Environmental News For The Week Ending 21July 2018

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 normally a Tuesday evening regular post at GEI.

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Bad Bugs: How the White House Is Stoking a World Public Health Crisis — Certainly a dust up with Beijing, Tehran, or Pyongyang is a scary thing to contemplate. But the thing that should also keep people up at night is Washington’s approach to international health organizations and the president’s stubborn refusal to address climate change. Bad bugs are coming, and they are stronger and nastier than they have ever been. A few – like malaria and yellow fever – are ancient nemeses, but they’re increasingly immune to standard drugs and widening their reach behind a warming climate. Others – like Ebola, SARS, MERS, and Zika – are new, exotic, and fearsome. And antibiotic-resistant bacteria threaten to turn the clock back to pre-penicillin days, when a cut could be a death sentence. Trump’s disdain for international agencies and treaties, plus cuts in public health programs and a relaxation of regulations on the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry, could create a worldwide medical catastrophe. The president recently asked Congress to cut over $15 billion from health care, especially in the area of overseas response. On the very day that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an emergency over the latest Ebola outbreak, National Security Adviser John Bolton eliminated the National Security Agency’s program for epidemic prevention. Diseases like Ebola get media attention, in part because Ebola kills more than 80 percent of its victims in a particularly grotesque manner: death by massive hemorrhaging. But the more familiar diseases like malaria do the most damage. The malaria plasmodium infects 216 million people a year and kills 450,000, many of them children. And after decades of retreat, the disease is roaring back with varieties that are increasingly hard to treat. One by one, the barriers that once kept the disease at bay have fallen. Having overcome chloroquine, and then Fansidar, now malaria has begun to breach the latest cure, artenisinin. Yellow fever, once a major killer but largely tamed by mosquito control and vaccinations, is also making a comeback. Dengue, or “break-bone fever,” which infects 400 million worldwide and kills over 25,000 people a year, has spread from nine countries in 1970 to over 100 today.

Virginia resident dies after coming into contact with a flesh-eating bacteria — A Virginia resident has died from an infection involving a waterborne bacteria that eats flesh. Virginia Department of Health officials weren’t releasing the person’s name or other details about the resident, citing privacy laws. Katherine McCombs, a ­foodborne disease epidemiology program coordinator at the health department, said the person died from a Vibrio infection. So far this year, 23 people in Virginia have contracted illnesses tied to Vibrio, according to health officials, which is up slightly from last year. The death is the first this year in Virginia. Vibrio is a naturally occurring bacteria found in brackish or warm salt waters that can cause serious infections. The most common species that cause illness in Virginia are Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Vibrio vulnificus, according to health officials. The person who died in Virginia suffered an infection from the Vibrio vulnificus bacteria. It is more rare and is often underreported, according to the state’s health department. Vibrio vulnificus is more often found in states along the Gulf Coast. In Virginia, there are typically fewer than 10 cases reported each year, according to state health officials. With Vibrio vulnificus illnesses, a person typically becomes infected if they have a cut or open wound exposed to brackish water that becomes contaminated with the bacteria. Symptoms include redness around the wound, swelling at the cut area, fever, tiredness and generally “feeling poorly”.

‘People Are Literally Being Poisoned’: How Sewage Problems in Alabama Got So Bad — and Why Other States Should Worry — Alabama’s Lowndes County, which lies between Selma and Montgomery, has been coping with basic sewage problems for decades.Most residents of this rural county, who are predominantly poor and black, live too far from cities to attach their homes to sewer systems. So they rely on septic tanks. But installing and maintaining those septic systems is difficult — not only because they’re so expensive but also because they have to be specially designed to work in the region’s clay-rich soil. As a result, many people who live in Lowndes County have open pits of human waste in their yards or raw sewage backing up into their homes after heavy rains. Neither the county nor the state seems to be in any position to help, and at times, they’ve arguably made things worse. After Baylor University researchers found evidence of hookworm, a tropical disease that’s largely been eradicated in most developed countries, in more than a third of the residents they sampled in Lowndes County, a United Nations poverty investigator visited the area last December. “I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” remarked Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, as he toured a nearby county.Suddenly, national and international media are taking an interest in Lowndes County’s long-festering issues. But they’ve been slower to recognize how widespread the problem of poor sewage treatment is in the United States. “It’s not just in Alabama. A lot of rural communities are experiencing the same problem,” says Catherine Flowers, who has been the area’s most prominent advocate for improving its sewage disposal and the associated problems. “This is a problem around the country that shouldn’t exist.”

Penalty for poisoning Lake Michigan ‘unjustifiably low,’ surfers say as they seek to restart lawsuit vs. U.S. Steel –Surfrider Chicago is looking to relaunch its federal lawsuit against U.S. Steel, which it says sickened surfers when it dumped toxic hexavalent chromium in a waterway connected to Lake Michigan in northwest Indiana. Attorney Mark Templeton of the U. of C.’s Abrams Environmental Law Clinic said Tuesday that he filed a motion on Surfrider’s behalf seeking to reopen the case in the U.S. District Court in Hammond. The suit had been on hold after U.S. Steel agreed to work out a consent decree with the U.S. EPA to resolve problems at its plant in Portage, Indiana, where the spill took place last year. But Surfrider is now looking to reopen the case so it can compel the steelmaker to comply with discovery requests “necessary to evaluate the consent decree between U.S. Steel and the government,” Templeton said. Templeton added that because Surfrider’s case against U.S. Steel is much broader in scope, “resolving the government’s complaints won’t resolve ours.” He claimed that in order to know what U.S. Steel needed to do to become compliant with the Clean Water Act, the plaintiffs require documents that can only be obtained by lifting a stay on the case. U.S. Steel did not respond to a request for comment.

More Than a Third of Schools Tested Have ‘Elevated Levels’ of Lead in Drinking Water – A troubling new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that more than a third of the nation’s schools that tested their water for lead found “elevated levels” of the neurotoxin. But despite heightened concern in recent years about lead in drinking water, more than 40 percent of schools surveyed conducted no lead testing in 2016.According to the GAO’s nationwide survey, roughly 43 percent of school districts, serving 35 million students, tested for lead in 2016. Of the districts that tested, 37 percent found lead at levels above the threshold the districts set for taking remedial action. All the districts that found elevated levels reported taking steps to lower lead, such as installing filters, replacing old water fountains, and providing students and employees with bottled water. The GAO said that 41 percent of schools, serving about 12 million students, did not test for lead in 2016. Sixteen percent of schools said they did not know if they had tested. No federal law requires lead testing in schools, and the GAO said only eight states require testing.

Can Elon Musk fix Flint’s water? – The Michigan community of Flint has become a byword for lead poisoning. Elon Musk recently entered the fray. He tweeted a promise to pay to fix the water in any house in Flint that had water contamination above acceptable levels set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Here’s what Flint’s mayor wants Elon Musk to do – Tech billionaire Elon Musk has been known to offer help, from donating solar batteries to Puerto Rico to building a tiny ‘submarine’ to rescue that Thai soccer team that was trapped in a cave. (It was never put to use.) The latest disaster to land on Musk’s radar? The water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The predominantly black city of Flint has been reeling from a manmade water crisis since 2014 when the city switched its water source, exposing everyone to lead-contaminated water. Twelve people died as a result of a Legionnaires outbreak from the same water source switch. Given how many times the state and city told residents the water was safe when it wasn’t, people have a hard time trusting their water even today.

Watts: Another Flint? – The whole world knows the story of Flint by now. The famously depressed city in Michigan, where the majority of residents are African American, shifted its drinking-water source to a local river in 2014 in order to save money. . As it turned out, they were being poisoned by lead contamination from years of industrial-waste dumping. Eventually, a state of emergency was declared. But Flint is not alone. Across the country, for example, there’s another impoverished community you might have heard of – this one near the golden shores of Southern California. Watts, located on a mere 2.1 square miles in South Central Los Angeles, isn’t suffering the immediate effects observed in Flint. Not yet. But the causes of pollution recently detected under a 58-year-old housing project – and the reluctance of officials to address the situation – are much the same. Today, in one of the ironies common to urban redevelopment schemes, an effort to improve Watts may actually be making things worse. The billion-dollar makeover of a sprawling housing project that’s been plagued for decades by contamination from industrial sources threatens to endanger the very residents it is supposed to help. Testing of the site has shown toxic levels of lead and other deadly chemicals.

Coca-Cola Plant Starves Mexican Town of Water, Leads to Diabetes Epidemic – It has been something of an obsession here to keep an eye on the attempts by the corporate class to monetize the most basic building block of all life – namely, water. The New York Times reported this weekend from a small, impoverished place in Mexico, where that phenomenon has put the people there in an impossible position – namely, perish from thirst or contract diabetes. a local Coca Cola plant is using up all th water and residents are now drinking large amounts of Coca Cola. The mortality rate from diabetes in Chiapas increased 30 percent between 2013 and 2016, and the disease is now the second-leading cause of death in the state after heart disease, claiming more than 3,000 lives every year.

Fast Food Nation: Inside India’s Growing Crisis — Ten years ago, Prem Shah’s life got turned upside down. “You have diabetes,” his doctor told him after a blood test the next day. Pram was 38 at the time and could neither read nor write. . He had never even heard of diabetes. Further examinations and treatment in the hospital would have cost 15,000 rupees (about 185 euros). Prem, his wife Geeta and their four children didn’t have that much money to spare. They are members of the lowest-ranking of the four main Indian castes and live in a doorless stone hut in a slum in the Baljit Nagar neighborhood. Even a single day in a public hospital, which is almost free for patients, was too expensive for the family. If Prem doesn’t work during the day, the family doesn’t have anything to eat at night. Soon, the disease began affecting him badly. For many people living in emerging economies, eating at McDonald’s or Pizza Hut is a status symbol indicative of prosperity. The new wealth is also drawing people from the countryside into the cities, where physical labor is less necessary. It’s this new sedentary lifestyle that is making people ill.

Start-up producing cell-grown meat raises new funding — German drugmaker Merck and a top European meat processor are backing a startup producing beef from cattle cells, ramping up a race to transform the global meat industry with cell-culture technology. The $8.8 million investment in Netherlands-based Mosa Meat by Merck’s venture investing unit and Basel, Switzerland-based Bell Food Group fuels a continuing effort to fulfill growing global demand for meat via a process that developers say requires a fraction of the resources used in traditional livestock and poultry production.

Is Your Popcorn Laced With Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals? No one should be exposed to toxic chemicals in their food, particularly children. But that’s exactly what the Center for Environmental Health (CEH) found in tests of microwave popcorn bags sold in Dollar Stores. These stores are frequented by communities of color and millions of poor Americans. In fact, every single bag that was independently tested contained toxic per- or polyfluoroalkyl substances(PFASs) – chemicals linked to developmental problems, hormone disruption, organ damage and more. These findings are particularly alarming for children’s health, as their bodies are still developing, making them more vulnerable to the effects of hormone disruptors.PFASs confuse our bodies’ hormones and damage the liver and kidney. There are hundreds of PFAS chemicals, yet there is no publicly available information about which ones are used in microwave popcorn products. In 2008, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) determined that certain PFAS chemicals could migrate out of microwave popcorn bags and contaminate popcorn. A 2007 publication from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tested 17 types of microwave popcorn from eight different brands and detected PFAS in the air from just-heated popcorn bags, suggesting people might also inhale these chemicals when eating microwave popcorn.

New Dicamba Drift Estimate: 1.1 Million Acres Damaged Already in 2018 – A University of Missouri report released Thursday estimates that drift damage from the pesticide dicamba has occurred across 1.1 million acres of agricultural crops, trees and other plants so far this year.This comes less than a year after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and many statesintroduced additional restrictions meant to prevent off-target damage from the pesticide. Last year dicamba drift wreaked havoc on a reported 3.6 million acres of soybean crops not genetically engineered to resist the notoriously drift-prone pesticide.”The widespread damage to crops and even hearty trees like the catalpa and Bradford pear confirms this drift-prone poison can’t be safely used and shouldn’t get approved by the EPA again,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “You’d have better luck herding kittens than getting dicamba to stay put. The EPA’s new leadership needs to end the use of this dangerous pesticide.”

Research shows pesticides influence bee learning and memory — A large-scale study published by researchers from Royal Holloway University of London has drawn together the findings of a decade of agrochemical research to confirm that pesticides used in crop protection have a significant negative impact on the learning and memory abilities of bees. Their findings are published on 11 July in the Journal of Applied Ecology. PhD student Harry Siviter, alongside Professor Julia Koricheva, Professor Mark Brown, and Dr Elli Leadbeater combined data from a large number of studies in which bees that had been exposed to pesticides had to learn about floral scents, a test that is commonly used to measure learning and memory in bees. Their research reveals that even at very low field-realistic dosages, pesticides have significant negative effects on bee learning and memory, with worker bees exposed to pesticides less likely to learn and memorise a rewarding scent. Learning abilities are a vital component of the search for food in bees, because individuals must remember what type of flowers to visit, where to find them, which flowers they have recently drained of nectar, and how to find the way back to the hive.

Trump administration introduces proposal to roll back Endangered Species Act protections | TheHill: The Trump administration is proposing significant changes to the way it enforces the Endangered Species Act (ESA), saying they are a needed modernization of decades-old regulations, but wildlife groups say the changes will put endangered animals and plants at risk. The proposal would make it easier to delist an endangered species and would withdraw a policy that offered the same protections for threatened species as for endangered species unless otherwise specified. It would streamline interagency consultations and make it more difficult to protect habitat near land where endangered species live. The proposed rules also include an interpretation that a species considered endangered would be protected for a “foreseeable future” that extends “only as far” as it can be reasonably determined that “both the future threats and the species’ responses to those threats are probable.” In a call with stakeholders on Thursday, Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Deputy Director Greg Sheehan called the proposal a way of “providing clarity.” He said the changes would help the agency meet the Endangered Species Act’s main goal of “species recovery” so that animals and plants could more easily be removed from endangered and threatened species lists. The move to change the act reflects demands from industry groups and landowners who frequently challenge endangered species protections as overbearing and unsuccessful. Critics of the law have argued that only 3 percent of all species placed on the endangered list have ever been delisted.

Climate change is turning sea turtle eggs female. What about alligators? – Sometime in mid-August, 400 baby alligators will hatch on the roof of a building at the University of North Florida. Researchers will scoop up the newborns and tally them up: male or female? If Professor Adam Rosenblatt’s hypothesis is correct, most of the tiny reptiles wriggling out of their manmade nests will be female, thanks to climate change. The warming world has already launched a new – overwhelmingly female – generation of sea turtles. In the Pacific Ocean’s most important sea turtle nesting area, females outnumber males 116 to 1, National Geographic reported. More and more South Florida sea turtles are born female too, said Florida Atlantic University Professor Jeanette Wyneken. In seven of the last ten years, Wyneken and her students found every sea turtle nest they sampled in Palm Beach County was totally female. “Basically what we’re seeing is when the temps would go over 31 Celsius (87.8 degrees Fahrenheit) we would pretty much have 100 percent female nests,” she said. That’s because sea turtle sex is determined by the heat of the sand around them. Science has clearly shown that warmer nests mean more female sea turtles, but although alligator eggs also change sex depending on temperature, Rosenblatt said there’s no research on how alligators react to rising temperatures. “Nobody has really looked at future temperature scenarios and climate change and their effects on crocodilians,” he said.

Surprise tornadoes leave trail of destruction in Iowa – A flurry of tornadoes that formed unexpectedly swept through central Iowa Thursday, injuring at least 17 people, flattening buildings in three cities and forcing the evacuation of a hospital.The tornadoes hit Marshalltown, Pella and Bondurant as surprised residents ran for cover. The storms injured 10 people in Marshalltown and seven at a factory near Pella, but no deaths were reported. Marshalltown , a city of 27,000 people about 50 miles northeast of Des Moines, appeared to have been hit the hardest. Brick walls collapsed in the streets, roofs were blown off buildings and the cupola of the historic courthouse tumbled 175 feet to the ground.

July 2018 ENSO Update: Dog days — The chance that El Niño conditions will be in place across the tropical Pacific by the fall is about 65%, and close to 70% by the winter, continuing the El Niño Watch from last month. After a trip through the tropical Pacific, we’ll get into what El Niño could mean for global weather and climate this winter. The tropical Pacific is still well within neutral limits. The temperature of the ocean surface in the Niño3.4 region has edged above average, with June 2018 coming in about 0.11 degrees Celsius above the long-term average, based on our best-quality data set. Most climate models predict that the Niño3.4 region temperatures will reach the El Niño threshold (0.5°C above the long-term average) by the fall. Much of the rest of the equatorial Pacific is warmer than average now, as well, with only the Niño1+2 region (the farthest east region, next to the coast of South America) still cooler than average. The temperature of the water below the surface of the Pacific is elevated, too. The downwelling Kelvin wave that was initiated a few months ago has sloshed to the east across the Pacific, bringing warmer waters toward the surface. It’s likely the surface will continue to warm over the next few months, helping to support the forecast for El Niño’s development.

“It’s Dire!” – Aussie Farmers Face Worst Drought In 100 Years – Farmers are saying the situation they’ve been presented with is “dire.” As they battle the worst drought they’ve faced in 100 years, farming families in central-western New South Wales in Australia are facing ruin. According to The Guardian, the farmers in the affected region of central and western New South Wales continue to battle a crippling drought that many locals are calling the worst since 1902. In Warrumbungle Shire, where sharp peaks fall away to once fertile farmland, the small town of Coonabarabran is running out of water. The town dam has fallen to 23% of its capacity and residents are living with level-six water restrictions. There are real fears the town will run dry. Unable to provide food would not only mean financial ruin for the farmers but also less food for those who need it.

Cumulative Stress Impairs Great Barrier Reef Recovery Jerri-lynn Scofield – Science Advances published a paper this week, Impaired recovery of the Great Barrier Reef under cumulative stress, analyzing the recent decline in corals on the Great Barrier Reef. (The full paper may be found here.)The paper found that coral recovery declined by 84% between 1992 and 2010, with some key coral types exhibiting close to zero recovery over that time period, while other reefs showed high recovery.The paper attributed loss in recovery capacity partly to “the cumulative effects of chronic pressures including water quality, warming, and sublethal effects of acute disturbances (cyclones, outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish, and coral bleaching.”Note that the period studied in this paper 1992-2010 – predated the serious back-to-back bleaching events of 2016 and 2017, which killed about half the coral in the 1400 mile long reef, as reported by Motherboard in The Great Barrier Reef Is Losing Its Ability to Recover from Bleaching Events Even with the exclusion of that bleaching, the effects on coral recovery reported are alarming, as Science News notes in Great Barrier Reef not bouncing back as before, but there is hope.

This year’s global hurricane boom could go into overdrive — The powerful weather pattern known as El Niño has been blamed for massive wildfires, crippling droughts, and global food shortages. And it’s looking increasingly likely that another one is on the way. The latest outlook from the National Weather Service, out Thursday, says there’s a 70 percent chance that El Niño will arrive before the end of the year. Summertime outlooks for El Niño are generally pretty accurate, so it’s a big deal that the weather pattern is still in the forecast. Another El Niño would carry far-reaching consequences for the world’s weather, one of which may have already arrived: Hurricanes and typhoons have been popping up more often than normal this year. (Both are place-specific names; the meteorological term for these storms is tropical cyclone.) El Niño warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean, providing additional fuel for tropical cyclones and increasing their activity by about 15 percent. As of Thursday, according to Grist’s analysis of available weather data, cyclone activity in the Pacific Ocean is running about 42 percent above normal; in the Indian Ocean, it’s about 40 percent above normal. But in the Atlantic, it’s a whopping 370 percent above normal.

Heat Records Falling Around the World in 2018 – The first five months of 2018 were the fourth warmest in global records going back to 1880, according to NOAA. Along the way, a number of extreme heat events have occurred already this year. In recent weeks across the Northern Hemisphere, these records have included an impressive number of all-time highs (an all-time high is the warmest temperature reported on any date at a given location). Setting an all-time high is no small accomplishment, especially for locations that have long periods of record (PORs). All-time highs are especially noteworthy when you consider that, on average, the planet is warming more during winter than during summer, and more at night than during the day. Urban heat islands are no doubt contributing somewhat to the heat records achieved in large urban areas, but the extreme heat of 2018 has also played out in remote rural areas without any urban heat islands.As of July 13, the U.S. Records summary page maintained by NOAA showed that 18 U.S. locations had set or tied all-time highs so far this year, as opposed to 10 locations that set or tied all-time lows. There is an even sharper contrast between the number of all-time warm daily lows (40) and all-time cool daily highs (5), which has been a common pattern in recent years.

Airlines prepare for flying in hotter temps as climate change brings more extreme heat — It’s less than a month into the summer and triple-digit temperatures have already shattered records in many cities across the country, like around Los Angeles area where it hit 114 degrees in Burbank and 120 degrees in Chino on July 6. That’s as hot as last year’s brutal summer when temperatures hovered around 120 degrees in Phoenix and prompted American Airlines to cancel more than 40 flights at its hub there. The regional jets that feed big airlines’ couldn’t operate with temperatures above 118 degrees. The extreme heat that has come with climate change is prompting airplane manufacturers to test their fleets for increasingly hotter temperatures.

Over a billion people struggle to stay cool as Earth warms (Reuters) – More than a billion people are at risk from a lack of air conditioning and refrigeration to keep them cool and to preserve food and medicines as global warming brings more high temperatures, a study showed on Monday. More electricity demand for fridges, fans and other appliances will add to man-made climate change unless power generators shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energies, according to the report by the non-profit Sustainable Energy for All group. About 1.1 billion people in Asia, Africa and Latin America – 470 million in rural areas and 630 million slum dwellers in cities – were at risk among the world’s 7.6 billion people, it said. In a survey of 52 countries, those most at risk included India, China, Mozambique, Sudan, Nigeria, Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, it said. The U.N.’s health agency says that heat stress linked to climate change is likely to cause 38,000 extra deaths a year worldwide between 2030 and 2050. In a heat-wave in May, more than 60 people died in Karachi, Pakistan, when heat rose above 40 degrees Celsius (104°F). In remote areas in tropical countries, many people lack electricity and clinics are often unable to store vaccines or medicines that need to be chilled, the study said. And in city slums, electricity supplies are often intermittent. Many farmers or fishermen, meanwhile, lack access to a “cold chain” to preserve and transport products to markets. Fresh fish goes off within hours if stored at 30 degrees Celsius (86°F) but stays fresh for days when chilled.

Hot Times for Reindeer: All-Time Records Melt in Lapland – Temperatures soared into the nineties Fahrenheit north of the Arctic Circle on Tuesday and Wednesday, as 2018’s parade of exceptional heat continued marching across the Northern Hemisphere. This week has been northern Scandinavia’s turn under the sizzling klieg lights, including Lapland (Sflpmi), the region of northern Scandinavia famed for its reindeer and often associated with Christmas. In contrast to that wintry reputation, Sweden is now grappling with an onslaught of wildfires unprecedented in modern times, as reported by weather.com.

Heatwave blankets Japan, kills 14 people over long weekend (Reuters) – An intense heatwave killed at least 14 people over a three-day long weekend in Japan, media reported on Tuesday, and high temperatures hampered the recovery in flood-hit areas where more than 200 people died last week. Temperatures on Monday, a national holiday, surged above 39 degrees Celsius (102.2 Fahrenheit) in some inland areas and combined with high humidity to produce dangerous conditions, the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. At least 14 people died from the heat over the long weekend, media reports said, including a woman in her 90s who was found unconscious in a field. Thousands more were treated in hospitals for heat-related conditions. The heat was most intense in landlocked areas such as Gifu prefecture, where it soared to 39.3 Celsius (102.7 F) in the town of Ibigawa on Monday – the hottest in the nation. The capital Tokyo recorded a high of 34 Celsius on Monday.

Heat Check — Extreme heat kills more Americans each year than any other weather-related event. In California this past week, triple-digit temperatures shattered records and caused tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents to lose power for days. And more than 50 deaths have been linked to a heat wave that hit Quebec earlier this month. Thanks to the “urban heat island effect,” cities are significantly warmer than their surrounding suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. And within a city like New York, a long history of disinvestment in black and brown neighborhoods means these communities are heating up the most. Hunts Point is one of the New York City neighborhoods with the highest risk of heat-related deaths. It’s also a place where 98 percent of residents are people of color. “Extreme heat is really becoming one of the most dangerous climate impacts,” says Annel Hernandez with the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, which has made tackling the urban heat island effect the top priority in its climate justice agenda for this year. “While hurricanes and storm surge happen every five years or even longer, extreme heat is something that’s happening every single year.” Heat-induced fatalities are entirely preventable. And with climate change threatening to increase the death toll, grassroots community leaders and city officials in New York are taking action. One solution is to beef up the city’s response to extreme weather events by providing ways for residents to keep cool and ensuring people know how to access them. But to save more lives as climate change makes the problem much worse, the city will have to undo decades of urban development that has put many communities of color at risk when the temperature spikes. Summer heat waves pose a serious public health threat. As people lose water and salt from sweating due to prolonged exposure to high temperatures, they can experience symptoms of heat exhaustion – muscle cramps, weakness, dizziness, headache, nausea, and fainting. If left unchecked, heat exhaustion can progress to heat stroke – which happens when the body can no longer regulate its core temperature. People get confused, lose consciousness, and can also suffer seizures.

As Temperatures Climb, Coalition Calls For Worker Protections – As extreme temperatures exacerbated by a warming planet continue to take a deadly toll on laborers across the country, a coalition of worker advocacy groups is calling on the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to create the country’s first national standard for heat stress. “Deaths and injuries from extreme heat are still too common in states without any protective standards,” said United Farm Workers of America President Arturo S. Rodriguez, who spoke to reporters during a conference call on Tuesday. “Farmworkers are not agricultural implements. They are important human beings who sweat and sacrifice to feed millions of people across America and the world.” Rodriguez’s organization, along with two former OSHA directors, the nonprofit consumer group Public Citizen, and a broad coalition of more than 130 labor, public health and environmental organizations, filed the petition to Loren Sweatt, the acting assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, on Tuesday. Without a federal heat stress standard, OSHA relies on a general requirement that employers provide workplaces free of hazards. But as global warming causes more frequent spells of extreme heat and record-breaking summers become the norm, the coalition said employers are falling far short. “We argue that [the general requirement] is not enough,” said Shanna Devine, a worker health and safety advocate for Public Citizen. “Employers aren’t going to voluntarily implement these common-sense criteria ― access to water, shade and breaks ― unless required to and unless there is likely to be a real penalty.”

Raging wildfire cuts off major route into Yosemite National Park – A wildfire burning largely out of control on the western edge of Yosemite National Park has killed one firefighter and shut down State Route 140, a major access route into the park. According to the Associated Press, the fire, now known as the Ferguson Fire, broke out Friday and has now burned more than six square miles of land, while forcing the evacuation of a popular hotel within the park, as well as rural communities nearby. Smoke from the fire is also degrading air quality and visibility in the park, according to Yosemite. Yosemite is also warning that an alternate park entrance, via Highway 41 to the south, is experiencing significant delays due to the closure of of the western route. The deceased firefighter, 36-year-old Braden Varney, was killed while using a bulldozer to dig a trench intended to slow the spread of the fire. According to the AP, 56 large fires are currently burning across the U.S., mostly in the West. The Union of Concerned Scientists notes that more severe and regular wildfires can be expected as global warming trends make forests drier during summer months. The economic impact of those fires is accelerating rapidly. The annual damage caused by wildfires averaged $665 million per year between 2000 and 2009, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data cited by UCS. In 2017, though, the cost of wildfire damage was estimated at over $3 billion in California alone. Nationwide spending to fight wildfires, meanwhile, rose to more than $2 billion in 2017.

Ferguson Fire doubles in size, yet to reach Yosemite National Park – As the Ferguson Fire swelled to 9,266 acres Monday, residents of Mariposa, the biggest town bordering Yosemite National Park, woke up to ash in the sky and fire rigs rumbling down Highway 49. Again. Officials propped a plywood board reading “fire information” with a few printed handouts stapled to it in a parking lot. Some shops closed, because tourists don’t like to visit when it is smoky, and that’s what they do when the tourists don’t come. It’s the same routine, again and again. One year ago to the day, the Detwiler Fire inched so close to Mariposa that the entire town had to be evacuated. It burned thousands of acres, and scorched the countryside bordering the community, but no one was killed.

The most worrying wildfires burning in the U.S. right now – After a record-breaking year of destruction, the summer is off to a fiery start. This week alone, there are more than 50 active wildfires burning across California, Colorado, and the rest of the West, many in urbanized areas.Pacific Standard spoke with wildfire policy expert Char Miller to learn which wildfires he’s watching, and what they can tell us about a pattern of destruction that he no longer calls the “new normal” – just “normal.”

• THE SPRING CREEK FIRE, COSTILLA AND HUERFANO COUNTIES, COLORADO – Scorching more than 100,000 acres, the Spring Creek Fire is already the third-largest fire in Colorado history, and set to become the second. Miller identified climate change as the underlying driver for the hot, dry conditions affecting the state, which now has nearly a third of the nation’s active wildfires, according to the Denver Post. Those include some of the strongest blazes still burning this week: the416 Fire and the Lake Christine Fire.
• GEORGES FIRE, INYO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA – Authorities say lightning set off this blaze near the Mount Whitney trailhead in the Sierra Nevada, temporarily halting hiking and camping activity in the area. Officials from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, estimated the damage Wednesday at 2,500 acres, with 30 percent of the blaze contained. Miller said the consequences of this fire outweigh its size, particularly because of the disruption to the Pacific Crest Trail.
• KLAMATHON FIRE, SISKIYOU COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, AND JACKSON COUNTY, OREGON – After charring northern California for a week, the Klamathon Fire jumped the border into Oregon, where it continues to burn at 60 percent containment. Covering 36,500 acres, the fire has prompted evacuations in both states. According to Cal Fire, one California resident has been killed, three people have been injured, and 82 structures have been destroyed as a result of the fire. Untethered from state lines, fires like this one complicate firefighting, demanding collaboration between agencies.
• GRANT FIRE, ALAMEDA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA – Though now under control, this 640-acre grass fire shut down a freeway in the Central Valley for hours on Sunday. The chaos prompted some drivers on Interstate-580 to flee along the shoulders of the gridlocked road, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Southern Oregon wildfires bring ‘unhealthy’ air quality, spark evacuations in four regions – The growth of the Klondike Fire has brought a level 2 evacuation warning for the residences in Oak Flat, located west of Selma in the Illinois River corridor. Level 2 means “get set” to go at any moment. This is the fifth area to be under an evacuation order due to wildfires in Southern Oregon. The growth of the Taylor Creek Fire has brought a level 3 evacuation – meaning “go now” – for an area northwest of Grants Pass. The Josephine County Sheriff’s Office announced the highest evacuation level for all residents on West Pickett Creek Road, located about 12 miles northwest of Grants Pass and six miles west of Merlin near the Rogue River. “Do not delay leaving to gather any belongings or make efforts to protect your home,” a statement from the sheriff’s office said. “This will be the last notice you receive. A shelter has been established at Grants Pass High School.” None of the wildfires burning in Southern Oregon have yet “blown up” or gotten out of hand. But the sheer number of blazes currently burning have impacted air quality, closed roads and trails, and sparked evacuation warnings in four different areas as of Friday. The eight major wildfires and multi-fire complexes were ignited by lightning last weekend. They’re now burning across a wide area – from Crater Lake to the Siskiyou Mountains. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown declared a statewide wildfire emergency to provide more resources to fire teams, but firefighters have still been stretched thin. And conditions will remain challenging, with temperatures expected to remain in the 90s to 100s for the next week.

All wildfires are not alike, but the US is fighting them that way – So far, the 2018 fire season has produced a handful of big fires in California, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado; conflagrations in Oklahoma and Kansas; and a fire bust in Alaska, along with garden-variety wildfires from Florida to Oregon. Some of those fires are in rural areas, some are in wildlands, and a few are in exurbs. Even in a time of new normals, this looks pretty typical. Fire starts are a little below the 10-year running average, and the amount of burned area is running above that average. But no one can predict what may happen in the coming months. California thought it had dodged a bullet in 2017, until a swarm of wildfires in late fall blasted through Napa and Sonoma counties, followed by the Big One – the Thomas fire, California’s largest on record, in Ventura and Santa Barbara.

Wildfires Are Destroying Our Air Pollution Gains – Americans today are breathing cleaner air than they have in decades. Our cars run 100 times cleaner than in the 1960s, and we burn less coal for power in favor of natural gas and renewables – changes with a huge impact on our health. But in areas across the West wildfires threaten to undo much of that progress.Climate change has made the West hotter and drier, and that, combined with decades of fire suppression, has led to larger wildfires and a longer fire season. Between 1984 and 2011, in fact, the area burned in this region increased by almost 90,000 acres each year. These massive new fires are sending huge amounts of particulate matter in the form of noxious ash into the air, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And some of the worst affected areas are much of northern Utah and Nevada, parts of California and Oregon, and most of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana.

The Arctic Is Burning: Wildfires Rage from Sweden to Alaska – There are currently 11 wildfires blazing in the Arctic circle, The Guardian reported Wednesday. While fires are also raging in Russia, Norway and Finland, Sweden has seen the most extensive Arctic fires, which have forced four communities to evacuate, according to The Guardian. Two Italian water-bombing planes that answered Sweden’s call for help will begin operating Wednesday, but Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency has requested even more planes and helicopters from the EU, The Local Sweden reported. “This is definitely the worst year in recent times for forest fires. Whilst we get them every year, 2018 is shaping up to be excessive,” university researcher and Uppsula resident Mike Peacock told The Guardian.

Sweden is battling a historic wildfire outbreak. Swedish firefighters have been battling throughout the summer in what has been described by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency as the country’s “most serious” wildfire situation of modern times. Not only is it particularly warm in Sweden at the moment, the heat also arrived early. While May can often be an up and down month where even the odd spell of snow isn’t unthinkable as far south as Stockholm, this year was a stark contrast. Sweden experienced its hottest May on record, and several cities saw their hottest individual May days since records began 150 years ago.

Wildfires rage in Arctic Circle as Sweden calls for help – At least 11 wildfires are raging inside the Arctic Circle as the hot, dry summer turns an abnormally wide area of Europe into a tinderbox.The worst affected country, Sweden, has called for emergency assistance from its partners in the European Union to help fight the blazes, which have broken out across a wide range of its territory and prompted the evacuations of four communities.Tens of thousands of people have been warned to remain inside and close windows and vents to avoid smoke inhalation. Rail services have been disrupted. The Copernicus Earth observation programme, which gives daily updates of fires in Europe, shows more than 60 fires burning across Sweden, with sites also ablaze in Norway, Finland and Russia, including in the Arctic Circle.Norway has sent six fire-fighting helicopters in response to its neighbour’s request for assistance. Italy is sending two Canadair CL-415s – which can dump 6,000 litres of water on each run – to firebro in central southern Sweden.In western Sweden, fire-fighting operations were temporarily halted near an artillery training range near Älvdalen forest due to concerns that unexploded ordnance might be detonated by the extreme heat. Residents in Uppsala said they could see the plumes of smoke and have been banned from barbecuing in national parks, after 18 consecutive days without rain.“This is definitely the worst year in recent times for forest fires. Whilst we get them every year, 2018 is shaping up to be excessive,” said Mike Peacock, a university researcher and local resident. There have been huge fires in the past in Sweden, but not over such a wide area. This appears to be a trend as more and bigger blazes are reported in other far northern regions like Greenland, Alaska, Siberia and Canada. Swedish authorities say the risk of more fires in the days ahead is “extremely high” due to temperatures forecast in excess of 30C. Much of the northern hemisphere has sweltered in unusually hot weather in recent weeks, breaking records from Algeria to California and causing fires from Siberia to Yorkshire. Ukraine has been hit especially hard by wildfires.

Europe’s Blistering Heat Wave Ruining This Year’s Harvest — Looking out over his parched fields south of Berlin, dairy and grains farmer Thomas Gaebert is wishing for rains to save his crops after relentless hot weather.He’s one of many farmers battling for survival after a heatwave and drought swept across northern parts of the continent, damaging crops from wheat to barley. Many German growers could go bankrupt if they suffer another crop failure, and too much rain in France is set to reduce output there. All combined, it’s shaping up to be the bloc’s smallest grains harvest in six years. Gaebert stands to lose a third of his usual wheat harvest and more than half his rapeseed output after heat and a lack of rain withered plants. He’s worried he won’t have enough of his own grain to feed his 2,500 cows, nor is he insured against the potential losses from the hot weather. The situation is so bad in Germany — temperatures exceeded 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) for much of May and June — that many farmers are destroying crops rather than attempting to harvest them, In the past few weeks, Germany was forced to import feed wheat from as far away as Romania. The U.K.’s hottest summer in four decades hurt wheat crops more than normal because a wet and late winter hindered root development, leaving plants more vulnerable to damage from summer dryness. In Poland, more than 66,000 farms spanning 1.2 million hectares (3 million acres) have been hit by drought, the Agriculture Ministry said. East of Poland, the damage to agriculture has prompted Lithuania and Latvia to declare a national natural disaster or state of emergency. It’s wheat output in France, the EU’s top grower, that’s come as the biggest surprise. While warm and wet weather initially sparked calls for the best harvest in years, that soon changed. Too much rain and not enough sun resulted in wheat with fewer grains, and will mean lower yields, according to Strategie Grains.

From stinky seaweed to sick fish, world’s warming oceans threaten livelihoods – From a rise in aquatic diseases to a “massive” invasion of stinking seaweed that stops fishing boats going out to sea, the warming of the world’s oceans is affecting the livelihoods of millions – and experts say it is going to get worse. Changes in water temperature, acidity and circulation patterns combined with rising sea levels will increasingly impact communities that live off the ocean, according to new analysis from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In Zanzibar, plant diseases are already destroying seaweed, a key export and a crucial source of income for women in the Indian Ocean archipelago. Meanwhile fishermen in the Caribbean have seen their catch plummet and costs rise due to a record invasion of sargassum, a brown, stinking seaweed, linked to ocean warming. “The sargassum is a new phenomenon, unprecedented and massive in its scale,” said Milton Haughton, executive director of the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism. “It prevents boats from going out. When it stays on the coastal harbour areas, it rots, decays, depletes the oxygen in the water and releases toxic substances and the fish dies,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The research by the FAO and 100 collaborating scientists shows climate change will reduce the productivity of fisheries in the world’s exclusive economic zones (EEZs) by up to 12 percent by 2050. The analysis shows the fall in productivity in EEZs could range from less than 3 percent to 12 percent, with significant regional fluctuations. The biggest decreases are expected in tropical countries, mostly in the South Pacific, and some regions could even see an increase in potential catch.

Sea Level Rise Could Sink Internet Infrastructure — Sea level rise may be coming for your Internet.The first ever study to look at the impact of climate change on the Internet found that more than 4,000 miles of fiber optic cable in U.S. coastal regions will be underwater within 15 years and 1,000 traffic hubs will be surrounded, a University of Wisconsin (UW) – Madison press release reported.”Most of the damage that’s going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later,” senior study author and UW – Madison professor of computer science Paul Barford said in the release. “That surprised us. The expectation was that we’d have 50 years to plan for it. We don’t have 50 years.”The study, conducted by researchers at UW – Madison and the University of Oregon and presented for the first time Monday at the 2018 Applied Networking Research Workshop in Montreal, mapped National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sea level rise projections over the Internet Atlas, which shows the location of the net’s physical infrastructure. It found that the most vulnerable U.S. cities to sea level-based Internet disruption were Seattle, New York and Miami, but, since most data converges on fiber optic strands leading towards major population centers, the effects could ripple out across the country and around the world. The study is one example of how public infrastructure must rapidly learn to adapt to climate change. Buried cables were designed to be water resistant, but not entirely waterproof the way ocean-crossing cables are. They were also often laid alongside existing rights of way like highways or coasts. “So much of the infrastructure that’s been deployed is right next to the coast, so it doesn’t take much more than a few inches or a foot of sea level rise for it to be underwater,”

Rising ocean waters from global warming could cost trillions of dollars – About 150 million people live within 1 meter (3 feet) of sea level. About 600 million live within 10 meters (33 feet) of sea level. As waters rise, these people will have to go somewhere. It is inevitable that climate refugees will have to move their homes and workplaces because of rising waters. In some places, humans will be able to build sea walls to block off the water’s rise. But, in many places, that won’t be possible. For instance, Miami, Florida has a porous base rock that allows sea water to permeate through the soils. You cannot wall that off. In other places, any sea walls would be prohibitively expensive. It isn’t just the inevitable march of sea level that is an issue. Rising waters make storm surges worse. A great example is Superstorm Sandy, which hit the US East Coast in 2012. It cost approximately $65 bn of damage. The cost was higher because of sea level rise caused by global warming.Climate scientists do their best to project how much and how fast oceans will rise in the future. These projections help city planners prepare future infrastructure. My estimation is that oceans will be approximately 1 meter higher in the year 2100; that is what our infrastructure should be prepared for. What I don’t know is how much this will cost us as a society.A very recent paper was published that looked into this issue. The authors analyzed the cost of sea level if we limit the Earth to 1.5°C or 2°C warming. They also considered the future cost using “business as usual” scenarios. What the authors found was fascinating. If humans take action to limit warming to 1.5°C, they estimate sea level will rise 52 cm by the year 2100. If humans hold global warming to 2°C, sea levels will rise by perhaps 63 cm by 2100. The difference (11 cm) could cost $1.4 tn per year if no other societal adaptation is made.

Hurricane Maria Aftermath: FEMA Admits to Deadly Mistakes in Puerto Rico – The Federal Emergency Management Agency was sorely unprepared to handle Hurricane Maria and the subsequent crisis in Puerto Rico, the agency admitted in an internal performance assessment memo released last week.FEMA’s after-action report details how the agency’s warehouse on the island was nearly empty due to relief efforts from Hurricane Irma when Maria made landfall last September, with no cots or tarps and little food and water.The report finds that the agency was severely understaffed and relied on “underqualified” staffers, and that leadership lacked key information on the island’s infrastructure both before and after the storm. The report advises that communities and families in remote areas must prepare independently of the agency for future weather disasters.As reported by NPR: San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who ended up in her own verbal battle with Trump, said she believes this report shows FEMA was negligent in how it responded to the island. Inside the agency, FEMA Administrator Brock Long, published a response acknowledging that the agency had work to do. He said the report gives FEMA the, quote, “opportunity to learn from the 2017 hurricane season and be more prepared for the next one.” And that hurricane season is now a month underway. The New York Times editorial board described FEMA’s response as “tragically inadequate” and warned that the agency must do better:There can be no excuse next time for the sort of incompetence and chaos that marked FEMA’s work on Puerto Rico. But there is another lesson that does not figure into FEMA’s account.Many mainland Americans persist in regarding Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens. The condescension with which Puerto Rico is too often held was clearly behind President Trump’s downplaying the disaster and his complaints about the cost, and most likely behind the radically underreported casualties. When the next killer storms strike, and they will, all Americans should be secure in the knowledge that their government, local and federal, will be there ready and able to help.

Canada’s high Arctic glaciers at risk of disappearing completely, study finds – Hundreds of glaciers in Canada’s high Arctic are shrinking and many are at risk of disappearing completely, an unprecedented inventory of glaciers in the country’s northernmost island has revealed.Using satellite imagery, researchers catalogued more than 1,700 glaciers in northern Ellesmere Island and traced how they had changed between 1999 and 2015. The results offered a glimpse into how warming temperatures may be affecting ice in the region, from glaciers that sprawl across the land to the 200-metre thick ice shelves, said Adrienne White, a glaciologist at the University of Ottawa. “It’s an area that’s very difficult to study,” said White. “Logistically it’s very hard to get to and even with satellite imagery – for the longest time Google Earth didn’t even have complete imagery – it was kind of the forgotten place.” White’s study, published last month in the Journal of Glaciology, found that the glaciers had shrank by more than 1,700 sq km of over a 16-year period, representing a loss of about 6%. A previous study of glaciers in the region – which used air photos and did not include ice shelves – showed a loss of 927 sq km between 1959 and 2000, hinting that the pace of loss may be increasing.

An ice shelf melts and the world’s sea levels gain an inch -The urgency of climate change is hard to grasp because everything is happening so slowly and incrementally. But the individual events are continuing to add up, and even a couple big pieces of ice melting can have a significant effect on the whole planet. Take Antarctica’s ice shelves, specifically Larsen C and George VI. There are a hell of a lot of ice shelves out there in our ever-warming Earth, and – surprise surprise – they’re basically all melting.Though Larsen C and George VI are puny in comparison to some of the more high profile shelves to collapse, they’re going to have a considerable impact on the world at large, raising the seal level one inch once they are melted, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal The Cryosphere. And though it may seem small, it’s not when you consider that this one inch is being added to our global sea levels. “These numbers, while not enormous in themselves, are only one part of a larger sea-level budget including loss from other glaciers around the world and from the Greenland, East and West Antarctic ice sheets. Taken together with these other sources, the impacts could be significant to island nations and coastal populations,” said University of Birmingham glaciologist and study author, Nicholas Barrand, in a statement. “The Antarctic Peninsula may be seen as a bellwether for changes in the much larger East and West Antarctic ice sheets as climate warming extends south.” “The vulnerability to change at George VI Ice Shelf and the possible sea level implications from these changes, are far greater,” . Though George VI is only half the size of Larsen C, the study found that it is posed to contribute three to five times more to global sea-level rise, as it currently serves as the primary boundary between a number of large glaciers and the open sea. Without George VI, the ice contained within these glaciers would add 8 mm to global sea levels before 2100 and 22 mm by 2300.

Giant iceberg drifting towards Greenland village could cause tsunami, prompting emergency evacuation – A massive iceberg has drifted dangerously close to tinyGreenland community, sparking widespread panic as residents fear it could trigger a tsunami.Local authorities have declared a state of emergency and told people to move further up the steep slope on which the village is built.The iceberg now looms over houses on the edge of Innaarsuit, a small island settlement in northwestern Greenland, but it has become grounded and appears to have stopped moving.Residents are now afraid that if the iceberg “calves” and a huge chunk of ice falls into the water it will create waves that could destroy the village.A small part of the iceberg has already fallen off. Heavy rain is expected in the region until Saturday, and may increase the chances of a major calving event.” There are 180 inhabitants and we are very concerned and are afraid,” Karl Petersen, chair for the local council in Innaarsuit, told CBC News. Last summer, four people died after waves swamped another settlement in northwestern Greenland. There is also a danger that the impact of iceberg calving could cause flooding as rivers near the community experience a water surge.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Global and US – US emissions of carbon have been falling, while nations in the Asia-Pacific region have already become the main contributors to the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These and other conclusions are apparent from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy (June 2018), a useful annual compilation of global trends in energy production, consumption, and prices. Here’s a table from the report on carbon emissions (I clipped out columns showing annual data for the years from 2008-2016). The report is careful to note: “The carbon emissions above reflect only those through consumption of oil, gas and coal for combustion related activities … This does not allow for any carbon that is sequestered, for other sources of carbon emissions, or for emissions of other greenhouse gases. Our data is therefore not comparable to official national emissions data.” But the data does show some central plot-lines in the carbon emissions story.A few thoughts:

• 1) The US has often had the biggest declines in the world in carbon emissions in absolute magnitudes in recent years. Granted, this is in part because the quantity of US carbon emissions is so large that even a small percentage drop is large in absolute size. Still, better down than up. The BP report notes: “This is the ninth time in this century that the US has had the largest decline in emissions in the world. This also was the third consecutive year that emissions in the US declined, though the fall was the smallest over the last three years. … Carbon emissions from energy use from the US are the lowest since 1992, the year that the UNFCCC came into existence.:
• 2) Anyone who follows this topic at all knows that China leads the world in carbon emissions. Still, it’s striking to me that China accounts for 27.6% of world carbon emissions, compared to 15.2% for the US. On a regional basis, the Asia Pacific region–led by China, India, and Japan, but also with substantial contributions from Indonesia, South Korea, and Australia–by itself accounts for nearly half of global carbon emissions. If you’re concerned about carbon emissions, you need to think about proposals that would have strong effects on China and this region.
• 3) Total carbon emissions from the three regions of South and Central America, the Middle East, and Africa total 13.8% of the global total, and thus their combined total is less than either the United States or the European/Eurasian economies. However, if the carbon emissions for this group of three regions keeps growing at about 3% per year, while the carbon emissions for the US economy keeps falling at 1% per year, their carbon emissions will outstrip the US in a few years.
• 4) In an interconnected global economy, it’s worth remembering that the country where energy is used doesn’t always reflect where the final product is consumed. If China produces something through an energy-intensive process that is later consumed in the US, it counts as energy use in China–but both countries play a role.

  For some more US-specific data, here’s some data from the Monthly Energy Review (June 2018) published by the US Energy Information Administration. This table shows total carbon emissions for the US, emissions per capita, and emissions relative to GDP, going back to 1950

Can we remove a trillion tons of carbon from the atmosphere? — ‘Remove’, ‘sequester’, ‘lock-up’. Call it how you like, but to stabilise our climate and surpass the Paris Agreement, we really need to be thinking about storing hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon. I don’t think anybody on Earth can visualise what numbers like these really look like. Yet, our future depends on us lowering the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to safe levels before, so-called self-amplifying feedbacks take over – if they haven’t already. There is a clue emerging as to how we might accomplish such a feat – in the image of the Blue Marble NASA image of Earth. Namely that over 70 percent of the planet is ocean and the fate of life on Earth is intrinsically tied to that of the oceans. Currently – and it is no secret – the oceans are in a terminal decline, acidifying, heating, losing their biomass and, the worse bit, flipping from carbon sink to carbon source. Fish stocks are also depleted, as ocean ecosystems fall under the sad blanket of degradation. This blue planet is 28 percent land, of which half is rock and ice. So 14 percent of this planet has soil that might sustain green plants, but 72 percent of this planet is the ocean, all of which can sustain green photosynthesis.So the green photosynthetic productivity in the ocean is down by 40-50 percent. That is the conservative data backed numbers for the collapse of phytoplankton in the worlds ocean. We are terrestrial beings so we think about forests. So everybody on the planet knows about the plight of the Amazon rainforest, and it is a global cause celeb. Tens of millions of dollars are being focussed on trying to save the remaining rainforests because 20 percent of the rainforest has been cut down. But in every five year period of time since 1950, there has been a loss of green plant life equal to an entire Amazon in the worlds oceans. So here we are. A dozen Amazons have gone missing from the world.

THIS! Raising a Child in a Doomed World — I cried two times when my daughter was born. First for joy, when after 27 hours of labor the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future. Anyone who pays much attention to climate change knows the outlook is grim. It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted. And anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume we’re almost certainly going to botch it. To stop emitting waste carbon completely within the next five or 10 years, we would need to radically reorient almost all human economic and social production, a task that’s scarcely imaginable, much less feasible. It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, enormous state investment in carbon capture and sequestration and global coordination on a scale never before seen, at the very time when the political and economic structures that held the capitalist world order together under American leadership after World War II are breaking apart. The very idea of unified national political action toward a single goal seems farcical, and unified action on a global scale mere whimsy. And even if world leaders somehow got their act together, significant and dangerous levels of warming are still inevitable, baked into the system from all the carbon dioxide that has already been dumped. There’s a time lag between carbon dioxide increase and subsequent effects, between the wind we sow and the whirlwind we reap. Our lives are lived in that gap. My daughter was born there.

We asked psychologists why so many rich people think the apocalypse is coming –Many of the world’s richest seem to earnestly believe that some kind of apocalyptic “event” is coming, and have prepared accordingly. You might have read about this before – such as in the New Yorker’s deep dive back in January 2017 – but billionaire doomsday preppers are back in the news again thanks to a new viral article penned by professor and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. In it, Rushkoff gives some insight on the grave manner in which some of the business elite are going about preparing for a doomsday, which he learned first-hand after receiving an invitation to speak with some one-percenters. It’s worth noting that the fear of doomsday is not specific to the world’s financial elite. It appears in splashy headlines. It is in the science fiction we read and watch. Apocalypse anxiety seems to be on everyone’s mind lately, and some psychologists have their own theories as to why. Clay Routledge, a researcher who studies existential anxiety and has conducted studies specifically about drivers of apocalyptic beliefs, tells Salon these apocalyptic fears can be motivated by a number of different variables – one big one being technology.“There are, of course, some very real threats to worry about, but our always-connected digital world can heighten anxiety because it is a constant and chaotic stream of information, and is often negative, and specifically fear-focused,” he explained.Furthermore, his research suggests that such anxieties could be linked to existential concerns and a search for meaning.“Though we tend to think of the apocalypse as negative, the idea may counterintuitively be attractive to some,” he said. “In a world in which life feels uncertain and often unfair, in which people struggle to find a sense of personal purpose, the idea of an apocalyptic ending, though terrifying, can also feel meaningful.” “This is obvious when we think about certain religious apocalyptic beliefs, but even among more secular types or those who do not believe in a particular religious apocalyptic narrative, apocalyptic ideas can be seductive,” Routledge added, noting that such beliefs could be a result of people dreaming of a “better world.” “Some are attracted to these ideas because they would be tested and could find their true purpose, maybe even emerge as heroes or people of importance in a new world,”

EPA proposal to limit role of science in decision-making met with alarm — Democratic lawmakers joined scientists, health and environmental officials and activists on Tuesday in denouncing a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), backed by industry, that could limit dramatically what kind of science the agency considers when making regulations. One lawmaker called the Trump administration proposal a “thinly veiled campaign to limit research” that “supports critical regulatory action”. The rule was introduced by the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, before his resignation this month amid ethics scandals. Tuesday’s public hearing drew opponents and a much smaller number of industry and trade groups backing it. If adopted, the rule would allow an EPA administrator to reject study results in making decisions about pollutants and other health risks if the underlying research data is not made public because of patient privacy concerns. Joseph Stanko, a representative of a coalition of groups and companies ranged against what it says are increasingly stringent air-pollution regulations, said the Pruitt rule “enables the public to more meaningfully comment on the science”. Opponents said the move would throw out the kind of public health studies that underlie enforcement of the Clean Air Act and other landmark controls, because such studies drew on confidential health data from thousands of individuals. “This has nothing to do with transparency,” the Democratic representative Paul Tonko of New York said at the hearing in EPA headquarters. “It’s a thinly veiled campaign to limit research … that supports critical regulatory action.” The “proposal and its false claims about transparency … guarantees that political interests will always matter more than science” in forming environmental regulations, Tonko said.

Starbucks Bans Plastic Straws, Winds Up Using More Plastic — 2018 will forever be remembered as the year that hating plastic straws went mainstream. Once the lonely cause of environmental cranks, now everyone wants to eliminate these suckers from daily life.In July, Seattle imposed America’s first ban on plastic straws. Vancouver, British Columbia, passed a similar ban a few months earlier. There are active attempts to prohibit straws in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco. Not to be outdone by busybody legislators, Starbucks, the nation’s largest food and drink retailer, announced on Monday that it would be going strawless. “This is a significant milestone to achieve our global aspiration of sustainable coffee, served to our customers in more sustainable ways,” said Starbucks Kevin Johnson CEO in a press release announcing the move.The coffee giant says that by 2020 it hopes to have eliminated all single-use plastic straws at its 28,000 stores worldwide. It will now top all its cold drinks with fancy new strawless lids that the company currently serves with its cold brew nitro coffees. As is to be expected, Starbucks’ decision was greeted with universal adulation. Yet missing from this fanfare was the inconvenient fact that by ditching plastic straws, Starbucks will actually be increasing its plastic use. As it turns out, the new nitro lids that Starbucks is leaning on to replace straws are made up of more plastic than the company’s current lid/straw combination. Right now, Starbucks patrons are topping most of their cold drinks with either 3.23 grams or 3.55 grams of plastic product, depending on whether they pair their lid with a small or large straw. The new nitro lids meanwhile weigh either 3.55 or 4.11 grams, depending again on lid size.

Vintage photos taken by the EPA reveal what America looked like before pollution was regulated — As the story goes, the chemical-filled Cuyahoga River in Cleveland burst into flames on June 22, 1969, possibly ignited by a spark from a passing train.That had happened at least dozen times before on the Cuyahoga. Additional fires were known to blaze up on rivers in Detroit, Baltimore, Buffalo, and other cities. River fires were far from the only environmental disasters in the US at the time. A spill from an offshore oil rig in California coated the coast in oil and pollutants. Smog and car exhaust choked cities around the country. People were ready for a change. In his 1970 State of the Union address, President Richard Nixon said: “We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.”Nixon followed that up with a list of requests to Congress and later that year announced the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. Soon after it was founded, the EPA began a photo project called Documerica that captured more than 81,000 images showing what the US looked like from 1971 to 1977. More than 20,000 photos were archived, and at least 15,000 have been digitized by the National Archives. As a reminder of what the US looked like before many of the EPA’s policies were in place, here’s a selection of the Documerica photos from the 1970s.

How a Government Program to Get Ethanol from Plants Failed – The nation’s most ambitious program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline has failed despite a bipartisan, 11-year effort that has cost taxpayers and companies billions. While the effort to produce cellulosic ethanol from wood and plant wastes was intended to reduce U.S. reliance on ethanol made from corn and other food sources, it has actually increased it. Those were the findings that EPA quietly delivered to Congress earlier this month amid the turmoil of former Administrator Scott Pruitt’s departure. Some industry experts complain that flawed EPA regulatory decisions under Pruitt played a key role in the failure, but cellulosic ethanol’s problems took shape during two previous administrations as companies grappled with the scientific challenges and changing economics that made the fuel too expensive to produce in volume. It started as a goal in the George W. Bush administration to produce as much as 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol by 2017. It was supposed to cut greenhouse gases by as much as 90 percent, measured against “reformulated” gasoline, which usually contains 10 percent ethanol. What came out of pipelines last year, according to a statement by Derrick Morgan, senior vice president of American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, was a mere trickle: 10 million gallons. “For perspective, that was enough fuel to satisfy approximately 40 minutes of U.S. fuel consumption last year,” Morgan noted, asserting that “cellulosic biofuel mandates” set by EPA under a 2007 law “are unachievable.” He blamed an “array of market, technology, cost and logistics challenges.” The United States uses almost 200 billion gallons of transportation fuels each year.

Green Groups Sue EPA to Reverse Pruitt’s Last Act – Environmental groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday in an attempt to block Scott Pruitt‘s last act as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an act they say his replacement Andrew Wheeler declined to undo despite requests.On July 6, the EPA wrote two memos saying the makers of super-polluting “glider trucks,” new truck bodies using old engines, could ignore an Obama-era rule limiting the number of these vehicles to 300 per manufacturer per year. “People will die because of Pruitt’s parting gift of thousands more super-dirty trucks on our roads spewing toxic pollution into the air we must breathe,” senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity‘s Climate Law Institute Vera Pardee said in a press release. “If Wheeler hopes to distance himself from Pruitt’s corrupt brand of loyalty to polluters, he’s off to a horrific start.”The Center for Biological Diversity was one of the groups that filed the suit, along with the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund. They are asking the federal court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to hand down an emergency order mandating that the EPA enforce the “glider truck” rule, arguing that the agency cannot simply decide to stop enforcing a rule, The Hill reported. The groups are concerned about the amounts of deadly air pollution produced by the trucks. One EPA study found that glider trucks emit about 43 times the nitrogen oxide and 55 times the particulate matter of trucks with new engines using up-to-date pollution controls, according to The Hill.

Court blocks EPA policy against enforcing truck pollution rule | TheHill: A federal appeals court on Wednesday blocked a Trump administration policy that sought to ignore a regulation limiting sales of trucks that environmental groups called “super-polluting.” The policy memo at issue said EPA wouldn’t enforce a 2016 regulation from the Obama administration that sought to put a cap on sales of “glider trucks,” new heavy trucks with older chassis and engines that do not meet current air pollution rules. Former EPA head Scott Pruitt issued the memo on July 6, the day he resigned from the agency. In granting a Tuesday motion from green groups to stop the policy, a three-judge panel said the stay is intended “to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion.”Environmental groups had argued that the July 6 “no action assurance” memo is illegal because it essentially overturns a regulation without going through the usual process to do so, including giving public notice and taking comments. The green groups argued further that allowing unlimited sales of glider trucks is a major threat to air quality, citing EPA’s own research findings that found that gliders emit as much as 43 times the nitrogen oxides as new trucks and 55 times the particulate matter.

What Saudi Women Drivers Want: Muscle Cars – WSJ – They rumble. They roar. And when a heel stamps on the gas pedal, they overtake. Weeks after the government lifted its longstanding female-driving ban, Saudi women are embracing not only driving, but driving fast, and loudly. “They don’t expect to see me in this car,” said Samia Weheba, 23 years old, as she zipped past taxis and sport-utility vehicles in her matte gray, 400-horsepower Audi RS3. “It’s such a guy’s car, especially in this country.” Many auto showrooms, getting ready for the end of the driving ban on June 24, hired saleswomen and rolled out vehicles they thought would appeal to women. They stocked affordable sedans and mini-SUVs, often in bright colors. At super-luxury auto maker Rolls-Royce, vehicles customized for potential female clients included a cherry-red Dawn Drophead Coupé. A classic Ghost model sedan was offered in rose quartz and sparkly black with a starlight ceiling. At Audi, “We expected women to begin with small cars with small engines,” said saleswoman Taghreed al-Shomrani in Jeddah. “But they are looking for big cars with big engines.” When Ms. Weheba, who works for Audi, told colleagues she wanted an RS3, few believed her. It is the kind of car young Saudi men use for drag racing.It is also popular for drag racing’s more dangerous variation, “drifting,” in which drivers show off their spinning and skidding skills. Ms. Weheba aspires to become one of Saudi Arabia’s first female drifters. “Everyone suggested I get the yellow Q2,” she said, referring to a mini-SUV from the German auto maker. Ms. Weheba, who wears her long, highlighted hair uncovered, dismisses the Q2 as “cute.” “Do I look like a yellow Q2 kind of girl?” she said.As soon as the Saudi king last September announced plans to let women drive, Sahar Nasief knew what she wanted: a Mustang convertible. “It’s always been my dream car,” said Ms. Nasief, 64, who learned how to drive decades ago as a student in the U.S.

Texas sets another electricity-usage record for July, sixth this week– Texas’ electric grid operator planned for a challenging summer. Now, it’s here with electricity-usage records falling daily since Monday. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas set a sixth electricity-usage record in the last four days. Between 4 and 5 p.m. Thursday, Texas averaged 73,259 megawatts. That topped the amount of electricity used an hour earlier and also in consecutive hours Wednesday afternoon. Those numbers all beat the August 2016 mark of 71,110. On Monday and Tuesday, Texas also set consecutive records for usage in July. The temperature at DFW International Airport was 107 late Thursday afternoon. At least one observation point in Fort Worth hit 110. “We fully expect to keep hitting new demand records as summer 2018 continues,” ERCOT officials said in a written statement Wednesday. Tuesday, usage averaged 70,963 megawatts between 4 and 5 p.m. That was the most ever for a single hour in July. Monday, Texans set the July record of 70,587 megawatts. Since then, usage has only escalated. One megawatt is the amount needed to power about 200 Texas homes on a hot day, according to ERCOT. While air conditioners struggled to keep homes and workplaces cool, the state’s electric grid was holding steady. Oncor, which operates power lines for most of North Texas, reported only small, routine outages on its website. “We know it’s hot out there. Operators are working around the clock,” said ERCOT spokeswoman Theresa Gage.

Feature: Energy industry faces unprecedented cyber threats almost daily – Every day the energy sector faces a barrage of cyber attacks, and just about once a day an attack is novel, something the industry has not seen before but must defend against. Receive daily email alerts, subscriber notes & personalize your experience. Whether hackers are hoping for financial gain or to disrupt the grid, utilities, pipeline companies and federal agencies have no choice but to prepare.”The problem is there are an infinite number of ways that you can create malware, that you can attempt intrusions,” John Bryk, a cyber and physical threat intelligence analyst with the Downstream Natural Gas-Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said in a recent interview. “There’s always going to be something new.”The center, launched by natural gas utilities in 2014 to help them prepare for and better understand threats, aggregates cyber risk data to spot trends and communicate back to companies.Cyber attacks that could cause physical damage are becoming more common. Although an attack is unlikely to bring down the entire grid, the risks have caused some sleepless nights for energy executives.”The implications of something going wrong is no longer loss of property, it’s loss of life,” Jed Young, chief information security officer at refining giant Andeavor, recently told a Houston conference.One of the biggest power and natural gas companies in the world, Dominion Energy, is facing more unique threats than ever before, and its director of information technology risk management said the attacks have escalated most intensely within the past 18 months. “It’s really gotten our attention on what are our levels of defense,” Dominion’s Tom Arruda said. “How do we protect at each level? And how do we ensure that, if anything were to happen, it would be limited in the scope of what it can do?”There are two kinds of digital utility systems that can come under attack: information technology and operation technology. The IT side includes digital communication, data and other material that is connected to the internet in some capacity. Under the OT umbrella reside the systems that manage the movement of electrons through the grid and molecules through pipelines.

The air conditioner paradox: heating the world while cooling our homes – As climate change drives ever hotter summer temperatures, more and more Canadians are turning to air conditioning to stay cool. It’s one of the miserable ironies of global warming because air conditioning contributes to even warmer climates. The use of air conditioners is predicted to explode as year after year sets new “hottest temperatures on record.” According to a May 2018 report by the International Energy Agency, the number of air conditioners worldwide will skyrocket from 1.6 billion units today to 5.6 billion units by 2050. That would spell trouble for the planet because of the energy air conditioners need and some of the chemicals they use.

Supersonic jets for the ultra rich could be a climate change disaster — Fifteen years after the last Concorde flew, a new fleet of up to 2,000 supersonic business jets is in the works to ferry wealthy travelers around the world. The planes are expected to hit the runway in the next decade, but the climate change alarms are already going off. President Donald Trump, of course, has hailed the supersonic revival as an example of the “Great American Spirit.” NASA dropped a $247.5 million contract on Lockheed Martin to build a quieter engine capable of breaking the sound barrier. Climate advocates, meanwhile, are pointing to a new report, released Tuesday by the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation, that offers heavy criticism of the next generation of ultra-fast business jets. The ICCT, which uncovered the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, warns that increased emissions from the new jets risk “large environmental consequences.” Its report concludes that the planes will burn five to seven times more fuel than normal aircraft and break United Nations-set carbon dioxide emissions limits for aircraft by 70 percent.

Is it time for a post-growth economy? – The crowds of protesters that confronted US President Donald Trump during his visit to London last week have channelled the world’s outrage at all that he represents. But despite this opposition, Trump’s base is expanding. Even those who baulk at his regressive positions – his racism, misogyny, divisiveness – are willing to hold their noses and line up behind him. Why? Because of his promises to deliver growth.Politicians rise and fall on their ability to grow the GDP. It doesn’t matter what it takes, whether it’s ripping up environmental protections, gutting labour laws, or fracking for cheap oil: If you achieve growth, you win.This is only the beginning. As we bump up against the limits of growth – market saturation, resource depletion, climate change – politicians will become increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of it. People like Trump will proliferate because everyone knows that we need growth: if the economy doesn’t keep expanding by at least two percent or three percent a year in developed countries, it collapses into crisis. Debts can’t be repaid, firms go bust, people lose their jobs. The global economy has been designed in such a way that it needs to grow just to stay afloat. We are all hostages to growth, and hostages to those who promise it.

IEA warns of ‘worrying trend’ as global investment in renewables falls – The world’s energy watchdog has sounded the alarm over a “worrying” pause in the shift to clean energy after global investment in renewables fell 7% to $318bn (£240bn) last year. The International Energy Agency said the decline is set to continue into 2018, threatening energy security, climate change and air pollution goals. Fossil fuels increased their share of energy supply investment for the first time since 2014, to $790bn, and will play a significant role for years on current trends, the IEA said. Investment in coal power dropped sharply but was offset by an uptick in oil and gas spending, the World Energy Investment report found. Dr Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, said of the renewables fall: “We are seeing a decrease, which is disappointing. And more disappointing is we see the signs this decline may continue this year – this is a worrying trend.” Fossil fuels’ share of energy investment needs to drop to 40% by 2030 to meet climate targets but instead rose fractionally to 59% in 2017.

Volcanic lava flows continue to affect geothermal power generation on Hawaii’s Big Island – Lava flows from the Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii led to the shutdown of the Puna Geothermal Venture (PGV) power plant on May 3, 2018. The 38-megawatt (MW) facility is the only geothermal plant on the island, and it produced about 29% of the island’s electricity generation in 2017. The plant voluntarily ceased operations ahead of the approaching lava flow. Continuing eruptions in lower Puna, the southeastern corner of the island, have damaged transmission lines and equipment, and local residences are experiencing extended power outages. The island’s utility, Hawaii Electric Light Co (HELCO), has implemented switching operations to reroute power from its nearby plants to customers in undamaged areas of lower Puna. PGV is a geothermal plant drawing steam and hot geothermal fluid up through 11 production wells drilled 6,000 feet to 8,000 feet deep. Pressurized steam from the hot fluid, along with non-condensable gases, is routed through the facility to drive a turbine generator that produces electricity. Exhaust steam from the turbine is used to vaporize a working fluid, which drives a second turbine that generates additional electricity. The remaining steam (along with geothermal fluid) is reinjected into the ground through reinjection wells. Plant operators quenched 10 of the 11 geothermal wells to prevent them from releasing gases. Quenching involves injecting the well with water to cool and depressurize it. The 11th well was plugged with bentonite clay after quenching efforts were unsuccessful. Two of the capped geothermal wells, identified as KS-5 and KS-6, were covered by lava from the Kilauea fissures in late May. A transmission substation and a warehouse containing a drilling rig were also destroyed by the lava flows.

Hidden Gem for Big Oil in Carbon Tax Plan: Ending Climate Liability Suits – Oil and gas companies could be off the hook for climate change-related damages if a new carbon tax proposal makes its way through Congress. The proposal is being spearheaded by Americans for Carbon Dividends, an industry-backed organization whose mission is to build support for the Baker-Shultz Carbon Dividends Plan, which proposes taxing carbon emitters and returning the proceeds to the American public. It also includes a waiver of the right to sue fossil fuel companies for climate change impacts and suggests rolling back most Environmental Protection Agency regulations on greenhouse gases.Launched earlier this month, Americans For Climate Dividends is co-chaired by former Senators Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and John Breaux (D-La.), whose lobbying firm was hired to promote the campaign. Its public relations effort is being led by Hill+Knowlton, a firm that once spearheaded the communications campaign for Big Tobacco.The group has succeeded in gaining support from politicians and policymakers from both parties and even garnered qualified support from some environmental organizations.

Fossil Fuel Industry Outspent Environmentalists and Renewables by 10:1 on Climate Lobbying, New Study Finds – Industry sectors based on fossil fuels significantly outspent environmental groups and renewable energycompanies on climate change lobbying, new research has found.In a study published Wednesday in the journal Climatic Change, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle shows that between 2000 and 2016, lobbyists spent more than $2 billion trying to influence climate legislation in the U.S. Congress.Analyzing data from lobbying reports made available on the website OpenSecrets.org, Brulle found that electric utilities spent the largest sums during this timeframe followed by the oil, gas and coal industries, and transportation sector, respectively. Overall, lobbying by corporate sectors involved in the production or use of fossil fuels overshadowed that of environmental organizations and the renewable energy sector by a ratio of approximately 10 to 1.

EPA eases rules on how coal ash waste is stored across the US – The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule Tuesday to overhaul requirements for handling the toxic waste produced by burning coal, providing more flexibility to state and industry officials who had sought a rollback of restrictions put in place in 2015.The far-reaching rule will dictate how coal ash, which has contaminated waterways in two high-profile spills in Tennessee and North Carolina in the past decade, is stored at more than 400 coal-fired power plants around the country.The new standards – the first major rule signed by EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler – will extend the life of some existing ash ponds from April 2019 until October 2020, empower states to suspend groundwater monitoring in certain cases and allow state officials to certify whether utilities’ facilities meet adequate standards. EPA officials estimate that the rule change will save the industry between $28 million and $31 million a year in compliance costs.“These amendments provide states and utilities much-needed flexibility in the management of coal ash, while ensuring human health and the environment are protected,” Wheeler said in a statement. “Our actions mark a significant departure from the one-size-fits-all policies of the past and save tens of millions of dollars in regulatory costs.”Industry officials petitioned the Trump administration last year to reconsider existing standards for the fine powder and sludge – which contains mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other heavy metals – and the new regulation expands on the proposal then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued in March. Wheeler worked for several years as a lobbyist for Murray Energy, which supported reconsideration of the coal ash rule, before joining the administration this spring. He said in an interview with The Washington Post this month that he has not lobbied EPA directly for several years, though he lobbied other government departments since President Trump took office.

Black Lung Rate Hits 25-Year High In Appalachian Coal Mining States – One in five working coal miners in central Appalachia who have worked at least 25 years now suffer from the coal miners’ disease black lung. That’s the finding from the latest study tracking an epidemic of the incurable and fatal sickness.It’s the highest rate in a quarter century and indicates that the disease continues to afflict more miners in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. “We haven’t seen this rate of black lung since before the early ’90s,” says Cara Halldin, an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and one of the authors of the study.Black lung results from the inhalation of coal and silica dust during coal mining. Lung tissue is scarred by the dust, which diminishes the ability to breathe.

A tenth of U.S. veteran coal miners have black lung disease: NIOSH (Reuters) – More than 10 percent of America’s coal miners with 25 or more years of experience have black lung disease, the highest rate recorded in roughly two decades, according to a government study released on Thursday that showed cases concentrated heavily in central Appalachia. The study by researchers from the government’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health marks the most authoritative evidence to date of a resurgence of the incurable respiratory illness caused by coal dust, which plagued miners in the 1970s but was nearly eradicated by the 1990s. “Although many consider black lung a disease of antiquity, it is undeniable that … these contemporary cases resulted from injurious exposures encountered in the 21st century,” the authors said in the report, published in the American Journal of Public Health. The National Mining Association, which represents U.S. coal mining companies, has cast doubt on assertions that black lung disease is rebounding, arguing that miners are not required to participate in screenings. “The exclusion of healthy individuals who self-select out of the program may skew the results – we won’t know until more data is available,” said NMA spokeswoman Ashley Burke. The authors of the NIOSH report said that their findings underscored the need for stricter regulations as the administration of U.S President Donald Trump seeks industry feedback on coal dust policy enacted in 2014. The 2014 standards reduced allowable miner coal dust exposure in underground mines to 1.5 milligrams per cubic meter, from 2 mg/m3.

India’s coal demand rose 7.5% to 900 million tons in 2017/18 – India’s coal demand rose 7.5 percent to about 900 million tonnes in the year ending March 2018, Coal Minister Piyush Goyal told lawmakers on Wednesday. Coal is expected to remain India’s main energy source for the next three decades, even as the country encourages the use of renewable power generation. State-owned Coal India Ltd has been directed to boost production, Goyal said in a written reply to lawmakers. India, the third world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter and one of the world’s largest coal producers, depends on coal for about three-fifths of its energy needs.

India’s $17Bln 6,000 MW Nuclear Power Park to be Ready by 2026 – India’s Kudankulam will become the country’s first nuclear power park by 2026. The first and second units of the Kudankulum Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) are fully operational, the third and fourth units are being constructed at a cost of approximately $6 billion. The government has sanctioned $7.5 billion to the fifth and sixth units of the plant. The overall cost of the the nuclear park will be around $17 billion. India aims to complete the construction of seven other nuclear power reactors, presently at different stages of construction, in the next seven years at a cost of $7.5 billion. In addition, 12 more nuclear power reactors were accorded administrative approval and sanctioned by the government in June 2017.

Construction starts on second Bangladeshi reactor – First concrete for the foundation of unit 2 of the Rooppur nuclear power plant in Bangladesh was poured during a ceremony on 14 July. A construction licence for the Russian-supplied reactor was issued by the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Regulatory Authority on 8 July. The VVER-1200 reactor design has already been implemented at Novovoronezh II in Russia, where the first unit of that design – a development from the VVER-1000 – entered commercial operation in February 2017.

US coal and nuclear plant bailout could cost $16.7 billion – Providing financial support to uneconomic US coal and nuclear power plants, as the Trump administration has ordered, could cost $16.7 billion annually, according to a study commissioned by a group of renewable energy, oil and gas trade associations and released Thursday.