035. Some of this would be generated on rooftops and used in the underlying buildings, requiring no access to the nation’s electrical transmission grid.
However, about 1,000 GW of new electricity would have to be carried by the grid. This would more than triple the load on the grid, forcing a totally new grid-management philosophy to accommodate many new sources of supply and demand. At present, access to the nation’s electric grid is strictly limited; the new grid could be modeled on the internet, where everyone can attach a device and start sending and receiving easily. Furthermore, the new grid would consist of many microgrids tied together, greatly increasing the reliability of energy-delivery to homes and businesses.
Renewable energy presents unique challenges, requiring many changes in building codes, laws, regulations and policies. For example, large wind turbines can produce flickering light and very-low-frequency sounds, which some humans find profoundly disturbing, in some cases potentially triggering seizures or causing illness. Therefore, large turbines could only be placed where they would not disturb anyone, and impacts on wildlife require careful consideration. In addition, new transmission lines will be political poison in some locales; therefore, thoughtful, sensible and detailed early planning will be required everywhere. Only the government has the capacity to organize such a large undertaking.
Still, there’s no doubt that the U.S. has sufficient land to site the necessary new renewable energy equipment. Griffith’s free book shows that 100 percent of U.S. energy demand could be met by either 100 million acres of wind turbines, or 15 million acres of solar panels. (Wind turbines require more land because they must be spaced farther apart than solar panels.) The clean solution will involve some combination of solar and wind. The U.S. currently has 2.8 million acres of residential rooftops, 1.3 million acres of commercial rooftops, 4.6 million acres of parking lots and 12.8 million acres of roads in addition to 339 million acres of cropland, 655 million acres of grassland and pasture, and another 39 million acres of idle cropland. In sum, a small fraction of available land, rooftops and road rights-of-way would be sufficient to power the whole economy with solar energy.
To provide another perspective, the Earth receives 85,000 terawatts of sunlight; all human activity worldwide requires 19 terawatts, and the U.S. alone requires about 4 terawatts. Sun power is plentiful and free.
In late August, Democrats in the U.S. Senate released their own far-reaching plan for converting the economy to clean sources of power. They promise that, when they gain a majority, they will immediately begin spending $400 billion per year to convert the economy to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, and they say 40 percent of those dollars will be intended to benefit communities of color and low-income, deindustrialized and disadvantaged communities.
Similarly, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has proposed converting the U.S. electricity-generating system to renewable fuels by 2035 and the rest of the economy (transport, buildings and industry) by 2050.
Both Democratic blueprints are huge steps forward, far better than the Republican plan, which is to double down on fossil fuels, fry the planet, and hope for the best. Still, both Democratic plans are somewhat less ambitious than the Griffith road map. Griffith calls for a World War II scale of mobilization, to “shoot for the moon,” to reach the clean energy goal in 15 years, creating the needed sense of urgency and national commitment. If the Democrats embraced Griffith’s more-aggressive plan, we could avert the worst of the climate emergency, revive the economy quickly with many millions of good new jobs, and save every family money, all at the same time. Why would anyone want to settle for less?
There’s no surprise here: Clean renewable energy, such as solar panels and electric vehicles, simply requires more manufacturing, installation and maintenance compared to fossil fuels. These would be good, well-paid jobs in every zip code — jobs that could not be outsourced to China or Mexico. Most of the jobs would be in the trades — electrical, plumbing and construction, many of them in parts of the country neglected during the past 40 years. All it would take is government leadership, organization and commitment.
The new engineering study, produced by Rewiring America, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to converting the U.S. economy to clean electric power, uses conservative assumptions. For example, it assumes using only technologies that are commercially available today; no technical or price breakthroughs are presumed. The study also assumes no behavioral changes by the public. Further, the study assumes that no assets, like coal power plants, will be shut down before their original capital costs have been amortized (no “early retirement” of fossil-fuel assets). It also posits no special efficiency measures besides the inherent efficiency of clean electricity vs. fossil fuels, and no carbon capture and storage. Lastly, it assumes a technology transition no faster than the U.S. has achieved in the past — the authors call it “the maximum feasible transition,” based on the history of U.S. industrial mobilization organized by the government between 1940 and 1945.
The new study was conducted by Saul Griffith and Sam Calisch (both with advanced degrees from MIT) and Alex Laskey, co-founder of Rewiring America.
The study — in the form of a 30-page white paper, plus a short book available free in PDF — began in 2018 when Griffith (a MacArthur “genius” awardee) worked under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy, creating a detailed database of every publicly documented energy flow in the U.S. economy, from supply to demand.
The present study builds on that database using a “machines up” approach — examining every machine involved in every energy flow: lights, heat and motors throughout every sector of the economy, including transportation, buildings, industry and power generation. The study assumes that, at the end of every fossil-fueled machine’s normal lifetime, it will be replaced by an equivalent electric-powered machine. A gas stove gets replaced by an induction cooktop, a gasoline car by an electric car, a natural-gas furnace by a heat pump, an incandescent light bulb by an LED. In many buildings, a new breaker box would be required. The difference in cost between the old machines and the new ones installed, added up across the economy, is the cost of the transition. The number of jobs created by this expenditure is then calculated from reliable databases showing jobs created per million dollars invested.
Most households and many businesses cannot afford to make a lump-sum investment in new technologies, so the government would need to invent a low-interest loan program (“climate loans”) to make the transition possible. Griffith and his colleagues calculate the transition would cost the federal government $300 billion per year for 10 years, about 1.5 percent of current gross domestic product, less than half of what the U.S. currently spends on the military.
The benefits of the plan would be enormous. First, of course, the world’s other major manufacturing nations (China, Germany, Japan and South Korea) would see the economic benefits of replicating our transition, so the world could avoid the worst of the climate emergency. In 2017, climate disruption was costing the U.S. about $240 billion each year, according to a study led by Robert Watson, former chair of the International Panel on Climate Change. With more fires, floods, record-breaking heat waves and destructive wind storms, the annual cost of climate change is likely higher today, and rising.
The Griffith plan, with its conservative assumptions, says it is consistent with holding global average temperature rise to about 1.75 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit), if the world’s other major emitters adopt a similar plan within 10 years. To hit the stricter 1.5°C/2.7°F target established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would require early retirement of some large fossil-fueled machines, such as coal power plants. The federal government could buy them out and retire them, as part of its overall effort. To go further and hit the 1.0°C/1.8°F target that likely could prevent long-term melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice would require removal of carbon dioxide directly from the air, an expensive and nascent technology. The Griffith study says what’s most important is to ramp up rapidly now what we already know how to do. The climate emergency is truly an emergency.
Second, the average U.S. household would save between $1,000 and $2,000 each year on its energy bill, the Griffith study shows, because electric power is simply more efficient than fossil-fueled sources, doing more work with less energy. After the transition, the U.S. economy as a whole would use 50 to 60 percent less energy than today. And then there are the jobs. In addition to jobs in manufacturing and the trades, there would be jobs in education and training, plus finance jobs to manage the large volume of financial transactions required during the transition. Third, as a technology leader and early adopter, the U.S. could export both its technology and its clean energy.
The clean energy would come 85 percent from wind turbines and solar-panel arrays. Some nuclear power would be “very useful” but “not necessary,” the study says, though it still assumes 100 gigawatts (GW) of new nuclear power. Nuclear currently produces about 20 percent of U.S. electricity; the study says the cost of a new nuclear plant is double the cost per watt of solar or wind. The study also includes some biofuels for long-distance aviation and certain industrial processes, plus 100 GW of new hydropower.
The U.S. currently has roughly 300 GW of carbon-free electricity-generating capacity. In the Griffith plan, this would grow sixfold to about 1,800 GW by 2035. Some of this would be generated on rooftops and used in the underlying buildings, requiring no access to the nation’s electrical transmission grid.
However, about 1,000 GW of new electricity would have to be carried by the grid. This would more than triple the load on the grid, forcing a totally new grid-management philosophy to accommodate many new sources of supply and demand. At present, access to the nation’s electric grid is strictly limited; the new grid could be modeled on the internet, where everyone can attach a device and start sending and receiving easily. Furthermore, the new grid would consist of many microgrids tied together, greatly increasing the reliability of energy-delivery to homes and businesses.
Renewable energy presents unique challenges, requiring many changes in building codes, laws, regulations and policies. For example, large wind turbines can produce flickering light and very-low-frequency sounds, which some humans find profoundly disturbing, in some cases potentially triggering seizures or causing illness. Therefore, large turbines could only be placed where they would not disturb anyone, and impacts on wildlife require careful consideration. In addition, new transmission lines will be political poison in some locales; therefore, thoughtful, sensible and detailed early planning will be required everywhere. Only the government has the capacity to organize such a large undertaking.
Still, there’s no doubt that the U.S. has sufficient land to site the necessary new renewable energy equipment. Griffith’s free book shows that 100 percent of U.S. energy demand could be met by either 100 million acres of wind turbines, or 15 million acres of solar panels. (Wind turbines require more land because they must be spaced farther apart than solar panels.) The clean solution will involve some combination of solar and wind. The U.S. currently has 2.8 million acres of residential rooftops, 1.3 million acres of commercial rooftops, 4.6 million acres of parking lots and 12.8 million acres of roads in addition to 339 million acres of cropland, 655 million acres of grassland and pasture, and another 39 million acres of idle cropland. In sum, a small fraction of available land, rooftops and road rights-of-way would be sufficient to power the whole economy with solar energy.
To provide another perspective, the Earth receives 85,000 terawatts of sunlight; all human activity worldwide requires 19 terawatts, and the U.S. alone requires about 4 terawatts. Sun power is plentiful and free.
In late August, Democrats in the U.S. Senate released their own far-reaching plan for converting the economy to clean sources of power. They promise that, when they gain a majority, they will immediately begin spending $400 billion per year to convert the economy to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, and they say 40 percent of those dollars will be intended to benefit communities of color and low-income, deindustrialized and disadvantaged communities.
Similarly, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has proposed converting the U.S. electricity-generating system to renewable fuels by 2035 and the rest of the economy (transport, buildings and industry) by 2050.
Both Democratic blueprints are huge steps forward, far better than the Republican plan, which is to double down on fossil fuels, fry the planet, and hope for the best. Still, both Democratic plans are somewhat less ambitious than the Griffith road map. Griffith calls for a World War II scale of mobilization, to “shoot for the moon,” to reach the clean energy goal in 15 years, creating the needed sense of urgency and national commitment. If the Democrats embraced Griffith’s more-aggressive plan, we could avert the worst of the climate emergency, revive the economy quickly with many millions of good new jobs, and save every family money, all at the same time. Why would anyone want to settle for less?
trump's epa allows greedy mofos to poison your water and land!!!
Trump’s EPA Gives Power Plants A Pass On Deadly Coal Ash
Unlined Ponds Leak Arsenic and Other Poisons; Rivers and Waterways Polluted; Unedible Fish in a Tranquil Kentucky Lake
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
9/4/2020
Retiree Julie Pease and her husband moved into their modest lakefront home near Herrington Lake in Kentucky eight years ago, but she won’t eat the fish because the lake is polluted by coal ash from the nearby power plant.
Team Trump recently pushed back the deadlines for utilities to close an estimated 523 leaking, unstable or dangerously-sited coal ash ponds. Kentucky Utilities, which operates the E.W. Brown power plant in Harrodsburg, Ky., closed its main coal ash pond in 2008, but the six million tons of coal ash that remain at the site has polluted Herrington Lake.
“The fact that we could retire from New Jersey and buy a home on the lake was very appealing to us,” said Pease who didn’t know about the pollution when they bought their house.
Coal-burning power plants produce about 100 million tons of coal ash a year. Arsenic, lead and mercury lace the ash. Companies mixed the ash with water and stored it in unlined pits called coal ash ponds, often near rivers or lakes such as Herrington Lake which was built in the 1920s.
About a third of power plants with coal ash dumps are in the southeast. About 41% are in the Midwest, and about 10% are in the Southwest.
Under the law, the EPA is required to ensure that there is “no reasonable probability of adverse effects on health or the environment.” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, who previously lobbied for a coal company, maintains that allowing coal ash ponds to stay open longer still meets this standard because the agency will require some utilities to submit risk mitigations plans and “meet the baseline level of acceptable risk.”
“Extending closure deadlines delays necessary cleanup, allows ongoing contamination to worsen, and puts communities at risk from the catastrophic harms that happen when impoundments fail or flood,” said Lauren Piette, an attorney for Earthjustice.
A spokesperson for Kentucky Utilities did not respond to an email from DCReport.org.
Court Cases
A coal ash rule passed under former President Barack Obama allowed power companies to put coal ash in unlined ponds indefinitely, until their operators determined they were leaking. Federal judges threw that out in a 2018 decision, Utility Solid Waste Activities Group v. EPA.
Wheeler used that decision and a 2019 decision, Waterkeeper Alliance Inc. v. EPA, to rewrite regulations to benefit utilities. The Trump EPA initially gave power companies until Oct. 31, 2020 to stop receiving waste and start closing unlined, leaking ponds.
Eight More Years
Wheeler’s new rule says power plants have until April 11, 2021 to stop sending coal ash ponds and start the closure process. Plants can get extensions until 2023, 2024 and even 2028.
Wheeler’s new rule is expected to save utilities $26.1 million a year.
At Herrington Lake, selenium, an element that is concentrated in coal ash, is poisoning fish and causing deformities in juvenile largemouth bass. Kentucky Waterways Alliance and the Sierra Club have sued Kentucky Utilities over pollution in the lake, and the state recently held a hearing.
Pease, who used to work at a Habitat for Humanity, and her husband, a retired high school math teacher, get their drinking water from the lake, but they filter it. They like to kayak on the lake with their dogs and go swimming.
“We were absolutely drawn by the beauty of the place where we live,” Pease said.
RELATED: Environment Trump cuts oil and gas drillers' rent on public lands, as state budgets suffer
RELATED: Environment Trump seeks to fast-track dozens of fossil fuel projects
Team Trump recently pushed back the deadlines for utilities to close an estimated 523 leaking, unstable or dangerously-sited coal ash ponds. Kentucky Utilities, which operates the E.W. Brown power plant in Harrodsburg, Ky., closed its main coal ash pond in 2008, but the six million tons of coal ash that remain at the site has polluted Herrington Lake.
“The fact that we could retire from New Jersey and buy a home on the lake was very appealing to us,” said Pease who didn’t know about the pollution when they bought their house.
Coal-burning power plants produce about 100 million tons of coal ash a year. Arsenic, lead and mercury lace the ash. Companies mixed the ash with water and stored it in unlined pits called coal ash ponds, often near rivers or lakes such as Herrington Lake which was built in the 1920s.
About a third of power plants with coal ash dumps are in the southeast. About 41% are in the Midwest, and about 10% are in the Southwest.
Under the law, the EPA is required to ensure that there is “no reasonable probability of adverse effects on health or the environment.” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, who previously lobbied for a coal company, maintains that allowing coal ash ponds to stay open longer still meets this standard because the agency will require some utilities to submit risk mitigations plans and “meet the baseline level of acceptable risk.”
“Extending closure deadlines delays necessary cleanup, allows ongoing contamination to worsen, and puts communities at risk from the catastrophic harms that happen when impoundments fail or flood,” said Lauren Piette, an attorney for Earthjustice.
A spokesperson for Kentucky Utilities did not respond to an email from DCReport.org.
Court Cases
A coal ash rule passed under former President Barack Obama allowed power companies to put coal ash in unlined ponds indefinitely, until their operators determined they were leaking. Federal judges threw that out in a 2018 decision, Utility Solid Waste Activities Group v. EPA.
Wheeler used that decision and a 2019 decision, Waterkeeper Alliance Inc. v. EPA, to rewrite regulations to benefit utilities. The Trump EPA initially gave power companies until Oct. 31, 2020 to stop receiving waste and start closing unlined, leaking ponds.
Eight More Years
Wheeler’s new rule says power plants have until April 11, 2021 to stop sending coal ash ponds and start the closure process. Plants can get extensions until 2023, 2024 and even 2028.
Wheeler’s new rule is expected to save utilities $26.1 million a year.
At Herrington Lake, selenium, an element that is concentrated in coal ash, is poisoning fish and causing deformities in juvenile largemouth bass. Kentucky Waterways Alliance and the Sierra Club have sued Kentucky Utilities over pollution in the lake, and the state recently held a hearing.
Pease, who used to work at a Habitat for Humanity, and her husband, a retired high school math teacher, get their drinking water from the lake, but they filter it. They like to kayak on the lake with their dogs and go swimming.
“We were absolutely drawn by the beauty of the place where we live,” Pease said.
RELATED: Environment Trump cuts oil and gas drillers' rent on public lands, as state budgets suffer
RELATED: Environment Trump seeks to fast-track dozens of fossil fuel projects
in the land of stupid!!!
destroying the land for greed
The Latest American Natural Wonder On The Trump Hit List
Mining Companies Want to Do Their Dirty Work Near the Boundary Waters Wilderness
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
8/4/2020
President Jimmy Carter signed a law more than four decades ago to prohibit mining in the Boundary Waters, a pristine wilderness with more than 1,000 lakes that stretches almost 200 miles along the Canadian border in Minnesota.
Now the Trump Administration is preparing to sully this land forever—to the benefit of the billionaire Chilean landlord of the Kushners.
Trump’s Bureau of Land Management plans to study the environmental impact of mining for copper, nickel, cobalt and precious metals near Ely, Minn., just three miles away from the Boundary Waters, which are within the 3 million-acre Superior National Forest . State regulators say the plans of Twin Metals, the mining company, are incomplete and have published almost 800 comments asking for more information.
Under Obama, the Forest Service said a copper-nickel sulfide mine on land leased by Twin Metals carried an “unacceptable” risk that the mine might “cause serious and irreplaceable harm” to the Boundary Waters. The Bureau of Land Management decided against renewing two leases held by Twin Metals.
After Trump was elected, a company controlled by Andrónico Luksic, the Chilean mogul behind Twin Metals, bought a six-bedroom house for $5.5 million in the Kalorama neighborhood in D.C. where Jeff Bezos and Barack Obama own homes. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner moved in, paying $15,000 a month in rent.
Luksic’s spokesman has said that the Kushners’ choice of the property was coincidental, but soon after Trump’s inauguration the BLM started to look at reversing the Obama decision on the leases.
“The WH has expressed interest in the Twin Metals matter and Doug Domenich [sic.] (then an advisor to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke) wants to talk to the WH today,” attorney Karen Hawbecker wrote in June 2017. The leases were renewed for 10 years in May 2019 with a right to perpetual renewal.
Twin Metals claims the design of the mine would prevent acid mine drainage in which sulfuric acid formed by mining dissolves heavy metals in rocks. The pollution can make streams as acidic as battery acid, and the damage can last hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years. Acid mine drainage destroyed Tar Creek in Oklahoma, contributing to one of the worst Superfund sites in our nation’s history.
The Wilderness Society, Minnesota businesses and other environmental organizations sued Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in federal court to try to stop the mine, saying that damage caused by acid mine drainage might not ever be remediated.
The lawsuit claims that renewing the leases without doing an environmental impact statement was a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
Now the Trump Administration is preparing to sully this land forever—to the benefit of the billionaire Chilean landlord of the Kushners.
Trump’s Bureau of Land Management plans to study the environmental impact of mining for copper, nickel, cobalt and precious metals near Ely, Minn., just three miles away from the Boundary Waters, which are within the 3 million-acre Superior National Forest . State regulators say the plans of Twin Metals, the mining company, are incomplete and have published almost 800 comments asking for more information.
Under Obama, the Forest Service said a copper-nickel sulfide mine on land leased by Twin Metals carried an “unacceptable” risk that the mine might “cause serious and irreplaceable harm” to the Boundary Waters. The Bureau of Land Management decided against renewing two leases held by Twin Metals.
After Trump was elected, a company controlled by Andrónico Luksic, the Chilean mogul behind Twin Metals, bought a six-bedroom house for $5.5 million in the Kalorama neighborhood in D.C. where Jeff Bezos and Barack Obama own homes. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner moved in, paying $15,000 a month in rent.
Luksic’s spokesman has said that the Kushners’ choice of the property was coincidental, but soon after Trump’s inauguration the BLM started to look at reversing the Obama decision on the leases.
“The WH has expressed interest in the Twin Metals matter and Doug Domenich [sic.] (then an advisor to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke) wants to talk to the WH today,” attorney Karen Hawbecker wrote in June 2017. The leases were renewed for 10 years in May 2019 with a right to perpetual renewal.
Twin Metals claims the design of the mine would prevent acid mine drainage in which sulfuric acid formed by mining dissolves heavy metals in rocks. The pollution can make streams as acidic as battery acid, and the damage can last hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years. Acid mine drainage destroyed Tar Creek in Oklahoma, contributing to one of the worst Superfund sites in our nation’s history.
The Wilderness Society, Minnesota businesses and other environmental organizations sued Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in federal court to try to stop the mine, saying that damage caused by acid mine drainage might not ever be remediated.
The lawsuit claims that renewing the leases without doing an environmental impact statement was a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
Colorado
US rivers and lakes are shrinking for a surprising reason: cows
Cattle-feed crops, which end up as beef and dairy products, account for 23% of water consumption in the US
Troy Farah
the guardian
Thu 2 Jul 2020 05.30 EDT
As a fifth-generation rancher in Colorado, Paul Bruchez knows the value of water. Not only does he raise cattle irrigated by the Colorado River and its nearby tributaries, Bruchez runs a fly-fishing business on those same streams.
“My income, my life, requires a reliable water resource,” he said. But since moving to northern Colorado two decades ago, the Colorado River has shrunk by an average of 20% compared to last century. Climatic conditions are one culprit – the area is suffering the worst regional dry spell on record. But there’s another big problem.
Cows.
A recent analysis published in Nature found cattle to be one of the major drivers of water shortages. Notably, it is because of water used to grow crops that are fed to cows such as alfalfa and hay. Across the US, cattle-feed crops, which end up as beef and dairy products, account for 23% of all water consumption, according to the report. In the Colorado River Basin, it is over half.
“There are many smaller streams that have been dried up completely,” said Brian Richter, the study’s lead author and the president of Sustainable Waters, a water conservation non-profit. “We’re only seeing the beginning of what’s going to become a major natural resource issue for everybody living in the western United States.”
Agriculture accounts for 92% of humanity’s freshwater footprint across the planet, and has long been identified as a major culprit in drought. But the new study suggests how extreme its impact can be.
“The fact that over half of that water is going to cattle-feed crops just floored us,” Richter said. “We had to double and triple check to make sure we got the numbers right.”
Lake Mead, in Arizona and Nevada, for example, hasn’t been full since 1983, and has fallen by almost two-thirds in the last 20 years alone. According to Richter’s analysis, almost 75% of that decline can be attributed to cattle-feed irrigation.
In the Colorado River Basin as a whole, which services about 40 million people in seven states and is overtaxed to the point that it rarely ever reaches the ocean anymore, that number is 55%.
It takes a lot of water to make a double-cheeseburger. One calculation puts it at 450 gallons per quarter-pounder. The study also found that most of these water-intensive beef and dairy products are being consumed in western cities. “Beef consumers living in the Los Angeles, Portland, Denver and San Francisco metropolitan areas bear the greatest responsibility for these hydrological and ecological impacts,” Richter and his colleagues reported.
Around 60 species of fish in the western US are experiencing increased risk of extinction due to draining water tables, according to the study. As streams dry up, toxic chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides that run off from farms become concentrated, suffocating river-dwelling fauna. Invasive species can find a foothold in the changing environment.
It’s a dire situation, but people like Richter and Bruchez are working on solutions. For the past 18 years, Bruchez has been involved with local water sustainability efforts, including several multimillion dollar river restoration projects, and champions strategies like improved irrigation systems and rebuilding riparian habitat.
The most cost-effective solution, proposed in Richter’s paper, is fallowing farmland, meaning letting it sit idle, without irrigation. “You can’t get more water savings off of an acre than by not watering it,” Richter said, and described it as “growing water” rather than a crop. He noted that the strategy should be temporary and rotational, and that ranchers should be compensated because they lose income growing nothing. Fallowing is at least twice as effective as other water-saving tactics, according to Richter’s analysis.
Agricultural strategies aside, people who eat beef and dairy will ultimately need to consume less or choose products that don’t depend on irrigated crops fed to cows, Richter said. Plant-based meat alternatives can play a role, as one analysis found that a meatless Beyond Burger generates 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and has practically no impact on water scarcity.
“Reduced consumption of beef is one very effective way for an individual consumer to reduce their water and energy footprint; however, it is difficult to guarantee that there would be a subsequent decrease in water stress in the western US with decreased beef consumption,” Dr Shelie Miller, the director for University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment, said in an email. “Even with decreased water consumption associated with beef and dairy, there are a multitude of competing water demands in the western region of the US.”
In other words, even if beef and dairy are sucking American rivers dry, addressing cattle-feed crops is only part of the solution to growing water scarcity.
Bruchez, the rancher, is concerned about “the volume of water that is used to put into people’s yards, parks, golf courses, whatever for scenery”. Agriculture, he said, “isn’t in my eyes the only thing to look towards”.
“My income, my life, requires a reliable water resource,” he said. But since moving to northern Colorado two decades ago, the Colorado River has shrunk by an average of 20% compared to last century. Climatic conditions are one culprit – the area is suffering the worst regional dry spell on record. But there’s another big problem.
Cows.
A recent analysis published in Nature found cattle to be one of the major drivers of water shortages. Notably, it is because of water used to grow crops that are fed to cows such as alfalfa and hay. Across the US, cattle-feed crops, which end up as beef and dairy products, account for 23% of all water consumption, according to the report. In the Colorado River Basin, it is over half.
“There are many smaller streams that have been dried up completely,” said Brian Richter, the study’s lead author and the president of Sustainable Waters, a water conservation non-profit. “We’re only seeing the beginning of what’s going to become a major natural resource issue for everybody living in the western United States.”
Agriculture accounts for 92% of humanity’s freshwater footprint across the planet, and has long been identified as a major culprit in drought. But the new study suggests how extreme its impact can be.
“The fact that over half of that water is going to cattle-feed crops just floored us,” Richter said. “We had to double and triple check to make sure we got the numbers right.”
Lake Mead, in Arizona and Nevada, for example, hasn’t been full since 1983, and has fallen by almost two-thirds in the last 20 years alone. According to Richter’s analysis, almost 75% of that decline can be attributed to cattle-feed irrigation.
In the Colorado River Basin as a whole, which services about 40 million people in seven states and is overtaxed to the point that it rarely ever reaches the ocean anymore, that number is 55%.
It takes a lot of water to make a double-cheeseburger. One calculation puts it at 450 gallons per quarter-pounder. The study also found that most of these water-intensive beef and dairy products are being consumed in western cities. “Beef consumers living in the Los Angeles, Portland, Denver and San Francisco metropolitan areas bear the greatest responsibility for these hydrological and ecological impacts,” Richter and his colleagues reported.
Around 60 species of fish in the western US are experiencing increased risk of extinction due to draining water tables, according to the study. As streams dry up, toxic chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides that run off from farms become concentrated, suffocating river-dwelling fauna. Invasive species can find a foothold in the changing environment.
It’s a dire situation, but people like Richter and Bruchez are working on solutions. For the past 18 years, Bruchez has been involved with local water sustainability efforts, including several multimillion dollar river restoration projects, and champions strategies like improved irrigation systems and rebuilding riparian habitat.
The most cost-effective solution, proposed in Richter’s paper, is fallowing farmland, meaning letting it sit idle, without irrigation. “You can’t get more water savings off of an acre than by not watering it,” Richter said, and described it as “growing water” rather than a crop. He noted that the strategy should be temporary and rotational, and that ranchers should be compensated because they lose income growing nothing. Fallowing is at least twice as effective as other water-saving tactics, according to Richter’s analysis.
Agricultural strategies aside, people who eat beef and dairy will ultimately need to consume less or choose products that don’t depend on irrigated crops fed to cows, Richter said. Plant-based meat alternatives can play a role, as one analysis found that a meatless Beyond Burger generates 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and has practically no impact on water scarcity.
“Reduced consumption of beef is one very effective way for an individual consumer to reduce their water and energy footprint; however, it is difficult to guarantee that there would be a subsequent decrease in water stress in the western US with decreased beef consumption,” Dr Shelie Miller, the director for University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment, said in an email. “Even with decreased water consumption associated with beef and dairy, there are a multitude of competing water demands in the western region of the US.”
In other words, even if beef and dairy are sucking American rivers dry, addressing cattle-feed crops is only part of the solution to growing water scarcity.
Bruchez, the rancher, is concerned about “the volume of water that is used to put into people’s yards, parks, golf courses, whatever for scenery”. Agriculture, he said, “isn’t in my eyes the only thing to look towards”.
environment funnies
When your "leader" is a fool!!!
