Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666
This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics over the last week. This is a Tuesday evening regular post at GEI.
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WHO: Don’t Expose Babies to Electronic Screens — Infants less than a year old should not be exposed to electronic screens, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday. Issuing its first such guidelines, the United Nations health agency said that older children, aged two to four, should be limited to one hour per day sedentary screen time. The guidelines also covered sleep and exercise. Among the findings were that:
- Infants under one should interact in floor-based play – or “tummy time” – for at least an hour each day and avoid all screens.
- Children between one and four should spend at least three hours in a variety of physical activities spread across the day, with no more than an hour of screen time.
- Children shouldn’t be restrained in a pram or high chair, or strapped to someone’s back, for more than an hour at a time.
The WHO said under-fives should be physically active and getting plenty of sleep, and that this would establish healthy habits through adolescence and into adulthood. “Healthy physical activity, sedentary behavior and sleep habits are established early in life, providing an opportunity to shape habits through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood,” the WHO stated in the guidelines to member states. Being inactive is a “leading risk factor” for mortality, and is fueling a global rise in overweight and obesity, the agency said. Being excessively overweight can lead to diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes and some types of cancer. In a report from 2017, the WHO said the number of obese children and adolescents globally had skyrocketed tenfold to 120 million inside the past 40 years. It added that the rise was accelerating in low- and middle-income nations, especially in Asia.
One in six people dying of lung cancer in UK are non-smokers, experts say – Growing numbers of non-smokers are being diagnosed with lung cancer, many at a stage when it is incurable, experts in the disease have revealed. They blame the rise on car fumes, secondhand smoke and indoor air pollution, and have urged people to stop using wood-burning stoves because the soot they generate increases risk. About 6,000 non-smoking Britons a year now die of the disease, more than lose their lives to ovarian or cervical cancer or leukaemia, according to research published on Friday in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. That is about a sixth of the 36,000 deaths a year from lung cancer. “If considered as a separate entity, lung cancer in never-smokers is the eighth most common cause of cancer-related death in the UK and the seventh most prevalent cancer in the world,” the authors state. A “never-smoker” is classed as someone who has smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime. “With declining rates of smoking, the relative proportion of lung cancers in never-smokers is rising,” the authors said. “In addition, the absolute numbers and rates of lung cancers in never-smokers are increasing.” Cosford – himself a non-smoker with lung cancer – said: “People will find these numbers very surprising. They rarely think of lung cancer as a non-smoker’s disease. They’re so focused on smoking as the main risk factor that we forget that there are quite a few causes of lung cancer that affect non-smokers.
Measles Cases Reaching Highest Number In Decades, New Research Finds (CBS) – Measles cases are approaching numbers the United States hasn’t seen in 20 years. The number of measles cases in the United States is approaching the record, with 70 new cases reported, for the decade in a four-month time span, according to new data released Monday. Pediatrician Dr. Jeffery Avner is on the front lines of a measles outbreak that is showing no signs of slowing down. His hospital in Brooklyn has treated nine cases of measles so far, including an adult and a child who ended up in the intensive care unit. ‘Parents don’t really understand risks of measles because it’s become such a rare disease, but measles does have very serious complications. One in 20 children with measles get pneumonia, which by the way, is the most common cause of death,” Avner said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now reporting 626 cases of the highly contagious virus in 22 states, including New Jersey and Delaware. It’s the second-highest number of cases reported since measles was declared eliminated in 2000. Most of the New York cases have occurred in unvaccinated people in Orthodox Jewish communities. Doctors across the country are also fighting against the anti-vaccine movement among some parents. “They are getting information from sources that are incorrect, that are trying to sell them on ideas and studies that were fraudulent and debunked,” Avner explained. Some experts are concerned with Passover this week there will be an increase in measles cases after the holiday in the coming weeks.
U.S. measles outbreak triggers quarantine at two Los Angeles universities (Reuters) – A nationwide measles outbreak has led health officials to quarantine dozens of people at two Los Angeles universities, officials said on Thursday. The quarantine affects the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) and comes as the United States battles the highest number of measles cases since the country declared the virus eliminated in 2000. The United States has confirmed 695 cases of measles, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday. California has confirmed 38 cases, state health officials have said. The people ordered quarantined at the two California campuses were exposed to measles and could not provide evidence they had been immunized against the disease, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said in a statement. “Both universities are assisting with the implementation of quarantine orders and determining how best to support students who must be quarantined and who live on campus,” the Department of Public Health said. At Cal State LA, the quarantine is related to a measles exposure at a library on April 11. The quarantine initially affected about 200 employees, including some student-employees, the university said in a statement. That number was later reduced to 156 people, the Department of Public Health said in an email on Thursday, and the quarantine will end in a week. At UCLA, 119 students and eight staff members who were exposed to measles at the campus earlier this month and could not provide proof of immunity were ordered quarantined on Wednesday, the university said in a statement. Since then, officials have released more than 40 people from the quarantine after establishing they had immunity. The UCLA quarantine will end by Tuesday, according to the Department of Public Health. The virus can lead to deadly complications, but no measles deaths have been reported in the latest U.S. outbreak. U.S. public health officials have blamed the nationwide outbreak, which coincides with a global rise in the prevalence of the disease, in part on the spread of misinformation about the safety of vaccines.
Could antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” become a bigger killer than cancer? – CBS 60 Minutes – video & transcript – When antibiotics were first used in the 1940s they were a revolution in medicine. Before that, diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis were often a death sentence, and even an infected scratch could be fatal. Since then, antibiotics have saved hundreds of millions of lives. But now many of these drugs are becoming ineffective. Scientists say it’s a problem of our own making. We’ve used antibiotics so freely, some bacteria have mutated into so-called “superbugs.” They’ve become resistant to the very drugs designed to kill them. A study commissioned by the British government estimates that by 2050, 10 million people worldwide could die each year from antibiotic resistant bacteria. That’s more than currently die from cancer. To understand the danger posed by superbugs, we start with the story of David Ricci.
Climate Change Could Worsen Antimicrobial Resistance Threat, Scientists Predict –Climate change could worsen the spread of microbes which are immune to drugs and substances we use to kill them, such as antibiotics, scientists have warned.Overusing antibiotics, in both humans and animals, is commonly blamed for the growing threat of what is known as antimicrobial resistance. Antibiotic resistance, a subset of antimicrobial resistance, is one of the “biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today,” the World Health Organization has said.The authors of a study presented at the 29th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) say global warming could also play an important role. The study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The team were partly inspired to explore this association off the back of a 2018 study published in the journal Nature, which showed the combination of rising local temperatures and population density in the U.S. was linked to an increase in antibiotic resistance.A spike in temperature of 10C was linked with a 4.2 percent increase in antibiotic resistance to E.coli, which can trigger serious food poisoning; a 2.7 percent increase in Staphylococcus aureus, which can cause skin infections and food poisoning; and a 2.2 percent increase in Klebsiella pneumoniae, which can cause pneumonia. In the new study, the authors wanted to find out if they would find similar trends in Europe, “A region with diverse healthcare systems and societies.”
We ignore the disaster in the antibiotics market at our peril – FT – Achaogen is not a company most people have heard of. . And yet its recently announced bankruptcy is one of the most significant – and worrying – corporate failures of this decade. In the global struggle against superbugs, Achaogen is a biotech at the front line. Its failure is the latest symptom of an ailing antibiotics market. Decades of disinvestment have left perilously few companies active in antibiotic development. Without external investment, small biotechs cannot carry prospective drugs through the complex and expensive later-stage trials they must pass. Against the odds, Achaogen appeared to have succeeded. Its antibiotic, plazomicin, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2018 for treating complex urinary tract infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria. It is a vitally needed drug and just one of the many new antibiotics we need to replace drugs that are rapidly losing their effectiveness against superbugs. Achaogen was a leading example of what could be achieved by a smart start-up working in partnership with government and philanthropic funders. In the year before filing for bankruptcy protection last week, Achaogen closed research and development programmes, laid off staff and even auctioned lab equipment online in desperate efforts to stay afloat. It is not alone. Ten of 12 antibiotics launched in the US in the past decade (not all of them breakthrough products) are achieving US sales of less than $100m a year. This barely covers the cost of keeping them on the market, let alone recouping investments. The tragedy is not that investors have lost their money. Rather, it is the signal that there is no viable route to market for new antibiotics, however valuable they may be to society. Capital-starved smaller companies will fold. Innovation will die on the vine. Money already invested by governments and charities will be squandered. Despite agreement about what is wrong, our political leaders have chosen not to address the problem.
The Next Ebola Epidemic: International slow-walking – and threatened cuts to aid from the Trump administration – could exacerbate a burgeoning ebola outbreak in the Congo.– The Ebola epidemic in West Africa from 2013 to 2016 left more than 11,000 dead and panicked the American public when a few isolated cases turned up on U.S. soil. By the time the outbreak was contained, the international community had learned valuable lessons about how to combat the virus.Now, a new outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is testing that knowledge – and the political will of the global community to mount a robust response.With more than 830 deaths since August 2018, the epidemic in northeastern DRC is the second-largest recorded, behind the multi-country epidemic in West Africa. The DRC outbreak has not yet crossed international borders. Moreover, responders are applying new solutions, including a vaccine that has proved effective.But many health experts argue that the threat is underestimated, leading to a dangerously inadequate global response.As of late March, the World Health Organization (WHO) had received less than half of its $148 million funding request for Ebola over the next six months. The WHO bureaucracy, moreover, appears hesitant. On April 12, the agency againdeclined to declare the epidemic a “public health emergency of international concern” – a designation that could unlock critical resources needed to bring the outbreak under control.One reason for the tepid response may be the remote location. The DRC epidemic is centered more than 1,000 miles from the capital, Kinshasa. In West Africa, by contrast, three coastal countries were affected, including capital cities with direct air links to Europe and North America. Nonetheless, the threat of spread beyond the DRC worries health experts. Tens of thousands of people a day cross the borders from the area into Rwanda, Uganda, and South Sudan. Indeed, WHO’s statement expressed “deep concern” about the “potential risk of spread to neighboring countries.”
Outbreak- Statewide Hepatitis A Infections In Georgia – The state of Georgia is experiencing a statewide viral outbreak. Hepatitis A is spreading across the state as 250 cases of the infection have been identified. That’s more than four times the number of infections in 2017. The Georgia Department of Public Health says the cases date as far back as June 2018. The number of cases identified is nine times higher than the total of 24 infections identified in 2017, the department said according to a report by First Coast News.Hepatitis A has been spreading rapidly in areas with a large homeless population. Some cities in California have even taken to bleaching the streets in an attempt to contain the infection. The Hepatitis A viral infection (HAV) is most commonly spread through close person-to-person transmission through fecal-oral exposure, according to the department. Drug users, homeless populations, and men who have sex with men are the most at risk for HAV, the department says. Although less common, it can also be transmitted through contaminated food, water or other objects. 31 additional cases of the virus have been reported in just the past week. This HAV outbreak is ongoing, and complicated by the E. coli outbreak also ravaging the state of Georgia. According to Northwest Georgia News, health officials also said Wednesday that the number of Georgians hit by an E. coli outbreak has increased to 27, up from 17 a week ago. The CDC late last week identified the probable source of the E. coli as contaminated ground beef.
E. Coli Outbreak Linked to Ground Beef Has Spread to 10 States – An E. coli outbreak linked to ground beef has spread to 10 states and infected at least 156 people, CNN reported Wednesday.The outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O103 began March 1 and has hospitalized 20 people, but no one has died, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said. “Ill people in this outbreak report eating ground beef at home and in restaurants,” CDC wrote. “Traceback investigations are ongoing to determine the source of raw ground beef supplied to grocery stores and restaurant locations where ill people reported eating.” As of an update Tuesday, the CDC said no common supplier of the beef had yet been found. However, also on Tuesday, K2D Foods recalled around 113,424 pounds of raw ground beef over possible contamination with the same strain of E. coli, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced. Investigators are working to determine if the recalled beef is linked to the outbreak in any way. K2D Foods does business as (DBA) Colorado Premium Foods and is based in Carrolton, Georgia. The recalled beef was produced on March 26, March 29, April 2, April 5, April 10 and April 12 and came in two 24-pound vacuum-packed packages in cardboard boxes labeled “GROUND BEEF PUCK” with “Use Thru” dates of April 14th, 17th, 20th, 23rd, 28th and 30th, according to FSIS. The products had an establishment code of “EST. 51308” and were sent to distributors in Ft. Orange, Florida and Norcross, Georgia. The first cases in the outbreak were reported to the CDC by health officials in Kentucky and Georgia, Reuters reported. When it first announced the outbreak earlier this month, CDC said that it had infected 109 people in six states, according to CNN. It has since spread to 10, with cases reported in Tennessee, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio and Virginia.
Deregulation could give bacon a bad taste – Do you know who is being put in charge of regulating the pork industry to make sure your bacon, ham and pork chops aren’t contaminated? The pork industry! Until now, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service has been responsible for food safety regulation. The agency was founded a century ago to combat brutal practices in livestock slaughterhouses, which included the trifecta of maimed slaughterhouse workers, abused animals and health epidemics. Now the Trump administration has unveiled plans to get rid of about 40 percent of federal pork inspectors and basically let the pork industry regulate itself. What can we do? We can all become vegetarians. Doesn’t interest you? How about everyone start keeping kosher? Or perhaps we can pressure Republicans to ease off on their deregulation efforts. The residents of Flint, Michigan, would support this 100 percent. For decades, the Flint River was an unregulated dumping ground for local industries. When the city fell into debt, then-Michigan Gov. Rich Snyder oversaw a decision to stop piping in treated water from Detroit, and instead use the Flint River as the city’s prime water source. Lately, the Trump administration has pushed for self-regulation of offshore oil rigs, while the nuclear industry is eager to slash government safety inspections and handle them itself. Similar efforts have led to Boeing being allowed to certify the safety tests of its own 737 Max airliners, according to NPR. And that policy has worked like a charm – except for the recent crashes of two such jets that killed 346 passengers. Former and current Boeing employees interviewed by The New York Times describe “a culture that often valued production speed over quality.” But hey, every Boeing plane didn’t crash. So stop whining, you big-government socialists!
Pig brains kept alive outside body for hours after death – Since the early twentieth century, scientists have conducted experiments that keep animals’ brains alive from the moment the heart stops, by cooling the brains and pumping in blood or a substitute. This made Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan wonder: could a whole brain be revived hours after death? Sestan decided to find out – using severed heads from 32 pigs that had been killed for meat at a slaughterhouse near his lab. His team removed each brain from its skull and placed it into a special chamber before fitting the organ with a catheter. Four hours after death, the researchers began pumping a warm preservative solution into the brain’s veins and arteries. The system, which the researchers call BrainEx, mimics blood flow by delivering nutrients and oxygen to brain cells. The preservative solution the team used also contained chemicals that stop neurons from firing, to protect them from damage and to prevent electrical brain activity from restarting. Despite this, the scientists monitored the brains’ electrical activity throughout the experiment and were prepared to administer anaesthetics if they saw signs that the organ might be regaining consciousness. The researchers tested how well the brains fared during a six-hour period. They found that neurons and other brain cells had restarted normal metabolic functions, such as consuming sugar and producing carbon dioxide, and that the brains’ immune systems seemed to be working. The structures of individual cells and sections of the brain were preserved – whereas cells in control brains, which did not receive the nutrient- and oxygen-rich solution, collapsed. And when the scientists applied electricity to tissue samples from the treated brains, they found that individual neurons could still carry a signal. The BrainEx system is far from ready for use in people, he adds, not least because it is difficult to use without first removing the brain from the skull. Nevertheless, the development of technology with the potential to support sentient, disembodied organs has broad ethical implications for the welfare of animals and people. “There isn’t really an oversight mechanism in place for worrying about the possible ethical consequences of creating consciousness in something that isn’t a living animal,”
China’s African swine fever crisis ‘very serious’ with stocks falling and pork prices set to hit all-time high – African swine fever has had a “very serious” impact on China’s pig industry, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, with stocks shrinking and pork prices expected to rise to an all-time high later this year. China has already culled 1.02 million pigs since August, with a total of 129 cases discovered, said Wang Junxun, a deputy chief of the veterinary bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, on Tuesday. The number of sows, or mother pigs, has plunged 21 per cent in March from a year earlier, said Wang, pointing to a supply problem in the future. Pork prices rose only 2.1 per cent in the first week of March from a year earlier, but in the first week of April, prices increased by 36 per cent. “Pork output will fall, and supply will be tight. The price of live hogs will hit new historical highs in the fourth quarter of this year,” said Wang. According to China’s statistics bureau, the country still had 375 million sows, pigs and piglets as the end of March, a rapid fall from 428 million at the end of December. But while the official picture is bleak, the real situation on the ground could be much worse, according to two industry insiders who had access to classified information about the situation. The executives at a state-controlled pork producer and trader declined to be named as they are not allowed to speak about the swine fever, but believe official statistics are being under reported.
High CO2 levels will wreck plants’ nutritional value, so don’t plan on surviving on vegetables – Kristie Ebi, the University of Washington professor who was the lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) blockbuster report last fall on the need to limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, made it clear that climate shifts are far from the only consequence of rising CO2 levels. “Our emission of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is reducing the nutritional quality of our food,” she says. Ebi directly refuted an idea that’s been floating around for a while about the effect of CO2 on food production and global hunger. Technically, plants need CO2 to survive: They bring it in, break it down, and rely on carbon to grow. Some researchers have claimed that more CO2 means that more plants will be able to grow, and higher CO2 levels will then help solve food insecurity. That, according to Ebi, is a hugely, dangerously wrong. Not only will climate change and global warming make agricultural productivity and much more unstable, but when plants take in an excess of CO2, their chemical makeup changes in a way that that’s harmful to the humans and animals that depend on them for nutrition: higher concentrations of CO2, increases the synthesis of carbohydrates like sugars and starches, and decrease the concentrations of proteins and nutrients like zinc, iron, and B-vitamins. “This is very important for how we think about food security going forward,” Ebi says. A lack of iron can lead to outcomes like anemia and stunted development; low levels of zinc contributes to loss of appetite and additional developmental difficulties. B vitamins are crucial for converting our food into energy, and the way our bodies function overall. “It’s not just us,” Ebi says. Animals like cows that rely on grains and plants for their diet produce meat and milk that contain fewer nutrients and vitamins, and people who eat meat take in fewer of those crucial resources. To understand just how profound these effects will be, Ebi’s team studied fields of rice that were saturated with CO2 levels equivalent to those we might experience in 2050. They found that levels of protein in the rice declined by around 10%, iron by around 8%, zinc by 5%, and B vitamins by around 18%. “These don’t sound like major changes, but when you think about the poor in countries who eat mainly starches, this will put them from the edge to over the edge and into nutrient deficiency,” Ebi says.
PepsiCo is suing farmers in India for growing the potatoes it uses in Lays chips – PepsiCo has offered to stop pursuing four small farmers in India it accuses of illegally growing a variety of potatoes registered for exclusive use in its Lays chips. The company’s Indian subsidiary filed lawsuits against the farmers earlier this month. They were heard by a court in the Indian state of Gujarat on Friday, when a lawyer for PepsiCo offered to drop the case provided the farmers join thousands of others in the company’s authorized cultivation program. “That was a discussion that happened in the court today,” a PepsiCo spokesperson told CNN. “We told them, why don’t you join our program and we will provide seeds … Either join us or grow other potatoes. That way, we are willing to let go of the case.” A lawyer for the farmers has asked for time to consider the offer. The next court hearing is due June 12. Farmer unions and activists have been fighting back against the food and beverage maker over the case, the latest battle in India between local businesses and big global players. PepsiCo, which owns brands like Pepsi, Lays, Gatorade and Quaker Oats, is reportedly seeking damages of 10 million rupees ($143,000) from each farmer. The farms they operate have only a few acres each.
We’ll be eating the first Crispr’d foods within 5 years, according to a geneticist who helped invent the blockbuster gene-editing tool – While ethicists debate the applications of blockbuster gene-editing tool Crispr in human healthcare, an inventor of the tool believes it has a more immediate application: improving our food. “I think in the next five years the most profound thing we’ll see in terms of Crispr’s effects on people’s everyday lives will be in the agricultural sector,” Jennifer Doudna, the University of California Berkeley geneticist who unearthed Crispr in early experiments with bacteria in 2012, told Business Insider. Crispr has dozens of potential uses, from treating diseases like sickle cell to certain inherited forms of blindness. The tool recently made headlines when a scientist in China reportedly used it to edit the DNA of a pair of twin baby girls. Then there are Crispr’s practical applications – the kinds of things we might expect to see in places like grocery stores and farmers’ fields within a decade, according to Doudna. Crispr’s appeal in food is straightforward: it’s cheaper and easier than traditional breeding methods, including those that are used to make genetically modified crops (also known as GMOs) currently. It’s also much more precise. Where traditional breeding methods hack away at a crop’s genome with a dull blade, tools like Crispr slice and reshape with scalpel-like precision. Relatively cheap and easy to use, Crispr is showing up in everything from veggies to lab-grown meat. Want a mushroom that doesn’t brown? A corn crop that yields more food per acre? Both already exist, though they haven’t yet made it to consumers’ plates. What about a strawberry with a longer shelf life or tomatoes that do a better job of staying on the vine? “I think all of those things are coming relatively quickly,” Doudna said.
New Roundup-Cancer Lawsuit Exposes Cozy Relationship Between Monsanto and EPA – On Monday, Monsanto Co. corporate spokesman William Reeves admitted the corporation has regularly communicated with U.S. regulatory agencies regarding reviews of the controversial Roundup herbicide. Reeves denied that Monsanto had given the agencies orders to follow. Reeves’ testimony came about during the latest lawsuit against biotech giant Monsanto, as Alva and Alberta Pilliod fight to prove that Roundup caused their cancer. The Pilliods are both living with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after spraying the herbicide Roundup on their properties for nearly 30 years. The septuagenarian couple were diagnosed with the most common form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, in 2011 and 2015. Now the couple is seeking damages related to their use of Roundup after recent studies have linked the world’s most popular herbicide to cancer. Courthouse News reported on the latest developments in the case: “Attorney Brent Wisner, representing plaintiffs Alva and Alberta Pilliod, played video testimony of Monsanto corporate spokesman William Reeves in court Monday, in which he acknowledged Monsanto executives had exchanged text messages with regulators who sat on a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency committee that found glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, is not carcinogenic for humans.The Pilliods’ legal team hopes these email and text exchanges will be enough evidence of collusion between Monsanto and the EPA to delay a review by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a public health agency connected to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” The text messages show that on June 18, 2015, Monsanto scientist Eric Sachs sent a text message to former EPA toxicologist Mary Manibusan, looking for help finding a contact in the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). The ATSDR had begun working on the profile after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research concluded that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans.” In another text, Manibusan told Dan Jenkins, Monsanto’s liaison to U.S. regulatory agencies like the EPA, that he may need help “trying to do everything we can to keep from having a domestic IARC occur with this group,” in reference to the ATSDR. By June 23, 2015, Jenkins wrote to his Monsanto colleagues alerting them that Jack Housenger, director of EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, would put a hold on the report..
Court Orders EPA To Decide Whether To Ban Brain-Damaging Pesticide from Food – Today, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to decide by mid-July whether to ban chlorpyrifos, the organophosphate pesticide linked to neurodevelopmental damage in children. Organophosphates like chlorpyrifos were first developed by the Nazis for chemical warfare but were later repurposed for agriculture. Chlorpyrifos was banned from home use nearly two decades ago, as it is too toxic to children. “We commend the court for this ruling as it forces the EPA to stop stalling,” said Patti Goldman, Earthjustice attorney. “While we are moving forward, the tragedy is that children are being exposed to chlorpyrifos, a pesticide science has long shown is unsafe. We hope Trump’s EPA finally decides to protect the future of countless children and the health of millions of farmworkers.” Last year, the same court ordered EPA to finalize its proposed ban on chlorpyrifos based on undisputed findings that the pesticide is unsafe for public health and particularly harmful to children and farmworkers, but EPA asked and received a rehearing. Last month, advocates represented by Earthjustice argued again in court that chlorpyrifos has no place near fruits or vegetables. Today’s court order comes two years after the Trump administration reversed EPA’s own proposal to ban this pesticide. That decision happened weeks after former EPA boss Scott Pruitt met with the head of the largest manufacturer of chlorpyrifos, Dow Chemical (now DowDupont), which sells it under the name of Lorsban. In 2017, Pruitt falsely claimed the science is “unresolved,” and decided EPA would study the issue until 2022 even though agency scientists said chlorpyrifos is unsafe. Chlorpyrifos is a widely used agricultural pesticide linked to reduced IQ, attention deficit disorder, and other developmental damage in children, according to multiple studies. Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate that comes from the same chemical family as sarin nerve gas, is used on foods like strawberries, apples, citrus, broccoli, corn and more.
Deadly Kissing Bug Spreads to Delaware, CDC Confirms – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that the kissing bug, which can transmit a potentially deadly parasite, has spread to Delaware,ABC News reported Wednesday.The CDC had warned in September of last year that the bug was spreading north from South and Central America, and had already been sighted in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, The Delaware News Journal reported. But the agency confirmed last week that a bug that bit a child’s face in Kent, Delaware in July 2018 was indeed a kissing bug. Kissing bugs earned their name for their habit of biting people on their face, according to the World Health Organization. They are also called triatomine bugs, a range of species that can carry the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes Chagas disease, the CDC explains. Chagas can lead to stroke or heart failure, though most people who are infected experience no symptoms. Initial symptoms can include fever, fatigue, aches, headache, rash and swelling at the site of transmission, according to ABC News. There are currently 300,000 people in the U.S. and 8 million people in Central and South America living with the disease. Most of those living in the U.S. with the disease were infected while visiting Latin America,The Delaware News Journal reported. However, researchers have predicted U.S. infections could increase withclimate change.”We know the bugs are already across the bottom two-thirds of the U.S., so the bugs are here, the parasites are here. Very likely with climate change they will shift further north and the range of some species will extend,” Loyola University Chagas disease specialist Patricia Dorn said in a 2012 University of Vermont press release reported by ScienceDaily.Delaware is one of the northernmost states in which the bug has been documented, The Miami Herald reported.
Forty hospitalized after toxic chemical leak in Chicago suburb – A disaster unfolded in the northern Chicago suburb of Beach Park in Lake County, Illinois on Thursday morning when a cloud of toxic anhydrous ammonia leaked into the air. At approximately 4:25 a.m., authorities were called to respond to a “possible vehicle fire” near North Green Bay Road and 29th Street. When sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene they reported what appeared to be a “cloud of smoke” and were “overcome by an airborne chemical.” The chemical emitted from a semi-trailer tank was later confirmed to be anhydrous ammonia, a chemical most often used in fertilizer and as an industrial refrigerant according to the Centers for Disease Control. A semi-truck was towing two separate two-ton containers of the chemical which began to leak out onto the road, releasing plumes of toxic gas into the surrounding air creating a cloud of poison which was originally thought to be smoke, although no actual fire occurred. So far, 40 people have been hospitalized after inhaling the gas, including 11 firefighters. Seven victims remain in critical condition as of the time of this writing. A worker called 911 after driving through the gas cloud on her way to work and feeling as if she could not breathe. The spill prompted a Level 5 Hazmat emergency response, and area schools announced closures early in the day due to the spill. Authorities issued a warning at around 5 a.m. on Twitter to residents living in a one-mile radius to stay inside with the windows closed and shut all HVAC systems off. The shelter-in-place order was lifted at 10 a.m. and roads reopened at 11 a.m.. The number of hospitalizations reported by the media continued to rise throughout the day, from 30 to 37 to 40. ABC 7 News reported that residents woke in the morning to the smell of burning, indicating the potency of the toxic gas which was released. Some residents left the area with their families after smelling the gas. Those admitted to the hospital who remain in critical condition are being intubated. Patients who had inhaled the chemical were admitted with severe swelling of the vocal chords and upper airways and required mechanical ventilation.
“Americans more concerned about pollution in drinking water than climate change – Americans are more concerned about pollution in their drinking water than about global warming, according to research from Gallup. A report released on Monday, based on data aggregated between 2017 and 2019, showed that Americans are more concerned about a range of environmental issues than they are about global warming.The Gallup poll presented data on six areas of concern: global warming, loss of tropical rain forests, air pollution, extinction of plant and animal species, pollution of rivers, lakes and reservoirs and pollution of drinking water. Americans in each region expressed less concern about global warming than about each other topic, with the exception of loss of tropical rain forests. (Only individuals in the northeast were more concerned about global warming than about rainforest loss.) The report showed strong regional differences in the amount of concern about global warming. Residents of the Northeast expressed the greatest concern about global warming, with 70 percent saying they believed the “seriousness of global warming is generally correct or underestimated.”Americans living in the South exhibited the least concern about the seriousness of global warming, with 53 percent saying that global warming had already begun and 60 percent saying they believed the “seriousness of global warming is generally correct or underestimated.” 72 percent of those living in the Northeast said they worried a great deal or fair amount about global warming, while 61 percent of those living in the South indicated the same views.
‘It is not alarmist to say that the people of Florida are being slowly poisoned by the water’ – The dead fish that piled up on Florida’s beaches last year demonstrated the environmental impact of red tide and blue-green algae and the dramatic consequences for tourism, businesses and, potentially, real-estate values. But it is past due to focus on the public health crisis. While more research is needed, evidence points in the same direction:
- Blue-green algae are laden with microcystins that are a cause of non-alcoholic liver cancer. The algae blooms also produce BMAA (β-Methylamino-L-alanine), a toxin that is linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, ALS and Parkinson’s. Last year, Drs. Paul Cox and James Metcalf of Brain Chemistry Labs reported that microcystin levels in samples from Lake Okeechobee and the St. Lucie canal were 300 times the level recommended as safe by the United Nations.
- BMAA is a documented cause of Alzheimer’s and ALS. The University of Miami Brain Endowment Bank reported that the BMAA toxin is found in the brains of people with neuro-degenerative diseases.
- Dr. David Davis, a neuropathologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, reported that monkeys fed BMAA developed early symptoms of ALS. Another study, from 2017, documented that monkeys given BMAA developed the amyloid plaque and “tau tangles” that are the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Last month, Dr. Davis’ team reported that detectable levels of the BMAA toxin were found in the brains of dead dolphins that displayed degenerative damage similar to Alzheimer’s, ALS and Parkinson’s in humans.
- High concentrations of BMAA have been found in the seafood in South Florida waters where blue-green algae blooms occur. Ingestion of BMAA contaminated food is known to lead to Alzheimer’s and ALS.
- Toxins in blue-green algae are airborne: Dr. Elijah Stommel of Dartmouth reported that people living near bodies of water with heavy blue-green algae blooms had a 15 times greater chance of getting ALS. Research by Prof. Mike Parsons, a Florida Gulf Coast University marine biologist, found airborne cyanobacteria toxins a mile from retention ponds and three miles from the Caloosahatchee River. A study of air filters near bodies of water infected with blue-green algae along the Caloosahatchee River taken during the heavy blooms in 2018 by Dr. Larry Brand of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Atmospheric and Marine Science is expected soon.
Flint: 5 Years Later, and Our Water Is More Threatened Than Ever — Five years ago this week, an emergency manager appointed by then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder made the devastating decision to save money by switching Flint’s water supply over from Detroit’s water system to the Flint River. Seen as a temporary fix, the new water supply was not properly treated. High levels of lead leached from the old pipes, poisoning a generation of Flint’s children, and bacteria responsible for an outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease killed more than a dozen residents. Five years ago, we hoped this would be a rallying cry for federal investment in our water systems. But today, things aren’t better: they’re worse. Almost daily, there are new headlines about how vulnerable our water infrastructure has become. Martin County, Kentucky, has suffered a catastrophic failure of its water system that has led to higher water rates for discolored, toxic water; like residents in Flint, they don’t trust what comes out of the tap. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), have contaminated water in states across the country where military and industrial facilities have released this dangerous chemical associated with cancer risks. Testing has shown a widespread problem with lead in our schools. And on top of all of this, climate change is exacerbating many of our water problems, stressing water supplies, threatening critical infrastructure and overburdening our aging stormwater collection systems. What’s more, a recent survey by Food & Water Watch of the two largest water systems in each state revealed a shocking estimated 15 million people had their water shut off in 2016 for nonpayment. That’s 1 in 20 households. Statistically, someone in your neighborhood is having a hard time paying their water bills. Water affordability is just one more aspect of our deepening water crisis. Since peaking in the 1970s, federal funding to maintain our aging water systems has plummeted by 82% on a per capita basis. In 1977, the federal government spent $76.27 per person (in 2014 dollars) on water infrastructure, but by 2014 that support had fallen to $13.68 per person. Meanwhile, many water systems are nearly 100 years old.
Federal Judge Rules Flint Residents Can Sue EPA Over Water Crisis – – As Flint, Michigan, marks five years since the city’s deadly water crisis began, a federal judge ruled in favor of residents who want to sue the federal government for not acting promptly to ensure the city had clean drinking water.Residents filed suit against the EPA in 2017, demanding $722 million in damages and arguing that the agency was able to inform the city that its drinking water was contaminated months before it finally issued an emergency order.“These lies went on for months while the people of Flint continued to be poisoned,” Judge Linda Parker, an Obama appointee, wrote in her ruling Friday.The EPA was notified that Flint was using a contaminated drinking water source – the Flint River – in mid-2015, when a whistleblower wrote in a memo that the water contained lead. But the agency didn’t issue an emergency order to protect residents for another seven months. By that time, residents of the majority-black city had been drinking the tainted water for a year and a half.City officials began drawing drinking water from the river in April 2014, switching from Detroit’s system to save money. Residents began complaining of rashes, hair loss, and other health concerns almost immediately, and reporting that the water was brown and had an unpleasant taste and odor – but the city insisted the water was safe.State regulators continued telling residents that the water was safe for drinking even after a group of doctors reported in September 2015 that they had detected high levels of lead in children’s bloodstreams. The EPA issued its emergency order in January 2016 andclaims that it lacked the authority to take action sooner because of the state’s decision-making.As residents are arguing in their lawsuit, the agency’s inspector general reported later that year that under the Safe Drinking Water Act, in the event of state inaction “the EPA can and should proceed with an [emergency] order” to protect the public “in a timely manner.” “The lead-contaminated public water supply system will affect the residents for years and likely generations to come,” Parker wrote. “The acts leading to the creation of the Flint Water Crisis, alleged to be rooted in lies, recklessness and profound disrespect, have and will continue to produce a heinous impact for the people of Flint.”
Climate change threatening to dry up the Rio Grande River, a vital water supply — For nearly 2,000 miles, the Rio Grande River winds it way from the Rocky Mountains down to the Gulf of Mexico. As one of the country’s longest and most iconic rivers, it provides drinking water and irrigation for more than six million people in three U.S. states. But climate change is threatening that vital water supply.For more than 130 years, one river gauge in northern New Mexico has tracked the pulse of the Rio Grande. “It’s the oldest continuously operated gauge in the United States operated by the U.S. Geological Survey,” USGS hydrologist Mark Gunn said.When CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller and her team visited, the Rio Grande was beating along. But Gunn told us last July that its flow nearly flat-lined.”Since we’ve been measuring since 1889, last year was the lowest discharge … in the history of this gauge,” Gunn said, adding, “It was so low that we actually had to dig out this whole entire area and dig a channel into the river to be able to get water to go to the gauge.” “So it basically made your machine here malfunction,” Miller said.”Yes, it did,” Gunn said. The Colorado snowpack that melts into the Rio Grande is declining – 25 percent over the last 50 years – and University of New Mexico climatology professor David Gutzler said climate change is threatening to dry it up. With that in mind, cities downstream have been preparing. Albuquerque’s water authority has spent $6 million incentivizing desert-friendly landscaping. The city even sends every 4th grade class to the river for a lesson in water conservation. We followed the Rio Grande 150 miles south to where it pools into the Elephant Butte Reservoir, New Mexico’s largest. The shrinking reservoir can be seen from space. But up close, you can see the bathtub ring left by higher water levels 25 years ago. That means less of it can be released to the 90,000 acres of farmland on the other side of this dam. “It is now April … and we have not released any water from storage. We should have been running for a month and a half by now,” King said.Until water is released in June, parts of the Rio Grande will look dusty and dry, like the desert around it. The canals that deliver water to farms like Dixie Ranch will remain empty.
Agent Orange: US to clean up toxic Vietnam War air base – BBC – The US has launched a multi-million dollar clean-up operation at an air base in Vietnam it used to store the notorious chemical Agent Orange. The ten-year programme, unveiled more than four decades after the end of the Vietnam War, will cost $183m (£141m). The site at Bien Hoa airport, outside Ho Chi Minh City, is considered the most contaminated in the country. Agent Orange was a defoliant sprayed by US forces to destroy jungles and uncover the enemy’s hiding places. It contained dioxin, which is one of the most toxic chemicals known to man and has been linked to increased rates of cancers and birth defects. Vietnam says several million people have been affected by Agent Orange, including 150,000 children born with severe birth defects. At Bien Hoa the chemical has contaminated the soil and seeped into nearby rivers. The amount of dioxin in the area is four times higher than that found at Danang airport where a similar operation was completed in November. A statement from the US development agency USAID, which is behind the clean-up, described the site as the “largest remaining hotspot” of dioxin in Vietnam.
Interior’s Bernhardt worked closely on matters he promised to avoid – Interior Secretary David Bernhardt began working on policies that would aid one of his former lobbying clients within weeks of joining the Trump administration, according to a POLITICO analysis of agency documents – a revelation that adds to the ethics questions dogging his leadership of the agency. Bernhardt’s efforts, beginning in at least October 2017, included shaping the department’s response to a key portion of a water infrastructure law he had helped pass as a lobbyist for California farmers, recently released calendars show. The department offered scant details at the time about meetings that Bernhardt, then the deputy secretary, held with Interior officials overseeing water deliveries to the farmers, leading many observers to believe he was steering clear of the issues he had previously lobbied on. But newly disclosed schedule “cards” prepared by Interior officials for Bernhardt show more than three dozen meetings with key players on California water issues, including multiple lengthy meetings on specific endangered species protections at the heart of his previous work. Those appointments were only vaguely identified on his official calendars. Interior’sinspector general is probing whether Bernhardt violated ethics rules by working on policies he had pushed as a lobbyist for the Westlands Water District, a job that earned his former firm more than $1.3 million in the five years before he returned to government service. Bernhardt’s ethics agreement barred him from participating in any “particular matters” involving Westlands until August 2018, one year after he arrived at the agency, and it was only after that recusal period ended that then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke publicly tasked him with working on California water issues. But the newly released information shows that Bernhardt had weighed in on discussions around Westlands’ policy priorities for nearly a year by that point. “They were creating the perception that he was not involved in these issues that his former client had a major stake in, when we now know he was deeply involved in them,”
Ethics Investigations Opened into Actions of EPA Head Wheeler, Top DOI Officials –Ethics investigations have been opened into the conduct of senior Trump appointees at the nation’s top environmental agencies. The two investigations focus on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler and six high-ranking officials in the Department of Interior (DOI), The Hill reported Tuesday. Both of them involve the officials’ former clients or employers. “This is demonstrative of the failures at the very top of this administration to set an ethical tone,” Campaign Legal Center Ethics Counsel Delaney Marsco told The Washington Post of the DOI investigation. “When people come to work for government, they’re supposed to work on behalf of the public. It’s a betrayal of the public trust when senior political appointees seem to give privileged access to their former employers or former clients.” Here’s a run-down of the two investigations. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is investigating Wheeler for failing to disclose that he lobbied for Darling Ingredients within two years of assuming his post at the EPA, CNN reported Wednesday. The Ethics in Government Act mandates that all officials must disclose the sources of any money over $5,000 earned in the two years before their appointment, but Wheeler failed to disclose his work on behalf of the chemical company in 2015 and 2016 while working for Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting. The committee cited Faegre’s quarterly disclosure forms as proof that Wheeler had not listed the earnings. “These documents indicate that you may have improperly omitted Darling from your financial disclosure, and they raise concerns that you may have failed to identify other clients who paid for your service as a lobbyist during the period covered by your disclosure report,” House Oversight chairman Elijah Cummings wrote in a letter to Wheeler informing him of the investigation. Six officials at the DOI are being investigated by the department’s Office of Inspector General over meetings with former employers or clients on department-related business, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. President Donald Trump signed an executive order early in his term saying all appointees must recuse themselves from matters involving former clients for two years. But the Campaign Legal Center sent a letter to the DOI watchdog in February detailing how six officials had violated that pledge. The Office of Inspector General wrote back to the center April 18 to say an investigation was in process. “The department takes ethics issues seriously,” Interior spokeswoman Faith Vander Voort told The Washington Post in an email.
Frogs, salamanders and toads suffering ‘catastrophic population decline’, scientists say – Amphibians across the world are experiencing “catastrophic population declines” from a widening range of interacting pathogens, scientists say. Fungal disease chytridiomycosis is thought to have caused the extinction of 90 amphibian species around the world and the marked decline of at least 491 others over the last 20 years. According to Dr Benjamin Scheele, the lead author of a study into chytridiomycosis, it is “the greatest recorded loss of biodiversity attributable to a disease”. But now amphibians are also under attack from another pathogen known as the ranavirus, which exists in at least four varieties.In addition scientists have found that there are at least two species of chytridiomycosis, and within these, many different genetic types.In response to the demise of worldwide amphibian populations, this week zoological experts will gather in London in a bid to develop an emergency plan to save these creatures. A description of the event on the Zoological Society of London’s website reads: “Amphibians continue to experience worldwide declines and remain the most threatened vertebrate class.“Nearly 30 years of research has shown that pathogens, in particular chytridiomycete fungi and ranaviruses, are responsible for infectious diseases that cause catastrophic population and host community declines on all continents where amphibians exist.” Among the 90 species of amphibians wiped out since chytridiomycosis began taking its toll across the world are the golden toad in Costa Rica (Incilius periglenes), the southern gastric-brooding frog of Australia (Rheobatrachus silus), and Arthur’s stubfoot toad (Atelopus arthuri) in Ecuador. Researchers believe that globalisation and the wildlife trade are the main causes behind the spread of this global pandemic.
Plans to expand Iceland’s fish farms risk decimating wild salmon populations – A five-fold expansion in open net fish farms that scientists believe could decimate Iceland’s wild salmon stocks is pitting Big Aquaculture against ecologists in the country. Next month, a parliamentary bill is expected to extend farm licenses from 10 to 16 years, while omitting critics from oversight panels and handing primary monitoring powers to industry. Jon Kaldal of the Icelandic Wildlife Fund said: “We are at a crossroads. If industrial-scale open net salmon farming is allowed to take over, it will cause massive pollution and a dramatic increase in the risk of farmed fish escaping. Iceland is the final frontier for north Atlantic salmon.” It is also a new horizon for a multi-billion euro Norwegian industry that campaigners say has halved its own wild salmon population and steam-rollered opposition. But scientists say that they are under pressure from the industry to play down their findings. The Guardian has seen evidence of targeted pressure against Icelandic environmental scientists, although a fear of reprisal prevents many from speaking out. One scientist said: “I felt that I had to be careful because everything I said would be scrutinised for its potential to benefit industry.”
Antarctica: Thousands of emperor penguin chicks wiped out – Thousands of emperor penguin chicks drowned when the sea-ice on which they were being raised was destroyed in severe weather. The catastrophe occurred in 2016 in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. Scientists say the colony at the edge of the Brunt Ice Shelf has collapsed with adult birds showing no sign of trying to re-establish the population. And it would probably be pointless for them to try as a giant iceberg is about to disrupt the site. The dramatic loss of the young emperor birds is reported by a team from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Drs Peter Fretwell and Phil Trathan noticed the disappearance of the so-called Halley Bay colony in satellite pictures. It is possible even from 800km up to spot the animals’ excrement, or guano, on the white ice and then to estimate the likely size of any gathering. But the Brunt population, which had sustained an average of 14,000 to 25,000 breeding pairs for several decades (5-9% of the global population), essentially disappeared overnight. Emperors are the tallest and heaviest of the penguin species and need reliable patches of sea-ice on which to breed, and this icy platform must persist from April, when the birds arrive, until December, when their chicks fledge.
Researchers say world’s second-largest emperor penguin colony has been wiped out – Researchers say what was once the world’s second-largest colony of emperor penguins has “now all but disappeared” after changes in sea-ice conditions made their typical breeding grounds highly unstable.A group of researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) published their findings in the Antarctic Science journal on Thursday. The team said in astatement that they studied “very high resolution satellite imagery to reveal the unusual findings.” According to their research, satellite imagery showed that the emperor penguin colony at Halley Bay in Antarctica had drastically decreased over the past three years on account of breeding failures caused by severe changes in local environmental conditions.“For the last 60 years the sea-ice conditions in the Halley Bay site have been stable and reliable,” the team said. “But in 2016, after a period of abnormally stormy weather, the sea-ice broke up in October, well before any emperor chicks would have fledged.”The group said the conditions were repeated the following two years, leading to “the death of almost all the chicks at the site each season.” “The colony at Halley Bay colony has now all but disappeared, whilst the nearby Dawson Lambton colony has markedly increased in size, indicating that many of the adult emperors have moved there, seeking better breeding grounds as environmental conditions have changed,” the researchers said.
‘Coming Mass Extinction’ Caused by Human Destruction Could Wipe Out 1 Million Species, Warns UN Draft Report – On the heels of an Earth Day that featured calls for radical action to address the current “age of environmental breakdown,” Agence France-Presse revealed Tuesday that up to a million species face possible extinction because of destructive human behavior.The warning comes from a forthcoming United Nations report, a draft of which was obtained by AFP, that “painstakingly catalogues how humanity has undermined the natural resources upon which its very survival depends.” A product of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the landmark three-year assessment was prepared by 150 experts from 50 countries, with additions from another 250 contributors.As John Vidal wrote in a preview of the study for HuffPost last month, “It is the greatest attempt yet to assess the state of life on Earth and will show how tens of thousands of species are at high risk of extinction, how countries are using nature at a rate that far exceeds its ability to renew itself, and how nature’s ability to contribute food and fresh water to a growing human population is being compromised in every region on Earth.”Outlining some of the experts’ key findings, AFP reported Tuesday: The accelerating loss of clean air, drinkable water, CO2-absorbing forests, pollinating insects, protein-rich fish, and storm-blocking mangroves – to name but a few of the dwindling services rendered by nature – poses no less of a threat than climate change…The direct causes of species loss, in order of importance, are shrinking habitat and land-use change, hunting for food or illicit trade in body parts, climate change, pollution, and alien species such as rats, mosquitoes, and snakes that hitch rides on ships or planes, the report finds.As AFP reported, the draft document warns that “subsidies to fisheries, industrial agriculture, livestock raising, forestry, mining and the production of biofuel, or fossil fuel energy encourage waste, inefficiency, and over-consumption.” Unsustainable human activity, according to the document, already has “severely altered” 40 percent of the marine environment, 50 percent of inland waterways, and three-quarters of the planet’s land.
Environment Aotearoa: Government stocktake describes New Zealand environment on the brink – New Zealand’s environment is in a precarious state and facing an overwhelming number of threats, according to a sweeping government stocktake.The major issues include thousands of species threatened or at risk of extinction, rivers unsafe for swimming, the loss of productive land due to urban expansion, and a warming climate likely to destabilise many parts of the environment.The findings were detailed in Environment Aotearoa 2019, undertaken by the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) and Stats NZ. The agencies are required by law to produce such a report every three years. It measured dozens of environmental issues, some of which used updated or newly released data. It described an environment besieged in numerous ways, largely as a result of human actions.The report showed that when it came to the environment’s overall health, “things are very bad,” said Forest & Bird’s chief executive, Kevin Hague.”We’ve spent too many years in denial about how our actions – from rampant dairy conversions to destructive sea bed trawling – are irreversibly harming our natural world,” he said.”As a nation, we need to make a bold plan to protect and restore nature now.”While it paints a grim picture in many respects, the report’s assessment of native ecosystems and the plants and animals they contain is particularly bleak.Almost two-thirds of rare ecosystems were threatened by collapse, the report said, and thousands of individual species were either threatened or at-risk of extinction. Those species include 90 per cent of all seabirds, 84 per cent of reptiles, 76 per cent of freshwater fish and 74 per cent of terrestrial birds.
Illegal Charcoal Trade Wrecks Myanmar’s Bulwark Against Cyclones – The depletion of mangroves in southern Myanmar is impacting local fisheries near the island villages and playing havoc with the mangrove forest that protect the coastline from extreme weather events. The illegal charcoal trade persists due to a lack of law enforcement and oversight in Myanmar and Thailand. Many Burmese labor workers, charcoal kiln owners and traders are indebted to the charcoal warehouses that they ultimately supply in Thailand, which guarantees a steady supply of charcoal into Thailand. It’s illegal to produce charcoal in Myanmar for commercial use, so figures on cross-border trade are sketchy at best. (A 2017-2018 Mongabay investigation found that approximately $10 million worth of charcoal was being smuggled from Katha, a town in northern Myanmar, into China.) Thailand used to produce its own charcoal, but the government banned the practice in the late 1990s. After Thailand’s ban, charcoal tycoons moved across the border to Myanmar to help fulfill Asia’s demand for charcoal. Mangrove charcoal allows such illegal supply chains to persist, and it can also lead to exploitation. When the Thais created a new industry and an incentive to commit environmental crimes in Myanmar, they also set up a debt trap for the workers involved, so that Thailand would receive a steady supply of charcoal, said Ko Myo Oo, founder of the Myanmar environmental nonprofit Green Network. Those selling charcoal from Myanmar would be able to earn nearly 16 times more selling to Thailand than if they were to sell to a domestic market, he said. The illegal charcoal trade poses a deadly threat to the world’s remaining original mangrove cover, of which approximately 35 percent is already gone, according to the WWF.
Trump’s EPA wants to put a toxic mine in pristine Alaska. What could go wrong? – Back in my youth, while in Montana, I came across Berkeley Pit, called “the richest hill on earth.” There, churches and historic neighborhoods were bulldozed to expand the pit so greedy men could make their fortunes mining copper, silver and gold. After the riches were extracted, and problems arose, those men absolved themselves of any wrongdoing, and left. Over time, the mine closed and the pit began to fill with an acidic brew so toxic that when snow geese landed there, they died. As it threatened Montana’s groundwater, the pit became an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) superfund site that would cost American taxpayers billions of dollars for generations. I fear the same awaits Alaska’s Pebble Mine, a nightmare proposed by the Canadian mining company, Northern Dynasty. Don’t be fooled by the name. For many Alaskans, Pebble is a boulder on their heart. If built, it would be a massive pit one mile in diameter and 600ft deep. It would obliterate 3,500 acres of wetlands and 80-plus miles of salmon streams, and produce an estimated 10 billion tons of waste. Earthen dams would hold back toxic mine tailings, all in earthquake country, in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, the richest sockeye salmon run in the world. What could go wrong? In 2014, a 40-meter-high earthen dam that contained a massive copper and gold tailings pond at Mount Polley Mine, in British Columbia, failed. A toxic slurry emptied downstream into lakes and waterways, including Quesnel Lake, until then the cleanest deep water lake in the world. Knight Piésold, the geotechnical consulting firm that provided the design and supervised construction (and paid no post-disaster fines), is the same firm Northern Dynasty has hired to build the earthen dams at Pebble. An earthen dam would hold back toxic mine tailings, all in earthquake country And who will pay to remediate the Mount Polley mess, the biggest mine disaster in Canada’s history? Taxpayers, to the tune of an estimated $40m-100m. Opposed by more than 65% of Alaskans, and 80% of Bristol Bay residents, Pebble was barely breathing until Donald Trump won the White House. With Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA, Pebble mine became a symbol of virtuous enterprise hobbled by government regulatory overreach.
Indonesian Companies Fined for 2015 Climate Disaster Have Not Paid, Group Says – More than $1 billion in fines have not been paid by 11 Indonesian palm oil and paper pulp companies found guilty for their failure to prevent burning on their land during the historic 2015 Indonesian forest fires, according to Greenpeace Indonesia. The activist group is calling attention to the unpaid fines to pressure the government and the companies, which were found guilty of improper land management in lawsuits filed by the Indonesian government. The verdict found that the companies’ practices contributed to the massive fires, which charred more than 6.1 million acres. The companies, which include Kallista Alam, PT Surya Panen Subur, Jatim Jaya Perkasa and Bumi Mekar Hijau, released the equivalent of an estimated 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, believed to be the largest human-caused climate event in decades. “The government must be sure to enforce the law, and ensure that the legal institutions, like the courts, push the companies to pay the fine,” said Asep Komarudin, a campaigner with Greenpeace Indonesia. The nation experienced an extreme El Nino event in 2015 that brought abnormally dry conditions. This, along with years of mismanagement of forests and carbon-rich peatlands, resulted in the unprecedented fires. “That year at the peak, the daily fire emissions coming from Indonesia exceeded the daily emission produced from the entire U.S.,” said Hanny Chrysolite, a forest and climate program officer with the World Resources Institute (WRI) – Indonesia. “The fires also affected other sectors of Indonesia like the economy and also health.”
How China’s ban on plastic waste imports became an ‘earthquake’ that threw recycling efforts into turmoil – China’s ban on accepting the world’s used plastic has thrown recycling efforts into turmoil. For many years, China took the bulk of scrap plastic from around the world, processing much of it into a higher quality material that could be used by manufacturers. But, at the start of 2018, it closed its doors to almost all foreign plastic waste, as well as many other recyclables, in an effort to protect its environment and air quality, leaving developed nations struggling to find places to send their waste. “It was like an earthquake,” “China was the biggest market for recyclables. It created a major shock in the global market.” Instead, plastic was redirected in huge quantities to Southeast Asia, where Chinese recyclers have shifted. With a large Chinese-speaking minority, Malaysia was a top choice for Chinese recyclers looking to relocate, and official data showed plastic imports tripled from 2016 levels to 870,000 tonnes last year.In the small town of Jenjarom, close to Kuala Lumpur, plastic processing plants appeared in large numbers, pumping out noxious fumes around the clock. Huge mounds of plastic waste, dumped in the open, piled up as recyclers struggled to cope with the influx of packaging from everyday goods, such as foods and laundry detergents, from as far afield as Germany, the US, and Brazil. Residents soon noticed the acrid stench over the town – the kind of odour that is usual in processing plastic, but environmental campaigners believed some of the fumes also came from the incineration of plastic waste that was too low quality to recycle. “People were attacked by toxic fumes, waking them up at night. Many were coughing a lot,” Thirty-three factories were closed down, although activists believed many had quietly moved elsewhere in the country. Residents said air quality had improved but some plastic dumps remained. In Australia, Europe and the US, many of those collecting plastic and other recyclables were left scrambling to find new places to send it. They faced higher costs to have it processed by recyclers at home and in some cases resorted to sending it to landfill sites as the scrap piled up so quickly. “Twelve months on, we are still feeling the effects but we have not moved to the solutions yet,”
How recycling is changing in all 50 states – Waste Dive began tracking the effects of China’s scrap import policies across all 50 states (and the District of Columbia) during Nov. 2017 in honor of America Recycles Day. Since then, a host of other foreign and domestic changes have spurred ongoing ripple effects that will continue for years to come. Many service providers have taken this as an opportunity to reset pricing conditions and local governments are struggling to adapt to this new reality. While portrayals of all residential recycling programs being in free-fall are an exaggeration, it’s clear that the system is going through a significant transformative period.Small and mid-sized municipalities are particularly vulnerable to price increases and program changes. Many stakeholders are working to help stabilize and improve this system, and results are shining through, but a clear path forward has yet to materialize. Ongoing turbulence is expected in 2019 and we’ll be tracking the news for as long as it’s relevant. We scan the news daily, but can’t spot it all. See information that doesn’t reflect your knowledge or would help expand ours? Send an email to [email protected].
Cigarette Butts: The Most Littered Item in the World – We’ve known for more than 50 years that smoking cigarettes comes with health hazards, but it turns out those discarded butts are harmful for the environment, too. Filtered cigarette butts, although small, contain dozens of chemicals, including arsenic and benzene. These toxins can leach into the ground or water, creating a potentially deadly situation for nearby birds, fish and other wildlife. These tiny bits of trash are a very big problem. Each year trillions of cigarette butts are tossed out around the world. Beach cleanups continually find that cigarette butts are the most-littered item – even more than plastic bags. Municipalities have started to take steps to curb plastic pollution, enacting bans on plastic straws, bags and other single-use items. Will similar efforts be undertaken to snuff out cigarette butt litter?
Mozambique Hit by Second Historic Cyclone in Little Over a Month – Cyclone Kenneth made landfall in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province on Thursday as the strongest storm to ever hit the country, The Guardian reported. It struck with wind speeds of 140 miles per hour and was expected to raise waves 16 feet higher than usual and bring torrential rain.The storm comes little over a month after Cyclone Idai killed more than 700 people, displaced tens of thousands and caused $1 billion in damage, making it the deadliest and costliest storm in Mozambique’s history, CNN reported. In the entire region, including Mozambique’s neighbors Malawi and Zimbabwe, Idai killed more than 1,000 and forced millions from their homes, The New York Times reported.”It’s really an anomaly in the history of cyclones in this region. There’s never been two storms this strong hit in the same year, let alone within five weeks of each other in Mozambique,” meteorologist Eric Holthaus told The Guardian.Kenneth has already killed one person in Mozambique, who was struck by a falling coconut tree in the city of Pemba, BBC News reported. The storm was downgraded to an ex-cyclone Friday as winds decreased, but France’s meteorological agency predicts more than 23.6 inches of rain could fall over the next few days. That’s nearly double the 10 days of rainfall that caused devastating flooding in the port city of Beira during Cyclone Idai.It’s the extreme rainfall that can be directly linked to climate change, Holthaus told The Guardian.”We have very strong evidence that everywhere in the world, rainfall is getting more intense. So that means you can get the same amount of rainfall, but it just happens in a shorter period of time, because if the atmosphere is warmer then that will create more intense thunderstorms that rain out faster,” Hotlhaus said. “We can directly link Kenneth with climate change for that reason. Not only is this an extremely intense rainfall event, globally, but it’s being made worse because of climate change.” Cabo Delgado, where Kenneth struck, is 600 miles northeast of Beira. The region had never before in modern history been struck by a hurricane-force storm, The New York Times reported.
Hurricane Michael Upgraded to Category 5 at Landfall -In its full report on devastating Hurricane Michael, published Friday, the NOAA/NWS National Hurricane Center found that Michael was a Category 5 storm with top sustained winds of 140 knots (160 mph) when it smashed ashore near Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle on October 10. In the U.S., Michael is being blamed for 16 direct deaths, 43 indirect deaths, and damages of $25 billion.Michael intensified at a heart-stopping rate while moving through the eastern Gulf of Mexico, rocketing from Category 1 to Category 4 strength in just 24 hours less than a day before landfall. At the time it moved ashore, Michael was officially classified as a top-end Category 4, with top sustained winds of 155 mph – just 2 mph short of the Cat 5 minimum.Michael joins an elite group of just three other hurricanes recognized as Category 5 storms when they struck the continental United States. All but one of these powerhouse storms hit Florida while at Cat 5 strength.
- Hurricane Andrew: 145 kts (165 mph) landfall at Homestead, Florida, on August 24, 1992
- Hurricane Camille: 150 kts (175 mph) landfall at Pass Christian, Mississippi, on August 18, 1969
- Labor Day Hurricane: 160 kts (185 mph) landfall at Long Key, Florida, on September 2, 1935
Like Michael, Andrew was initially classified as a high-end Category 4 at landfall, but was subsequently upgraded to Category 5 in post-season analysis. In Andrew’s case, the upgrade from 140-mph to 160-mph peak landfall winds did not occur until a review completed in 2002, a full decade after Andrew struck. In a similar 2014 reanalysis, Camille’s winds were downgraded from 190 to 175 mph, but the storm remained a Category 5. Michael’s upgrade means that the U.S. was hit by two Category 5 storms in 2018, since Super Typhoon Yutumade landfall on Tinian in the U.S. Northern Mariana Islands on October 25 with 180 mph winds. Category 5 landfalls have also occurred in two other U.S. territories in the past: byTyphoon Karen in Guam (1962), and by the San Felipe Segundo hurricane in Puerto Rico (1928).
The Sea Beneath Us – Water will leach inside homes, she said, through basement cracks. Toilets may become chronically backed up. Raw sewage may seep through manholes. Brackish water will corrode sewer and water pipes and inundate building foundations. And most hazardous of all, water percolating upward may flow through contaminants buried in the soil, spreading them underground and eventually releasing them into people’s homes. The coup de grace will be the earthquakes, which, when they strike, may liquefy the entire toxic mess, pushing it toward the surface. The future Hill described is caused by a phenomenon called groundwater rise. In a nutshell, as a warming climate raises sea levels, the sea won’t only move inland, flooding low-lying land near the shore; it may also push water up from beneath our feet. That’s because for those of us living near the shore, a sea lurks in the ground – a saltwater water table. On top of that salt water floats a layer of lighter fresh water. As the salt water rises with rising seas, Hill and others think, it will push the fresh water upward. In low-lying areas, that water may emerge from the ground. The result, Hill explained, will be that in places like Oakland, flooding will occur not just at the shoreline, but inland in areas once considered safe from sea level rise, including the Oakland Coliseum and Jones Avenue, where Hill and her students now stood, more than a mile from San Leandro Bay. In fact, she added, rising groundwater menaces nearly the entire band of low-lying land around San Francisco Bay, as well as many other coastal parts of the U.S. The threat it poses can’t be neutralized with the usual strategy: physical structures that keep the sea at bay. No matter how many seawalls we build, many experts say, groundwater can still gurgle up from below, potentially turning large swaths of the densely populated shoreline around the Bay into unwanted, unplanned, possibly toxic wetlands. The issue is barely on the radar of Bay Area planners and decision-makers; it’s been mostly overlooked until recently. The public has hardly heard of it. Hill is trying to change all that. She’s on a mission to increase awareness of sea level rise’s gotcha-from-behind twin – groundwater rise.
The desperate race to cool the ocean before it’s too late – Coral reefs smell of rotting flesh as they bleach. The riot of colors – yellow, violet, cerulean – fades to ghostly white as the corals’ flesh goes translucent and falls off, leaving their skeletons underneath fuzzy with cobweb-like algae.Corals live in symbiosis with a type of algae. During the day, the algae photosynthesize and pass food to the coral host. During the night, the coral polyps extend their tentacles and catch passing food. Just 1 °C of ocean warming can break down this coral-algae relationship. The stressed corals expel the algae, and after repeated or prolonged episodes of such bleaching, they can die from heat stress, starve without the algae feeding them, or become more susceptible to disease.Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – actually a 2,300-kilometer (1,400-mile) system made up of nearly 3,000 separate reefs – has suffered severe bleaching in the past few years. Daniel Harrison, an Australian oceanographer looking at what might be done to buy more time for the Great Barrier Reef, says the situation is getting dire. “There might be as little as 25% of shallow-water coral cover left from pre-anthropogenic times. We don’t really know, because nobody started surveying before 1985,” he tells me. “You’ve got less than 1% of the ocean in coral reefs, and 25% of all marine life. We’re looking at losing all of that really quite quickly, in evolutionary terms. In human-lifetime terms.”Coral reefs are not just about colorful fish and exotic species. Reefs protect coasts from storms; without them, waves reaching some Pacific islands would be twice as tall. Over 500 million people depend on reef ecosystems for food and livelihoods. Even if the temperature increase eventually stabilizes at 1.5 °C a century or two from now, it’s not known how well coral reef ecosystems will survive a temporary overshoot to higher temperatures. The corals are like the canary in the coal mine.The corals are like the canary in the coal mine, Harrison says: “They’re very temperature-sensitive. I really do think it’s just a harbinger of things to come. You know, the coral ecosystem might collapse first, but I think there might be quite a few more ecosystems that’ll follow it. Life is very resilient, but ecosystems as we know them aren’t.”
Glaciers gone after record hot summers = Some of the southern region’s smaller glaciers have disappeared, following two of the hottest summers on record. The discovery was made by Niwa climate scientists and glaciologists last month, during the annual long-term aerial Snowline Survey of the South Island’s glaciers. Niwa scientists take to the skies every March to record the snowline altitude of up to 50 glaciers, using specialised cameras from a light aircraft. Thousands of photos are taken from different angles to build 3-D models of glaciers that can be compared year on year, to give an accurate depiction of how much of the previous winter’s snow remains to contribute to long-term glacial ice accumulation. The information gathered over the past four decades has produced a unique and valuable data set that provides an independent measure of how climate change and variability are affecting New Zealand’s water resources. Although Niwa scientists are still piecing together data from the latest survey, project leader Andrew Lorrey said it was not hard to miss the fact that some of the smaller glaciers at lower altitudes had now disappeared. “It’s really sad to see that some of our smaller glaciers – particularly on the fringes of the Southern Alps, that are a little bit lower in altitude like North Canterbury and as you go south out of Queenstown – are reducing to nothing.
One of Alaska’s warmest springs on record is causing a dangerous thaw – Alaska is in the midst of one of the warmest springs the state has ever experienced – a transformation that has disrupted livelihoods and cost lives. The average temperature for March recorded at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) observatory in Utqiagvik (which was known as Barrow before 2016, when the city voted to go by its traditional Inupiaq name) was 18.6 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Fairbanks, Alaska, notched its first consecutive March days when the temperature never dropped below freezing. Ice roads built on frozen waterways – a vital means of transportation in the state – have become weak and unreliable. At least five people have died this spring after falling through ice that melted sooner than expected. “Climate change is happening faster than it’s ever happened before in our record,” Thomas said. “We’re right in the middle of it.” Utqiagvik set daily temperature records on 28 of the first 100 days of this year, according to the Alaska Climate Research Center. In early February, residents awoke to find the landfast ice that usually clings to the shore until summer had been swept out to sea by strong winds – a sign the ice wasn’t as thick or well-grounded as it used to be. “It was like, ‘Whoa, I’ve never seen that before,’” Thomas said. “It was surprising in a human way,” he added. “But not necessarily surprising in a science way.” The Barrow observatory has been monitoring climate for more than 40 years. Thomas knows where the trends are headed. This time of year, he explained, “you shouldn’t be able to smell anything.” The ground should still be frozen solid. The historic warm temperatures this spring are linked to vanishing ice on the Bering and Chukchi seas west of Alaska. Both areas set records this year for their lowest amount of ice in March. When ice forms later and melts earlier, it leaves coastlines vulnerable to erosion from fall and spring storms. The shoreline on Shishmaref has retreated more than 100 feet in Erickson’s lifetime, and the town has voted to relocate to a new site farther from the sea. Residents who subsist on seal and walrus meat must navigate an increasingly unreliable ice pack as they search for food.
It’s been exceptionally warm in Greenland lately and ice is melting a month early – You might have heard about the exceptional heat this year in the northern hemisphere and around the world. March was just declared the second warmest on record globally Records have been shattered in Alaska. Scotland hit 70 degrees in February. Winter warmth has torched the U.K., Netherlands and Sweden as well – coming on the heels of Europe’s warmest year on record. But they’re not alone. Greenland is baking, too. In fact, its summer melt season has already begun – more than a month ahead of schedule.Marco Tedesco is a professor in atmospheric sciences at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He monitors behavior of the cryosphere – the part of earth’s water system that is frozen. He says melting of this extent shouldn’t begin until May. “The first melt event was detected on April 7,” he wrote in email.“Air temperature anomalies were up to more than 20 degrees Celsius [36 Fahrenheit] above the mean,” noted Tedesco. His team has been eyeing Greenland’s southeast coast as ground zero for the early-season thaw. “Surface air temperature jumped to 41 degrees on April 2, up from minus-11,” he said. Temperatures dropped below freezing briefly before again soaring into the 30s, where the mercury has held steady for most of the past week.What’s been sling-shotting this balmy air northward? “The subtropical jet stream,” wrote Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Mass. It’s teamed up with the polar jet to “transport warm, moist air from near Florida northward into southern Greenland,” she explained. “Locking this pattern in place has been a strong ridge – a northward bulge in the jet stream – just east of Greenland.” A lack of ice cover in the Arctic Ocean north of Scandinavia gave this bubble of warmth a bit of an extra boost, intensifying its warm conveyor belt into Greenland. “Arctic ice cover continues to dwindle and temperatures there soar.”
Greenland Is Melting Even Faster Than Experts Thought, Study Finds CNN – Climate change is eliminating giant chunks of ice from Greenland at such a speed that the melt has already made a significant contribution to sea level rise, according to a new study. With global warming, the island will lose much more, threatening coastal cities around the world. Forty percent to 50% of the planet’s population is in cities that are vulnerable to sea rise, and the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is bad news for places like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Mumbai.Researchers reconstructed the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet by comparing estimates of the amount of ice that has been discharged into the ocean with the accumulation of snowfall in the drainage basins in the country’s interior for the past 46 years. The researchers found that the rate of ice loss has increased sixfold since then — even faster than scientists thought. “We wanted to get a long precise record of mass balance in Greenland that included the transition when the climate of the planet started to drift off natural variability, which occurred in the 1980s,” study co-author Eric Rignot wrote in an email. “The study places the recent (20 years) evolution in a broader context to illustrate how dramatically the mass loss has been increasing in Greenland in response to climate warming.”
Greenland Is Melting 6 Times Faster Than in the 1980s – Greenland is melting six times faster than it was in the 1980s, which is even faster than scientists thought,CNN reported Tuesday. The new figure is part of a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesthat reconstructed the mass balance of Greenland over the past 46 years, comparing ice lost to snowfall gained over the period. The results showed that Greenland has contributed 13.7 millimeters to sea level risesince 1972, half during the last eight years. If all the ice in Greenland were to melt, it would raise global sea levels by more than 20 feet.In reporting the findings toThe Washington Post, study author and Earth systems scientist for the University of California at Irvine and NASA Eric Rignot echoed the urgency of activists from the Sunrise Movement toExtinction Rebellion who have called for immediate government action on climate change. “If we do something now, it will take 30 years to affect the climate and another few decades to turn the melt down of glaciers, so probably half of that signal is already written in stone,” Rignot said. “But the impact sea level will have on humanity increases with every 10 [centimeters] of sea-level rise, and right now we are about to commit to multi-meter sea-level rise in the coming century if we don’t do something drastic.” Monday’s study found that ice loss from Greenland began to exceed its natural variability in the 1980s. From 1980 to 1990, Greenland’s glaciers discharged 51 billion tons of ice into the ocean. From 2010 to 2018, they discharged 286 billion tons. “When you look at several decades, it is best to sit back in your chair before looking at the results, because it is a bit scary to see how fast it is changing,” Rignot told AFP. The research also showed that even Greenland’s colder north is impacted by ice loss. “The entire periphery of Greenland is affected. I am particularly concerned about the northern regions, which host the largest amount of potential sea-level rise and are already changing fast,” Rignot told The Washington Post.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions from thawing Arctic permafrost may be 12 times higher than thought, scientists say – Emissions from thawing Arctic permafrost may be 12 times higher than previously thought, scientists have discovered. Permafrost is a mix of soil, rock or sediment that has been frozen for at least two years which is mostly found in the uppermost areas where temperatures are rising more quickly than the rest of the world. When it thaws because of global warming, it releases large quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise and creating a perpetual cycle where more permafrost melts. Nitrous oxide, a third greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, stays in the atmosphere for an average of 114 years, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It has “conventionally been assumed to have minimal emissions in permafrost regions,” according to a fresh study published in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics journal. However the research team behind the study, led by Harvard University scientists, has found that nitrous oxide emissions are 12 times higher than previously thought and therefore more of a threat. The group used a small plane with a probe on its nose to measure greenhouse gases over 120 square miles of thawing permafrost in the North Slope of Alaska. They found that nitrous oxide emissions reached what was previously thought to be the expected yearly limit within just one month in August 2013. Nitrous oxide also poses a second threat because “up in the stratosphere, sunlight and oxygen team up to convert the gas into nitrogen oxides, which eat at the ozone,” Harvard University said in a statement. Jordan Wilkerson, one of the authors of the study, said: “Much smaller increases in nitrous oxide would entail the same kind of climate change that a large plume of CO2 would cause.”
Arctic Laughing Gas Emissions Could Accelerate Global Warming – Scientists have identified yet another hazard linked to the thawing permafrost: laughing gas. A series of flights over the North Slope of Alaska has detected unexpected levels of emissions of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide from the rapidly warming soils. Nitrous oxide, which chemists know also as laughing gas, is an estimated 300 times more potent as a climate warming agent than the principal greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. It was present in data recordings at levels at least 12 times higher than all previous estimates.And it is long-lived: it survives in the atmosphere for around 120 years, according to a separate new study of the microbiology of nitrous oxide. And if it gets even higher, into the stratosphere, it can be converted by the action of oxygen and sunlight into another oxide of nitrogen, to quietly destroy the ozone layer.Oxides of nitrogen are at least as damaging to stratospheric ozone – an invisible screen that absorbs potentially lethal ultraviolet radiation from the sun – as the man-made chlorofluorocarbons banned by an international protocol three decades ago.Nitrogen is an inert gas which makes up almost four-fifths of the planet’s atmosphere. It is vital to life: growing plants build their tissues by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with the aid of photosynthesis. But they must also absorb nitrogen from plant decay and animal waste, through their roots, with help from soil microbes.The process is natural, but too slow to help deliver the cereals, tubers and pulses needed to feed seven billion humans and their livestock. For more than 100 years, nations have been making nitrogenous fertilizer in factories and applying it generously to soils to boost harvest yields.As a consequence, nitrous oxide is now the third most significant greenhouse gas, and the news that it isrising from the permafrost could be troubling. The permafrost is home to enormous stores of carbon: as soil microbes become warmer and more active,they start to break down long-frozen and partly-decomposed plant material to release both carbon dioxide andpotent quantities of methane. The implication is that nitrous oxide could add to the mix, and accelerate warming still further.
Arctic’s Melting Permafrost Will Cost Nearly $70 Trillion, Study Finds – An alarming study released Tuesday found that melting Arctic permafrost could add nearly $70 trillion to the global cost of climate change unless immediate action is taken to slash carbon emissions. According to the new research, published in the journal Nature Communications, melting permafrost caused by accelerating Arctic warming would add close to $70 trillion to the overall economic impact of climate change if the planet warms by 3°C by 2100. Even if action is taken to limit warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century, the research found melting permafrost would still add $24.8 trillion to overall climate costs. Dmitry Yumashev of Lancaster University, the lead author of the study, told National Geographic that melting permafrost and sea ice “are two known tipping elements in the climate system” that could trigger a cycle of unstoppable global warming.In an interview with the Guardian, Yumashev called his study’s results “disheartening,” but said nations of the world have the technological capacity to confront the crisis.What’s needed, he said, is urgency and political will. “Even at 1.5°C to 2°C [warming], there are impacts and costs due to thawing permafrost. But they are considerably lower for these scenarios compared to business as usual,” said Yumashev. “We have the technology and policy instruments to limit the warming but we are not moving fast enough.” “With climate change we’re conducting a high-risk experiment where we don’t know what is coming,” co-author Kevin Schaefer told National Geographic. “The most important thing to remember about our study is the greater the warming, the stronger the feedbacks and the higher the costs to society.” As National Geographicreported, the “$25 to $70 trillion cost of Arctic warming adds four to six percent to the total cost of climate change – which is estimated to reach $1,390 trillion by the year 2300 if emissions cuts are not better than the Paris Agreement. However, the costs of the current business-as-usual path could be more than $2,000 trillion.”
Global Climate Coalition: Documents Reveal How Secretive Fossil Fuel Lobby Group Manipulated UN Climate Programs – A fossil fuel – backed industry group was able to influence the process behind the United Nations climate assessments for decades, using lobbyists and industry-funded scientists to manipulate international negotiations, a cache of recently discovered documents reveals. The documents include hundreds of briefings, meeting minutes, notes, and correspondence from the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). They were released Thursday by the Climate Investigations Center in collaboration with DeSmog and Climate Liability News. The documents date from 1989 and continue through 2002, when the lobbying group disbanded as its fossil fuel industry backers succumbed to public pressure to disavow its tactics. The documents show how the GCC influenced international negotiations, manipulated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) process, and undertook a disinformation campaign designed to cast doubt on mainstream climate science. The GCC was initially part of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), before becoming its own entity in 1995. NAM has a long history of defending portions of its membership, including tobacco companies that were facing an onslaught of liability litigation, with aggressive tactics that include discrediting science, attacking scientists, and misleading the public. Founding members of the GCC were mainly fossil fuel producers and utilities, including oil majorsShell, Texaco (now a part of Chevron), and Amoco (now part of BP); oil refiner and retailers ARCO (now a subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum) and Phillips Petroleum; coal miners BHP-Utah International and Peabody; and utilities American Electric Power and Pacific Gas and Electric. Other companies, including Exxon, joined later – and the international oil giant would go on to be a key player in the group. Revealed in the documents is a decades-long campaign that continued until 2002, intended to protect its members’ interests by denying and casting doubt on climate science. Internally, the group acknowledged the dangers of climate change and the scientific consensus that it is overwhelmingly driven by the burning of fossil fuels as early as 1995.
‘We Are the Ones Making a Difference’: Greta Thunberg Addresses Extinction Rebellion in London – A day before countries around the world celebrate Earth Day, activist and leader of the School Strike for Climate Greta Thunberg addressed protesters in London who have been occupying a number of major landmarks for almost a week, rallying the demonstrators to continue their fight against the “existential crisis” brought about by climate change.”Humanity is now standing at a crossroads,” Thunberg told the protesters gathered at the Marble Arch. “We must now decide which path we want to take. How do we want the future living conditions for all species to be? We have gathered here today and in many other places around London and across the world too, because we have chosen which path we want to take and now we are waiting for the others to follow our example.”Watch: The demonstrators had joined Extinction Rebellion’s public action, in which members of the movement have also occupied Oxford Circus and Parliament Square and superglued themselves to train cars to disrupt daily life and call attention to the climate crisis. Police have made at least 963 arrests, according to the Guardian, while London mayor Sadiq Khan has called for the demonstrators to disperse. But leaders of the movement say their message is getting out to the public and that disruption is necessary to convey the dire situation in which world governments have placed communities by ignoring the climate crisis for decades. “People are willing to be arrested,” spokesperson Ronan McNern said in a statement. “What this disruption is doing, we are the news now. It is making people talk in pubs and buses about Extinction Rebellion. It makes them think about their existence which is under threat.””We – people in Extinction Rebellion and the children in the School Strike for Climate – we are the ones making a difference,” said Thunberg, who is 16 and started a global movement last fall when shestaged a one-person protest outside Swedish Parliament, refusing to attend school unless lawmakers took action to stop the burning of fossil fuels. “It shouldn’t be like that but since no one else is doing anything we will have to do so,” she continued. “And we will never stop fighting, we will never stop fighting for this planet and for the futures of our children and grandchilden.”
1,000+ Arrested as Extinction Rebellion Protests in London Enter Second Week – Extinction Rebellion, the climate protest that has blocked major London thoroughfares since Monday April 15, was cleared from three key areas over Easter weekend, The Guardian reported. Police removed protesters from Oxford Circus Saturday, and from the roads Parliament Square and Waterloo Bridge Sunday. The last person to be arrested clearing the bridge was a 70-year-old woman who had been arrested once before during the protests at Oxford Circus. “I have been a nurse and a childminder most of my life,” the woman, who preferred not to give her name, told The Press Association. “The world we are leaving for the children and grandchildren is going to be horrendous and we let it happen. It happened on our watch. So we have to stand up and fight or lie down and fight.” Despite the loss of the three sites, the movement is far from over. On Monday afternoon, around 100 protesters staged a die-in at London’s Natural History Museum to call attention to the sixth mass extinction, BBC News reported.Protesters also continue to gather at Marble Arch, where they were addressed Sunday by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has been credited with inspiring the youth climate strike movement.”Keep going. You are making a difference,” Thunberg said, as BBC News reported Sunday. The protesters are calling for the government to “tell the truth about climate change,” to reduce UK greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025 and to create a citizen’s assembly to help drive the process. They aim to maximize arrests in order to call attention to the climate crisis.
Police arrest over 1,000 climate change protesters in London – More than 1,000 people have been arrested in London over the last seven days of climate change protests organised by the Extinction Rebellion (XR) group.Protesters continued to peacefully occupy public spaces in the capital, including Parliament Square, Piccadilly Circus, Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus and Marble Arch, despite mounting and provocative police arrests. On Saturday, 200 extra police from neighbouring forces were demanded by the Metropolitan Police to deal with the protesters. Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick declared, “Every day we have had over 1,000 officers – and now over 1,500 officers.”The right-wing media and politicians have applauded the manhandling of protestors by the police, demanding the full force of the law to be used against them.Video footage shot Saturday afternoon showed police dragging protesters down the road near Regent Street adjacent to the Oxford Circus area. By Saturday evening police heavily outnumbered protesters. Forcing protesters to leave Waterloo Bridge on Saturday, police issued a warning that remaining there would be an arrestable offence. By Sunday evening, 963 people had been arrested, and a further 100-plus were arrested by Monday afternoon – for a total at 1,065 people. Those arrested range in age from 19 to 77. Of these, 53 have been charged for various offences including breach of Section 14 Notice of the Public Order Act 1986, for obstructing a highway and obstructing police.A Met spokesman said that, contrary to reports, its cells were not yet full in London and that they had contingency plans to handle even larger-scale arrests. On Sunday, police moved in to clear protesters from Oxford Street and Parliament Square during the day, and the remaining activists from Waterloo Bridge in the evening. Those demonstrators not arrested were being allowed to go to a small designated “legal” protest area at nearby Marble Arch. After evicting them, police remained at all three sites in force.
Climate movement grandpa James Hansen says the Green New Deal is ‘nonsense’ -In the 1980s, NASA scientist James Hansen brought climate change to the attention of Congress, and shortly thereafter the public. Humans, he testified in 1988, were responsible for rising global temperatures. But the man who put his reputation on the line to alert the world to the dangers of global warming doesn’t appear to agree with the most recent crop of climate advocates.In April 20 debate with Sunrise Movement’s Varshini Prakash and Christian Aid’s Amanda Mukwashi, Hansen called the Green New Deal “nonsense.” Hosted by Al Jazeera, the 12-minute debate highlights a growing fault line between two theories of climate action. Among progressives and environmental justice advocates, the Green New Deal represents a last-ditch, economy-wide overhaul. Hansen, on the other hand, seems to argue for a more economically incremental approach that is centered on a carbon tax.That tension came to a head when Hansen appeared visibly aggravated by the progressive proposal and Prakash, realizing that one of the most prominent climate scientists in the world was scoffing at her organization’s central focus, could only laugh in disbelief. Although Hansen is a proponent of using technology to bring down emissions, a carbon tax, he said, “is the underlying policy required. People need energy, we need to make the price of fossil fuels include their cost to society.”The green new dealers, on the other hand, think their predecessors are offering too little too late. Prakash referenced a “point of no return” during the debate, a threshold past which temperatures rise so much that they trigger a series of unstoppable and catastrophic feedback loops. That kind of outcome can only be stopped by drastic action, she argued. When I spoke to Sunrise’s Evan Weber late last year, he indicated that the organization wasn’t actively pursuing a carbon tax. What was most striking about Hansen’s argument was his measured tone, a stark difference from the way even the typically staid scientists behind the U.N’s IPCC report are beginning to discuss the issue. “We should be phasing down emissions now,” he said, which seems like a bit of an understatement considering he’s been advocating for decreased emissions for the last, oh, four decades. “If we do that, we will get a little bit warmer than we are now, and then temperature(s) can begin to decline,” he said, adding that we will have to phase out fossil fuels over the “next several decades” in order to accomplish this goal.
No Silver Bullets – It’s no secret that we need to rapidly decarbonize the US economy to respond to the threat of catastrophic climate change. But the Green New Deal’s (GND) greatest promise isn’t the goal of 100 percent renewable energy and net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Its promise lies instead in the grassroots organizing that’s pushed a leftist pipe dream to the center of congressional politics in a matter of months. That activist energy will be key to implementing the underlying policies that will transform our inequitable, exploitative, carbon-intensive energy system. Even seemingly technocratic policies to expand energy efficiency upgrades in buildings – which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s GND resolution goes all in on – require political struggle on the ground. Take the case of New York State. A decade ago, working with broad social justice coalitions, the state’s government tried to generate the same upgrades that the GND now proposes – and failed. I was a member of the coalition that drove New York’s building upgrade experiment. I saw up close how technocratic policy divorced from on-the-ground organizing undermined the bold vision laid out in the legislation. An obsession with targets and timetables distracted from the imperative to continuously organize for a just and sustainable tomorrow. Instead of chasing silver bullet solutions, we’d be wise to follow the Black radical tradition: the recognition that justice is always elusive, that the fight never stops, and that our movements are, to a degree, ends in and of themselves.
How to stop climate change? Nationalise the oil companies — Extinction Rebellion has retaught a lesson every generation must learn: that civil disobedience works. Amid the spluttering of obnoxious news presenters, it has forced the existential threat of climate change on to the airwaves and into newsprint. But as this phase of protestwinds down, the demands must radicalise. With capitalism itself rightly being challenged, the focus must shift to the fossil fuel companies and the banks. As long as they remain under private ownership on a global scale, humanity’s future will be threatened. Take ExxonMobil, which plans to pump an astonishing 25% more oil and gasin 2025 than it did in 2017. As that well-known bastion of eco-socialism, the Economist, puts it: “If the rest of the industry pursues even modest growth, the consequence for the climate could be disastrous,” adding that “the market cannot solve climate change by itself”. According to the UN’sIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we wish to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – beyond which climate disasters multiply – then oil and gas production has to fall by 20% by 2030, and 55% by 2050. However, the economic self-interest and political power of the fossil fuel industry is deliberately sabotaging this goal. Last year, the industry spent an astonishing $124,837,199 on lobbying politicians in the US. During the 2016 elections, the industry spent over $100mon campaign contributions; recent top donors include the Koch brothers, Chevron and ExxonMobil. This is not wasted money, far from it. In the neoliberal era, rolling back the state has in practice meant withdrawing state support and social security for the majority, but continuing vast subsidies for vested interests. One recent study found that worldwide fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $4.9tn in 2013. So long as these sectors remain in private hands, they will continue to place short-term profit for elite investors ahead of the future of the planet and continued existence of humanity. They must be brought under public ownership, with a legal mandate to “green” the economy. One suggestion by the Next System Project is that the US government could create a community ownership of power administration, modelled on Roosevelt-era New Deal agencies. It would grant legal authority and funding mechanisms to buy back the energy grid and take over energy utilities.
The Way We Talk About Geoengineering Matters – Solar geoengineering describes a set of approaches that would reflect sunlight to cool the planet. The most prevalent of these approaches entails mimicking volcanic eruptions by releasing aerosols (tiny particles) into the upper atmosphere to reduce global temperatures – a method that comes with immense uncertainty and risk. We don’t yet know how it will affect regional weather patterns, and in turn its geopolitical consequences. One way we can attempt to understand potential outcomes is through models.Models are representations of complex phenomena that are used to approximate outcomes. While they have limitations, they are an important tool to help scientists and decision makers understand potential futures based on scientific, technological and policy changes. With both potential and profound risks and uncertainties, we need more expansive modeling research on solar geoengineering techniques – not only to understand possible environmental impacts and risks, but political and social consequences as well. Without looking at this broader range of outcomes, the messaging behind solar geoengineering can then lead to simplifications and mischaracterizations of its potential in the media. In spaces where public familiarity is low and risks are high, scientists and journalists should both be responsible for capturing the nuance and complexities around geoengineering – only a full picture will enable an informed public debate. In the case of solar geoengineering, models offer the opportunity to examine questions on a global scale – a scale at which real world experiments aren’t yet feasible or ethical. A small set of researchers have been examining the potential outcomes of solar geoengineering through modeling impacts for several years. This research has been valuable in gaining a deeper understanding of the possible consequences of deploying solar geoengineering. However, many of the scenarios analyzed have been under idealized, or “best case” conditions – in other words, we’re not comprehensively looking at what could go wrong.And as we all know too well, the real world rarely imitates the best-case scenario. An example that comes to mind is that of DDT. Developed as an insecticide, DDT was extremely effective at reducing mosquito populations for a number of years during and after World War II. However, widespread use of the chemical led to massive environmental harm due to a failure to thoroughly investigate its impacts before widespread use – impacts that were not accounted for.
Beyond the Green New Deal: Another climate cause is dividing Democrats – – Democrats running for president have debated the Green New Deal for months, but a separate demand from climate advocates to aggressively restrict fossil fuel extraction is exposing new fissures within the field of primary candidates. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., unveiled a plan for public lands last week headlined by a moratorium on fossil fuel exploration. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called for a similar ban as well. “Any serious effort to address climate change must include public lands – fossil fuel extraction in these areas is responsible fornearly a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions,” Warren said in a Medium post outlining her plan. The move drew cheers from activists in the “keep it in the ground” movement, a coalition of environmental activists who seek to block mining, drilling and fracking operations in order to push the economy toward renewable energy more quickly.”Keep it in the ground” supporters draw on the same arguments as the Green New Deal: According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world has only a limited window to slash greenhouse gas emissions to levels that are likely to head off a dangerous increase in global temperatures.But the two causes, while closely related, are not identical. The Green New Deal resolution co-authored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., called for sweeping investments in renewable energy, but kept silent on how to regulate fossil fuels. That omission prompted some criticism from groups like Greenpeace, which praised Warren and Sanders for their plans. Sens. Warren, Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., have signed onto the “Keep It In The Ground Act,” a bill by Sen. Jeff Merkley that would block new oil, coal and gas leases on public land and waters. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who is running on a climate-focused platform, has said he supports it as well. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is backing a separate bill with Sanders that seeks “a mandatory fossil fuel phase-out” in the electricity sector by 2050. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., has tweeted that she opposes drilling on public land.
The Problem With Putting a Price on the End of the World – New York Times -On a Saturday afternoon in early December, in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in economics, William Nordhaus gave the crowning lecture of his half-century career as an economist, titled“Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics.” The Nobel was a tribute to the originality and influence of his work developing economic models that help people think about how to slow climate change. It also seemed to be a cri de coeur from the Swedish academics who choose the economics laureates: Climate change is a threat like no other. Fatal heat waves, droughts, wildfires and severe hurricanes are all becoming more common, and they are almost certain to accelerate. Avoiding horrific damage, as a United Nations panel of scientists recently concluded, will require changes in human behavior that have “no documented historic precedent.” In his speech, Nordhaus explained that people use too much dirty energy because they don’t have to pay the true costs it imposes on the world: pollution-related health problems in the short term and climate change in the long term. Economists refer to these costs as externalities, because they are not naturally part of the market system. “We have a climate problem,” Nordhaus said, “because markets fail, and fail badly, in the energy sector.” The only solution, he argued, was for governments to raise the price of emissions. Economists and other policy experts have long focused on this idea of carbon pricing. It can take the form of a carbon tax, as Nordhaus prefers. Or the pricing can be embedded in a system of permits known as cap-and-trade, as President Barack Obama and other Democrats proposed in their 2009 bill to address climate change. Either way, the underlying concept is simple. When a product becomes more expensive, people use less of it. Carbon pricing is an elegant mechanism by which market economics can work on behalf of the climate rather than against it. But if the idea’s straightforwardness is its great economic advantage, it has also proved to be its political flaw. Energy, for utilities and transportation, is a major cost of living. And across the industrialized world, the middle class and the poor have been struggling with slow income growth. As Nordhaus acknowledged in his speech, curbing dirty energy by raising its price “may be good for nature, but it’s not actually all that attractive to voters to reduce their income.”
Developer cancels plan for large Upper Peninsula wind project – Citing planning delays, a global renewable energy developer has canceled plans for a major wind project in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.A local referendum on the project is scheduled for May 7, though it is not clear whether that impacted developers’ decision. The 130-megawatt Summit Lake Wind project, backed by global developer Renewable Energy Systems (RES), haddivided local residents over its location in “pristine U.P. wilderness” near Lake Superior. The project in L’Anse Township northwest of Marquette was opposed by the local tribe for threatening hunting and fishing access.“After a careful review of several factors, RES has decided to discontinue the development of the Summit Lake Wind project,” RES project manager Sean Stocker said in a statement. “We have enjoyed working with the local community and want to thank all the landowners and supporters of the Summit Lake Wind project.”The company said “continued delays in the planning process have ceased to make the project financially and logistically viable.” A company spokesperson declined a request for further comment. Researchers who previously spoke to Energy News Network described Summit Lake as unique because of its location (most Michigan wind projects are on rural farmland) and leasing structure with primarily one landowner. The project called for 49 turbines spread over thousands of acres near the McCormick Wilderness area of the Ottawa National Forest. The company previously said the site was chosen due to the local wind availability, grid capacity, distance from residences and for its “compatible use of timberland.”
Unreliable Nature Of Solar And Wind Makes Electricity Much More Expensive, Major New Study Finds – Solar panels and wind turbines are making electricity significantly more expensive, a major new study by a team of economists from the University of Chicago finds. Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) “significantly increase average retail electricity prices, with prices increasing by 11% (1.3 cents per kWh) seven years after the policy’s passage into law and 17% (2 cents per kWh) twelve years afterward,” the economists write. The study by Michael Greenstone, Richard McDowell, and Ishan Nath compared states with and without an RPS. It did so using what the economists say is “the most comprehensive state-level dataset ever compiled” which covered 1990 to 2015. The cost to consumers has been staggeringly high: “All in all, seven years after passage, consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy,” they write. Last year, I was the first journalist to report that solar and wind aremaking electricity more expensive in the United States – and for inherently physical reasons. Solar and wind require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment’s notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, I noted. And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California, and Denmark to pay neighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it. My reporting was criticized – sort of – by those who claimed I hadn’t separated correlation from causation, but the new study by a top-notch team of economists, including an advisor to Barack Obama, proves I was right. Previous studies were misleading, the economists note, because they didn’t “incorporate three key costs,” which are the unreliability of renewables, the large amounts of land they require, and the displacement of cheaper “baseload” energy sources like nuclear plants. The higher cost of electricity reflects “the costs that renewables impose on the generation system,” the economists note, “including those associated with their intermittency, higher transmission costs, and any stranded asset costs assigned to ratepayers.”
Is the grid ready for electric vehicles? – Some Americans appear increasingly ready to give up their gas cars for electric vehicles. But are the country’s electric grids prepared for them?The question is a critical one in the quest to address climate change, because transportation is now the single largest sector contributing to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. EVs are widely viewed as a key way to help change that.“The broad answer is actually yes, the grid can handle the introduction of large amounts of EVs,” said Matt Stanberry, vice president of Advanced Energy Economy, a business association dedicated to development of clean and affordable global energy systems. “The capability is there,” Stanberry said. “The question is how do you get there.”Stanberry, along with others looking at the issue, believes what’s needed is not more power, it’s more efficiently and strategically provided power.“Cars sit around 20, 21 hours a day. There’s plenty of time to charge – so quite a bit of flexibility,” said Dan Bowermaster, program manager for electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent non-profit center for public interest energy and environmental research, which has been looking at grid readiness for EVs.But he said with new technology coming, such as storage and the ability to use a vehicle’s battery to power a home or to provide extra power to the grid, “Now is the time for everyone to prepare.” Ideally, people would charge their cars when the grid isn’t jammed with activity or when there’s extra power available. That would be in the middle of day in the sunny West when solar power is peaking. In windy areas like Texas, it’s nighttime. In the Northeast, it’s overnight when there’s less power usage. Utilities think they can influence people’s charging behavior by making it more advantageous to charge during those times.
Electric Car-Owners Shocked: New Study Confirms EVs Considerably Worse For Climate Than Diesel Cars – The Brussels Times reports that a new German study exposes how electric vehicles will hardly decrease CO2 emissions in Europe over the coming years, as the introduction of electric vehicles won’t lead to a reduction in CO2 emissions from highway traffic. According to the study directed by Christoph Buchal of the University of Cologne, published by the Ifo Institute in Munich last week, electric vehicles have “significantly higher CO2 emissions than diesel cars.” That is due to the significant amount of energy used in the mining and processing of lithium, cobalt, and manganese, which are critical raw materials for the production of electric car batteries. A battery pack for a Tesla Model 3 pollutes the climate with 11 to 15 tonnes of CO2. Each battery pack has a lifespan of approximately ten years and total mileage of 94,000, would mean 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometer (116 to 156 grams of CO2 per mile), Buchal said. Add to this the CO2 emissions of the electricity from powerplants that power such vehicles, and the actual Tesla emissions could be between 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometer (249 and 289 grams of CO2 per mile). German researchers criticized the fact that EU legislation classifies electric cars as zero-emission cars; they call it a deception because electric cars, like the Model 3, with all the factors, included, produce more emissions than diesel vehicles by Mercedes. They further wrote that the EU target of 59 grams of CO2 per kilometer by 2030 is “technically unrealistic.” The reality is, in addition to the CO2 emissions generated in mining the raw materials for the production of electric vehicles, all EU countries generate significant CO2 emissions from charging the vehicles’ batteries using dirty power plants. For true emission reductions, researchers concluded the study by saying methane-powered gasoline engines or hydrogen motors could cut CO2 emissions by a third and possibly eliminate the need for diesel motors.
Bill Black: Faked Emissions May Send Volkswagen CEO to Prison — In this Real News Network interview, Bill Black examines the VW emissions scandal examines the Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal and discusses how corruption has become endemic in corporate Germany, and why the SEC and DoJ are targeting VW. Black is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United.
Fire mostly contained after ethanol train derailment in Texas: Union Pacific (Reuters) – A fire that broke out early Wednesday after 25 cars of a Union Pacific train hauling ethanol derailed at Fort Worth, Texas, has been “mostly contained”, a company spokeswoman said. Union Pacific was working with the Fort Worth Fire Department and planned to clear the site Wednesday morning, she said. The company did not have a timeline for reopening the tracks. The derailment and subsequent fire prompted evacuations in the neighborhood, and there were no injuries, a report with NBCDFW.com said. The company did not comment on the evacuations.
Trump Appointed Fossil Fuel Insiders to Federal Agencies. It’s Backfiring. President Trump enjoys broad support from conservative Christians because of his promises to attack reproductive rights and stack the courts in their favor, but thousands of anti-choice “evangelical environmentalists” lashed out at his administration this week. Their gripe? An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal to gut the regulatory analysis behind pollution standards that have drastically reduced mercury and other toxic emissions from coal-burning power plants. Mercury, after all, can harm fetuses and developing brains. In a letter published in The Hill this week, the Evangelical Environmental Network became the latest group to speak out against an EPA proposal to heavily revise the cost-benefit analysis behind its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS, which have required coal plants to invest in pollution controls that reduced the amount of mercury they spew into the air by up to 90 percentover the past decade. Progressive environmental groups, lawmakers in both parties and even electric utilities also came out against the proposed rule-making during a public comment period that ended this week.The unusual dissent from conservative evangelicals was the latest evidence that Trump’s plan to unleash fossil fuels production by stacking federal agencies with industry insiders and slashing regulatory oversight is backfiring. The president’s first picks to run the EPA and the Interior Department resigned in scandal, and their replacements are already mired in investigations and ethical concerns. Earlier this week, ethics watchdogs requested an internal investigation of EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler’s involvement in the proposal to gut MATS, which are estimated to save $37 to $90 billion in public health costs each year by reducing thousands of asthma and heart attacks and cases of lung cancer. Wheeler was formerly a lobbyist hired by the Murray Energy coal mining company, which challenged the economic analysis behind the regulations and asked the Trump administration to throw them out as recently as 2017, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “It is becoming more and more clear why coal and energy companies are happy to have their former lobbyist Andrew Wheeler in charge of the EPA,” said CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder, in a statement. “Administrator Wheeler’s apparent failure to abide by ethics obligations and to avoid the reality or appearance of conflicts continues to undermine the EPA’s integrity and weakens public confidence in our government.”
Detroit denies Marathon’s request to keep pet coke piles uncovered – Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration on Monday denied Marathon Petroleum Corp.’s request to continue storing petroleum coke in an uncovered pit after years of complaints from southwest Detroit residents about clouds of black dust blowing in the air and into the Detroit River. The Buildings, Safety, Engineering and Environmental Department (BSEED) formally denied Marathon’s request for a variance to a 2017 city ordinance requiring the oil refining byproduct to be stored inside a covered facility. Marathon has stored its pet coke in a 30-foot deep pit since 2012. The soot-like black substance, which is burned for energy for utility boilers and kilns, has to be trucked away from Marathon’s sprawling refinery along I-75 and the Rouge River. Marathon has to either enclose its pit or reapply for a variance that addresses issues with “fugitive dust” from the pet coke getting into the air from the wheels of trucks exiting the refinery facility, said Raymond Scott, deputy director of BSEED. “Their application lacks quite a bit of information that would give us the comfort we need in order to continue with a variance,” Scott told Crain’s. “They’ll be provided the opportunity to correct the lack of information in their current application.” Marathon failed to demonstrate in its variance application that it has a daily street sweeping schedule to clean up any pet coke dust that may escape the storage pit while it’s being loaded and trucked out of the facility, according to a variance denial letter BSEED Director David Bell sent Monday morning to Marathon.
Ocasio-Cortez plans Kentucky visit despite being uninvited by GOP colleague – Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is planning to visit Kentucky soon despite being uninvited by one of the state’s Republican members of Congress. Corbin Trent, a spokeswoman for the New York congresswoman, told CNN on Friday that they’ve been invited by other Kentuckians and that plans are in the works for a visit to the Bluegrass State on their own, though the exact timing is unclear. “Luckily, we still have open borders with Kentucky, we are free to travel there,” Trent said. “We hope to visit and have a town hall, listen to concerns of workers in Kentucky.” In a spirited House Financial Services Committee hearing last month, Rep. Andy Barr, R-Kentucky, invited Ocasio-Cortez to his home state to see the impact her Green New Deal proposal would have on coal miners. “I want to invite the gentlelady to come to eastern Kentucky where thousands of coal miners no longer have paychecks,” he said. “I invite her to go underground with me and meet the men and women who do heroic work to power the American economy.” Ocasio-Cortez was quick to take him up on the offer. “I’d be happy to,” she said, adding her proposal calls for “fully funding the pensions of coal miners in West Virginia and throughout Appalachia because we want a just transition to make sure that we’re investing in jobs across those swaths of the country.” Last week, however, Barr appeared to rescind his invitation, calling on Ocasio-Cortez to apologize to fellow GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas before any potential Kentucky trip.
Environmental groups want ruling on coal ash water pollution (AP) – Two Tennessee environmental groups are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on whether the federal Clean Water Act applies to pollution from a coal ash dump. The groups sued to force the Tennessee Valley Authority to clean up coal ash pits at its Gallatin Fossil Plant. Court documents showed pollutants from the ash leech into the groundwater and then enter the Cumberland River. That’s a source of drinking water for Nashville. In September, a divided panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Clean Water Act doesn’t address leaks through groundwater, only direct discharges, such as through a pipe.
Judge Brian Morris Stymies New Trump Coal Sales on Federal Lands – US federal district judge Brian Morris dealt a serious setback to the Trump administration’s decision to increase coal mining on federal lands – stymieing issuance of new leases until the Department of the Interior undertakes further necessary environmental review required under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. Morris deferred for the time being a further ruling on whether to reinstate completely the 2016 moratorium on new activity – overturned by Trump in March 2017. More than 40% of the coal mined in the United States comes from federal lands. And as Energy World reports, the Department of the Interior’s: Bureau of Land Management administers about 300 coal leases in 10 states. Most of that coal – 85 percent – comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. Other states with significant federal coal reserves include Colorado and New Mexico. Production and combustion of coal from federal lands accounted for about 11 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2014. As Energy Worldreports:[Judge Morris] said Interior Department officials had wrongly avoided an environmental review of their action by describing it “as a mere policy shift.” In so doing, officials ignored the environmental effects of selling huge volumes of coal from public lands, the judge said. … “The moratorium provided protections on public lands for more than 14 months,” Morris said in Friday’s 34-page order. He added that lifting the moratorium was a “major federal action” sufficient to trigger requirements for a detailed analysis of its environmental impacts. As the New York Times reports last Friday in Judge Delivers Major Setback to Trump Policy to Increase Coal Mining on Federal Land: The decision means that “the Interior Department has to go back to the drawing board if they want to continue to sell coal mining leases on public lands – they have to do a better job of legally and scientifically justifying this,” said Jenny Harbine, an attorney for Earthjustice, who took part in the oral arguments against the Trump administration. Morris ordered government attorneys to undertake further negotiations with environmental groups, states – including the attorneys general of California, New Mexico, New York and Washington, who had sued over the decision to resume federal coal leasing – and tribal officials, according to Energy World.
Indiana chamber rejects ex-EPA chief Pruitt effort to keep coal-fired plants online (Reuters) – The leading business lobby group in Indiana on Monday rejected a plea from former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt to back legislation that would keep aging coal-fired power plants online because it would raise electricity rates for local businesses and homeowners. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce took the unusual step of calling out Pruitt and Rail Point – a coal company with whom he has registered as a lobbyist – for pressuring local lawmakers to block utilities Vectren Corp and the Northern Indiana Public Service Co (NIPSCO) from shutting their remaining coal plants and replacing their generation capacity with natural gas and renewables. Hallador Energy Co, the parent of Rail Point, on Saturday announced it hired Pruitt, who resigned as the head of the EPA amid a series of ethics investigations, as a lobbyist who is calling on the state legislature to put a moratorium on new utility generation purchases. The Indianapolis Star on Friday reported that Pruitt registered as a coal lobbyist in the state. The Chamber’s 50-member energy committee unanimously rejected Pruitt’s campaign.
India Looks To Add 12 New Nuclear Power Stations – India will add 12 nuclear power stations to its lineup to shore up its power supply situation, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) said on Monday, according toThe Times of India. The “irreplaceable source of clean, pollution-free energy” is expected to be a significant and essential part of India’s energy needs, KN Vyas, DAE secretary said at an industry event in Russia, adding that there is no substitute for nuclear energy as it is particularly reliable. Vyas highlighted its Kaiga Nuclear Power station which, according to him, has had a streak of 962 uninterrupted days of runtime. As of 2018, six nuclear reactors were being constructed in India to meet the growing needs of the country. Its nuclear capacity was expected to triple by 2031. India’s Nuclear Power Corporation, tasked with building and operating India’s power plants, had voiced reservations about this ambitious timeline, saying that it would need to lower those expectations, according to a Telegraph report. In 2018, India slashes its nuclear power plant construction plans by two-thirds, an unfortunate reality that was expected to increase its reliance on coal power. India has long battled pollution problems, with the WHO estimating that at its worst, India can be 70 times dirtier than what the WHO considers safe. Nuclear power could prevent worsening of this pollution problem as its energy needs continue to grow. India is a signatory to the Paris Climate Agreement, and ranks 14th on the Global Climate Risk Index, according to Business Insider India, yet still it is vulnerable. Plans to be the world’s greatest solar energy success has fallen flat. It is largely dependent – perhaps too much so – on thermal and hydropower plants, both which require water. Nuclear power could add another layer of security for India.
U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Weren’t Built for Climate Change – In 2011, after an earthquake and tsunami caused a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi power plant, Gregory Jaczko, then the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, had to worry about two things: whether radioactive fallout would harm the U.S. and whether a similar accident could befall an American plant. The answer to the first question turned out to be no. The second question preoccupies him still. The NRC directed the operators of the 60 or so working U.S. nuclear power plants to evaluate their current flood risk, using the latest weather modeling technology and accounting for the effects of climate change. Companies were told to compare those risks with what their plants, many almost a half-century old, were built to withstand, and, where there was a gap, to explain how they would close it. That process has revealed a lot of gaps. But Jaczko and others say that the commission’s new leadership, appointed by President Donald Trump, hasn’t done enough to require owners of nuclear power plants to take preventative measures – and that the risks are increasing as climate change worsens. According to a Bloomberg review of correspondence between the commission and plant owners, 54 of the nuclear plants operating in the U.S. weren’t designed to handle the flood risk they face. Fifty-three weren’t built to withstand their current risk from intense precipitation; 25 didn’t account for current flood projections from streams and rivers; 19 weren’t designed for their expected maximum storm surge. Nineteen face three or more threats that they weren’t designed to handle. The industry argues that rather than redesign facilities to address increased flood risk, which Jaczko advocates, it’s enough to focus mainly on storing emergency generators, pumps, and other equipment in on-site concrete bunkers, a system they call Flex, for Flexible Mitigation Capability. Not only did the NRC agree with that view, it ruled on Jan. 24 that nuclear plants wouldn’t have to update that equipment to deal with new, higher levels of expected flooding. It also eliminated a requirement that plants run Flex drills. The commission’s three members appointed by President Trump wrote that existing regulations were sufficient to protect the country’s nuclear reactors. Jaczko disagrees. “Any work that was done following Fukushima is for naught because the commission rejected any binding requirement to use that work,” he says. “It’s like studying the safety of seat belts and then not making automakers put them in a car.”
Swing and a miss on nuclear bailout – Toledo Blade editorial – The latest bill put before the Ohio General Assembly to save two agingnuclear power plants, including Davis-Besse 30 miles east of Toledo, is a swing and a miss.While Ohio has some legitimate reasons to try to preserve the Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear power stations, or at least postpone their phase-out, the legislation introduced by state House Speaker Larry Householder (R., Perry County) has not achieved the critical mass to justify a “yes” vote.While posing as green-energy legislation, it’s really a bailout for a private company and a not-balanced energy policy; too much campaign finance influence and not enough sacrifice by parent owner FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron. The plants are owned by FirstEnergy Solutions Corp., a FirstEnergy subsidiary that has filed for bankruptcy. And while it’s true that nuclear is a carbon-free energy generator – unlike natural gas and coal – it is not renewable. This legislation needs to reward conversion to renewable sources of energy, not give up on it. The measure would provide a credit of $9.25, to be adjusted annually for inflation, for each megawatt hour of carbon-free electricity generated. Together, Davis-Besse and Perry, in Lake County, east of Cleveland, generate 90 percent of the zero-carbon energy in the state. Mr. Householder’s bill would impose surcharges on all electric-utility customers in the state – $2.50 a month for the typical residential consumer. It would also eliminate renewable and energy efficiency mandates, thereby saving ratepayers $1.89 per month, on average. Though they produce no climate-warming carbon, Davis-Besse and Perry, like all nuclear plants, are potential environmental disasters. They generate hazardous waste and a radiation release into the atmosphere would have severe consequences.PJM, the interstate organization that coordinates the transmission of electricity through Ohio and 12 other states, has said the plants are not critical to maintaining reliable and affordable power in the region. But the plants are a public utility, whose regulation and oversight has required significant public investment.And Ohio has an interest in diversified electrical energy sources, rather than allowing natural gas to be the sole source of power while new, renewable sources are brought up to scale. Ultimately, it is FirstEnergy’s problem, not the consumers’. FirstEnergy bears the burden of these plants’ economic inefficiency. FirstEnergy has made sure to spend generously on getting friendly lawmakers elected to the statehouse. Toledo needs an energy policy that promotes power through renewable sources like wind, solar, and water power. The Householder bill is not that policy.
DeWine Declines Comment On Nuclear Plant Bailout Proposal – Ohio lawmakers are debating a plan to bail out the state’s two nuclear power plants by raising rates on customers. Governor Mike DeWine isn’t weighing in on that proposal, but says nuclear energy needs to be a part of Ohio’s short-term energy landscape. Ohio Public Radio’s Jo Ingles reports. FirstEnergy Solutions has filed for bankruptcy, saying it needs state lawmakers to step in and pass a bailout of its nuclear power plants. DeWine says those two facilities are needed. “You cannot dramatically reduce carbon or keep those numbers down without using nuclear. I’m all for wind and solar. Those are going to continue to move forward, I believe, but you cannot hit the number without using nuclear. So nuclear is an important part of this.”DeWine won’t comment on the specifics of the plan being pushed by Republican House Speaker Larry Householder, which would also wipe out the current requirements for utilities to get power from alternative energy. Many environmentalists do not consider nuclear a form of “green energy.”
Siderewicz to testify against energy bill – Should Blockbuster have been subsidized to compete with Netflix? Siderewicz made the analogy Monday – two days ahead of his scheduled testimony before the Ohio House’s energy generation subcommittee on House Bill 6, opponents of which, including Siderewicz, say is no more than a bailout of Ohio’s two struggling nuclear power plants. The legislative proposal that creates the Ohio Clean Air Program, Siderewicz said, could have a chilling effect on a second nearly identical $900 million natural-gas electric plant that would be known as Trumbull Energy Center and built nearby LEC. Supporters of the bill say it would generate $300 million each year for clean energy production and should save most customers money because it calls for getting rid of renewable energy mandates that add on extra charges. The idea, supported by the leader of the Republican-controlled Ohio House, drew immediate criticism from groups that favor renewable energy, such as wind and solar, and those who say the plan too heavily favors the nuclear plants. About half of the money from the surcharge would go to the Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Toledo and the Perry plant in Lake County that produce 14 percent of the state’s electricity. The rest would go to expanding Ohio’s clean energy sector. Both plants are slated to close by 2021 unless their operator, FirstEnergy Solutions, can find a buyer or the government eases the cost of operating them. Siderewicz called the proposal “so embarrassingly silly it’s hard to believe it’s actually being debated.” Subsidizing the plants negatively affects the free market and could cause potential investors in TEC to pull back their financial support, he said.
Ohio nuclear subsidy bill designed to undermine wind and solar, experts say – Analysts say legislation to subsidize Ohio’s nuclear plants through the creation of a statewide “Clean Air Program” would discourage development of wind and solar energy because it would undermine renewable energy requirements set in place a decade ago. The bill would eliminate a surcharge allowing utilities to pass along their costs for complying with the state’s renewable portfolio standard, replacing a competitive renewable energy market with subsidies that appear aimed toward existing nuclear and coal power plants. Terrence O’Donnell, a Columbus-based lawyer who represents wind and solar developers, wrote in comments for the committee that House Bill 6 amounts to a “government takeover of the energy sector.” The bill, O’Donnell wrote, is tantamount to undoing the renewable portfolio standard, which “sets out competitive, market-based procurements whereby the state sets a target and allows the flourishing clean energy private sector to select least cost projects.” Hearings on the bill continue this week before the House Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee, which includes three new Republican members added by Householder amid rumors the bill as written might not have enough support to advance. Unveiled April 12 by Rep. Householder, R-Glenford, HB 6 would replace monthly customer fees that reflect utility costs to obtain renewable energy and separate fees financing utility energy efficiency programs with “clean air fees” that Householder said will be lower. The entire renewable energy and energy efficiency package, said Householder and the bill’s sponsors, is now adding $4.39 to the average residential customer bill. The new charges, which have no sunset provision, would cost about $2.50. But the renewable energy charges only amount to 37 cents on average for residential customers,according to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. The remainder of the $4.39 figure, an estimate produced by Householder’s staff, is presumably for efficiency and peak demand programs, and some of the state’s utilities plan to continue the old charges at least until they have paid for previously created expenses. And state regulators can, under existing law, allow utilities to create new customer-paid energy efficiency programs in the future. Language buried deep in the 27-page bill also makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a solar or wind developer trying to finance a new project to rely on funding from the Clean Air Fund that HB 6 would create.
Nuclear bailout bill slammed by environmental, other groups – As Gov. Mike DeWine came out in support of aid for the state’s two nuclear power plants, members of a House subcommittee got an earful Tuesday from environmental and other groups who say a bill that would shore up the plants is nothing but a corporate bailout.“It is an Orwellian twist to call (House Bill) 6 a ‘clean air resource’ bill. The bill creates a new tax on all customers of the four Ohio utilities, even if they buy their power from other suppliers. The main beneficiary will be FirstEnergy Solutions, which is now in bankruptcy and will soon be owned mainly by a few Wall Street hedge funds,” said John Finnigan, lead counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund.“It is not clean air policy. It is a corporate bailout policy – and no one should be surprised to see such widespread opposition to the proposal,” said Todd Snitchler, vice president of market development at the American Petroleum Institute, and a former chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and former Republican lawmaker.Backers of the legislation say the proposal to create a new Ohio Clean Air Program would help plants that are the biggest source of carbon dioxide-free energy in the state. Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, has made the bill a priority and wants it approved quickly.The proposal would create a new Ohio Clean Air Program, charging residential customers $2.50 per month on their electric bill to create a $300 million fund. More than half of the money would go to FirstEnergy Solutions, owner of the Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear plants in northern Ohio. . It says without help, the plants will close within two years.. The state also would likely create a program to send funding to coal and gas power plants that make emissions improvements.
33 Years Later- Chernobyl’s Deadly Effects Estimates Vary – April 26 marks the 33rd anniversary of the 1986 radiation disaster at Chernobyl reactor Number 4 in Ukraine, just north of Kiev the capital. It is still nearly impossible to get scientific consensus on the vast extent of the impacts. The explosions and two-week long fire at Chernobyl spewed around the world something between one billion and nine billion curies of radiation – depending on whose estimates you choose to believe. The accident is classified by the UN as the worst environmental catastrophe in human history.Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout has been blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) acknowledges only 56 deaths among firefighters who suffered and died agonizing deaths in the disaster’s immediate aftermath. However, the IAEA’s officially chartered mission is “to accelerate and enlarge the contributions of nuclear power worldwide.” Because of its institutional bias, one can dispute nearly everything the IAEA says about radiation risk.Also on the low-end of fatality estimates is the World Health Organization which has to have its radiation studies approved by the IAEA! In 2006, the WHO’s “Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime (240,000 liquidators; 116,000 evacuees, and the 270,000 residents of the Strictly Controlled Zones).” The WHO added to this 4,000 the estimate that “among the five million residents of areas with high levels of radioactive cesium deposition” in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine” predictions suggest “up to 5,000 additional cancer deaths may occur in this population from radiation exposure…”Alternately, Ukraine’s Minister of Health Andrei Serkyuk estimated in 1995 that 125,000 people had already died from the direct effects of Chernobyl’s radiation. Serkyuk said a disproportionate share of casualties were among children, pregnant women and rescue workers or “liquidators.” Liquidators were soldiers ordered to participate in the removal and burial of radioactive topsoil, heavy equipment, trees, and debris, wearing no protective clothing, respirators or radiation monitors. On January 10, 2010 The Guardian reported that “reputable scientists researching the most radiation-contaminated areas of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine” dispute the IAEA estimates that only 56 firefighters died “and that about 4,000 will die from it eventually.” The paper noted for example, that, “The International Agency for Research on Cancer, another UN agency, predicts 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl; an assessment by the Russian academy of sciences says there have been 60,000 deaths so far in Russia, and an estimated 140,000 in Ukraine and Belarus.” The Guardian further noted that, “Meanwhile, the Belarus national academy of sciences estimates 93,000 deaths so far and 270,000 cancers, and the Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection calculates 500,000 deaths so far.”
Russia Unveils Sub With ‘Nuclear Tsunami’ Doomsday Drones– Russia has launched a new submarine that will carry underwater nuclear torpedoes capable of devastating enemy coastlines with a tsunami wave up to 500 meters (1,600 ft) that can leave behind radioactive isotopes, according to NBC News and US-Govt. funded outlet RFE/RL. The U.S. intelligence agencies estimate Status-6 will carry a multi-megaton thermonuclear bomb payload. For comparisons’ sake the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 16 kilotons, several orders of magnitude smaller. A one megaton bomb is the equivalent of 1,000 kilotons – one one million tons of TNT. Reports from Russia indicate the bomb could be as large as 100 megatons. Status-6 is designed to attack enemy coastal cities, ports, shipyards, and naval bases. Once Status-6 arrives at its destination it detonates the bomb, causing an enormous amount of damage through blast and heat. A 100 megaton bomb would generate artificial tsunamis, carrying the destruction far inshore. –Popular Mechanics. Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw the launch of the Project 09852 special-purpose nuclear-powered submarine Belgorod at the Sevmash Shipyard in Northern Russia on Tuesday, according to Russian state news agency TASS. Of note, the submarine is not yet operational. Construction will be completed afloat, according to TASS, which predicts that the submarine will begin sea trials in 2020, after which it will be delivered to the Russian navy at the end of that year. A Russian defense industry source told TASS that the Belgorod will carry up to six strategic underwater drones, which can travel up to 54 knots (62 mph) underwater and “avoid all acoustic tracking devices and other traps,” according to Popular Mechanics.
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