Environmental News For The Week Ending 25August 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 a Tuesday evening regular post at GEI.

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Outbreak Alert: Rare “Flesh-Eating” STD Reported In England – A rare flesh-eating STD (sexually transmitted disease) has been reported in England. An unnamed female patient, who lives in Southport has been diagnosed with donovanosis within the last 12 months. Donovanosis is an STD that causes flesh-eating ulcers on a patient’s genitalia; it has now popped up in England. Donovanosis is also spread by coming into contact with a patient’s infected ulcer and it is typically seen in India, New Guinea, parts of the Caribbean, central Australia, and southern Africa,according to Fox News. The disease is painless, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but it causes horrifying and progressive ulcerative lesions on the genitals or perineum, which can be prone to heavy bleeding.

Cell Phones in Schools? France Says No, San Francisco Educators Urge Caution — As the school year begins, the movement to exercise caution in students’ use of cell phones and other wireless devices is gaining international momentum. The French Parliament voted last month to ban cell phones in nursery, elementary and middle schools. More than 5,000 miles away, San Francisco educators are urging the school district to make sure that students and teachers know about the state of California’s guidelines for safer use of cell phones. “Peer-reviewed research has found that radiofrequency radiations emitted by cell phones and Wi-Fi routers and other wireless devices can impact the brain and the reproductive system,” said Sarahn Aminoff, a teacher in the San Francisco district. “We are concerned about the health of the city’s educators and about the students whose growing bodies may be more susceptible to the effects of wireless radiation.”

Why is San Francisco … covered in human feces? – It’s an empirical fact: San Francisco is a crappier place to live these days. Sightings of human feces on the sidewalks are now a regular occurrence; over the past 10 years, complaints about human waste have increased 400%. People now call the city 65 times a day to report poop, and there have been 14,597 calls in 2018 alone. Last year, software engineer Jenn Wong even created a poop map of San Francisco, showing the concentration of incidents across the city. New mayor London Breed said: “There is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here.”

The Problem With Cannabis Packaging — Packaging is increasingly becoming a way for cannabis products to declare that they aren’t illegal drugs anymore. But at what cost? Two very interesting stories came out this week. One, from Janet Burns at Gizmodo, details the booming trend of fancy packaging in legal cannabis products: artful tins, minimalist tubes, modernist cubes, faux-vintage cases. The other, from Kristen Millares Young at the Washington Post, examines how this same packaging is clogging the sewers, landfills, waterways, and recycling operations of Washington state, where recreational use is legal.

Flushed contact lenses are big source of microplastic pollution — Contact lenses that are flushed down the toilet or dropped in sink drains contribute vastly to microplastic pollution in the oceans, researchers warned Monday. The amount of plastic waste created by lenses and their packaging in the United States alone is equal to 400 million toothbrushes each year, said researchers at Arizona State University who described their findings at the National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society in Boston.

‘Green hajj’ slowly takes root in Mecca – Thousands of cleaners are busy separating plastic from other rubbish as more than two million Muslims wrap up a pilgrimage to Mecca that presents a huge environmental challenge for Saudi Arabia. The Mamuniya camp in Mina near the holy city is dotted with colour-coded barrels — black for organic waste and blue for cans and plastics for recycling. It’s all part of an initiative to reduce the environmental footprint of the hajj, one of the world’s largest annual gatherings. More than 42,000 tonnes of waste are produced during the pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest sites, according of Mohammed al-Saati, head of sanitation for the Mecca municipality.

Why Asbestos Is Still a Major Public Health Threat in the U.S. — Reports surfaced this month that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had proposed a significant new use rule (SNUR) for asbestos in June, requiring anyone who wanted to start or resume importing or manufacturing the carcinogenic mineral to first receive EPA approval.Advocates and some EPA employees raised concerns that the SNUR could pave the way for expanded asbestos use in the U.S., while agency spokespeople maintained the new rule would help the agency better regulate the material that different studies estimate kills between 12,000 and 39,275 Americans a year.

Judge orders top Michigan health official to stand trial for Flint deaths — A state court judge ruled Monday that Nick Lyon, the executive director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, will be brought to trial for two counts of involuntary manslaughter, as well as other felony charges related to the Flint water crisis. This ruling marks the first time anyone has been ordered to stand trial for the criminal conspiracy committed against the population of this working class city north of Detroit. Lyon was appointed by Governor Rick Snyder and still holds the position as head of the state health agency. The maximum sentence for the involuntary manslaughter charges could be as much as 30 years in prison, plus another five for misconduct in office.

‘Devastating’ dolphin loss in Florida red tide disaster (AFP) – A state of emergency has been declared in Florida as the worst red tide in a decade blackens the ocean water, killing dolphins, sea turtles and fish at a relentless pace.More than 100 tons of dead sea creatures have been shoveled up from smelly, deserted beaches in tourist areas along Florida’s southwest coast as a result of the harmful algal bloom this month alone. In just the past week, 12 dolphins washed ashore dead in Sarasota County, typically the toll seen in an entire year.

Fla. manatee deaths already higher than last year — So far, 554 manatees have died in Florida in 2018, and toxic algal blooms are to blame. The number already exceeds the 2017 total of 538, and there are still four months left of the year. Red tide is the suspected cause of more than 100 of the deaths. “We find that the primary route is through ingestion of seagrass that has the toxins on it,” said Martine de Wit of the state’s marine mammal pathology laboratory in St. Petersburg. Jeff Ruch, executive director of the environmental group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said that the state’s manatees “have no defense against this ecological disaster.”

New England Seal Die-Off Could be Linked to Chemical Pollution – Researchers think a mysterious die-off of seals along the Maine coast could be linked to chemical pollution, the Portland Press Herald reported Sunday.More than 400 dead or stranded seals have washed up on the Maine coast so far this year, more than in any of the past seven years, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) statistics.The immediate cause of the die-off is not yet known, but marine biologist Susan Shaw told the Portland Press Herald it could be related to toxic chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), which are found in high quantities in Maine harbor seals and make it harder for marine mammals to fight off disease.

Tons of Plastic Trash Enter the Great Lakes Every Year – Where Does It Go? — Matthew Hoffman has estimated that around 10,000 tons of plastic enter the Great Lakes annually. Plastic enters the Great Lakes in many ways. People on the shore and on boats throw litter in the water. Microplastic pollution also comes from wastewater treatment plants, stormwater and agricultural runoff. Some plastic fibers become airborne – possibly from clothing or building materials weathering outdoors – and are probably deposited into the lakes directly from the air. When plastic pollution was initially found in the Great Lakes, many observers feared that it could accumulate in large floating garbage patches, like those created by ocean currents. However, when we used our computational models to predict how plastic pollution would move around in the surface waters of Lake Erie, we found that temporary accumulation regions formed but did not persist as they do in the ocean.

General Mills Faces Lawsuit Over Glyphosate in Cereals – Monsanto‘s – and now Bayer‘s – glyphosate problem is also a headache for General Mills. The Cheerios-maker could face a class action lawsuit alleging the company failed to warn consumers about traces of the controversial herbicide in its products.A Florida woman filed the lawsuit Thursday in Miami federal court, according to Reuters. The move comes about a week after a California jury awarded $289 million to a school groundskeeper who claimed Monsanto’s blockbuster weedkiller Roundup gave him cancer.

Threat of chlorpyrifos ban puts alternatives in spotlight – Makers of farm chemicals are fighting a potential ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, but ending its use wouldn’t send bugs swarming on crops, industry sources say. That’s because farmers would still have a wide array of pesticides at their disposal, and new ones are always being developed, said Jay Vroom, president of CropLife America, the trade group representing farm chemical companies. That isn’t to say the industry would let a prohibition on chlorpyrifos go into place without objection, Vroom said.

New Pesticide as Harmful to Bees as Neonicotinoids – Agricultural pesticides are used to kill the pests that damage or destroy our crops, but at the same time, these pest killers are also killing the very pollinators that make agriculture possible. So it is with Sulfoxaflor, a new pesticide. It has only been recently that the widely used neonicotinoid pesticides were discovered to be responsible for bee population declines. This has resulted in three of these pesticides now being banned in Europe and two will be phased out in Canada, and that is good news for the bees. Based on the phase-out over time of neonicotinoids, chemical companies have been searching for something to replace the pest killer. However, newly developed pesticides could be just as bad for pollinators if allowed to be marketed. One such pesticide is Sulfoxaflor, the first branded sulfoximine-based insecticide,

Germany Is Abuzz, Literally –Cherrypicking the vast mire of policy regulations, German newspapers hit tabloid gold this summer with the headline: ‘Killing a Wasp Can Cost You 5,000 Euros!’ A headline designed to make the reader’s blood boil for reasons I’ll get into. Since Berlin was sweltering with uncommonly high temperatures this summer, the wasp situation became uncomfortably relevant. You would get your lager and your currywurst and prepare to enjoy it at a picnic table or outside, on the sidewalk, when here they came: the bomber squadron of wasps, or what I, from my Georgia childhood, would call yellowjackets. .

Canada Takes Action To Save The Bees — The Canadian government announced it will ban two pesticides that have been linked to the falling numbers of pollinators, including bees. The pesticides include: clothianidin and thiamethoxam, both of which fall under the category of neonicotinoid (called neonics) pesticides. Health Canada announced that it will ban most outdoor uses of these pesticides within 3 to 5 years.Neonicotinoid pesticides are currently in widespread use in agriculture, horticulture, forestry, aquaculture, and urban and household pest control products. Clothianidin was developed by Bayer CropScience and Takeda Chemical Industries’ developed the pesticide clothianidin while Syngenta developed thiamethoxam.

Millions of Dead Bees Devastate Mexican Beekeepers’ Business – The death of millions of bees in the apiaries of the La Candelaria commons, in the heart of the Maya area of Quintana Roo, inflicted disaster and desolation on the beekeepers of the region, who thought the possible cause could be the spraying of a nearby crop of habanero chili peppers. Up to now some 365 beehives have been counted in 18 apiaries within a radius of 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the field of habanero peppers, which could be why the beekeepers are losing their main source of income. The volume of bees affected has not been totally quantified, however, because more bees keep dying in hothouses farther away.

West Texas Vineyards Hit by Herbicide Drift — Wine makers in West Texas are reeling from herbicide drift injuries on their grapevines, an emerging threat to the state’s $13 billion a year industry, NPR’s Morning Edition reported Tuesday.The damage likely originates from use of Monsanto’s dicamba and Dow’s 2,4-D formulations on nearby cotton fields. The companies sell cotton seeds that are genetically modified to withstand applications of the weedkillers. If farmers use the products improperly, the highly volatile chemicals can get picked up by the wind and land on off-target crops.

Scientists are raising the alarm that upcoming USDA overhaul will slash research funding – Scientists are raising alarms over a Trump administration plan to overhaul two federal offices tasked with food and agriculture research, calling the move a ploy to slash funding to projects on climate change, nutrition and other top concerns. The plan, announced by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue last week, would relocate one top research office – the Economic Research Service – into the Office of the Secretary, a political branch of the Agriculture Department. It would also move ERS and a second scientific office, the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, out of Washington by the end of 2019.

Does Global Warming Make Food Less Nutritious? – It is difficult to say whether or not the climate change we are now experiencing is negatively impacting the nutritional quality of our food, researchers warn that it may be only a matter of time. “Humanity is conducting a global experiment by rapidly altering the environmental conditions on the only habitable planet we know,” reports Samuel Myers, a research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Earlier this year, Myers and his colleagues released the results of a six year study examining the nutritional content of crops exposed to levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) that are expected to exist by mid-century. The conclusions were indeed troubling. They found that in wheat grains, zinc concentrations were down some 9.3 percent and iron concentrations were down by 5.1 percent across the seven different crop sites (in Australia, Japan and the U.S.) used in the study. The researchers also noted reduced protein levels in wheat and rice grains growing in the CO2-rich test environment.

China culls thousands of pigs as African swine fever spreads – More than 14,500 pigs have been culled in an eastern Chinese city, officials said Wednesday, as the world’s largest pork producer scrambles to contain an outbreak of African swine fever. Beijing reported its first case of the disease in early August, and since then the virus has spread to pigs in several cities across China, requiring authorities to destroy large numbers of hogs. African swine fever is not harmful to humans but causes haemorrhagic fever in domesticated pigs and wild boar that almost always ends in death within a few days. There is no antidote or vaccine, and the only known method to prevent the disease from spreading is a mass cull of the infected livestock.

Giraffe Parts Sold Across U.S. Despite Plummeting Wild Populations – Conservation groups say the United States is playing a role in the significant decline of wild giraffe populations by allowing their skin, bones and other body parts to be sold on the U.S. market. From 2006 to 2015, the U.S. imported approximately 40,000 giraffe parts and products, thought to represent nearly 4,000 individual giraffes, according to a report released Thursday by Humane Society of the United States and Humane Society International.The report reveals that giraffe parts and products are sold online and in stores by at least 51 dealers across the country. An undercover investigator visited 21 of these stores and found products such as giraffe leather boots, knives and carvings made from their bones, taxidermy trophies, and pillows, rugs, book covers and furniture made from skin and hide.

Surge in invisible, deadly pollutant is choking Hong Kong – On the surface, efforts to improve air quality in Hong Kong have paid off, and the government’s Environmental Protection Department earlier this year furnished the figures to prove it. Between 2013 and last year, average concentrations in the air of major pollutants such as tiny particulates of nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide plummeted by between 28 and 36 per cent.Yet the city is still choking, and one cause is an invisible, lesser-known pollutant lurking in the lower atmosphere, vexing policymakers and scientists who seek a solution: ground-level ozone.This variety of ozone differs from the high-level toxic gas in the upper atmosphere that shields the Earth from the sun’s powerful rays. From an annual average concentration of 25 micrograms per cubic metre of air in 1997, the figure had by this June climbed to 45mcg, according to the NGO Clean Air Network.

Smoke Brings Seattle its Worst Air Pollution in Decades – Weather Underground Smoke from the wildfires raging in southwestern Canada and the Northwest U.S. have brought Seattle and much of Washington State their worst PM2.5 air pollution in the past twenty years over the past few days. At Seattle’s 4103 Beacon Hill S monitoring site, 24-hour-average fine particle pollution (PM2.5) levels hit 57.3 μg/m3 on August 14. That’s well in excess of the EPA standard of 35 μg/m3, and is the highest PM2.5 level ever measured at the site, in EPA records that extend back to 1999.

Wildfires Choke Washington State’s Air, Delaying Flights and Trash Collection — Unhealthy levels of air pollution caused by smoke from wildfiresdelayed flights and trash collection in parts of Washington state Sunday and Monday.The city of Spokane in Eastern Washington had the worst air quality in the country Monday morning, according to measurements by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), The Spokesman-Review reported.The EPA measured the city’s air as 382 on a 500 point scale air quality index scale 6 a.m. Monday, clearly in the worst, “hazardous” air pollution category. The city has delayed trash collection in some areas till Tuesday to limit the time city employees spend outdoors.

Hard to see, hard to breathe: US West struggles with smoke (AP) – Smoke from wildfires clogged the sky across the U.S. West, blotting out mountains and city skylines from Oregon to Colorado, delaying flights and forcing authorities to tell even healthy adults in the Seattle area to stay indoors. As large cities dealt with unhealthy air for a second summer in a row, experts warned that it could become more common as the American West faces larger and more destructive wildfires because of heat and drought blamed on climate change. Officials also must prioritize resources during the longer firefighting season, so some blazes may be allowed to burn in unpopulated areas. Seattle’s Space Needle was swathed in haze, and it was impossible to see nearby mountains. Portland, Oregon, residents who were up early saw a blood-red sun shrouded in smoke and huffed their way through another day of polluted air. Portland Public Schools suspended all outdoor sports practices. Thick smoke in Denver blocked the view of some of Colorado’s famous mountains and prompted an air quality health advisory for the northeastern quarter of the state.

California’s largest wildfire brings new dangers for firefighters on front lines: After more than three weeks, firefighters Monday continued to struggle against the largest fire in modern California history as the Mendocino Complex blaze prompted more evacuations and posed new dangers to those on the front lines. While battling the fire, five members of Los Angeles Fire Department Strike Team 1880C were injured Sunday. All five suffered minor injuries and were treated and released from area hospitals.

Breathing Fire: All This Smoke Means Smaller Newborns And More ER Visits – Ask anyone who lived in Washington’s Wenatchee Valley in 2012 about the smoke that year, and they’ll remember. The fires were close and the valley’s dry hillsides trapped the wildfire smoke. It was so bad clinics and drug stores ran out of masks. The air was so choked with smoke that summer camps were canceled and children were kept inside.

Ryan Zinke’s claim that “environmental terrorists” are to blame for wildfires, explained – Massive infernos continue to rage across much of the West. California’s Mendocino Complex Fire is now the largest in state history, covering more than 317,900 acres as of Thursday.Fires are a natural occurrence in many woodlands and are essential to a healthy ecosystem. But the growing scale and destruction from these fires stems from human activity.What kinds of human activity? According to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, environmental terrorists.“[Fires] have been getting worse,” Zinke said in an interview with Breitbart News Saturday. “We have longer seasons, hotter conditions, but what’s driving it is the fuel load. And we have been held hostage by these environmental terrorist groups that have not allowed public access, that refuse to allow the harvest of timber.” I asked the Interior Department who these terrorists are and they pointed me toward Zinke’s August 8 editorial in USA Today, where he said that radical environmentalists “make outdated and unscientific arguments, void of facts, because they cannot defend the merits of their policy preferences year after year as our forests and homes burn to the ground.”

Verizon throttled fire department’s “unlimited” data during Calif. wildfire – Verizon Wireless’ throttling of a fire department that uses its data services has been submitted as evidence in a lawsuit that seeks to reinstate federal net neutrality rules. “County Fire has experienced throttling by its ISP, Verizon,” Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden wrote in a declaration. “This throttling has had a significant impact on our ability to provide emergency services. Verizon imposed these limitations despite being informed that throttling was actively impeding County Fire’s ability to provide crisis-response and essential emergency services.”

2018 Colorado wildfires part of worst year in history, five make top 20 biggest blazes – Colorado’s wildfire season isn’t close to being over, but it’s already become the second worst year in history in terms of acreage that’s been burned with five fires making the list of the top 20 largest.In 2018, Colorado wildfires have already burned more than 431,606 acres and Caley Fisher, a public information officer for the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control (CDPS), explained to Newsweek that the wildfire season could be far from over. While Colorado’s wildfire season has traditionally been confined to the months from May to September, Fisher explained that now, wildfires occur year-round.

Study cites longer dry spells as fueling U.S. wildfires (Reuters) – Less rain and longer droughts are the major cause behind larger and more intense wildfires in the U.S. West, not higher temperatures and early snowmelt as previously thought, according to research released on Monday. The findings by the U.S. Forest Service and University of Montana could help scientists better predict the severity of fire seasons, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study comes as tens of thousands of firefighters battle more than 100 blazes that have charred more than 1.9 million acres (770,000 hectares) in the Western United States. California is marking one of the most destructive fire seasons on record. The researchers compared snowmelt timing and warming summer temperatures to fluctuations in the amount and distribution of summer rains on lands scorched by wildfires and determined that the latter were drivers. Lack of summer rain and the extended duration of droughts foster warmer, drier air during fire seasons, leading to more surface heating, which, in turn, sucks moisture from trees, shrubs and vegetation, the study found.

Summer Rainfall Declines ‘Primary Driver’ of Surge in U.S. Wildfires — Sharp declines in summer rainfall could be a “primary driver” of the record-breaking wildfires ripping across the western U.S., research shows.Using satellite data, the study finds that there have been “previously unnoted” declines in summer rainfall across close to a third of forests in the western U.S. over the past four decades. These declines are “strongly correlated” with wildfire increases, the study finds.

Researchers claim water irrigation efficiency efforts actually cause more water use – An international team of researchers has found that efforts to make irrigation systems more efficient are actually prompting more water use. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group explains the basis for their argument and offers suggestions about better ways to manage water use. In recent years, it has become clear that the world is heading into a water crisis – there does not appear to be enough fresh water available to meet the coming demand. Also, natural aboveground and underground water reservoirs are being depleted with no clear alternatives in sight. In this new effort, the researchers note that one of the biggest uses of water is for growing crops – and many of those crops are grown in places that do not receive enough rainfall for proper growth. That has led to widespread irrigation. But irrigation in places like California’s Central Valley is not sustainable at its current pace – groundwater levels there have been dropping for decades. Noting that they need to take action, governments around the world have paid for research efforts aimed at finding ways to use water more efficiently – and one approach has been methods to make irrigation systems more efficient. These include technology such as drip systems, which offer plants the least amount of water possible to keep them growing. The researchers have been studying the efficiency of such systems, and have found that instead of using less water, they actually use more. They explain that this is because with normal watering systems, such as spraying fields, excess water makes its way back to surface or underground water systems. When using the more efficient methods, however, less water is able to re-enter natural systems, resulting in net losses. The researchers suggest that such efforts have thus far resulted in wasted money as many governments pay farmers to use the more efficient systems.

Thousands stranded as floods submerge southern Indian state (AP) – Thousands of stranded people were waiting to be rescued and officials pleaded for more help from relentless monsoon floods that have partially submerged the southern Indian state of Kerala, where more than 190 have died in a little over a week.Heavy rains hit parts of the state again Saturday morning, slowing attempts to deploy rescuers and get relief supplies to isolated areas. Many have seen no help for days and can only be reached by boat or helicopter.More than 300,000 people have taken shelter in over 1,500 state-run relief camps, officials said. But authorities said they were being inundated with calls for assistance, local media reported.”We are receiving multiple repetitive rescue requests,” the office of the state’s top official, Pinarayi Vijayan, said in a tweet, asking those in need to provide their exact location and nearby landmarks so rescuers can find them. Officials have called it the worst flooding in Kerala in a century, with rainfall in some areas well over double that of a typical monsoon season.The downpours that started Aug. 8 have triggered floods and landslides and caused homes and bridges to collapse across Kerala, a picturesque state known for its quiet tropical backwaters and beautiful beaches. Officials estimate more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) of roads have been damaged. One of the state’s major airports, in the city of Kochi, has been closed. Meteorologists expect the rains to ease up over the next few days.

Unprecedented monsoonal floods kill over 370 in southwest India — More than 370 people have been killed and some two million displaced by flash flooding and landslides caused by heavy monsoonal rains which began on August 8 in the southwest Indian state of Kerala. Twelve of the state’s 14 districts have been inundated, in what has been described as Kerala’s worst disaster since 1924. Crop and property damage is estimated at about 80 billion rupees ($US1.146 billion), with 20,000 homes and 40,000 hectares of agricultural crops destroyed and at least 83,000 kilometres of roads damaged. Most of the fatalities occurred when entire villages were wiped out by catastrophic landslides. Tens of thousands of flood victims are currently being accommodated in over 4,000 relief camps.According to state government officials, tens of thousands remain marooned, including up 5,000 people trapped in the riverside town of Chengannur. Authorities also fear outbreaks of water-borne diseases like diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid and leptospirosis could take more lives. Although flood waters subsided in most areas on Sunday, and official “red alert” warnings were lifted in most of the state, dam levels remain dangerously high . The Indian Meteorological Department has also warned that rain will continue falling on the state until August 23, with heavy downpours forecast for the districts of Idukki, Kozhikode and Kannur. Idukki, which has received more than 321 centimetres of rain since June, is now virtually cut off from the rest of the state.

How Delhi’s rising heat and a love of concrete caused a deadly water crisis – It’s about 4pm on a muggy monsoon day in Wazirpur, a low-income urban village in Delhi. A group of 30 women are lined up in the 34C heat (93F) behind an assortment of empty coolers, buckets, petrol containers – anything they can store water in once the government tanker arrives. For many in this megacity of 29 million, this desperate jostle for water has become a part of daily life, with people sometimes missing out on work to wait for water that may not come. . “Here we wait for water and manage our routine based on that.” Population growth, climate change, disputes between states, urbanisation and poor management of resources have made water – especially fresh, clean water – a commodity that is not readily available to all. A recent government thinktank report revealed that several major cities in India, including Delhi, could run out of groundwater as soon as 2020. Access to water is already a matter of life and death, with gross inequities in its distribution leading to desperate scrums. In furnace-like conditions, tensions can easily boil over.

Farmworkers are dying from extreme heat – On June 16, Miguel Angel Guzman Chavez arrived in Georgia from Mexico. He was 24 years old and went right to work picking tomatoes. The Georgia heat was consistently more than 90 degrees, and on June 21, the temperature soared to 95 degrees. That day, Chavez collapsed in the field, suffering from heat stroke, which then led to cardiac arrest. Less than two hours later, he was pronounced dead at the Colquitt Regional Medical Center.

State of the climate: 2018 set to be fourth warmest year despite cooler start — Temperatures on the Earth’s surface in the first half of 2018 were lower than over the same period for the three previous years. This was due, in part, to a moderate La Niña event during late 2017 and the first half of 2018. However, the world is quickly switching to El Niño conditions, which should contribute to a somewhat warmer finish to the year.Sea ice has been at record or near-record lows in the Arctic for much of the year, but has recovered slightly over the past two months.Antarctic sea ice extent has generally been on the low-end of normal for the first half of 2018.With the data now in for the first half of the year, Carbon Brief estimates that 2018 is most likely to be the fourth warmest on record for the Earth’s surface.

Summer weather is getting ‘stuck’ due to Arctic warming – Summer weather patterns are increasingly likely to stall in Europe, North America and parts of Asia, according to a new climate study that explains why Arctic warming is making heatwaves elsewhere more persistent and dangerous. Rising temperatures in the Arctic have slowed the circulation of the jet stream and other giant planetary winds, says the paper, which means high and low pressure fronts are getting stuck and weather is less able to moderate itself. The authors of the research, published in Nature Communications on Monday, warn this could lead to “very extreme extremes”, which occur when abnormally high temperatures linger for an unusually prolonged period, turning sunny days into heat waves, tinder-dry conditions into wildfires, and rains into floods.

Heatwaves, rains may become more severe as weather stalls: study (Reuters) – Scorching summer heatwaves and downpours are set to become more extreme in the northern hemisphere as global warming makes weather patterns linger longer in the same place, scientists said on Monday. They said there was a risk of “extreme extremes” in North America, Europe and parts of Asia because manmade greenhouse gas emissions seemed to be disrupting high-altitude winds that blow eastwards in vast, looping “planetary waves”. “Summer weather is likely to become more persistent – more prolonged hot dry periods, possibly also more prolonged rainy periods,” said Dim Coumou, lead author of the study at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Air pollution is fighting global warming – Burning wood and coal pollutes the air with tiny particles like soot and smog, but some of those same particles can temporarily mitigate some effects of global warming. Aerosols reflect back more of the sun’s rays, reducing solar warming. Their role has been significant as humans continue to warm the planet with carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, a third of the warming driven by greenhouse gases has been offset by aerosols in the last 50 years, researchers have found. Policymakers have tended to take the mitigation effects of aerosols for granted, assuming that they could have an even effect on reducing global warming throughout the planet. But new research published in Nature Communications on Friday shows that is not the case, and that some areas of the planet could have greater spikes in warmth connected to the reduction in aerosols.

Geoengineering Could Lead To Lower Crop Yields: New Study – A new study has determined that spraying the skies with chemicals to combat global warming will likely come with the unintended side-effect of reducing crop yields. Researchers with the University of California, Berkeley, have published a new study which calls into question the scientific efforts to block sunlight via climate engineering, also known as geoengineering. Geoengineering is the deliberate and large-scale manipulation of the weather and climate using a variety of technologies. One popular form of geoengineering being explored by scientists is known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM), a process which involves spraying aerosols from planes equipped with particulates designed to reflect sunlight in an effort to combat “anthropogenic global warming.

Volkswagen In Trouble For Altering Mexico’s Weather – With a headline torn straight from a futurist global dysphoria movie, The FT reports that Volkswagen is reversing course on the use of controversial weather-altering technology at a major Mexican car plant after local farmers complained that the system caused drought by preventing rainfall. Hail storms present significant problems for car manufacturers, which often have large numbers of finished vehicles parked outside at distribution centers or plants. The German carmaker had installed hail cannons, which fire shockwaves into the atmosphere, at its Puebla site to prevent the formation of ice stones that had been damaging finished vehicles parked outside its facility. However, as The FT reports, local farmers said the devices, which were set to fire automatically under certain weather conditions, caused a drought during the months that should have been Mexico’s rainy season.

Research Highlight: Climate Model Predicts Faster Warming for the North Atlantic Ocean – Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have predicted faster rates of warming than previously predicted for the North Atlantic Ocean in a recent paper published in the Journal of Climate. This warming could disrupt major oceanic cycles and have worldwide impacts on climate systems.The researchers modeled scenarios based on possible future greenhouse gas and aerosol emission rates. One likely scenario focuses on future decline in aerosols and continued increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Aerosols are minute particles suspended in the atmosphere. Some scatter sunlight, thereby actually acting as cooling agents.The aerosol cooling effect is about 50 percent of the warming effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide at present.

Gulf Of Alaska Cod Are Disappearing. Blame ‘The Blob’ NPR – The cod population in the Gulf of Alaska is at its lowest level on record, according to an expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The culprit is a warm-water mass called “the blob” that churned in the Pacific Ocean between 2013 and 2017. At its peak, the blob stretched from Alaska to South America. In the Gulf of Alaska, the cod population plummeted by more than 80 percent.Climate change didn’t cause the blob all on its own. But scientists say global warming made it worse, pushing high ocean temperatures to the extreme.

The end of the oceans — In June this year, scientists from the University of Tasmania and the University of Technology Sydney published research showing that over the past decade the biomass of large fish in Australian waters has declined by more than a third. The results may have jarred with government claims of Australian fisheries being among the most sustainable in the world, but they closely matched official figures showing a 32 per cent decline in Australian fishery catches in the same period. The declines were sharpest in species targeted for fishing and areas in which fishing is permitted, but even populations of species not exploited by fishing declined across the same period. The notion that a third of large fish in Australian waters disappeared in just 10 years should be of profound concern to all.

Parris Island, Charleston Coast Guard threatened by rising seas, global warming – The Marine Corps training grounds on Parris Island will need a sea wall.That’s what Assistant Commandant Glenn Walters told a congressional committee earlier this year, calling the rising seas and repeated flooding of the base a critical vulnerability. And it’s not just Parris Island. A runway for the Marine Corp Air Station nearby in Beaufort is only a few feet from the Mulligan Creek marsh and has been rip-rapped to protect it. In Charleston, the roads near the Coast Guard stations on the Ashley and Cooper rivers get swamped with a heavy rain during high tides.

Sea level rise is already costing property owners on the coast – WaPo – The sea has risen about eight inches since 1900, and the pace is accelerating, with three inches accumulating since 1993, according to a comprehensive federal climate report released last year. Scientists predict the oceans will rise an additional three to seven inches by 2030, and as much as 4.3 feet by 2100. Meanwhile, mapping has become increasingly precise, providing near-exact elevations that let researchers predict when individual properties could be underwater.

Sea Level Rise Has Already Cost 8 East Coast States More Than $14 Billion in Home Values – Sea level rise caused by climate change has already cost the U.S. $14.1 billion dollars in home values across eight East Coast states, according to new data released Thursday by the First Street Foundation, a Brooklyn-based non-profit whose stated mission is “to educate citizens and elected officials on the risks, causes and solutions to sea level rise and flooding.”In two separate data summaries released July 25 and Aug. 23, scientists affiliated with the organization looked at how coastal flooding had influenced home values in five Southern coastal states and the tri-states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut between 2005 and 2017.They found that $7.4 billion in home values had been lost in the five Southern states and $6.7 billion in the tri-state area.”It is one thing to project what the future impacts of sea level rise could be, but it is quite another to know that the market has already responded negatively to this threat,” head of data science at First Street Foundation Steven A. McAlpine said in the July 25 release.

Jakarta, the fastest-sinking city in the world The Indonesian capital of Jakarta is home to 10 million people but it is also one of the fastest-sinking cities in the world. If this goes unchecked, parts of the megacity could be entirely submerged by 2050, say researchers. It sits on swampy land, the Java Sea lapping against it, and 13 rivers running through it. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that flooding is frequent in Jakarta and, according to experts, it is getting worse. But it’s not just about freak floods, this massive city is literally disappearing into the ground. “The potential for Jakarta to be submerged isn’t a laughing matter,” .”If we look at our models, by 2050 about 95% of North Jakarta will be submerged.” It’s already happening – North Jakarta has sunk 2.5m in 10 years and is continuing to sink by as much as 25cm a year in some parts, which is more than double the global average for coastal megacities.

Some Arctic ground no longer freezing–even in winter – Nikita Zimov has spent years running a research station that tracks climate change in the rapidly warming Russian Far East. So when students probed the ground and took soil samples amid the mossy hummocks and larch forests near his home, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Zimov suspected something wasn’t right. In April he sent a team of workers out with heavy drills to be sure. They bored into the soil a few feet down and found thick, slushy mud. Zimov said that was impossible. Cherskiy, his community of 3,000 along the Kolyma River, is one of the coldest spots on Earth. Even in late spring, ground below the surface should be frozen solid. Except this year, it wasn’t. Every winter across the Arctic, the top few inches or feet of soil and rich plant matter freezes up before thawing again in summer. Beneath this active layer of ground extending hundreds of feet deeper sits continuously frozen earth called permafrost, which, in places, has stayed frozen for millennia. But in a region where temperatures can dip to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the Zimovs say unusually high snowfall this year worked like a blanket, trapping excess heat in the ground. They found sections 30 inches deep – soils that typically freeze before Christmas – that had stayed damp and mushy all winter. For the first time in memory, ground that insulates deep Arctic permafrost simply did not freeze in winter.”This really is astounding,” says Max Holmes, an Arctic scientist with Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts. The discovery has not been peer-reviewed or published and represents limited data from one spot in one year. But with measurements from another scientist nearby and one an ocean away appearing to support the Zimovs’ findings, some Arctic experts are weighing a troubling question: Could a thaw of permafrost begin decades sooner than many people expect in some of the Arctic’s coldest, most carbon-rich regions, releasing trapped greenhouse gases that could accelerate human-caused climate change?

Melting Permafrost Below Arctic Lakes Is Even More Dangerous to the Climate, NASA Warns – Scientists have worried for years that rising temperatures will free carbon trapped in frozen soil in the Arctic, accelerating the pace of climate change – but now they believe abrupt thawing below lakes is even more dangerous. That’s the finding of a new paper published as part of a 10-year NASA collaboration to study how climate change will play out in the icy Arctic region.”We don’t have to wait 200 or 300 years to get these large releases of permafrost carbon,” “It’s already happening but it’s not happening at a really fast rate right now, but within a few decades, it should peak.” The new research is based on measurements and models of how climate change and melting permafrost interact. Specifically, the team of scientists looked at permafrost melting below bodies of water known as thermokarst lakes. The team behind the new research measured carbon release at 72 different locations on 11 thermokarst lakes across Siberia and Alaska, plus five locations without lakes, to calculate how much greenhouse gas was being produced and how old the carbon it contained was. Then, they used this data to make sure the models they were building were on the right track. Here’s the problem: When permanently frozen dirt melts, the bacteria trapped inside it become active again, munch through whatever organic material is in reach, and produce carbon dioxide and methane, which are both powerful greenhouse gasesBut when that happens below thermokarst lakes, the process is even grimmer because the water at the surface speeds up the melting below. The released gases, built with carbon atoms between 2,000 and 43,000 years old, quickly rise up through the lake and into the atmosphere.”Within decades you can get very deep thaw-holes, meters to tens of meters of vertical thaw,” Walter Anthony said in the statement. “So you’re flash thawing the permafrost under these lakes. And we have very easily measured ancient greenhouse gases coming out.”

Fast-Melting Lakes Could Increase Permafrost Emissions 118 Percent – Scientists may need to more than double their assessment of how much carbon dioxide and methane thawing Arctic permafrost will release into the atmosphere this century, according to a study published this month.The paper, published in Nature Communications Aug. 15, said that previous estimates for how greenhouse gasses released by thawing permafrost would contribute to global climate change focused on the slow thawing of permafrost near the surface.However, those estimates excluded the impact of thermokarst lakes that form when warming soil melts ground ice, rapidly thawing the soil beneath them and providing food for carbon-dioxide and methane-releasing bacteria. “Thermokarst lakes provide a completely different scenario. When the lakes form, they flash-thaw these permafrost areas,” lead study author and University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Water and Environmental Research Center associate professor Katey Walter Anthony said in a UAF press release. “Instead of centimeters of thaw, which is common for terrestrial environments, we’ve seen 15 meters of thaw beneath newly formed lakes in Goldstream Valley within the past 60 years.”Previous models had not incorporated thermokarst lakes because the small size of each lake made them difficult to account for. However, the study found it was important to take their emissions into consideration because, unlike the gradual thawing of permafrost soil, the rapid thawing beneath the melt lakes cannot be reversed this century. “You can’t stop the release of carbon from these lakes once they form,” Walter Anthony said. “We cannot get around this source of warming.”

Maersk launches first container ship through Arctic route in alarming sign of global warming – Maersk Line, the world’s largest container shipping company, is about to launch the first ever container ship on an Arctic route along Russia’s north coast, as melting sea ice promises to offer a possible future alternative to the Suez Canal. The Venta Maersk, a new ice-class 42,000 tonne vessel which can carry 3,600 containers, will leave Vladivostok on Russia’s east coast later this week.The ship, carrying a cargo of frozen fish, will then follow the Northern Sea Route up through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, before travelling along Russia’s north coast and eventually to St Petersburg by the end of September.The route has seen growing traffic during summer months already, with cargos of oil and gas regularly making the journey.Arctic sea ice hit a record low for January this year, and an “extreme event” was declared in March as the Bering Sea’s ice levels reached the lowest level in recorded history as temperatures soared 30 degrees above average. Data released by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Colorado showed this winter’s sea ice cover was less than a third of what it was just five years ago.

Arctic’s strongest sea ice breaks up for first time on record — The oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up, opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen, even in summer. This phenomenon – which has never been recorded before – has occurred twice this year due to warm winds and a climate-change driven heatwave in the northern hemisphere. One meteorologist described the loss of ice as “scary”. Others said it could force scientists to revise their theories about which part of the Arctic will withstand warming the longest. The sea off the north coast of Greenland is normally so frozen that it was referred to, until recently, as “the last ice area” because it was assumed that this would be the final northern holdout against the melting effects of a hotter planet. But abnormal temperature spikes in February and earlier this month have left it vulnerable to winds, which have pushed the ice further away from the coast than at any time since satellite records began in the 1970s. “Almost all of the ice to the north of Greenland is quite shattered and broken up and therefore more mobile,” said Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute. “Open water off the north coast of Greenland is unusual. This area has often been called ‘the last ice area’ as it has been suggested that the last perennial sea ice in the Arctic will occur here. The events of the last week suggest that, actually, the last ice area may be further west.” Ice to the north of Greenland is usually particularly compacted due to the Transpolar Drift Stream, one of two major weather patterns that push ice from Siberia across the Arctic to the coastline, where it packs. “The ice there has nowhere else to go so it piles up. On average, it’s over four metres thick and can be piled up into ridges 20 metres thick or more. This thick, compacted ice is generally not easily moved around. “However, that was not the case this past winter (in February and March) and now. The ice is being pushed away from the coast by the winds.”

“Hothouse Earth” Co-Author: The Problem Is Neoliberal Economics — When journal papers about climate change make headlines, the news usually isn’t good. Last week was no exception, when the so-called hothouse earth paper, in which a team of interdisciplinary Earth systems scientists warned that the problem of climate change may be even worse than we thought, made its news cycle orbit. (The actual title of the paper, a commentary published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, is “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.”)Coverage of the paper tended to focus on one of its more alarming claims, albeit one that isn’t new to climate researchers: that a series of interlocking dynamics on Earth – from melting sea ice to deforestation – can feed upon one another to accelerate warming and climate impacts once we pass a certain threshold of warming, even after humans have stopped pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The best chance we have for staying below that catastrophic threshold is to cap warming at around 2 degrees Celsius, the target enshrined in the Paris Agreement. That’s all correct and plenty daunting. Yet embedded within the paper is a finding that’s just as stunning: that none of this is inevitable, and one of the main barriers between us and a stable planet – one that isn’t actively hostile to human civilization over the long term – is our economic system. Asked what could be done to prevent a hothouse earth scenario, co-author Will Steffen told The Intercept that the “obvious thing we have to do is to get greenhouse gas emissions down as fast as we can. That means that has to be the primary target of policy and economics. You have got to get away from the so-called neoliberal economics.” Instead, he suggests something “more like wartime footing”, essentially shifting the U.S. to a centrally planned economy, rather than leaving things like prices and procurement of key resources up to market forces, to roll out renewable energy and dramatically reimagine sectors like transportation and agriculture “at very fast rates.”

Sixth Mass Extinction Ushers In Record-Breaking Wildfires and Heat – There have been five mass extinction events on Earth, and it is a scientific fact we are well into the sixth mass extinction event. By far, the worst of these was the Permian mass extinction that occurred roughly 252 million years ago. That one annihilated 95 percent of all life on Earth. During the Permian mass extinction, global warming caused by a massive amount of CO2 released from volcanism warmed both the oceans and the atmosphere, which then triggered the release of colossal amounts of methane that had been trapped underneath the ice in the Arctic. This caused an even greater spike in planetary warming, which wiped out nearly all life on Earth. In our current mass extinction event, however, rather than the CO2-caused warming coming from a volcano, it is anthropogenic (human-caused), and the climate is not just warming, it is disrupted. And this time, rather than the process taking tens of thousands of years as it did during the Permian mass extinction, humans are increasing atmospheric CO2 levels far, far more rapidly. Whether or not humans go extinct remains to be seen, but there is no denying that sustaining 7.6 billion humans while we are forcing the extinction of between 150-200 other species each day and have pushed Earth’s climate out of its natural state is very much in question. I’ve spoken to prestigious scientists both on and off the record who believe that sooner rather than later, global population will be reduced to around 1 billion humans. Whichever scenario runs its course, we are all facing massive loss in the future. It is only then can we decide what is truly important in our lives, and how to comport ourselves as we go through our days.

Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth – Chris Hedges – The spectacular rise of human civilization – its agrarian societies, cities, states, empires and industrial and technological advances ranging from irrigation and the use of metals to nuclear fusion – took place during the last 10,000 years, after the last ice age. Much of North America was buried, before the ice retreated, under sheets eight times the height of the Empire State Building. This tiny span of time on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old is known as the Holocene Age. It now appears to be coming to an end with the refusal of our species to significantly curb the carbon emissions and pollutants that might cause human extinction. The human-induced change to the ecosystem, at least for many thousands of years, will probably make the biosphere inhospitable to most forms of life.The planet is transitioning under our onslaught to a new era called the Anthropocene. This era is the product of violent conquest, warfare, slavery, genocide and the Industrial Revolution, which began about 200 years ago, and saw humans start to burn a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum. The numbers of humans climbed to over 7 billion. Air, water, ice and rock, which are interdependent, changed. Temperatures climbed. The Anthropocene, for humans and most other species, will most likely conclude with extinction or a massive die-off, as well as climate conditions that will preclude most known life forms. We engineered our march toward collective suicide although global warming was first identified in 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius.”The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures.” The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures. We ignore the wisdom of the past and the stark scientific facts before us. We are entranced by electronic hallucinations and burlesque acts, including those emanating from the centers of power, and this ensures our doom. Speak this unpleasant truth and you are condemned by much of society. The mania for hope and magical thinking is as seductive in the Industrial Age as it was in pre-modern societies.

You can kick the planet ‘in the butt’ – Trump’s science pick – President Trump’s pick to lead the White House science office told scientists four years ago that “he doesn’t know” if there’s a climate tipping point and said the planet can be kicked “in the butt really, really hard” and recover.The comments of former University of Oklahoma extreme-weather expert Kelvin Droegemeier, the choice to be director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, occurred during a discussion at the South Central Climate Science Center. The remarks are in one of several videos online where the nominee sheds more light on his views of warming temperatures.. In the past, Droegemeier also diverged from Trump administration officials in calling for more federal science spending (Greenwire, Aug. 1).In the videos, the Oklahoma meteorologist expresses belief in human-driven climate change but also repeatedly points out the limits of climate models. They are more complicated than weather models, which also are not perfect, he said. During the talk at the science center, Droegemeier said the climate issue has become too politicized and that some people “become kind of crazy” when those limits are pointed out. “If we are intellectually honest with one another, we’ll say, yeah, the observations show the planet is warming. The evidence of the models suggest that it’s human-induced, or there’s a strong human signal … but we don’t know everything there is to know about the nitrogen cycle, about all the carbon cycling, all this stuff. Carbon sequestration. We don’t know,” he said, according to online audio of the talk.

Watch Out California! 53 Major Earthquakes Just Hit The Ring Of Fire In A 24 Hour Period – Is something unusual starting to happen to the crust of our planet? The USGS defines any earthquake of at least magnitude 4.5 as “significant”, and there were 53 earthquakes that met that criteria along the Ring of Fire on Sunday alone. If you would like to verify that information for yourself, you can so do right here. Not too long ago, I wrote about how “Earth changes” seem to be accelerating all over the world, but even I was stunned by the ferocity of the seismic activity that we witnessed over the weekend. Because none of the earthquakes happened in the United States, the mainstream media almost entirely ignored this story, but that is a huge mistake. The entire west coast of the U.S. falls along the “Ring of Fire”, and experts assure us that it is only a matter of time before the seismic tension that is building up along the tectonic plates in that area is released. Much of the seismic activity on Sunday was near the small island nation of Fiji, and it is true that Fiji often experiences earthquakes because it sits directly inside the Ring of Fire…Fiji falls in the Pacific Ring Of Fire – a massive horseshoe-shaped area in the Pacific basin.The ring is formed of a string of 452 volcanoes and sites of seismic activity (earthquakes), which encircle the Pacific Ocean.Roughly 90 percent of all earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire, and 75 percent of the world’s active volcanoes are dotted along the expansive ring. It certainly is not unusual to see earthquakes happen along the Ring of Fire, but what was unusual about the activity on Sunday was the size of the earthquakes. The largest quake on Sunday was a massive magnitude 8.2 earthquake that could have done an enormous amount of damage if it had been closer to the surface… A massive quake of magnitude 8.2 struck in the Pacific Ocean close to Fiji and Tonga on Sunday but it was so deep that it did not cause any damage, authorities in Fiji said. The U.S. Tsunami Warning Center also said the quake was too deep to cause a tsunami. Earthquakes that are that deep are usually not so large. This “deep focus” earthquake on Sunday was actually the second largest “deep focus” earthquake that has ever been recorded… In addition to this massive earthquake in Fiji, other areas of the south Pacific were also hammered on Sunday as well. You may remember that the Indonesian island of Lombok was shaken by a tremendous quake back on August 5th which killed hundreds of people, and on Sunday they were hit once again. The following comes from CNN…

Powerful 7.3 Earthquake Strikes Coast Of Venezuela – A powerful 7.3 earthquake struck Sucre, Venezuela on Tuesday at 5:31 p.m. local time on Tuesday, at a depth of 76 miles according to the USGS. M7.3 earthquake today along the northern coast of Venezuela is one of the largest ever recorded earthquakes along the boundary between the Caribbean & South American plates. There was an M7.7 quake to the west in 1900 but this will have preceded detailed instrumental recordings pic.twitter.com/e9HY0inE9E – Stephen Hicks (@seismo_steve) August 21, 2018 The USGS estimates a 43% chance that up to 100 people are dead, and a 19% chance of up to 1,000 fatalities. No word from the town of Carúpano, which sits 23.9 miles from the epicenter and has a population of 112,000.

Trump Administration Hit With 7 Major Environmental Setbacks In Court In Past Week – Trump administration suffered seven major environmental setbacks in the past week as mounting losses in federal courts stall its ambitious deregulatory agenda. On Friday morning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency’s June 2017 decision to delay Obama-era safety standards for chemical plants, arguing the “action was arbitrary and capricious.” On Thursday, the U.S. District Court in South Carolina issued a nationwide injunction against the EPA’s delay of the 2015 Water of the U.S. rule, which extended federal safeguards to 2 million miles of streams and 20 million acres of wetlands, securing the drinking water of more than 117 million Americans. That same day, the U.S. District Court in Fresno, California, overruled the Fish and Wildlife Service’s objection to considering evidence that shows proposed mitigation for the $15 billion “WaterFix” tunnel project under the San Francisco Bay Delta fails to protect endangered fish. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Morris in Montana ordered the State Department to complete an additional environmental review of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, effectively halting the administration’s attempt to railroad the controversial tar sands project. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of International Trade affirmed an immediate embargo on seafood from Mexico caught with gillnets, a fishing method blamed for killing so many endangered vaquitas that as few as 15 of the porpoises remain. The decision ruled against a challenge from the departments of Commerce, Treasury and Homeland Security to a similar order in July. Last Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in a 2-to-1 decision that the EPA offered “no defense” of its decision to delay a ban on chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide that’s been linked to learning disabilities in children. Pruitt reversed plans to ban the chemical in one of his first and most widely reviled decisions in March 2017. That same day, the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ordered the EPA to ban or regulate stormwater discharges from commercial and industrial sites, in a precedent-setting interpretation of the Clean Water Act.

Indonesia sets palm biofuel plant condition for jet purchases from US, France: minister (Reuters) – Indonesia has asked for its companies to be allowed to build palm oil jet fuel plants in the United States and France as a condition for its airlines to buy Boeing Co and Airbus SE planes, its trade minister said. This marks the latest effort by the world’s biggest palm oil producer to find ways to help mop up output of the tropical oil, its second-largest export, that is increasingly unwelcome in the European Union (EU) and United States given environmental and competitive concerns. Home to the world’s third-largest expanse of tropical forests, Indonesia faces pressure to limit destruction of forests, particularly growing on carbon-rich peatlands, that are at risk from rapidly expanding palm and mining sectors. EU negotiators in June agreed to phase out use of palm oil in transport fuels from 2030 due to concerns over high indirect greenhouse gas emissions, while the United States in April placed an anti-dumping tariff of up to 341 percent on Indonesian biodiesels. Indonesia’s trade minister, Enggartiasto Lukita, on Monday told reporters he had conveyed the country’s palm oil fuel plant requirement for jet purchases to the U.S. secretary of commerce during a visit to Washington in late July. “We have asked that Indonesian companies be allowed to produce jet biofuel in the U.S.,” he said. The aim is to source “all raw materials” for the plants from Indonesia, he added. The United States has responded “positively” and Indonesia has also conveyed the same requirement to Airbus, he added. Indonesian airlines rely on the U.S. and European aircraft makers to meet their demand for planes. The same minister has previously threatened that Indonesia will stop buying Airbus planes if the EU implements a plan to curb palm oil use in biofuels, according to local media. An Airbus spokesman declined to comment, while a Boeing spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

A push to eliminate “blood cobalt” from lithium-ion batteries – The U.S. government is funding a push to reinvent lithium-ion batteries so they contain little or no cobalt, an increasingly expensive metal found largely in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where activists say workers often toil in inhumane conditions. Cobalt – contained in virtually every commercial lithium-ion battery on the planet – has unusual energy density and the ability to stabilize volatile electrochemistry. But its price has swung wildly given booming demand for electric cars in China, from Tesla, and elsewhere – in addition to electronic devices like smartphones.

• By seeking to eliminate or seriously reduce the metal’s use in batteries, the Department of Energy, along with several startups, may complicate what has been one of the primary quests of the last decade: to create a safer, cheaper battery that lasts much longer than current technology.
• In a June speech in Washington, D.C., Peter Faguy, a senior manager in the battery research effort at DOE, used the term “blood cobalt” to describe the metal, suggesting that removing it from lithium-ion batteries is a moral issue.
• The DOE is funding three-year research efforts at Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national labs.
• Jason Croy, who is leading the Argonne effort, said that a leading solution is to swap in nickel. That does well in achieving high energy, but so far hasn’t proven stable enough for use in commercial batteries. He said manganese is another potential substitute.
• At Berkeley, Gerbrand Ceder, the project leader, said he is working on an entirely different material – a battery made with disordered rock salt, which he said does not require cobalt for stability. He said the battery can be charged at a high five volts, a key quality when high energy is sought.
• Ceder said cobalt may never be removable from electronic devices because the space for a battery is so small that the metal’s density is needed.

Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can’t afford to ignore it – Bitcoin’s electricity usage is enormous. In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland. Since then, its demands have only grown. It’s now on pace to use just over 42TWh of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru, according to estimates from Digiconomist. That’s commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes – or roughly 1m transatlantic flights. That fact should be a grave notion to anyone who hopes for the cryptocurrency to grow further in stature and enter widespread usage. But even more alarming is that things could get much, much worse, helping to increase climate change in the process. Burning huge amounts of electricity isn’t incidental to bitcoin: instead, it’s embedded into the innermost core of the currency, as the operation known as “mining”. In simplified terms, bitcoin mining is a competition to waste the most electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second. The more electricity you burn, and the faster your computer, the higher your chance of winning the competition. The prize? 12.5 bitcoin – still worth over $100,000 – plus all the transaction fees paid in the past 10 minutes, which according analysts’ estimates is another $2,500 or so. This is a winner-takes-all game, where the prize is guaranteed to be paid to one, and only one, miner every 10 minutes. Burning more electricity increases your chances of winning, but correspondingly decreases everyone else’s – and so they have a motivation to burn more electricity in turn. The economic outcome of all of this is laid bare in a Credit Suisse briefing note published on Tuesday: the network as a whole will reinvest almost all the bitcoin paid out as mining rewards back into its electricity consumption. (Credit Suisse’s ballpark figure assumes that 80% of the expenses of bitcoin miners are spent on electricity). At current prices for electricity and bitcoin, the bank calculates a maximum profitable power draw of bitcoin at around 100TWh – two-and-a-half times higher than its current rate. Any higher and the miner will lose money. But it gets worse. If bitcoin were to become the global currency its supporters hope it will, its pricewould increase. And if its price increases, so too does the amount of electricity miners can afford to burn. Credit Suisse estimate that a bitcoin price of $50,000 – five times its level as I write – would increase the electricity consumption tenfold. And at a bitcoin price of $1.1m, it would be profitable to use almost all the electricity currently generated in the world for mining.

European Union to Ban Halogen Bulbs – Halogen lightbulbs will soon flicker out in Europe after the European Union’s ban on the sale of the bulbs comes into effect on Sept. 1.Households are expected to switch to LED lights, which tend to be more expensive up front, but usually last longer, consume less energy and can save on electricity bills in the long term compared to halogens. Lighting manufacturer Philips estimated to the Guardian that consumers can save up to £112 ($144) a year from the switch.The EU directive banned less efficient light sources with the goal of cutting carbon emissions. Proponents tout electricity savings across the EU of up to 93 terawatts each year by 2020, or the equivalent of Portugal’s annual electricity usage.Phasing out inefficient lights will “save 15.2 million tons of CO² emissions by 2025,” Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, European Commission spokeswoman for climate action and energy, told CNN. “This is the equivalent to the emissions generated by around 2 million people per year. This is a significant contribution to the fight againstclimate change.” Itkonen added that the ban will also help reduce oil imports to the European Union by nearly 75 million barrels a year.

Power-Hungry Amazon Sticking Rural Americans With Tab For Data-Center Expansions – Amazon, through negotiated tax incentives and secret deals with power companies and politicians, has perfected the art of sticking rural Americans with the tab for their power-hungry data centers, reports Bloomberg. Power companies, like politicians, actively pursue Amazon. In that way, the company fits into a long U.S. tradition of shifting costs from businesses to poor residents, who already pay about three times more of their income on utility bills than do wealthy households, according to a 2016 ACEEE study. The difference these days is that data-center operators, unlike manufacturing plants, can’t claim to be engines of job growth, says the ACEEE’s Elliott. – Bloomberg Meanwhile, data centers typically add few new jobs to rural counties. “When you attracted the steel mill years ago, you got 2,000 employees,” says Neal Elliott, senior director of research at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), a green lobbying group. “When you attract a data center, you get maybe 50.” Despite this, desperate state politicians scrambling to replace shrinking manufacturing industries have worked closely with utility companies to score Amazon data center contracts, “using the company’s name as a shorthand for economic resurgence.” In Virginia, where Amazon’s Vadata Inc. is believed to operate at least 29 data centers and be planning 11 more, the company’s 78-page application for a special rate agreement has two versions – a heavily redacted public one and another under seal with state regulators.Amazon has also negotiated an unknown rate discount with American Electric Power in Ohio, where it received $77 million in tax incentives for three data centers in 2016. Late last year, Amazon dangled 12 more in exchange for reduced electricity rates, and AEP exempted it from surcharges other Ohioans must pay. –Bloomberg“That’s de facto cost-­shifting,” according to Ohio State University economist Ned Hill. “Other businesses and households in Ohio are now bearing all the costs of those riders.” Those “other businesses” include Facebook, which opened a $759 million data center in Ohio in 2017. “As a general practice, we do not negotiate exclusive rates,” said spokeswoman Melanie Roe.

Just say no: Wi-Fi-enabled appliance botnet could bring power grid to its knees – At USENIX Security Symposium here on Wednesday, Saleh Soltan from Princeton University’s Department of Electrical Engineering presented research that showed that if Wi-Fi-based high-wattage appliances become common, they could conceivably be used to manipulate electrical demand over a wide area – potentially causing local blackouts and even cascading failures of regional electrical grids. The research by Soltan, Prateek Mittal, and H. Vincent Poor used models of real-world power grids to simulate the effects of a “MaDIoT” (Manipulation of Demand Internet of Things) attack. It found that even swings in power usage that would be within the normal range of appliances such as air conditioners, ovens, and electric heating systems connected to “smart home” systems would be enough to cause fluctuations in demand that could trigger grid failures. These kinds of attacks – focused on home-automation hubs and stand-alone connected appliances – have not yet been seen widely. But the increasing adoption of connected appliances (with many home appliances now coming with connectivity by default) and the difficulty of applying security patches to such devices make a Mirai-style botnet of refrigerators increasingly plausible, if not likely. Soltan and his team looked at three possible categories of potential malicious demand manipulation:

• Attacks that result in frequency instability on the grid by suddenly spiking demand. As demand increases, the line frequency of the electrical grid – the oscillation of alternating current over the wire – decreases. A sudden surge in demand could cause a corresponding dramatic drop in frequency, taking generators offline.
• Attacks that cause line failures and result in cascading failures. Soltan, Mittal, and Poor found that an attack focused on unbalancing supply across a grid could cause line failures as power is moved from one part of the grid to another.
• Attacks that affect the cost of operation. .

Australia faces increased blackout risks this summer as coal plants age — The risk of blackouts in Australia’s upcoming summer has grown from last year as ageing coal-fired power plants have become less reliable, the nation’s energy market operator said on Friday, calling for more power investment in the next few years. The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) latest outlook underscores worries about the country’s grid just days after the government’s signature energy policy to boost power reliability, lower emissions and cut prices collapsed amid political turmoil.

No matter how many leaders Australia knifes, renewable energy will still win: Russell (Reuters) – Imagine a country that is one the world’s largest exporters of energy, but can’t agree on a domestic policy to end electricity blackouts. Imagine a country on the verge of losing a fourth prime minister within a decade to internal party squabbles, mainly over energy policy. Imagine a country that is likely to start importing liquefied natural gas (LNG), even though it is about to become the world’s largest exporter of the super-chilled fuel. The problem for Australia is that this isn’t something being imagined, it’s the reality of a country that can’t find political and social consensus on climate politics and the role of its vast reserves of coal, natural gas and even uranium.

Hawaii’s unusual electric power system makes it really vulnerable to Hurricane Lane – A rare hurricane is bearing down on Hawaii, and it raises concerns about the state’s unusual electric power system. At the heart of the problem is a dirty secret: The island paradise still burns petroleum to provide most of its electric power. Hawaii has pledged to go 100 percent renewable by 2045, but petroleum-fired power plants still produce about two-thirds of its large-scale power generation. That’s fairly rare in the developed world, but it’s not uncommon in remote locations with isolated power systems. Hawaii certainly fits that profile, and it makes the state’s electric power system uniquely vulnerable to hurricanes.

U.S. leading all Paris Accord signatories in emissions reduction – Stephen Moore at the Washington Times reviewed the results of the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy and discovered that America’s place in the global emissions puzzle isn’t living up to our billing as the evil climate change deniers we’re supposed to be. In fact, not only are our emissions not going up, but in 2017 we reduced our emissions more than any other developed country in the world. Go figure.Take a wild guess what country is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? No, no, no, no, no and no. The answer to that question is the United States of America. Wow! How can that be? This must be a misprint. Fake news. America never signed the Kyoto Protocol some two decades ago. We never enacted a carbon tax. We don’t have a cap and trade carbon emission program. That evironmental villain Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accord that was signed by almost the entire rest of the civilized world. Yet the latest world climate report from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy finds that in 2017, America reduced its carbon emissions by 0.5 percent, the most of all major countries.That’s especially impressive given that our economy grew by nearly 3 percent – so we had more growth and less pollution – the best of all worlds.

EPA Is Set to Roll Back Restrictions on Coal-Burning Power Plants – The Trump administration is escalating an effort to revive the flagging U.S. coal industry with a planned move next week to replace restrictive Obama-era climate policies with new rules designed to help coal-burning plants run harder and stay open longer. The proposed new rules, which the Environmental Protection Agency plans is expected to release within days, would be the latest in a series of reversals of policies the Obama administration adopted to slow climate change. It would replace the agency’s so-called Clean Power Plan for the electricity business with regulations that cede power to states, and could ultimately lead to more heat-trapping gases going into the atmosphere even as it sets parameters to boost efficiency at coal-fired power plants. President Trump has repeatedly promised to support coal, an industry beset by a shrinking customer base, competition, falling prices and bankruptcies; the plan may be his administration’s most ambitious effort yet to kill regulations on coal’s behalf. And yet plummeting costs of cleaner fuels including natural gas, wind and solar in recent years have driven consumers and power companies away from coal so dramatically, they may blunt the proposal’s ultimate effect. The Trump administration proposal would have to be submitted for a public rule-making process before taking effect. It would apply to the power industry at large, but is firmly targeted at coal. Senior administration officials familiar with the proposal say it outlines technology that coal-burning plants can employ to produce more power from less fuel. It would also eliminate triggers that would mandate overhauls at plants, a rollback to encourage coal-burning units to make smaller improvements, which could extend the profitable lifespans of those plants by many years. Administration officials say the upshot would be existing coal-fired plants that burn cleaner, and they estimate efficiency gains of about 4%. The proposed rules are designed to address what many conservatives and coal-industry supporters criticized as overreach by the Obama administration determined to force coal plants to run less frequently and close more quickly.

Trump administration reveals greenhouse gas rule for power plants to replace Obama-era plan –The Trump administration on Tuesday revealed its long-awaited plan to scale back an Obama-era rule designed to cut planet-warming emissions from the nation’s power plants.The proposalfrom the Environmental Protection Agency – the Affordable Clean Energy Rule – will hand authority to states to create their own narrower rules for coal-fired power plants. That would give states the option to impose looser restrictions that allow utilities to emit more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and other pollutants.The measure also stands to relieve pressure on the coal industry, a sector President Donald Trump has vowed to revive. Coal miners have seen their fortunes fade as coal-fired plants retire ahead of schedule, under pressure from cheap natural gas and falling prices for renewable energy projects.Tougher regulation under former President Barack Obama put additional stress on the coal industry by requiring power plants in some cases to undertake expensive upgrades or shut down. On Tuesday, the EPA said Obama’s plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants was “overly prescriptive and burdensome.””The ACE Rule would restore the rule of law and empower states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide modern, reliable, and affordable energy for all Americans,” EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement.Obama’s signature Clean Power Plan established the first nationwide rules for carbon emissions. It set emissions goals for each state and gave them many options to reduce climate pollution, with the goal of cutting the nation’s emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Trump is expected to tout the new Affordable Clean Energy Rule at a rally in West Virginia on Tuesday evening. Politico first reported the broad outline last week. The New York Times and Washington Post later reported details. The new plan is projected to allow 12 times more greenhouse gas to be emitted over the next decade than under the Clean Power Plan, The Washington Post reported.

New Trump power plant plan would release hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 into the air – President Trump plans this week to unveil a proposal that would empower states to establish emission standards for coal-fired power plants rather than speeding their retirement – a major overhaul of the Obama administration’s signature climate policy. The plan, which is projected to release at least 12 times the amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere compared with the Obama rule over the next decade, comes as scientists have warned that the world will experience increasingly dire climate effects absent a major cut in carbon emissions. Trump plans to announce the measure as soon as Tuesday during a visit to West Virginia, according to two administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House was still finalizing details Friday.The Environmental Protection Agency’s own impact analysis, which runs nearly 300 pages, projects that the proposal would make only slight cuts to overall emissions of pollutants – including carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides – over the next decade. The Obama rule, by contrast, dwarfs those cuts by a factor of more than 12.The new proposal, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period, could have enormous implications for dozens of aging coal-fired power plants across the country. The EPA estimates that the measure will affect more than 300 U.S. plants, providing companies with an incentive to keep coal plants in operation rather than replacing them with cleaner natural gas or renewable energy projects. By 2030, according to administration officials, the proposal would cut CO2 emissions from 2005 levels by between 0.7 percent and 1.5 percent, compared with a business-as-usual approach. Those reductions are equivalent to taking between 2.7 million and 5.3 million cars off the road. By comparison, the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by about 19 percent during that same time frame. That is equivalent to taking 75 million cars out of circulation and preventing more than 365 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

EPA says its new coal plan could ‘adversely affect human health’ | TheHill: A recently introduced Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plan to ease restrictions on emissions from coal-fired power plants would lead to new carbon-related health issues and as many as 1,400 premature deaths per year, according to an EPA analysis of the proposal. “As compared to the standards of performance that it replaces … implementing the proposed rule is expected to increase emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and increase the level of emissions of certain pollutants in the atmosphere that adversely affect human health,” the EPA said in its analysis. The new regulations would overturn a signature Obama-era climate policy by allowing states, rather than the federal government, to establish emissions standards. The policy could reduce incentives to shift away from coal power to cleaner sources of energy.The EPA’s analysis also laid out possible effects on public health. In what the agency says is the most likely case, between 470 and 1,400 people annually are expected to fall ill or die by ozone-related causes and other factors by 2030. The adverse aspects of the proposal were first reported by The New York Times. EPA acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the agency’s plan will provide more clarity when it comes to regulations. “Today’s proposal provides the states and regulated community the certainty they need to continue environmental progress while fulfilling President Trump’s goal of energy dominance,” he said in a statement Tuesday. President Trump has vowed to reinvigorate America’s decaying coal-fired power plants and increase reliance on the fuel source.

EPA Proposal To Gut Obama-Era Coal Plant Rule Could Cause 1,400 Premature Deaths Per Year – The Trump administration proposed its plan Tuesday to gut a controversial Obama-era rule to cut carbon pollution from power plants, dealing a death blow to an ambitious regulation designed to be the backbone of the United States’ strategy to stave off climate catastrophe. The new regulation, which Acting Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler signed Monday, is called the Affordable Clean Energy rule. It gives states leeway to set their own, drastically lower greenhouse gas emissions targets and restrict what states can do to force coal plants to improve efficiency. The rule marks one of the most significant rollbacks yet to Barack Obama’s climate legacy, and ― despite the Trump administration’s oft-repeated calls for “regulatory certainty” ― is expected to ignite a yearslong legal battle.

Trump EPA offers weakened CO2 rule replacement -The Trump administration released a plan today to regulate carbon dioxide emissions at power plants, undercutting a much broader effort by former President Obama to slash planet-warming gases.The EPA proposal would give states wide latitude for determining how to cut greenhouse gases from the power sector, a key contributor in the U.S. to climate change. The proposed rule is far narrower than the Obama plan, which sought to cut emissions across the power sector rather than only at individual plants.On the campaign trail in 2016, President Trump promised to repeal Obama’s rule, called the Clean Power Plan. His administration stopped short of that today and is instead offering a weakened alternative to avoid a potentially damaging defeat in court.The move could satisfy a number of electric utilities that urged the administration to establish relaxed climate regulations rather than jettison them altogether.

Trump reshaped U.S. climate policy in one month: August 2018 – August may go down as a historic turning point in U.S. climate efforts. EPA launched a whirlwind of actions that stand to exacerbate people’s influence on global temperatures. First came the rollback of clean car rules, an aggressive effort to unravel former President Obama’s program to reduce tailpipe pollution. Then came the Clean Power Plan replacement, another muscular move that dismantles Obama’s signature initiative for curbing emissions from the power sector. The twin blows could have an outsized impact on carbon-cutting efforts globally, analysts said, potentially slowing the pace of emission reductions internationally and halting momentum to decarbonize the economy.

Conservatives warn endangerment finding fight is ‘still alive’ – Conservatives yesterday hailed the Trump administration’s Clean Power Plan replacement as a return to federalism, but some warned the fight to eviscerate the endangerment finding is still a hot topic. EPA’s 2009 ruling that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health is the legal basis for climate rules under the Clean Air Act.It’s what forced the agency to issue a new proposal – the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule – yesterday rather than repeal its greenhouse gas regulations altogether, and acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler has said the issue is settled law (Greenwire, Aug. 21).”Just to be clear, this is a regulation of greenhouse gases,” EPA air chief Bill Wehrum said of ACE yesterday. “No doubt about it.”But while the administration would have to navigate a legal labyrinth to repeal the endangerment finding, “the issue is still alive,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said yesterday. It’ll have to take more time, though, because any repeal of the finding would likely result in “a bunch of lawsuits,” Inhofe added. “I think we’ll eventually see changes there, but that hasn’t happened yet,” he said.

Trump’s EPA just handed these states a way to keep burning coal –The Trump administration is giving states a pathway to keep coal power plants running, and many will likely seize the opportunity.The window opened Tuesday when the Environmental Protection Agency revealed its plan to scrap President Barack Obama‘s greenhouse gas regulations for the nation’s power plants. The Trump administration intends to replace the rules with a policy that will make it easier for states to continue burning coal. President Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested the rule would help keep the nation’s embattled coal plants online, advancing his goal of reviving the coal industry.”We’re canceling Obama’s illegal anti-coal destroying regulations, the so-called Clean Power Plan,” he said during a rally in Charleston, West Virginia.

‘Affordable Clean Energy’ plan won’t save coal – analysts – President Trump’s diluted Clean Power Plan is unlikely to save the coal industry, but it represents a setback for U.S. efforts to address climate change, analysts say. In removing a government cap on power plant emissions, Trump leaves American climate policy to the whims of the power market, one of the few areas of the economy to post steep emissions reductions in recent years. The combination of cheap natural gas, stagnating power demand and advancements in wind and solar has prompted a wave of coal plant closures and slashed power-sector emissions. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that U.S. power-sector emissions decreased 24 percent between 2005 and 2016. The question is whether that will continue in the absence of a government-mandated cap on power plant emissions.

Report: Cheap Natural Gas and Renewables Could Close Half of US Coal Fleet by 2030 – The U.S. coal power plant fleet has been shrinking for years, with the official tally of coal plants closed exceeding those still open as of late last year. Another 43 gigawatts, or about 18 percent of the remaining 249 gigawatts of capacity, is expected to close by 2030. Absent “market interventions at a grand scale” – such as the Trump administration’s plan to force utilities to buy uncompetitive coal-fired power under the mandate of national security – the same trends are accelerating beyond current estimates, and could lead to the country’s coal fleet being nearly halved again by 2030.

Chinese traders ditch cheap U.S. coal for domestic supply as tariffs loom (Reuters) – Some Chinese coal traders handling U.S. imports have begun sourcing future supplies domestically, people with knowledge of the matter said, as they await delivery of the last U.S. cargoes to arrive before hefty tariffs kick in on Thursday in a deepening trade row between the world’s top two economies. At least six cargoes of U.S. coal were due to arrive this month, Thomson Reuters Eikon shipping data showed, but at least three were still en route or waiting off ports to unload cargo on Wednesday. From Thursday, the United States will impose new tariffs on $16 billion of goods and in retaliation, Beijing has pledged additional tariffs on a similar amount of U.S. imports including metals, fuel – and coal.

Russian Nuclear-Powered Missile “Lost At Sea” – Recovery Efforts Underway, Says US Intelligence – A bombshell CNBC report says that Russia is seeking to recover an advanced nuclear-powered missile that was “lost at sea” after a failed flight test which occurred in late 2017. Unnamed US officials made the astounding claim while citing a classified intelligence report detailing the Russian operation. CNBC explains based on its intelligence sources: Crews will attempt to recover a missile that was test launched in November and landed in the Barents Sea, which is located north of Norway and Russia. The operation will include three vessels, one of which is equipped to handle radioactive material from the weapon’s nuclear core. There is no timeline for the mission, according to the people with knowledge of the report. The U.S. intelligence report did not mention any potential health or environmental risks posed by possible damage to the missile’s nuclear reactor.

“Thermonuclear Detonations Over The 60 Largest US Cities” – FEMA Heightens Nuclear Response Readiness – The Federal government’s national disaster response and planning organization, FEMA, has significantly updated its nuclear disaster plans according to a new bombshell report in Buzzfeed, which describes the new plans as “truly terrifying”. The report is based on an exclusive interview with an unnamed US Federal Emergency Management official. Notably, the official indicated the new FEMA plan includes preparedness for a scenario involving “large nuclear detonations over the 60 largest US cities”.