Environmental News For The Week 29May 2018

Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666

This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics over the last week.

Please share this article – Go to very top of page, right hand side, for social media buttons.

Lawler: “US Deaths Jumped in 2017” — From housing economist Tom Lawler: US Deaths Jumped in 2017 — Provisional estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) indicate that the number of US deaths increased sharply last year, both in absolute terms and adjusted for age. According to the NCHS’ “mortality dashboard”, the “crude” US death rate (deaths per 100,000 of population) averaged 866.2 in 2017, up from 839.3 in 2016. The NCHS’ “age-adjusted” death rate (which adjusts for the changing age distribution of the population) for 2017 was 733.6, up from 728.8 in 2017 and the highest age-adjusted death rate since 2011. These data suggest that the total number of US deaths last year was around 2.821 million, compared to 2.744 million in 2016.

Corporate Privilege: Premeditated Murders, Civil Fines and Miscarriages of Justice – You know they do it on purpose right? Corporations intentionally sell deadly products and introduce hazardous goods to the marketplace because they know they can get away by paying civil fines instead of facing jail time when dead bodies start being counted. They call it risk/benefit analysis in corporate jargon, what they are really doing is maliciously calculating whether the profits to be gained will be greater than the suffering they will unleash every time they release defective cars, unsafe toys, fatal medicine or toxic foodstuffs to the public. Last evening, CNN reported that Johnson & Johnson was hit with a $25.75 million verdict for selling baby powder that has asbestos in it. This news was buried under an avalanche of Trump shenanigans, salacious tidbits and celebrity gossip. The headline made it seem like one of the leading pharmaceutical corporations in the world finally got their comeuppance and that justice was delivered. Alas, nowhere in the article does it mention that Johnson & Johnson has a market cap of over $327 billion dollars. Their fine for killing people with their cancer powder is an afterthought, this is not a punishment but an encouragement to keep putting profits above people.

CDC prepares to join Ebola fight in Africa | TheHill: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is preparing to deploy staffers to several cities and towns deep in the Congolese jungle amid a new Ebola outbreak that has claimed at least two dozen lives. The CDC maintains an office in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, about 350 miles from the epicenter of the outbreak. The dozen or so staffers who work in that office are likely to deploy to the hot zone once they receive a formal invite from Congo’s health ministry. See also Escaped Ebola Patients Risked Spreading Virus At Packed Prayer Meeting.

Cellphones may be to blame for surge in deadly brain tumors – Mobile phones may be behind a surge in a deadly brain tumor, scientists say. Cases of glioblastoma in England soared from 983 to 2,531 between 1995 and 2015, figures from the Office of National Statistics reveal. The rise was across all age groups and came as cases of lower-grade tumors fell. Experts say “widespread environmental or lifestyle factors” are likely to be responsible for the trend, with mobile phones a potential suspect. The findings are published in the Journal of Public Health and Environment. Study leader Alasdair Philips, of Children with Cancer UK, said: “We found a sustained and highly significant increase in GBM throughout the 21 years and across all ages. “Interestingly, we found the highest rise in incidence in frontal and temporal regions of the brain. This raises the suspicion that mobile and cordless phone use may be promoting gliomas.” Professor Denis Henshaw said: “Our findings illustrate the need to look more carefully at the mechanisms behind these cancer trends instead of focusing only on cures.” Typically, only a third of patients are still alive two years after being diagnosed with glioblastoma. Most survive just 14.6 months.

Scientists to grow ‘mini-brains’ using Neanderthal DNA – Scientists are preparing to create “miniature brains” that have been genetically engineered to contain Neanderthal DNA, in an unprecedented attempt to understand how humans differ from our closest relatives.In the next few months the small blobs of tissue, known as brain organoids, will be grown from human stem cells that have been edited to contain “Neanderthalised” versions of several genes.The lentil-sized organoids, which are incapable of thoughts or feelings, replicate some of the basic structures of an adult brain. They could demonstrate for the first time if there were meaningful differences between human and Neanderthal brain biology.“Neanderthals are the closest relatives to everyday humans, so if we should define ourselves as a group or a species it is really them that we should compare ourselves to,” said Prof Svante Pääbo, director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where the experiments are being performed.

As D.I.Y. Gene Editing Gains Popularity, ‘Someone Is Going to Get Hurt’ – As a teenager, Keoni Gandall already was operating a cutting-edge research laboratory in his bedroom in Huntington Beach, Calif. While his friends were buying video games, he acquired more than a dozen pieces of equipment – a transilluminator, a centrifuge, two thermocyclers – in pursuit of a hobby that once was the province of white-coated Ph.D.’s in institutional labs. “I just wanted to clone DNA using my automated lab robot and feasibly make full genomes at home,” he said. Mr. Gandall was far from alone. In the past few years, so-called biohackers across the country have taken gene editing into their own hands. As the equipment becomes cheaper and the expertise in gene-editing techniques, mostly Crispr-Cas9, more widely shared, citizen-scientists are attempting to re-engineer DNA in surprising ways.Until now, the work has amounted to little more than D.I.Y. misfires. A year ago, a biohacker famously injected himself at a conference with modified DNA that he hoped would make him more muscular. (It did not.) Earlier this year, at Body Hacking Con in Austin, Tex., a biotech executive injected himself with what he hoped would be a herpes treatment. (Verdict: No.) His company already had live-streamed a man injecting himself with a home-brewed treatment for H.I.V. (His viral load increased.) In a recent interview, Mr. Gandall, now 18 and a research fellow at Stanford, said he only wants to ensure open access to gene-editing technology, believing future biotech discoveries may come from the least expected minds. But he is quick to acknowledge that the do-it-yourself genetics revolution one day may go catastrophically wrong. “Even I would tell you, the level of DNA synthesis regulation, it simply isn’t good enough,” Mr. Gandall said. “These regulations aren’t going to work when everything is decentralized – when everybody has a DNA synthesizer on their smartphone.”

As Landmark Glyphosate Case Moves to Trial, Man Dying of Cancer to Have Day in Court With Monsanto – A California man dying of cancer will soon become the first person ever to take agrochemical giant Monsanto to trial over allegations that the company has concealed findings that glyphosate , the active ingredient in the company’s popular weedkiller Roundup, causes cancer.Before DeWayne Johnson, a 46-year-old father of three, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma at the age of 42, he worked for a school district in California, “where his responsibilities included direct application of Roundup and RangerPro, another Monsanto glyphosate product, to school properties,” according to his “landmark ” lawsuit .”Monsanto does not want the truth about Roundup and cancer to become public,” Johnson’s attorney, Michael Miller, told the Guardian. “We look forward to exposing how Monsanto hid the risk of cancer and polluted the science.”Monsanto attempted to bar Johnson’s experts from testifying and his legal team from using certain research to argue that Johnson’s cancer is tied to his exposure to Monsanto’s products. In an order issued last week, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Curtin Karnow granted some of Monsanto’s requests, but will still allow Johnson’s lawyers to use numerous peer-reviewed studies and expert testimonies during the trial, which begins June 18. Glyphosate has been classified as a probable human carcinogen by the state of a California and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a branch of the World Health Organization (WHO). However, U.S. and European regulators have continued to allow its widespread use in agriculture, despite concerns raised by scientists and anti-pesticide activists. See also Landmark lawsuit claims Monsanto hid cancer danger of weedkiller for decades.

What All Parents Need to Know About Pesticides in Produce — Every spring the Environmental Working Group (EWG) releases our Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce™ . The guide can be used by anyone trying to avoid pesticides, but it’s especially important for parents to limit their children’s exposures to these toxic chemicals.The idea is simple: Parents can buy organic versions of the items on the Dirty Dozen™ list of produce with the most pesticide residues to limit the amount of pesticides their kids ingest. On the flip side, families can save money by buying conventional versions of the items on the Clean Fifteen ™ list of produce with the least pesticide residues. This year marks the 25th anniversary of a landmark study by the National Academy of Sciences that warned children’s exposure to toxic pesticides through food could harm their health. The study is just as important today.

Rice, staple food of billions, could become less nutritious because of climate change – Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions threaten to make rice less nutritious, scientists said in a study released Wednesday, raising a worrying possibility about the staple food item for billions of humans. Rice, the scientists found, contains lower levels of key vitamins when grown amid high concentrations of carbon dioxide, the most common of the greenhouse gases driving climate change. “If we do nothing, then yes, there is this potential for profound negative impacts on human health,” said Kristie Ebi, a public health researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the authors of the study, which also involved researchers at institutions in China, Japan, Australia and the United States, including at the US Agriculture Department.The research, conducted in Japan and China, examined 18 rice varieties in outdoor experiments in which the plants were subjected to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 568 to 590 parts per million. Current concentrations are about 410 parts per million, but they’re growing at about 2 parts per million every year – and could reach the study’s levels in the later part of this century. Rice accounts for “approximately 25 per cent of all global calories,” according to the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances. It was led by Chunwu Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The study found that at the high concentrations, the crop’s content of the vitamins B1, B2, B5 and B9 all declined, including by as much as 30 per cent for B9 (folate). The research also confirmed previously discovered declines in protein, iron and zinc.

Climate change on track to cause major insect wipeout, scientists warn – Global warming is on track to cause a major wipeout of insects, compounding already severe losses, according to a new analysis. Insects are vital to most ecosystems and a widespread collapse would cause extremely far-reaching disruption to life on Earth, the scientists warn. Their research shows that, even with all the carbon cuts already pledged by nations so far, climate change would make almost half of insect habitat unsuitable by the end of the century, with pollinators like bees particularly affected. However, if climate change could be limited to a temperature rise of 1.5C – the very ambitious goal included in the global Paris agreement – the losses of insects are far lower. The new research is the most comprehensive to date, analysing the impact of different levels of climate change on the ranges of 115,000 species. It found plants are also heavily affected but that mammals and birds, which can more easily migrate as climate changes, suffered less. “We showed insects are the most sensitive group,” said Prof Rachel Warren, at the University of East Anglia, who led the new work. “They are important because ecosystems cannot function without insects. They play an absolutely critical role in the food chain.” “The disruption to our ecosystems if we were to lose that high proportion of our insects would be extremely far-reaching and widespread,” she said. “People should be concerned – humans depend on ecosystems functioning.” Pollination, fertile soils, clean water and more all depend on healthy ecosystems, Warren said. See also Urgent Climate Action Required to Protect Tens of Thousands of Species Worldwide, New Research Shows .

Clipped Wings: Trump Weakens Law That Protected Birds For A Century – Migratory birds are important ecological and economic drivers. Each year, birders spend an estimated $41 billion on trips and equipment. Birds are the proverbial ‘canary in the coal mine,’ and also literal ones. As ecological indicator species they inform us when environmental conditions have changed. And for the last 100 years, their status as creatures worth protecting has been enshrined by a U.S. law called the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The law makes it illegal to hunt, capture, kill, possess, import or export any migratory bird, or its feathers, nests or eggs without a permit. In December, the Interior Department announced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would no longer enforce “incidental take.” That provision of the law refers to when birds are unintentionally killed by something such as a building, power lines, wind turbines or oil and gas ponds. These open pits near and oil and gas operations often contain toxic drilling fluids and trace amounts of oil.

Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass – A first-of-its-kind study published Monday shows that, when it comes to impacting life on Earth, humans are punching well above our weight.The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , is the first ever comprehensive census of the distribution of the biomass, or weight of living creatures, across classification type and environment. It found that, while humans account for 0.01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our activity has reduced the biomass of wild marine and terrestrial mammals by six times and the biomass of plant matter by half.”I would hope this gives people a perspective on the very dominant role that humanity now plays on Earth,” lead researcher and Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel professor Ron Milo told The Guardian .According to the study, human impacts are due to the combined effects of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. In particular, the domestication of livestock has caused a shift in the relative biomass of different species of mammals.Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent. The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds. See also Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study.

Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation – There is a largely hidden, poorly regulated, and highly profitable industry in the United States that has a gruesome function: breeding dogs for the sole purpose of often torturous experimentation, after which the dogs are killed because they are no longer of use. Americans frequently express horror at festivals in countries such as China and South Korea where dogs are killed, cooked, and eaten. Mainstream media outlets in the U.S. routinely report, with a tone of disgust, on the use of dogs in those countries for food consumption. But in the U.S. itself, corporations and academic institutions exploit dogs (as well as cats and rabbits) for excruciating experiments that are completely trivial, even useless, and are just as abusive as the practices in Asia that have produced so much moral indignation in the West. These dogs are frequently bred into life for the sole purpose of being laboratory objects, and spend their entire, often short, existence locked in a small cage, subjected to procedures that impose extreme pain and suffering. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s aptly named the Animal Usage report, 60,979 dogs were used in the U.S. for experimentation in 2016 alone. The reported number of all animals used for experimentation, whose reporting was required, was 820,812. Often, the experimentation has nothing to do with medical research, but rather trivial commercial interests, and in almost all cases, dogs provide little to no unique scientific value.

UN, EU call for global action to protect bees – The United Nation’s food agency and the European Union on Saturday called for global action to protect pollinators, and bees in particular, which are crucial for ensuring food security. “It is not possible to have food security if we don’t have pollinators,” the head of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, Jose Graziano da Silva, told a conference in Slovenia ahead of the first-ever World Bee Day. Pollinators, such as bees, birds, bats, butterflies and beetles “are responsible for most of the crops and food that we eat,” he said. To cope with the impact of pesticides, shrinking forest areas and reducing wildlife, the world needs to find “ways to increase, preserve biodiversity,” he said. Bees help pollinate 90 percent of the world’s major crops, but in recent years many have been dying off from “colony collapse disorder”, a mysterious scourge blamed partly on pesticides. The UN has warned that 40 percent of invertebrate pollinators — particularly bees and butterflies — risk global extinction. EU environment commissioner Karmenu Vella, also attending the conference, announced that Brussels is scheduled to present its action plan to protect pollinators on June 1. “Basically, we’ll be addressing the threats, the causes, the consequences but also the actions that we have to take,” to protect pollinators and stop the decline of biodiversity, Vella told journalists.

Honeybees may be dying in larger numbers due to climate change – Beekeepers in the U.S. reported an increase in honeybee deaths over the last year, possibly the result of erratic weather patterns brought on by a changing climate, according to the scientist leading an annual survey on the insects. U.S. beekeepers said 40 percent of their hives, also called colonies, died unexpectedly during the year that ended March 31, according to a survey released Wednesday by researchers from Auburn University and the University of Maryland. That’s up from 33 percent a year earlier. Elevated bee-loss rates have been an agricultural concern for the past decade, since a mysterious malady called Colony Collapse Disorder coincided with a doubling of honeybee death rates and spurred greater attention and research on commercial and wild bees. Higher death rates make pollination more expensive for beekeepers and farmers. An autumn that began with hurricanes in southern states, followed by abnormal temperature patterns and frequent winter storms, may have disrupted bee feeding patterns and increased their vulnerability to other maladies, said survey coordinator Geoffrey Williams, an assistant professor at Auburn in Alabama. “Changes in climate and weather affect food and forage for bees,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious that if you have bees already on the edge and you have a radical, quick weather shift, they aren’t going to do as well.”

Beyond Honey Bees: Wild Bees Are Also Key Pollinators, and Some Species Are Disappearing – Declines in bee populations around the world have been widely reported over the past several decades. Much attention has focused on honey bees , which commercial beekeepers transport all over the U.S. to pollinate crops.However, while honey bees are a vital part of our agricultural system, they are generally considered the chickens of the bee world – domesticated and highly managed for specific agricultural use. They are not native to North America and often can’t be used as a surrogate for understanding what is happening with native wild bees – the focus of my research .There are about 5,000 native bee species in North America. Many have shown no evidence of decline, and some are thriving in highly urbanized areas. But other species, including some that were previously common, are becoming harder and harder to find. As scientists work to understand bee decline, it is important to identify the unique roles that native bees play, and to identify threats specific to them. One in every three bites of food we eat is made possible by bees. They pollinate almonds, apples, blueberries, squash, tomatoes and many other popular crops. They also pollinate alfalfa, which we feed to farm animals, so they support the meat component of our diet too.We need bees for food security and to maintain healthy ecosystems. Bees pollinate flowering trees and wildflowers, which in turn provide food and homes for other animals and improve water, air and soil quality. Along with honey bees, wild bees are also vital for crop pollination. Research has shown that the presence of wild bees increases yields across many types of crops . They often are more efficient at pollinating crops native to North America than honey bees. For example, a honey bee would have to visit a blueberry flowerfour times to deposit the same amount of pollen as a single visit from a bumble bee queen.

Mosquito explosion in southwest Russia makes it ‘impossible’ to leave home – Torrential rains and abnormally warm weather have spurred a mosquito infestation that has terrorized the Voronezh region in southwest Russia.Photos and video show the bloodsucking insects swarming yards, coating cars and surrounding homes.This report from the Russian media company RT is reminiscent of the Alfred Hitchcock horror movie “The Birds”:People are suffering from itchy bites and swelling and say that it’s “impossible” to leave their homes. Children are refusing to go to school as they are immediately “eaten alive” by the insects. Even at home people find scant refuge, as the tiny menaces manage to crawl through any crack they can find. Outside is far worse, as roads cannot even be seen through mosquito hordes, according to local media.Vestivrn, another Russian news organization, said (translated from Russian) that their numbers were “unprecedented” and that the insects had “eaten several pigs” that died as a result, although one official was skeptical that mosquitoes were the cause. The mosquito siege began around May 6 “with the volume of insects attributed to the recent flooding of local rivers,” reported the Epoch Times. Temperatures have also been much higher than normal. Mosquitoes thrive in warm, wet environments.

Giant predatory worms invaded France, but scientists just noticed them – WaPo – When Jean-Lou Justine received the first photograph of a giant worm with a head like a shovel, the biologist was astounded. Hammerhead flatworms, which grow to a foot or more in length, do not belong in European vegetable gardens. “We do not have that in France,” said Justine, a professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. The predatory worms are native to Asia, where they happily gobble up earthworms under a warmer sun. The gardener who took the first photo, an amateur naturalist named Pierre Gros, emailed Justine a second picture a week later. It was of a completely different species of giant worm. When Gros sent a third photograph, of a third species, Justine thought the images must be a prank: “The man is bringing back worms from his travels, and he pretends he finds them in his garden!” But Gros was neither prankster nor international worm-smuggler. Gros and Justine, co-authors of a new report published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ, had stumbled upon an alien predator in the soil beneath their feet. For the better part of two decades, several species of flatworm have made a home in metropolitan France.“The species are cryptic and soil-dwelling so can be easily overlooked, which often explains their inadvertent shipment round the world,” said entomologist Archie Murchie of Britain’s Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute, who was not involved with the study. Worms like these are spreading and will continue to spread, he warned, especially “with increased global trade.” Biologists knew that smaller worms, which eat escargot snails, had made their way to France. But until recently, Justine, an expert in parasites and worms called nematodes, had no idea France was under a hammerhead invasion.

Swaths of native forest near Great Barrier Reef set to be bulldozed – Federal officials plan to back the destruction of almost 2000 hectares of pristine Queensland forest in a move that threatens the Great Barrier Reef and undermines a $500 million Turnbull government rescue package for the natural wonder. A draft report by the Department of the Environment and Energy recommends that the government allow the mass vegetation clearing at Kingvale Station on Cape York Peninsula. The area to be bulldozed is almost three times the size of the combined central business districts of Sydney and Melbourne. Old growth forest in the vicinity of Kingvale Station, near rivers that flow into the Great Barrier Reef. Photo courtesy Australian Conservation Foundation. The draft recommendation comes despite the department conceding the native forest is likely to contain endangered species, and despite expert warnings that runoff caused by the clearing may damage the reef. Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg will make a final ruling on the proposal. It will test his long-stated willingness to protect the reef from poor water quality, which is triggered by land clearing. Last month the government announced it would spend more than $500 million to protect the reef, including $201 million to improve water quality through better farming practices. AdvertisementA rejection of the Kingvale proposal would put Mr Frydenberg at odds with Queensland Coalition MPs who have vocally backed the plan. Kingvale Station owner Scott Harris wants to clear the land – mostly eucalypt forest and melaleuca swamplands – to make way for cropping and other activities. The former Queensland Newman government approved the work in April 2014. However the federal government determined that the clearing must also be assessed under Commonwealth laws.

CSIRO planning US military funded genetic extinction experiments in Western Australia – A raft of emails obtained through a Freedom of Information request (The Gene Drive Files) reveal that CSIRO and University of Adelaide scientists are part of a US military funded global network researching a risky new genetic modification (GM) technique referred to as gene drives. The group have already identified six potential islands in Western Australia where they intend to use the technique to drive local mice populations to extinction.Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA – the US military’s research arm) is contributing US$6.4M to fund the Genetic Biocontrol of Invasive Rodents Program (GBIRd). This is being spread between the CSIRO, the University of Adelaide, several US research institutes and the NGO Island Conservation.The release of gene drives could have potentially catastrophic ecological consequences. Even gene drive proponents have now admitted that the gene drives are too risky to be released into the environment. We find it incredible that CSIRO and its GBIRd partners are already considering the environmental release of this technology.”Gene drives are a new and highly controversial technique that can force altered genetic traits through successive generations. The GBIRd scientists intend to use the technique to develop mice that only produce male offspring in order to drive local populations to extinction. Mice are notorious for stowing away on boats, which is how they have spread globally. One of the proposed release sites for the gene drive mice is Boullanger Island – a popular tourist destination just 1km from the mainland. There is no way that a release of gene drive mice there could be geographically contained. Most rodents are considered keystone species in their ecological communities as herbivores, seed eaters and seed dispersers, and prey for many carnivores. Many other species depend on them for survival. The ecological impacts if mice are driven to extinction in their natural habitats in Europe and Asia could be catastrophic.

Wyoming Votes to Allow First Grizzly Bear Hunt in 40 Years – The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission voted unanimously Wednesday to approve the largest grizzly bear hunt in the lower 48 states, despite opposition from environmental groups, tribal nations and wildlife photographers, The Washington Post reported .The vote comes less than a month after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service affirmed its June 2017 decision to delist grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYE) from protections under the Endangered SpeciesAct and pass management of the bears’ population off to the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. This will be the first grizzly bear hunt in Wyoming since 1974.”Allowing a trophy hunt of these majestic animals – the second-slowest mammal to reproduce in North America – so soon after they lost Endangered Species protections does nothing to build public confidence in state management of grizzly bears,” Sierra Clubrepresentative Bonnie Rice said in a statement reported by The Washington Post.There is still a chance the hunt will not take place. A U.S. District Court judge will decide several lawsuits challenging the delisting of the GYE bears this summer.If the bears remain delisted, the hunt will occur this fall and will allow hunters to kill one female or 10 male bears in a “demographic monitoring area” of prime habitat and an additional 12 male or female bears in a more “human dominated landscape,” for a potential kill of 22 bears. Montana decided not to allow a bear hunt in February and Idaho has permitted a hunt of one male bear, also this fall. More than 200 tribal nations opposed the hunt, saying the bears are sacred to their culture, and want to move the bears to tribal lands. One-hundred and seven wildlife photographers and 75 scientists also wrote letters condemning the hunt to Wyoming’s Republican Governor Matt Mead.

Trump Admin. Wants to Reinstate ‘Cruel’ Hunting Tactics in Alaska, Conservation Groups Say – The Trump administration has proposed new regulations to overturn an Obama-era rule that protects iconicpredators in Alaska’s national preserves . Wildlife protection organizations condemned the move, as it would allow hunters to go to den sites to shoot wolf pups and bear cubs, lure and kill bears over bait, hunt bears with dogs and use motor boats to shoot swimming caribou. Such hunting methods were banned on federal lands in 2015 that are otherwise permitted by the state. The proposed rule, posted Tuesday in the federal register and pushed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke , “would remove a regulatory provision issued by the National Park Service (NPS) in 2015 that prohibited certain sport hunting practices that are otherwise permitted by the State of Alaska.” Members of the public are invited to post comments on the proposed rule by 11:59 p.m. EST on July 23, 2018. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game was “pleased to see the National Park Service working to better align federal regulations with State of Alaska hunting and trapping regulations,” Maria Gladziszewski, the state agency’s deputy director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation, said in an email to The Associated Press . Safari Club International, a hunting advocacy group, backed the Interior’s new proposal. Zinke, an avid hunter himself, created his International Wildlife Conservation Council that is mainly comprised of trophy hunters and members of the Safari Club, who advocate for federal programs that support hunting.

110 Million Americans May Be Drinking PFAS-Contaminated Water – More than 1,500 drinking water systems across the country may be contaminated with the nonstick chemicals PFOA and PFOS, and similar fluorine-based chemicals , a new EWG analysis shows. This groundbreaking finding comes the same day the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA ) is convening a summit to address PFAS chemicals – a class of toxic chemicals that includes PFOA and PFOS, and that are linked to cancer, thyroid disease, weakened immunity and other health problems.From 2013 to 2015, the EPA mandated national testing for PFAS chemicals in public water systems, yet the full results of this testing, funded by taxpayers, were never made public. Water utilities with the highest concentrations of PFAS chemicals have been publicly identified . But the names of utilities with detectable PFAS contamination below the so-called reporting levels of 10 to 90 parts per trillion, or ppt, were not released. Millions of people were not informed that their water supply is contaminated with these chemicals.The additional water systems with PFAS contamination likely serve tens of millions of people, and it is essential for people in those communities to be informed of this hazard. Eurofins Eaton Analytical, which analyzed a third of the nationwide water samples, found that 28 percent of the water utilities it tested contained PFAS chemicals at concentrations at or above 5 ppt. The percentage of samples with PFAS detections nearly doubled when the laboratory analyzed down to 2.5 ppt. Based on this data, EWG’s analysis suggests that up to 110 million Americans could have PFAS in their water.This new research greatly exceeds EWG’s previous estimate of 16 million Americans being exposed to PFAS-contaminated water, as reported in the EWG’s national Tap Water Database . Independent scientific assessments find that the safe level of exposure to PFAS chemicals is about 1 ppt – significantly below the reporting level set by the EPA.

EPA Guard Shoves Reporter, Multiple News Outlets Blocked From Water Pollution Event – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) blocked reporters from CNN, E&E News and the Associated Press from attending a summit about water pollution on Tuesday, and a security guard reportedly grabbed a journalist by the shoulders and “forcibly” shoved her out of the building.”Guards barred an AP reporter from passing through a security checkpoint inside the building. When the reporter asked to speak to an EPA public-affairs person, the security guards grabbed the reporter by the shoulders and shoved her forcibly out of the EPA building,” the AP said Tuesday.EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox told the journalists they had not been invited to the summit and there was not space for them. Wilcox told NBC News the agency provided them with a livestream. He claimed the AP reporter threatened “negative coverage” if she was not allowed to attend the event, but also that he was “unaware of the individual situation that has been reported.”A climate reporter for Politico tweeted Tuesday that a security guard joked about how he told an AP reporter she could not film as she was being kicked out of the agency building. A journalist from E&E confirmed that his outlet as well as CNN and the AP had been barred from attending the event. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt convened the meeting about water contaminants perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl after facing fierce criticism last week for preventing the release of a major study examining their impacts on waterways throughout the country. Published emails revealed the agency and the Trump White House feared a “public relations nightmare” in response to widespread contamination from the chemicals, which are commonly used in Teflon, firefighting foam, and by the Department of Defense for exercises at U.S. bases, and have been tied to thyroid and pregnancy issues as well as some cancers.

Flint congressman’s staff reportedly barred from EPA event on water contamination – The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is having a rough week. On Tuesday, it was revealed that reporters from the Associated Press, CNN, and E&E News were barred from entering an EPA summit on toxic chemicals. When an AP reporter tried to enter the summit, she was reportedly “forcibly” removed. Though the EPA eventually relented and allowed press to cover the event, it was too late to stop an afternoon of negative coverage.Wednesday did not prove any better for the agency’s image. In a tweet, Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI) said the EPA barred his staff from attending a summit on water contamination.My staff was not allowed to attend today’s @EPA #PFAS summit, and I represent communities affected by drinking water contamination. @EPAScottPruitt‘s lack of transparency and willingness to deny access to Members of Congress and the media is deeply troubling. https://t.co/TK6ojDQ77o – Rep. Dan Kildee (@RepDanKildee) May 23, 2018 What’s especially concerning about this move is that Kildee represents Flint, Michigan, the site of an ongoing toxic water crisis. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to EPA officials that Flint’s congressional representative would find it necessary to attend an event concerning the very issue plaguing his constituents. The state government recently stopped providing bottled water to the town, arguing that Flint’s water is now safe. This move did not sit well with residents. On Tuesday, Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) office was stormed by 100 protesters who demanded the state begin providing bottled water once again. And as Mother Jones has reported, residents aren’t buying local officials’ claims and scientists are hesitant to agree with the government that the water is safe to drink. Kildee wasn’t the only member of Congress with something to say about the controversy. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) questioned who the EPA was really serving with this event, saying on Twitter that the agency was “more concerned with protecting the EPA chemical summit from the public than it is with protecting the public from harmful chemicals.”

Abandoned landfill threatens health of rural Tennessee residents – A landfill in Camden, Tennessee, approximately 80 miles west of Nashville, was abandoned by its owner last year, leaving a likely candidate for a federal Superfund site and nearby residents facing years of continued exposure to toxic waste.The 42-acre site, nicknamed “Black Mountain” by those who live in the area because of toxic sludge leaking out of the 30-foot-high landfill, was walked away from by Environmental Waste Solutions (EWS) last year after its owner declared bankruptcy.“The landfill is leaking heavy metals including lead and cadmium, which is a very big problem,” Environmental Attorney Elizabeth Murphy told the Tennessean. “Cadmium is dangerous because it causes liver damage.” Murphy is representing residents of Camden in Benton County, one of the poorest counties in the state. With an estimated 2016 population of about 16,000, Benton County’s median family income is just $32,720 while the median household income is $28,679.

Death by slow poisoning – On a Thursday morning at the government primary school in Madhusudankati, a village in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, a gaggle of five-year-olds chatter animatedly in a classroom. It’s a school scene that is as ordinary as it gets, but behind its normalcy lies a disturbing fact: the bodies of these children contain alarming levels of arsenic – a poisonous metalloid that sickens and kills with chronic exposure. Unlike the adults in Madhusudankati though, the children don’t show any symptoms yet. Madhusudankati is a lush green agricultural village about 14 km from the border with Bangladesh and deep inside India’s arsenic territory. About 15 years ago, scientists discovered that the shallow groundwater here had high levels of the mineral: up to 1,000 micrograms (mcg) per litre in places. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) prescribed safe level is 10 mcg per litre. When such water is consumed for years, either directly or through the food chain, the mineral damages organs like the skin, kidneys and lungs. The most visible symptom in early years is a classic blotchy pattern on the skin, a condition called raindrop pigmentation. If people showing such pigmentation don’t switch to safer water, they develop hyperkeratosis – dark crusts on their palms and soles, which can get infected and make it painful to work. Eventually, the skin can turn cancerous. Simultaneously, arsenic can destroy the kidneys and liver tissue, cause conjunctivitis and affect the lungs, just as heavy smoking does. There are few organs that arsenic spares. Today, an estimated 10 million people in nine districts in West Bengal drink arsenic-laden groundwater. It is the worst worldwide case of mass poisoning alongside Bangladesh, which has 40 million people at risk. When West Bengal’s problem first attracted international attention in 1995, a researcher from the University of Colorado compared its scale with the Chernobyl disaster. Today, we know it is worse. But despite the grave warnings from international bodies like the WHO, the West Bengal government has moved excruciatingly slowly to tackle the crisis.

Indian police kill 12 protesting industrial pollution in Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu — Police have killed at least 12 protesters in Tuticorin, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, in a brutal crackdown on mass opposition to a copper smelter that has spewed hazardous industrial waste into the area for decades, causing numerous fatalities.Ten protesters, including two women, were killed Tuesday and more than 60 others injured when police opened fire on a crowd of 20,000 that had defied a government ban on gatherings of more than four people. Yesterday, when opponents of the smelter took to the streets of Tuticorin to denounce Tuesday’s state violence, police again resorted to gunfire, killing a further protester.Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister, the head of the Tamil Nadu regionalist AIADMK, Edappadi Palaniswami, has justified the bloody police repression. “The police,” declared Palaniswami, “had to take action under unavoidable circumstances to protect public life and property.”H. Raja, the national secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu supremacist party that dominates India’s national government, has also endorsed the shooting down of people who were demanding the closure of a facility, owned by a billionaire Indian industrialist, that has wreaked havoc on the lives of the people of Tuticorin, as well as fishermen along a large swathe of India’s south-east coast. The police had “no other option,” claimed Raja, because the protests had “turned into violence.” The AIADMK is a close ally of the BJP, although not formally part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. The killings have provoked revulsion and anger across India. Fearing mass social unrest, the Tamil Nadu state government has ordered all internet access shut down for five days in Thoothukudi (the district in which Tuticorin is situated) and in the neighbouring districts of Tirunelveli and Kanniyakumari.

Experts: “Alarming” drought conditions hit US Southwest – Rivers and watering holes are drying up, popular mountain recreation spots are closing and water restrictions are in full swing as a persistent drought intensifies its grip on pockets of the American Southwest. Climatologists and other experts on Wednesday provided an update on the situation in the Four Corners region – where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet. They say the area is among the hardest hit and there’s little relief expected, and even robust summer rains might not be enough to replenish the soil and ease the fire danger. The region is dealing with exceptional drought – the worst category. That has left farmers, ranchers and water planners bracing for a much different situation than just a year ago when only a fraction of the region was experiencing low levels of dryness. Brian Fuchs, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center in Nebraska, said people are become more aware and more concerned. “We’ve been on this pattern where conditions have dried out, we haven’t seen much relief through last summer or into the winter months and here we are going into the summer of 2018 with over two-thirds of the region already in drought,” he said. “So that’s alarming to say the least.” Portions of the four states are seeing near-record to record dryness. Fuchs explained that some spots have missed out over the last two years on more than 12 inches (30 centimeters) of precipitation – which can add up to as much as a year’s worth of rain under normal conditions. Warmer-than-average temperatures haven’t helped as the soil dries out and water demand increases. With the region’s resources strained, a top federal official has resumed pressure on states in the Southwest to wrap up long-delayed emergency plans for potential shortages on the Colorado River, which serves 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico.

Water shortages to be key environmental challenge of the century, Nasa warns – Water shortages are likely to be the key environmental challenge of this century, scientists from Nasa have warned, as new data has revealed a drying-out of swaths of the globe between the tropics and the high latitudes, with 19 hotspots where water depletion has been dramatic.Areas in northern and eastern India, the Middle East, California and Australia are among the hotspots where overuse of water resources has caused a serious decline in the availability of freshwater that is already causing problems. Without strong action by governments to preserve water the situation in these areas is likely to worsen. Some of these hotspots were previously undocumented or poorly understood: a region in north-western China, in Xinjiang province, has suffered dramatic declines despite receiving normal amounts of rainfall, owing to groundwater depletion from industry and irrigation. The Caspian Sea was also found to be showing strong declines owing to similar forces, which is resulting in a shrinking shoreline. Previously, this change had been attributed to natural variability, but the new report demonstrates it was caused in large part by the diversion and extraction of water from rivers that feed it, for agriculture and industry. This depletion mirrors the well-known fate of the disappearing Aral Sea in the same region: because the Caspian Sea is much bigger it would take millennia to disappear altogether, but its shrinking shoreline and pollution will cause major problems throughout its borderlands. The comprehensive study, the first of its kind, took data from the Nasa Grace (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite mission to track trends in freshwater from 2002 to 2016 across the globe. “What we are witnessing is major hydrologic change. We see for the first time a very distinctive pattern of the wet land areas of the world getting wetter, in the high latitudes and the tropics, and the dry areas in between getting drier,” . “Within the dry areas we see multiple hotspots resulting from groundwater depletion.”

Toxic Algae Blooms Occurring More Often, May Be Caught in Climate Change Feedback Loop – Blooms of harmful algae in the nation’s waters appear to be occurring much more frequently than in the past, increasing suspicions that the warming climate may be exacerbating the problem.The Environmental Working Group (EWG) published newly collected data on Tuesday reporting nearly 300 large blooms since 2010. Last year alone, 169 were reported. While NOAA issues forecasts for harmful algal blooms in certain areas, the advocacy group called its report the first attempt to track the blooms on a nationwide scale.The study comes as scientists have predicted proliferation of these blooms as the climate changes, and amid increasing attention by the news media and local politicians to the worst cases.Just as troubling, these blooms could not only worsen with climate change, but also contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. EWG based its study on news reports and before-and-after satellite images that show the expansion of the blooms. Though the rapid increase in the annual numbers might reflect more thorough observations and reporting in recent years, Craig Cox, who focuses on agriculture for EWG, said the numbers may still be on the low side. In 2014, the news was especially urgent in Toledo, where a toxic algal bloom in Lake Erie forced health officials to declare the water unsafe for drinking and bathing. Harmful algae blooms had been common in the western part of Lake Erie from the 1960s through the 1980s, but they had diminished with better pollution controls – until about a decade ago,according to NOAA. Now the blooms – thick undulating mats of green – have become an annual occurrence there. The root cause of the problem lies mainly in agricultural runoff that contains phosphorus, which encourages algal growth. The agricultural industry in Ohio and elsewhere has long been aware of the problem. Joe Cornely, a spokesman for the Ohio Farm Bureau, said the bureau had been looking into it for years. But when it came to legislative and regulatory measures, Cornely said: “You’ve heard the old saying, ‘You can have it fast or right.’ We want it to be right.”

Adios, La Niña – NOAA – The La Niña event that overtook the tropical Pacific this past winter is officially over, according to the latest update from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. La Niña’s signature of heavier-than-usual rainfall in the western part of the basin has tapered off, and the cool surface waters in the central part of the basin are dissipating. This animation tracks the fall emergence, winter peak, and spring decay of the ocean half of the La Niña climate phenomenon. It shows monthly sea surface temperatures compared to average (1981-2010) from August 2017 through April 2018. Places where temperatures were up to 9 degrees cooler than average are blue; places where they were up to 9 degrees warmer than average are orange and red. Why do U.S. climate forecasters pay so much attention to a pattern that operates in the remote tropical Pacific? Because the Pacific is the world’s biggest ocean, and disruptions to its climate have a long reach. The seesawing changes in tropical rainfall, winds, and ocean temperature that accompany La Niña and its warm-phase partner, El Niño, trigger a cascade of potentially predictable impacts on seasonal climate in the United States and beyond.

Weather perceptions linked to belief in climate change, study shows — According to new research out of Utah State University, perceiving local weather as warmer or colder than normal is strongly connected to our pre-existing beliefs in climate change. Through collaborations with the University of Bergen and the Norwegian Citizen Panel, Howe collected survey data from a representative group of Norway citizens to understand the relationship between belief in climate change, and perceptions of whether the temperature and precipitation patterns deviated from normal.”We also found a pretty strong relationship between what people thought about global climate change more broadly and what they said they had experienced in terms of the weather at the local level,” said Peter Howe, an assistant professor of geography at Utah State University.”So, people who said they think that climate change is happening and caused mostly by humans – which is consistent with the scientific consensus on the issue – were more likely to say that the winter that they had experienced was warmer than normal,” he said. “The people who said that human-caused climate change wasn’t happening or that humans weren’t primarily the cause were significantly less likely to say that they had experienced a warmer-than-normal winter.” A larger implication of Howe’s research is that people’s opinions about climate change can be a barrier to them responding and adapting to direct climate change impacts.

Death toll climbs in Karachi heatwave – An intense heatwave across south Asia has killed dozens of people with sustained temperatures in excess of 40C (104F) coinciding with power cuts and Ramadan, when many Muslims avoid eating or drinking water. At least 65 people have died in Karachi in recent days according to the charitable organisation that runs the central morgue in the Pakistani port city, as volunteers handed out water to labourers and others working outside in temperatures as high as 44C. Local media reports claimed the death toll could have exceeded 100 in the sprawling megacity of 15 million, where high temperatures are exacerbated by an absence of green space, estimated to make up just 7% of the urban area. Authorities in Karachi have not confirmed the death toll but urged people to stay indoors and keep drinking water. Parts of the city have also been suffering from power cuts, particularly early in the morning when more people than usual have been waking to eat before sunrise in line with Ramadan fasting rituals. During the annual month-long rite, Muslims refrain from eating or drinking anything including water between sunrise and sunset, though children, older people, the sick and pregnant women usually do not participate. The Edhi Foundation, which runs Karachi’s central morgue, said most of the dead in the city were working-class people from poorer neighbourhoods, including children and elderly people.

Mekong River nations face the hidden costs of China’s dams– Sam In, a 48-year-old rice farmer from Cambodia’s northeastern province of Stung Treng, never knew that people paid for water until he was forced to move out of his home on the banks of a Mekong River tributary two years ago. Along with hundreds of other households, Sam In and his 10-member family were relocated to make way for a dam development that left his entire village, Sre Sronok, underwater. Now they live in a newly created village where government-funded houses with identical blue rooftops are neatly lined up on a spacious, dusty plot of land. Instead of a river, a national road runs alongside the village. “We have to buy the water we use for rice farming, drinking, cooking and bathing. It all used to come from the river, for free.” The government provided the family with 2 hectares of land to use for rice farming. But with no proper irrigation system or decent farming equipment to plow the land, which were promised by the government when they agreed to relocate, productivity is less than half that of the fields in their old village. Those fields, about 20km away, were submerged in September 2017 when the floodgates of the Lower Sesan 2 Dam were closed to create a 33,000-hectare water reservoir. Beyond the problems Sam In and his neighbors are experiencing, the dam construction is expected to result in a sharply reduced supply of fish, a change in the water flow and a reduced riverbed sediments that provide crucial nutrients to the rice crop in Vietnam and other Mekong countries. A 2012 study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that the dam would threaten more than 50 fish species.

New Orleans area levee system ‘high risk,’ and ‘minimally acceptable’, Corps says — Two different reviews of the New Orleans area levee system by the Army Corps of Engineers raise troubling questions about the ability of much of the system to withstand surges caused by a major storm nearly 13 years after Hurricane Katrina. The reviews also question the ability of local levee districts to keep up with costly maintenance between storms, as required to remain eligible for theNational Flood Insurance Program, records show.One of the reviews, completed in 2011, gave the 350-mile levee system the second worst classification – “Urgent (Unsafe or Potentially Unsafe)” — in the corps’ Levee Safety Action Classification system. While preliminary because post-Katrina improvements were not finished, the classification remains accurate to this date, a corps New Orleans District spokesman confirmed recently.The documents indicate New Orleans’ levee system is well-designed for a storm surge with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year, the so-called 100-year event. But the poor ranking reflects a stark reality: much of the metro area’s population is at risk of levee failures during stronger, less frequent storms — 200-year events or stronger. Such a disaster could kill nearly 1,000 people if storm surge overtopped east bank levees, the corps estimated, and almost 3,000 if those levees broke before being overtopped, unleashing a furious wall of water similar to what some areas faced during Katrina. The classification names used by the corps to assess levee risk have been changed since the initial ranking, so New Orleans’ system is now ranked as “high risk”, but the reasons for the rankings and the recommendations for local levee systems remain the same.

Here’s Why Seas Are Rising. Somebody Remind the Wall Street Journal. – Union of Concerned Scientists -On May 15, the Wall Street Journal published a commentary by Fred Singer which argued that rising sea levels are unrelated to global warming, that they won’t be much of a problem, and that there’s little we can do about them. Singer, whose history of disingenuous attacks on science on behalf of the tobacco, fossil fuel and other industries goes back nearly 50 years, is wrong on all counts.Singer acknowledges that “sea levels are in fact rising at an accelerating rate,” but then argues that “the cause of the trend is a puzzle.” Perhaps Singer is puzzled as to the causes, but science is crystal clear about this. Worse, we know that without strong policy to limit CO2 emissions, the rising water will continue to accelerate, inundating all the coastal cities of the world.Fundamentally, there are three reasons why the ocean is rising at an accelerating rate

1. Adding heat to things causes them to change temperature (1st Law of Thermodynamics)
2. Seawater volume increases with temperature (thermal expansion)
3. Adding a volume of water to the oceans from melting land ice causes them to increase in height (conservation of water)

All three of these principles (conservation of energy and mass, and the thermal expansion of water) are bedrock principles of physics which have been established for centuries and can easily be verified by direct observation.The effect of CO2 on the absorption of radiation has been understood for 160 years.

Government Sea Level Rise Report Released after Charges of Censorship – A high-profile case of alleged scientific censorship ended Friday when the National Park Service published a long-delayed report outlining how rising seas could damage parks across the country.The report includes references to mankind’s role in climate change – something federal officials had tried scrubbing from the study, according to documents released under a state open records request. The study had languished under administrative review since early 2017.Although National Park Service officials say the report was handled properly, the study’s lead author says the administrative review process has morphed from a “rubber stamp” into a tool for the government to suppress inconvenient science.“Censorship is a good word for that,” said Maria Caffrey, the University of Colorado, Boulder, researcher who led the study. She plans to file a scientific integrity complaint.The alleged interference, first reported by the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, attracted attention from Democratic lawmakers and the inspector general for the Interior Department, which includes the National Park Service. The affair also raised pressure on the Interior Department at a time when Secretary Ryan Zinke was defending political staff for reviewing research prior to publication. Zinke said no political staff was involved in editing the report, and he wanted an investigation into how journalists obtained the draft report before it was given to agency headquarters (Climatewire, April 12). A National Park Service spokesman said the only unusual part of the study’s review was the press’s involvement.

Plastic Killed Most Sperm Whales Found Dead in Greek Waters Since 2001 – More than a third of the sperm whales found dead in the eastern Mediterranean since 2001 were killed byplastic debris, researchers from the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute in Athens found.Necropsies on nine of the 24 dead whales found in Greek waters revealed that their stomachs were filled with large amounts of plastic, The Times reported on the Pelagos analysis.Marine biologists studying the carcasses said the animals likely suffered slow and “excruciating” deaths from the blockage. One juvenile male found off the coast Mykonos swallowed more than a hundred items of plastic, including single-use plastic bags . One of the bags came from a shop in Thessaloniki, a city 500 miles away. “The young whale suffered an excruciating death,” Pelgaos director Alexandros Frantzis told The Times. “We alone are accountable.””It’s alarming but not surprising,” Frantzis added. “The trend is bound to get worse because the amount of plastic waste in the Aegean Sea is growing.”Sperm whales are considered endangered in the Mediterranean. Cetaceans in these waters face threats from high levels of ship traffic, pollution, human density, tourism and fishing, Lifegatenoted. Plastic waste has also become a problem in this marine region. A sperm whale found dead in southern Spain in February was killed after ingesting 64 pounds of mostly plastic garbage. Experts determined the whale was unable to expel or digest the trash, causing it to die from peritonitis, or an infection of the abdomen.

Lava spatter hits Hawaii man and shatters his leg in first known injury from Kilauea volcano – Hawaii officials on Saturday reported the first known injury related to heightened volcanic activity from Kilauea after a Big Island resident was hit by lava spatter while standing on a third-floor balcony. That person, identified only as a homeowner on Noni Farms Road, shattered his leg from his shin to his foot when lava spatter struck him, a spokeswoman for the Hawaii County Mayor Harry Kim, according to Reuters.Lava spatters “can weigh as much as a refrigerator, and even small pieces of spatter can kill,” the spokeswoman told Reuters.Neither the mayor’s office nor the Hawaii County Civil Defense Center immediately responded to requests for additional information early Sunday morning. Noni Farms Road is a residential road that lies to the east of the Leilani Estates neighborhood in Pahoa, where the majority of the attention has been focused ever since Kilauea’s volcanic activity increased dramatically three weeks ago. To date, at least 23 fissures have formed along a northeast-southwest line in the rift zone, most in the Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens neighborhoods. Lava emerging from the vents has destroyed dozens of homes.Late Saturday, a fast-flowing stream of lava pouring from one of the active fissures also reached Highway 137, which hugs the island’s eastern coast.The lava shut down about a four-mile section of the highway, between Kamaili and Pohoiki roads, blocking one of the main escape routes for the area’s coastal residents. Officials said late Saturday that the lava had entered the ocean, and advised all people to avoid the area because of a new hazard: laze.Laze occurs when hot lava meets the ocean, sending a plume of hydrochloric acid and steam – along with fine glass particles – into the air.Laze plumes travel with the wind and can shift directions without warning, the county civil defense agency said.

Hawaii volcano poses a new threat: Acid from Kilauea’s lava, called ‘laze,’ pouring into the ocean – After destroying dozens of houses, lava from the Kilauea volcano has now reached the ocean, presenting a new health threat to Hawaii residents.Civil defense authorities on Hawaii posted a warning to stay clear of any lava stream that is flowing into the ocean. When the super hot lava hits the cooler sea water, it produces what is called “laze,” hydrochloric acid steam that pours into the air along with fine particles of glass. “Health hazards of laze include lung, eye and skin irritation,” the agency said in a message to residents. “Be aware that the laze plume travels with the wind and can change direction without warning.”A dispatch Sunday from Civil Defense said two lava flows have reached the ocean, including at least one near MacKenzie State Park. As a result, Highway 137 is closed between Kamaili Road and Pohoiki Road. The threat comes as one of the first injuries as a direct result of lava flows was reported, a man who suffered a “serious” injury from lava splatter while sitting on the porch of his home, according to theHonolulu Star Advertiser. “I heard the injury was quite bad, serious to his leg,” the newspaper quoted Civil Defense Administrator Talmadge Magno as saying.More than 20 fissures have opened since the volcano’s latest activity began May 3 and are being tracked. Yet, with more than 2,000 residents under evacuation, life largely goes on as normal on much of the Big Island. The tourism industry is still in full swing and the island’s airports remain open.

Ocean, jungle explosions new risks from Hawaii eruption (Reuters) – Lava from Hawaii’s erupting Kilauea volcano is exploding as it pours into the ocean, shooting rock fragments that are a danger to boaters. Inland, where molten rock is burning through jungle, methane explosions are hurling boulders while toxic gas is reaching some of the highest levels seen in recent times. These were new risks geologists warned of on Tuesday as Kilauea’s 19-day eruption showed no sign of easing, with repeated explosions at its summit and fountains of lava up to 160 feet (50 m) from giant cracks or fissures on its flank. Lava edged towards a geothermal power plant on Tuesday after destroying an old warehouse near the facility, County of Hawaii Civil Defense said. Workers at the closed Puna Geothermal Venture, which provided around 25 percent of electricity on Hawaii’s Big Island, worked to cap the last of three pressurized wells to reduce the risk of an uncontrolled release of toxic gases should they be inundated by lava. The race at the site marked the latest challenge facing authorities during what geologists call an unprecedented, simultaneous eruption at Kilauea’s summit and from giant fissures 25 miles (40 km) down its eastern side. “Fissures near Puna Geothermal Venture are active and producing lava slowly flowing onto the property,” Civil Defense said in a statement. “This activity has destroyed the former Hawaii Geothermal Project site,” it said referring to the warehouse. An explosive eruption at the Kilauea summit at 3:45 a.m. (9:45 a.m. EST) sent ash to a height of 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) over Hawaii’s Big Island, civil defense said. Communities southwest of the summit were dusted with ash, said National Weather Service meteorologist John Bravender. On the volcano’s east flank, nearly two-dozen fissures are producing 15,000 tons a day of toxic sulfur dioxide, a level “much higher than seen in recent times,” Bravender said.

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano is producing eerie blue flames only visible at night, and could cause deadly explosions – The Kilauea volcano in Hawaii is behind a new, potentially deadly phenomenon – eerie blue fire streaming up from below the ground.The flames, which can only be seen well at night, are caused by methane buildups, a by-product of the lava flows which have been enveloping the area around the volcano since it erupted last week on the Big Island.Photos published on Wednesday by the US Geological Survey show the flames spouting from cracks in the pavement in the Leilani Estates neighborhood, which has been worst affected by the surges of lava.The methane gas is produced when lava rolls over trees and other plant life, and burns it underground, giving off the gas.It then flows beneath the surface before bursting up when it finds an outlet, such as cracks in the ground caused by the recent seismic activity. The burning gas itself is hot, but not dangerous beyond that. However, authorities warned that if there is an underground build-up of the gas which is suddenly ignited, it can cause a powerful explosion, and toss chunks of rock several feet away, potentially injuring anybody it hits.

Did Fracking Cause The Hawaii Volcano Eruption? – Reuters reports the eruption in Hawaii is entering a new, more violent phase with lava exploding as it pours into the ocean, shooting rock fragments that are a danger to boaters. Inland, where molten rock is burning through jungle, methane explosions are hurling boulders while toxic gas is reaching some of the highest levels seen in recent times.On the volcano’s east flank, nearly two-dozen fissures are producing 15,000 tons a day of toxic sulfur dioxide, a level “much higher than seen in recent times,” Bravender said. Additionally, Reuters notes that the race at the Puna Geothermal Venture site marked the latest challenge facing authorities during what geologists call an unprecedented, simultaneous eruption at Kilauea’s summit and from giant fissures 25 miles (40 km) down its eastern side. “Fissures near Puna Geothermal Venture are active and producing lava slowly flowing onto the property,” Civil Defense said in a statement. “This activity has destroyed the former Hawaii Geothermal Project site,” Many are asking, why now, why so suddenly, why such an “unprecedented, simultaneous” eruption? John Rappoport asks the uncomfortable question – Did fracking cause the Hawaii volcano eruption?On the Big Island of Hawaii, where the Kilauea volcano has explosively erupted, there is a geothermal energy plant. It is the Puna Geothermal Venture (PGV) Plant, in Puna.There is a long-running debate about whether PGV is fracking. The debate may be a matter of terminology, because in the geothermal process, as hawaiifracking.com reports, “…the drilling and the injection of cold water into hot rocks used in geothermal energy plants does fracture the rocks, which can induce earthquakes and through contamination of the atmosphere and water tables can affect our health and safety.”Whether deep injection of fluid aims to capture oil, gas, or heat (geothermal), the beginning stage of the process is the same.Earthquakes induced by this water-injection could obviously trigger a volcano.So, on the Big Island of Hawaii, where there is a massive volcanic eruption underway, there is a geothermal plant, PGV. How close to the volcano is PGV?The Washington Post, May 12: “Long a concern for residents and the target of lawsuits challenging its placement ON AN ACTIVE VOLCANO, the Puna Geothermal Venture (PGV) is a major safety issue [i.e., chemicals stored at PGV] in the wake of the eruptions and earthquakes that have shaken the Big Island for days, government officials say.” (emphasis added)

Trump dials back Obama policy asking agencies to reduce emissions | TheHill: President Trump late Thursday replaced an executive order signed by former President Obama that sought to reduce federal agencies’ energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. The revocation came as part of a late-night executive order that instructs agencies to set their own goals for efficiency and “prioritize actions that reduce waste, cut costs, enhance the resilience of Federal infrastructure and operations, and enable more effective accomplishment of its mission.” Obama signed the original order in 2015, with a goal of reducing the federal government’s greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent in a decade. It asked agencies to reduce buildings’ energy use by 2.5 percent per year, use clean energy for 25 percent of their energy needs and shrink water use by 36 percent.Obama saw the measure as a key part of his pledge to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent to 28 percent by 2030. But Trump has dismantled Obama’s environmental and climate agenda piece by piece, including major regulations and the emissions-cut pledge. Trump’s new order, signed Thursday, only asks agencies to set their own goals, and to track their progress toward them, replacing the prescriptive targets in the Obama order. It also directs the heads of the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Management and Budget, both White House offices, to work to streamline the various energy and environmental requirements agencies must follow, in an attempt to make compliance more efficient.

Climate scientists warn about “methane time bomb” — A new article published by the Centre for Research on Globalization, titled “The Methane Time Bomb and the Future of the Biosphere,” presents evidence that the current emission of carbon threatens to melt the large polar ice caps, leading to tens of meters of sea level rise and the disappearance of species at a rate two orders of magnitude higher than without recent human actions. Dr. Andrew Glikson states in his abstract, “Having sent young generations to kill and die in wars, the powers that be are now presiding over the greatest mass extinction of nature since 66 million years ago,” a reference to the event that caused dinosaurs to go extinct. According to Glikson, methane is the most potent common greenhouse gas, and there are many hundreds of billions of tons stored in Arctic permafrost, lakes, shallow seas, and sediments. This methane has accumulated as part of the unoxidized organic matter present in such features since the Arctic glaciation that occurred approximately 2.6 million years ago. This methane reservoir, which also exists in tropical bogs, may have catastrophic effects on the biosphere upon its release.The global carbon project has released data showing that up to 1,400 billion metric tons of carbon on land and 16,000 billion metric tons in the oceans will potentially be released in the near future. This much carbon, which would be emitted in the form of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide or methane, would cause a significant rise in temperatures and widespread melting and defrosting of the polar ice sheets. This possibility comes from the combustion of fossil fuels and is further compounded by coal seam gas drilling, which perforates the earth’s crust in several parts of the world and further releases huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere. Glikson notes that even a small percentage of this carbon released into the atmosphere as methane, which has 25 to 75 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, may raise the atmospheric greenhouse concentration of carbon to the point that it leads to further extensive melting of the large ice sheets, major sea level rise, and a mass extinction event rivaling the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum that occurred approximately 56 million years ago.

Pruitt moves to rescind regulations inspired by West, Texas explosion that killed 15 – Sometime before 7:30 p.m. on April 17, 2013, in the small town of West, Tex., a fire broke out at the West Fertilizer Company plant. Twenty minutes after the fire started, the plant exploded – so powerfully that it registered as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale. A total of 15 people died in the blast, including the 12 volunteer first responders. Two hundred sixty people were injured, and 150 buildings in the vicinity were damaged. Half of them, including two schools, had to be demolished. Arson caused the fire, federal investigators concluded three years later. But 80,000 to 100,000 pounds of unsafely stored fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate was the source of the disastrous explosion. The fatal blast prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to make serious changes to regulations about how companies store dangerous flammable chemicals and how they develop risk-management plans. The new rules were set to take effect in June 2017, but they were held up by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt after he took office. Now Pruitt wants to rescind most of the safety regulations, saying that a lot of them imposed “unnecessary regulatory burdens” on the chemical industry. Pruitt’s proposed changes, signed Thursday, are subject to public comment. “The rule proposes to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens, address the concerns of stakeholders and emergency responders on the ground, and save Americans roughly $88 million a year,” Pruitt said in a statement. The bulk of the claimed savings would come from getting rid of a rule requiring owners of a chemical plant to evaluate options for safer technology and procedures that would mitigate hazards, according to an EPA report. He also seeks to rescind rules requiring companies to conduct a “root-cause analysis” after a “catastrophic” chemical release or an incident that might have caused one and to perform a third-party compliance audit after an accident at a plant or when conditions are discovered that could lead to an accidental release of chemicals. Pruitt’s move to dismantle these regulations is part of a broader push to scrap Obama-era environmental rules.

California will require solar panels on all new homes. That’s not necessarily a good thing. – David Roberts – The California Energy Commission (CEC) recently voted 5-0 to add some new provisions to the state’s building code. Among them is the requirement that as of 2020, all new house and multi-family residences of three stories or fewer, along with all major renovations, must be built with solar panels.Where solar is not suitable, homeowners must have access to a community solar project or receive efficiency upgrades that compensate. (There are some exceptions for buildings in highly shaded areas.)California is currently adding 113,000 housing units a year, and that number is rising. Right now only about 15 percent of them are built with solar, so this is a big boost to the residential solar industry. The CEC also boosted standards for insulation, air conditioning, water heaters, and much more. It’s all part of California’s mandate for new homes to be “net-zero energy” – to produce as much energy as they consume – by 2020, with all commercial construction to follow by 2030. Solar on most new houses! This might seem like an obviously good thing. Solar is great; solar panels are cool; California is leading the climate resistance. But among energy nerds, the mandate has caused much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth. They’ve been debating it all week on Twitter – on one hand, on the other; by now there are so many hands that I must confess to paralyzing ambivalence.So let’s walk through some of the pros and cons and see if we can draw some kind of conclusion.

Solar and wind are coming. And the power sector isn’t ready. – The US electricity system is at an extremely sensitive and uncertain juncture. More and more indicators point toward a future in which wind and solar power play a large role. But that future is not locked in. It still depends in large part on policies and economics that, while moving in the right direction, aren’t there yet. And so the people who manage US electricity markets and infrastructure, who must make decisions with 20-, 30-, even 50-year consequences, are stuck making high-stakes bets in a haze of uncertainty. That uncertainty has increased markedly under the recent Republican administration (somewhat ironically, given its oft-stated goal of “regulatory certainty”). Under President Obama, the feds established a consistent cross-agency push toward clean energy. The long-term trajectory was clear. Now it’s been thrown into doubt. President Trump has embraced fossil fuels, and the owners of struggling coal plants are appealing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for bailouts. Should utilities and market managers bet that the Trumpian revolt against modernity will succeed in slowing the growth of renewable energy? Or should they bet that it’s a passing phase and renewable energy will triumph? A fascinating bit of new research from the energy geeks at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) sheds some light on the stakes involved.

EMP Commission Warns Blackout Of Electricity, Food, Water To Last Year Or Longer With Huge Death Toll – Parts of the United States would be starved of electricity, water, food, internet service and transportation for a year or longer by the smallest electromagnetic pulse attack on the electric grid, according to a newly declassified report from a federal commission.The so-called EMP Commission report said that the threat is real, jeopardizes “modern civilization,” and would set back living conditions to those last seen in the 1800s. And as a result of the chaos, millions would likely die, according to the report titled “Assessing the Threat from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP),” from the recently re-established Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack.“A long-term outage owing to EMP could disable most critical supply chains, leaving the U.S. population living in conditions similar to centuries past, prior to the advent of electric power,” said the July 2017 report provided Secrets. “In the 1800s, the U.S. population was less than 60 million, and those people had many skills and assets necessary for survival without today’s infrastructure. An extended blackout today could result in the death of a large fraction of the American people through the effects of societal collapse, disease, and starvation. While national planning and preparation for such events could help mitigate the damage, few such actions are currently underway or even being contemplated,” added the executive summary.

Air Pollution Near Power Plants Tied to Premature Births – Closing coal- and oil-fired power plants is associated with a reduction in preterm births in the surrounding region, researchers report.Scientists counted the number of preterm babies born in regions surrounding eight power plants before and after their closings from 2001 to 2011. The study is in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Based on the mother’s home address, the researchers looked at preterm birthrates within three, six and 12 miles of each plant in the year before and the year after closing. There were 57,005 births, 28,083 before the plants closed. Air pollution levels after closing decreased to an average of four tons of nitrogen oxides per year from 177 tons before. The prevalence of preterm birth decreased significantly near power plants after they closed, with larger decreases in women who lived closer to the plants. For those living within three miles of the plants, the preterm birthrate was 5.1 percent after closing compared with 7.0 percent before. “This is closer to a causal effect than in some previous studies,” said the lead author, Joan A. Casey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “Here we have a natural experiment that can effectively randomize women to different levels of air pollution, something we can’t do ethically under other circumstances.”

Contaminated Fukushima Water Storage Tanks “Close To Capacity”, TEPCO Admits – The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it’s also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum, a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima. The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo – and it’s a miracle it hasn’t run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities. At some point, TEPCO and the government will need to make a difficult decision. Until then, ground water will continue to seep into the ruined reactor, where it becomes contaminated. Afterward, TEPCO can treat the contaminated water to purify it, but they can’t remove the tritium, which is why the supply of water contaminated with tritium continues to grow. As one government official pointed out, Japan can’t simply store the radioactive water forever. As of now, the company should be able to store water until 2020. Efforts have been made to increase storage capacity by constructing bigger tanks when the time comes for replacing the current ones. But a senior official of the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry said, “Operation of tanks is close to its capacity.” TEPCO plans to secure 1.37 million tons of storage capacity by the end of 2020, but it has not yet decided on a plan for after 2021. Akira Ono, chief decommissioning officer of TEPCO, said, “It is impossible to continue to store [treated water] forever.” But after that, Tepco is either going to need to start releasing the tritium water into the ocean (something that has been done by many power plants, but is politically popular in Japan) or find another solution. In fact, an average of 380 trillion becquerels had been annually released into the sea across Japan during the five years before the accident. If the water from Fukushima is diluted to the point that tritium content is only 1 million becquerels per liter, which is more than 10 times higher than the national average for sea release. But if it’s diluted, it can eventually be released. However, an industry report has determined that sea release would be the safest and most efficient option.

New Jersey governor signs nuclear power subsidy bill into law (Reuters) – New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed several legislative initiatives on Wednesday to advance the state’s clean energy goals, including a controversial bill that would subsidize the continued operation of nuclear power plants. The new nuclear law, which could cost about $300 million a year, establishes a Zero Emissions Certificate (ZEC) program to maintain New Jersey’s nuclear energy supply, which contributes close to 40 percent of the state’s electric capacity and is by far its largest source of carbon free energy. Plants seeking to participate in the program would be required, among other things, to demonstrate that they make a significant contribution to New Jersey air quality and are at risk of closure within three years. The four reactors operating in New Jersey are capable of generating over 4,100 megawatts (MW) of electricity. Three are located at the Salem-Hope Creek nuclear plant and are operated by a unit of Public Service Enterprise Group Inc, the state’s biggest power company. One megawatt can power about 1,000 U.S. homes. The other reactor, Oyster Creek, is owned by Exelon Corp, which also owns part of the Salem reactors. Exelon plans to shut Oyster Creek in October 2018 under a long-standing agreement with the state.