Environmental News For The Week Ending 16September 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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Antidepressants may cause antibiotic resistance –A key ingredient in common antidepressants such as Prozac could be causing antibiotic resistance according to new University of Queensland research. A study led by Dr Jianhua Guo from UQ’s Advanced Water Management Centre focused on fluoxetine, a prescription drug used to help people recover from depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder or eating disorders. Dr Guo said while overuse and misuse of antibiotics is generally considered the major factor contributing to the creation of ‘superbugs’, researchers were often unaware that non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals could also cause antibiotic resistance. “Our previous study reported that triclosan, a common ingredient in toothpaste and hand wash can directly induce antibiotic resistance,” he said.

What’s With All The Planes Full Of Sick People? – Has anyone else found all those planes full of sick people rather alarming? The first one that came to my attention was a flight into the United States from the Dubai. On that plane headed toward JFK International Airport in New York City, approximately 100 passengers and members of the crew became ill. The CDC met the flight at the airport and determined that out of the plane full of 521 people, about a hundred of them self-reported fevers of over 100 degrees and coughing. 19 of those people were found to be ill, 10 or 11 (reports vary) of them enough to be hospitalized by the CDC and the other 500+ people on that plane were sent on their ways…all over the nation, as JFK is a hub for international flights. Some point to a particularly aggressive strain of the virus ravaging Mecca, where some of the passengers had recently spent time. (source) But don’t worry. CNN reported that it’s “just the flu or common cold.” No biggie. That was on September 5th. On the same day as the UAE flight was briefly quarantined, 147 passengers on a flight into the Perpignan airport in the south of France were held for over an hour when it was feared that a child on board the plane was suffering from cholera. “It is likely the child is carrying cholera and they will be evacuated to the hospital for examination,” said firefighters.. (source) The good news is that the little boy did not have cholera. He just had regular old vomiting and diarrhea during the flight. The following day, passengers from two different flights originating in Paris and Munich and landing in Philadelphia became ill enough for the CDC to be contacted. According to a Customs and Border Control spokesperson, 12 passengers, who had attended the hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (sound familiar?) had complained of sore throats and coughs were not considered to be “extremely ill.” All 250 people on the two flights were assessed and everyone who wasn’t sick (yet) was released to go travel wherever it is that they were going. Possibly the strangest story yet is the one about the flight from Nigeria to London. The flight happened before all the other flights, but the information just came out on the news on the 8th. A Nigerian naval officer has been diagnosed with monkeypox but not until after everyone was already gone from the flight to their corners of the earth. Monkeypox is a rare viral zoonotic disease that occurs primarily in remote parts of central and west Africa, near tropical rainforests. Typically, case fatality in monkeypox outbreaks has been between 1% and 10%, with most deaths occurring in younger age groups.There is no specific treatment or vaccine available although prior smallpox vaccination was highly effective in preventing monkeypox as well. (source) The risk to the wider public is considered to be very low, PHE (Public Health England) said. (source) Monkeypox certainly sounds delightful.

First U.S. BPA Lab Study on Humans Finds Troubling Health Effects at Levels Deemed ‘Safe’ — The first U.S. study of the effect on people of exposure to a hormone-disrupting chemical widely used in food packaging showed that levels the Food and Drug Administration deems “safe” can alter insulin response, a key marker for diabetes. The groundbreaking study, published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, administered low doses of bisphenol A, or BPA, to 16 people, then tested their insulin production in response to glucose, commonly called blood sugar. When insulin and blood glucose levels were compared to the same measurements taken without exposure to BPA, researchers found that BPA significantly changed how glucose affected insulin levels. Similar insulin and glucose tests are used by doctors for diagnosing diabetes.”We’re living in an age where type 2 diabetes is rampant. Here is a signal of a new path to explore for what is causing it,” Pete Myers, a co-author of the study, told Environmental Health News.

BPA-Free Plastics Are Just as Toxic as BPA-Laden Ones, Study Says. Here’s Why – BPA is a chemical compound that has long been used to make plastic products including water bottles and to coat cans. But in recent years, following studies warning of the potential health consequences of minute traces, many companies have substituted similar chemicals into their food and drink containers that they then label “BPA-free.”The widespread use of BPA has, in theory, been reduced.The problem is that the chemical composition of BPS, short for bisphenol S, varies very little from BPA, or bisphenol A. This means that the supposed health benefits of replacing BPA with BPS and other similar compounds simply don’t exist, according to a new study in the journal Current Biology. An estimated 93% of Americans have BPA in their bodies, potentially impacting the human body’s endocrine system and causing fertility complications in men and women, according to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

U.S. “most dangerous” place to give birth in developed world, USA Today investigation finds – A USA Today investigation finds the United States is the “most dangerous place to give birth in the developed world.” Every year in the U.S., more than 50,000 mothers are severely injured during or after childbirth and 700 die. USA Today’s investigation, “Deadly Deliveries,” claims women are dying and suffering life-altering injuries during childbirth because hospitals are not following long-known safety measures. Maternal death in the United States has been steadily rising. The U.S. now has the highest rate in the developed world. USA Today conducted a four-year investigation into the nation’s hospital maternity wards and spoke to several families who lost loved ones and to women who were permanently harmed during their deliveries. In one example, Ali Lowry had internal bleeding after having a baby by C-section. It took medical staff hours to act on the warning signs, and in that time she nearly bled to death. Ali needed a hysterectomy to stop the bleeding. She and her husband, Shaun, sued Knox Community Hospital in Ohio and settled out of court. The doctor and hospital denied wrongdoing, and Knox Community told CBS News it could not comment on the case due to patient privacy laws.

September 11: nearly 10,000 people affected by ‘cesspool of cancer’ — John Mormando was at a loss to explain his rare diagnosis – fewer than 1% of breast cancer cases occur in men, and he has no family history of the disease. Then colleagues reminded him of the months he worked close to the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center. Tens of thousands of people who lived or worked in the neighborhood at the time found themselves breathing in air thick with toxic fumes and particles from the pulverized, burning skyscrapers. Many have since become sick, many have died and new cases are still occurring all the time that are linked back to the poisons that were in the air around the wreckage. The latest example is a cluster of men who have developed breast cancer, including Mormando. Now a commodities broker at the RJ O’Brien office in the city, he worked at the time at the New York Mercantile Exchange, a block away from the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, where extremists flew hijacked passenger jets into the center’s twin towers that morning in 2001, causing their collapse shortly afterwards.The site of the towers became known as Ground Zero and the attacks, which involved two other hijacked jets, one that was flown into the Pentagon and one that was brought down in a field on its way to Washington DC, collectively known as 9/11. “We went back to work exactly one week after 9/11, while the towers were still burning and everything else crumbled around us. We were told that the air was fine, and we needed to get back to work,” he said. “It was ridiculous. It was horrible. The smell downtown was as pungent as you could imagine. There were buildings still on fire. Those buildings burned for months.

New ‘Poison Papers’ Leak: EPA Knew About Many Dangerous Toxins, But Kept Quiet – video and transcript – Earlier this year The Real News reported on a trove of documents published in late 2017 known as the Poison Papers. These extensive files demonstrate that the EPA failed to fulfill its mandate long before Donald Trump was elected as United States president. The Poison Papers were analyzed and published by the Center for Media and Democracy and Dr. Jonathan Latham. They are a compilation of over 20,000 documents obtained from federal agencies and chemical manufacturers via open records requests in public interest litigation. They include internal scientific studies and summaries of studies, internal memos and reports, meeting minutes, strategic discussions, and sworn testimonies. The poison papers were recently augmented by a collection of documents from EPA whistleblower William Sanjour. Mr. Sanjour worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for over 30 years. Now here to discuss the Sanjour documents with us is Dr. Jonathan Latham himself. He is the co-founder and executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project and editor of the Independent Science News website. He holds a master’s degree in crop genetics and a Ph.D. in virology, and he joins us today from Auckland, New Zealand. Thank you for joining us again, Dr. Latham.

Research Links Long-Banned Insecticide DDT to Autism — High levels of exposure to the insecticide DDT in women seems to more than double the risk of autism in their children, new research suggests. The study looked for a link between the development of autism and two common environmental chemicals — DDT and PCBs. PCBs are chemicals that were used in many products, especially transformers and electrical equipment. In this study, they weren’t linked to autism. Both DDT and PCBs have been banned in the United States and many other countries for more than three decades. Yet they’re still present in soil, groundwater and foods. “They break down slowly over time. Even though they’re not produced any more in the Western world, almost everyone is exposed to some of them,” said study author Dr. Alan Brown. He’s a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. “In our Finnish population-based sample of more than 1 million pregnancies, virtually all of the women had exposure to DDT and PCBs,” Brown added. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social skills and nonverbal communication and also can cause repetitive behaviors. Signs include avoiding eye contact, speech delays, behaviors such as flapping or rocking, and intense reactions to stimulation such as sounds or lights. The exact cause is unknown, but the disorder is believed to involve both genetic and environmental factors. Some studies have found links between autism and certain toxins..

Bayer Beware- Lawyers Claim To Have Explosive Monsanto Documents — Lawyers involved in a California lawsuit against Monsanto claim to have “explosive” documents concerning the Bayer-owned agrochemical giant’s activities in Europe, according to Euronews. “What we have is the tip of the iceberg. And in fact we have documents now in our possession, several hundreds documents, that have not been declassified and some of those are explosive,” said US lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr, adding“And many of them are pertinent to what Monsanto did here in Europe. And that’s just the beginning.”Monsanto – bought by Germany’s Bayer AG in June for $66 billion, was ordered in August to pay a historic $289 million to a former school groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, who said Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller gave him terminal cancer. Monsanto says it will appeal the verdict.Environmental lawyers have been in Brussels in order to address a European Parliament special committee on the issue. “They are fighting a fight for more democracy and for transparency and to get a better insight in how big corporation such as Monsanto act and try to manipulate the facts,” said Belgium MEP Bart Staes.Last November EU approved the use of glyphosate – a key chemical in Roundup, following five years of heated debate over whether it causes cancer. While it was approved for just five years until 2022 vs. the usual 15 years, there are now rumors that they will withdraw Roundup’s license this year altogether. Labeled a carcinogen by the EPA in 1985, the agency reversed its stance on glyphosate in 1991. The World Health Organization’s cancer research agency, however, classified the compound as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015. California, meanwhile, has the chemical listed in its Proposition 65 registry of chemicals known to cause cancer.

GMOs Are Not Agriculture’s Future–Biotech Is — It is clear to me agriculture needs to adapt. The only question is how can we move forward in a way that does not repeat the mistakes of the GMO (genetically modified organism) era? The answer lies in newer technologies that allow us to responsibly develop crops that never integrate non-native elements into a plant. This was the catastrophic mistake of GMO. Today’s science is very different and enables us to precisely target and direct a plant’s natural gene-editing process. This approach accelerates natural breeding that has been a staple of farming for thousands of years and is already proving to be a rapid, versatile and low-cost way to improve nutrition, increase crop yields and reduce waste. In 1994 agribusiness giant Monsanto offered a partial answer when it introduced Roundup Ready soybeans and corn. Farmers flocked to these crops because they could use them in conjunction with Monsanto’s herbicide, which killed weeds that competed with crops for sunlight, water and nutrients. Regulators in many countries, including the U.S., deemed the product safe but the public continued to be concerned because such crops are transgenic, meaning that they have been created by the transfer of genetic material from unrelated living organisms.Despite 25 years of widespread use, public resistance to such transgenic crops has only grown, and this has limited enthusiasm for the further spread of GMO. This posed a dilemma. Agriculture needed a new engine to boost yields, but the public had no appetite for the further deployment of GMO. Enter precision gene editing, an entirely new approach to plant breeding that is radically different from what we know as GMO. Forty years ago scientists resorted to inserting foreign genetic material because in the 1970s no one knew how to precisely change particular genes associated with a specific trait. In other words, transgenic technology (GMO) was a kind of stopgap, used in the absence to tools to achieve what plant breeders have always wanted to accomplish: to make a particular change and obtain a particular result.

Citrus disease could kill California industry if Congress slows research, growers warn – A disease called citrus greening has devastated Florida’s citrus industry since its discovery in 2005. Agriculture officials are hoping they can stop it before California suffers the same fate. Congress is poised to continue spending $25 million a year into finding a way to stop it. But the money will not come without second thoughts. Lawmakers are debating a variety of aspects of the farm bill, and some have quietly suggested that the citrus research money could be shifted into a general agricultural research category.And while representatives of the citrus industry admit current progress on finding a cure – or lessening the impact of the disease – has been disappointing, they say the alternative is the death of the nation’s citrus industry. “I’ve been involved in this industry for a long time, and this is the biggest fight we’ve ever had,” said Joel Nelsen, president of California Citrus Mutual, an advocacy organization for California citrus growers. “It’s got us frustrated, it’s got us scared, it’s got us nervous.”As recently as 2012, Florida produced the vast majority of the nation’s oranges. California’s citrus production surpassed Florida’s after citrus greening infected about 80 percent of citrus trees in the Sunshine State – making the fruit bitter and unusable and permanently damaging the trees. Texas’s citrus production has also been effected by the disease. The disease is caused by a bacterium called Huanglongbing, which is passed by the Asian citrus psyllid, a tiny insect that feeds on the leaves and stems of citrus trees. It can easily spread to other neighboring trees, decimating a commercial citrus grove in a matter of years. There is no cure right now, only ways to slow down the disease. It was found in the Southern California city of Hacienda Heights in 2012.

New global study reveals the ‘staggering’ loss of forests caused by industrial agriculture — A new analysis of global forest loss – the first to examine not only where forests are disappearing, but also why – reveals just how much industrial agriculture is contributing to the loss. The answer: some 5 million hectares – the area of Costa Rica – every year. And despite years of pledges by companies to help reduce deforestation, the amount of forest cleared to plant oil palm and other booming crops remained steady between 2001 and 2015.The finding is “a really big deal,” because it suggests that corporate commitments alone are not going to adequately protect forests from expanding agriculture.Researchers already had a detailed global picture of forest loss and regrowth. In 2013, a team led by Matthew Hansen, a remote-sensing expert at the University of Maryland in College Park, published high-resolution maps of forest change between 2000 and 2012 from satellite imagery. But the maps, available online, didn’t reveal where deforestation – the permanent loss of forest – was taking place. For the new analysis, Philip Curtis, a geospatial analyst working with The Sustainability Consortium, trained a computer program to recognize five causes of forest loss in satellite images: wildfire, logging of tree plantations, large-scale agriculture, small-scale agriculture, and urbanization.The program’s decisions were based on mathematical properties of the images, which can help distinguish the larger blocky shapes of industrial agriculture from the smaller, irregular fields in shifting subsistence farming, for example. All told, about 27% of the total loss between 2001 and 2015 was due to large-scale farming and ranching, Curtis and his colleagues report today inScience. Such farming includes industrial plantations for palm oil, a valuable biofuel and a major ingredient in food, cosmetics, and other products. Forest cleared for those plantations is gone for good, whereas forest cleared for other purposes, including small-scale farming, typically grows back. (Urbanization, also a permanent conversion, made up just 1% of the total loss of forest.)

Fraud in honey content | The Economist –ACCORDING to the National Honey Board, per person consumption of the regurgitated nectar has doubled in America since the 1990s. As demand has increased, prices have followed. Domestic production has not. In 2016 American bees produced 73,000 tonnes of honey, or 35% less than they did 20 years ago. This has given honey-sellers an incentive to dilute it with cheaper things like corn, rice and beet syrup. According to the US Pharmacopeia’s Food Fraud Database, honey is now the third-favourite food target for adulteration, behind milk and olive oil. The mismatch between domestic production and demand means America imports a lot of honey (203,000 tonnes of it in 2017). Most once came from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and Uruguay, but now nearly half comes from Asia. High tariffs are imposed on Chinese honey, disguised versions of which drizzle into America via China’s neighbours. Although there are tests to screen honey for things that do not belong in it, a newer test that uses nuclear magnetic resonance is more effective. In addition to screening for over 40 unnatural substances, it can spot the geographical origin and botanical source (clover, heather, hawthorn, etc). “Honey fraud”, cautions Mr Garcia, “is a threat to national food security.” The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is alert to the scourge of honey fraud, and has published guidelines which require any additives to honey to be listed as ingredients. But they are not legally enforceable. One problem is that the FDA’s definition of honey is rudimentary. It describes honey as “a thick, sweet, syrupy substance that bees make as food from the nectar of plants or secretions of living parts of plants and store in honeycombs.” This somewhat insults bees, who take great care to deposit, dehydrate and allow their honey to ripen in the honeycomb, a process which is important to its taste. Fraudsters often harvest prematurely, leaving the liquid with a high water content. Nor does this definition take a clear position on whether something sold as honey should be free of additives.

Lab-grown meat and the fight over what it can be called, explained – Lab-grown meat. Cultured meat. Cell-based meat. Clean meat. It’s all the same thing: meat grown from just a few cells from an actual animal. And although it’s years away from your supermarket, its potential to radically change animal agriculture as we know it is stirring up tensions.At the urging of traditional meat producers, Missouri passed a law in May prohibiting anything not “derived from harvested production livestock or poultry“ from being marketed as “meat” in the state. This week, advocates of lab-based meat sued, alleging freedom of speech infringement, just before the law went into effect on Tuesday.While the Missouri law covers both imitation meats – like the Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger, which get their protein from plants – and lab-grown meat, they are not the same. Lab-grown meat is animal tissue, grown in a tank by putting a few cells in a growth medium and letting them reproduce. No plants.The lab-grown startups and their supporters believe that their products can one day make cows, pigs, and chickens – and even fish – obsolete. Memphis Meats, Just, Finless Foods, SuperMeat (in Israel), and Mosa Meat (in the Netherlands) are a few of the companies working on it. Nonprofits like the Good Food Institute and New Harvest are working to help fund them. And they have a compelling argument. If you couldgrow enough meat in a lab to satisfy at least some of the world’s meat demand, and if you could solve all the problems of animal welfare and environmental impact while you’re at it, why on earth wouldn’t you?

China’s Pig Market On Lockdown As African Swine Fever Spreads – A series of African Swine Fever outbreaks in China is “here to stay,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Friday, adding that it could spread to neighboring countries in Asia.On Wednesday, the FAO assembled an emergency meeting in Bangkok consisting of health experts, government officials, and industry participants from China and surrounding countries to develop a regional response to east Asia’s first outbreak of the disease.While the virus is not a direct threat to humans, it is extremely contagious and has a high mortality rate among pigs, and can have a devastating economic impact on meat producers.Apparently this is how they ‘cull’ pigs in #xuancheng city. #ASF#AfricanSwineFever pic.twitter.com/kq7BKXy50V – Björn Ooms (@Bjornooms) September 3, 2018“It’s critical that this region be ready for the very real possibility that African Swine Fever could jump the border into other countries,” said Wantanee Kalpravidh, regional manager in Asia for the FAO’s Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases. “That’s why this emergency meeting has been convened.”Reuters said the virus was first detected in China last month and has been found in 18 farms with many cases more than 600 miles apart, the FAO said in a statement.With an abundance of pork farms across China, the FAO indicated the spread of the virus to neighboring countries is almost inevitable.”The geographical spread, of which African Swine Fever has been repeated in such a short period of time, means that transboundary emergence of the virus, likely through movements of products containing infected pork, will almost certainly occur,” said Juan Lubroth, chief veterinary officer at FAO.

Investigation Exposes Animal Abuse at U.S. Supplier to World’s Largest Meat Company — In September of last year, two executives of JBS, the world’s largest meat producer, based in Brazil, were arrested and charged with insider trading. In May 2017, the billionaire siblings – Wesley Batista, JBS’s CEO, and his younger brother Joesley, the firm’s former chairman – admitted to bribing more than 1,800 politicians and government officials, including meat inspectors, in an effort to avoid food safety checks.Now, new undercover video shot by a Mercy for Animals (MFA) investigator at Tosh Farms, a JBS pork supplier based in Franklin, Kentucky, exposes what the animal rights group calls the “malicious and systemic abuse of mother pigs and piglets.” Extreme Animal Abuse Uncovered at JBS Pork Supplier – YouTube Tyler witnessed workers at Tosh Farms kicking and striking animals in their faces, ripping out the testicles of piglets without any pain relief, and even smashing the heads of piglets against the ground in order to kill them.Those piglets who did not immediately die were left to suffer, denied proper veterinary care. “A worker grabbed a piglet, just hours old, by the feet and swung him high and then slammed his head down against the hard concrete,” said Tyler. “Any life left quickly vanished.””From the day pigs are born until the day they are violently killed for JBS pork, their lives are filled with misery and deprivation,” said Matt Rice, president of MFA, in a press statement. “If JBS executives abused even one dog or cat the way their suppliers abuse millions of pigs, they would be jailed for cruelty to animals. As the largest meat company in the world, JBS has the power and responsibility to end this torture.”

More dead pigs? Hurricane threatens hog farms, sewage plants and people downstream – Hurricane Florence threatens to kill thousands of farm animals and trigger catastrophic spills of waste as it bears down on a Carolina coastal region dotted with sewage treatment plants, hog waste lagoons, poultry farms and coal ash ponds.Past hurricanes, including Matthew in 2016, caused numerous spills from sewage treatment plants and livestock farms, complicating the task of cleaning up after the storm. Florence poses an even more serious risk, especially if the Category 4 hurricane parks itself over the region and dumps record amounts of rain.Soil in much of the Carolinas is already saturated by several months of rainfall, adding to the potential risk of flooding and the collapse of earthen lagoons containing hog manure, coal ash or other types of waste.“It heightens the risk,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center. “The fact that the soil is already wet means surrounding land has less capacity to absorb the water. That means these lagoons are at greater threat of being overwhelmed.”Hurricane Florence is so large it is certain to cause pollution releases in the Carolinas and Virginia, especially in urban areas that have combined sewer and storm-water systems. In 2016 and 2017, there were 136 sewage spills in an eight-county of eastern North Carolina, 36 of which were caused by severe weather, including 11 caused by Hurricane Matthew, according to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.

Wet weather brings rise in tick-related cattle deaths in Zimbabwe – A combination of late, heavy rains and a shortage of cattle dip have contributed to a rise in tick-borne diseases in Zimbabwe this year, a government official said. As climate change brings more extreme and uncertain weather, as well as warmer conditions in many places, worries about such pest outbreaks are growning, experts say. Figures released by Zimbabwe’s Department of Livestock and Veterinary Services (DLVS) showed tick-borne diseases killed 3,430 cattle between last November and May – nearly twice as many as died during the same period in 2013/14. DLVS Director Josphat Nyika said the incidence of the most lethal tick-borne killer – called theileriosis, also known as January disease – had shown a sharp increase. About half of the tick-borne fatalities – some 1,751 cattle – succumbed to theileriosis in this period, he said. That is nearly seven times as many cattle as were lost to the disease in the previous period, according to government figures. “The wet and warm weather contributed to rising cases of tick-borne diseases as the rainy season progressed into May this year,” he said. And, he added, a shortage of foreign currency meant Zimbabwe had imported less cattle dip – known as acaricide – leaving the country facing “a serious shortage” of the tick killer. In Zimbabwe’s rural communities, cattle are a common source of wealth – and draught power – and about 90 percent of the country’s nearly 5.5 million cattle are owned by small-scale farmers, the government said.

Wisconsin’s Floods Are Catastrophic – and Only Getting Worse – AN ENTIRE SUMMER’S worth of rain has fallen across a broad swath of the Midwest in recent days. The resulting record floods have wrecked homes and altered the paths of rivers, in one case destroying a waterfall in Minnesota. The worst-affected region, southwest Wisconsin, has received more than 20 inches of rain in 15 days – more than it usually gets in six months.Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin declared a statewide emergency last week, mobilizing the Wisconsin National Guard to assist flood victims if necessary. The Kickapoo River in southwest Wisconsin rose to record levels – as high as six feet above the previous high water mark – producing damage that local emergency management officials described as “breathtaking.” In the tiny Wisconsin town of Gays Mills, this is the third catastrophic flood in 10 years. After floods a decade ago, about a quarter of the residents left, and the town was partially rebuilt on higher ground. But this time around is even worse – with almost every home in the town damaged. Is there a connection to climate change? Well, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, and the region’s main moisture source – the Gulf of Mexico – has reached record-warm levels in recent years, helping to spur an increase in precipitation intensity. But there’s more to it than that. Decades of development have also paved over land that used to soak up rainwater. Earlier this year, Wisconsin took controversial steps to loosen restrictions on lakeside development. Madison, home to the state’s flagship university, has seen the brunt of the flooding so far. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s center that specializes in studying lakes is itself flooded. On Twitter, the center posted maps of recent floods alongside projections for the worst expected floods later this century. They matched remarkably well. For Eric Booth, a climate scientist at the university, the whole thing is almost too much to comprehend. His research project on small stream water temperatures was washed away by the flooding. “The scale of what is happening is absolutely unbelievable to witness,” Booth wrote in an email. Booth’s own calculations showed that rainfall over the past 30 days is an approximately 1-in-1,000 year occurrence, assuming a stable climate. (That, obviously, isn’t a good assumption anymore.)

House Sends Water Resources Infrastructure Bill to Senate with Unanimous Vote – The House of Representatives today unanimously approved bipartisan, comprehensive water resources infrastructure legislation, which includes the Water Resources Development Act of 2018 (WRDA). The bill will improve America’s harbors, ports, waterways, flood protection, and other vital water infrastructure.The America’s Water Infrastructure Act of 2018 (S. 3021), approved today by voice vote, is the product of negotiations and agreement between House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over various water resources and energy infrastructure issues.Title I of S. 3021 is WRDA 2018, which authorizes locally driven water transportation and resources infrastructure improvements, to be carried out by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, that are critical to our economy and to protecting our communities. Additional titles of the bill address stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water infrastructure and hydropower development. WRDA:

• Authorizes locally driven, but nationally vital, investments in our Nation’s water resources infrastructure.
• Strengthens economic growth and competitiveness, helps move goods throughout the country and abroad, and protects our communities.
• Follows the transparent process Congress established under the 2014 reforms for considering proposed Army Corps of Engineers activities.
• Builds upon previous reforms of the Corps to further accelerate the process for moving projects forward more efficiently and at lower cost.
• Upholds Congress’ constitutional duty to provide for infrastructure and facilitate commerce for the Nation.

What the world needs now to fight climate change: More swamps – For centuries human societies have viewed wetlands as wastelands to be “reclaimed” for higher uses. China began large-scale alteration of rivers and wetlands in 486 B.C. when it started constructing the Grand Canal, still the longest canal in the world. Today many modern cities around the world are built on filled wetlands. Large-scale drainage continues,particularly in parts of Asia. Based on available data, total cumulative loss of natural wetlands is estimated to be 54 to 57 percent – an astounding transformation of our natural endowment.Vast stores of carbon have accumulated in wetlands, in some cases over thousands of years. This has reduced atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and methane – two key greenhouse gases that are changing Earth’s climate. If ecosystems, particularly forests and wetlands, did not remove atmospheric carbon, concentrations of carbon dioxide from human activities would increase by 28 percent more each year. Wetlands continuously remove and store atmospheric carbon. Plants take it out of the atmosphere and convert it into plant tissue, and ultimately into soil when they die and decompose. At the same time, microbes in wetland soils release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as they consume organic matter. Natural wetlands typically absorb more carbon than they release. But as the climate warms wetland soils, microbial metabolism increases, releasing additional greenhouse gases. In addition, draining or disturbing wetlands can release soil carbon very rapidly.For these reasons, it is essential to protect natural, undisturbed wetlands. Wetland soil carbon, accumulated over millennia and now being released to the atmosphere at an accelerating pace, cannot be regained within the next few decades, which are a critical window for addressing climate change. In some types of wetlands, it can take decades to millennia to develop soil conditions that support net carbon accumulation. Other types, such as new saltwater wetlands, can rapidly start accumulating carbon.Arctic permafrost, which is wetland soil that remains frozen for two consecutive years, stores nearly twice as much carbon as the current amount in the atmosphere. Because it is frozen, microbes cannot consume it. But today, permafrost is thawing rapidly, and Arctic regions that removed large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere as recently as 40 years ago are now releasing significant quantities of greenhouse gases. If current trends continue, thawing permafrost will release as much carbon by 2100 as all U.S. sources, including power plants, industry and transportation.

Toxic red tide algae moves north near Tampa Bay, killing hundreds of thousands of fish – The toxic algae bloom that has carved a trail of dead animals and triggered a putrid stench along western Florida’s coastline has drifted further north, killing hundreds of thousands of fish in the Tampa Bay region.The legions of dead fish were reported in a 20-mile stretch of coastline from Clearwater to St. Petersburg, environmental officials with Pinellas County told the Tampa Bay Times on Saturday.County workers roamed beaches and trawled offshore to collect the fish carcasses to head off decomposition as some beachgoers turned back. Rotting fish and the strong odor of the algae has previously repelled locals and imperiled Florida’s vital tourism sector for much of the summer. The toxic algae has claimed countless fish, hundreds of sea turtles, dozens of bottlenose dolphins and even a 26-foot whale shark in the past few months. The toxic algae stretches in varied density for about 120 miles of coastline, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said. In August, Gov. Rick Scott (R) declared a state of emergency and released funds to help with the massive cleanup effort and help businesses recover from lost profits. The algae has affected the coast in some way for 10 months – and has become a key political issue in the midterms for Scott, a U.S. Senate hopeful. A red tide is a natural phenomenon that develops miles offshore before making its way to the coast, where it feeds on a variety of pollutants, including phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizer, along with other runoff and wastewater. The toxins can aerosolize in the wind that drifts ashore, triggering respiratory problems or worsening conditions such as asthma. Until this past week, the red tide lurked south of Tampa Bay, the Times reported. But samples of high concentration of the algae have been found in waters near Clearwater Beach in the past few days.

Hundreds of seals are dying on the New England coast – Harbor and gray seals are dying by the hundreds from Southern Maine to northern Massachusetts, apparently from a combination of a measles-like illness and the flu.Late last month, the federal government declared the summer’s toll on seals an “unusual mortality event,” meaning federal resources would be provided to help understand and cope with the deaths.Teams have responded to more than 600 reports of dead or dying harborand gray seals, but there are probably more that have gone unreported or washed up on private property, said Mike Asaro, chief of the marine mammal and sea turtle branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “The total could be up to 1,000 at this point. We just don’t know,” he said.Marine mammal stranding agencies always expect to find some sick and deceased animals this time of year, as a percentage of newborn pups fail to thrive after weaning. But the carcasses washing up on New England beaches reveal an epidemic that’s touching all ages, said Katie Pugliares-Bonner, a senior biologist and necropsy coordinator for the New England Aquarium in Boston.Although research is still underway, the disease outbreak appears to be centered on the Isles of Shoals, a small group of islands off the coasts of Southern Maine and New Hampshire, Ms. Pugliares-Bonner said.Animals are suffering from phocine distemper virus, which is closely related to canine distemper in dogs, and a cousin of the measles, said Tracey Goldstein, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and a member of NOAA’s unusual mortality working group.Phocine distemper causes lung infections and seizures as it attacks the seal’s brain tissue. Some animals have washed up on beaches still alive, but lethargic and coughing, she said.

A powerful current just miles from SC is changing. It could devastate the East Coast. — Off South Carolina, the ocean suddenly changes color, from green to deep blue. You’re in the Gulf Stream now, in warm and salty water from the tropics, with swordfish, tuna and squid, in a current so strong that it lowers our sea level.The Gulf Stream is one of the mightiest currents on Earth. It moves at a rate of 30 billion gallons per second, more than all of the world’s freshwater rivers combined. On its way, it hauls vast amounts of heat; a hurricane that twists into it gets a blast of fuel. It’s a highway for migrating fish and a destination for deep-sea fishermen. It courses through an area that oil companies want to probe; an oil spill in the Gulf Stream would spread far and wide. Though just 50 miles from Charleston, the Gulf Stream has so much momentum it tilts the sea level down like a seesaw. If you could walk on water, a trek from the Gulf Stream to Folly Beach would go downhill 3 to 5 feet. Put another way, without the Gulf Stream whisking all that water past us, our tides would be at least 3 feet higher. In 2009, the Atlantic’s system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, slowed by 30 percent in a matter of weeks. Sea levels in New England also rose 5 inches above normal. Scientists were stunned. The currents regained their strength a year later, but scientists wondered: Was this a blip? Has global warming somehow gummed up the currents? If so, what’s next? The race to understand the Gulf Stream and its associated currents is a deep dive into history, technology and recent aha moments in science. But the impact of this great current is undeniable. Changes in its velocity could rearrange marine life throughout the hemisphere. If it’s slowing for the long term – as a growing chorus of scientists fear – sea levels on the East Coast would rise more quickly, further threatening billions of dollars in shoreside property. It would alter weather patterns, affecting everything from hurricanes here to monsoons in India.

Hurricanes and wildfires overwhelmed FEMA in 2017, according to new GAO report – The Federal Emergency Management Agency was stretched thin and overwhelmed in 2017 by the sequence of major hurricanes and wildfires that caused disasters across the country, according to a massive Government Accountability Office “performance audit” released Tuesday. The GAO report concludes that FEMA generally carried out its duties as expected when responding within the continental United States – to hurricanes Harvey and Irma and the California wildfires – but it found that FEMA was not ready for what Hurricane Maria did to Puerto Rico. “They were completely overwhelmed from a workforce standpoint,” . “Once Maria hit, their staff resources were pretty exhausted. Their other commodities and resources were exhausted.” Some of the FEMA staff deployed to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands “were not physically able to handle the extreme or austere environment of the territories, which detracted from mission needs,” according to the report. FEMA officials told the auditors that “the physical fitness of staff could be assessed” before future deployments. At one point last October – as FEMA struggled to respond to multiple disasters – 54 percent of FEMA’s deployed workers were forced to perform tasks for which they did not meet the agency’s standard of “qualified,” the report states. And many staffers couldn’t speak Spanish, something that hindered efforts in Puerto Rico: “FEMA did not have enough bilingual employees to communicate with local residents or translate documents.” FEMA had problems locating people on the islands “because many affected areas did not have posted addresses, many individuals use nicknames instead of their given names, and often several families were located on a single property,” the report states. .

FEMA Left 20,000 Pallets of Water Bottles on Puerto Rico Runway for at Least Four Months –As the federal government prepares for Hurricane Florence this week, alarming photos are raising fresh questions about its response to Hurricane Maria last year. The photos, first reported by CBS Wednesday after going viral on social media the day before, show potentially millions of water bottles sitting on a runway in Ceiba, Puerto Rico nearly a year after the storm.”If [FEMA] put that water on that runway there will be hell to pay … If we did that, we’re going to fess up to it,” a senior FEMA official told CBS News’ David Begnaud, who has covered the Maria recovery process extensively.However, in an interview with CBS Thursday morning, FEMA Deputy Administrator Daniel Kaniewski defended the placement of the water bottles.He said they were excess water bottles not needed during recovery that were taken out of storage and placed on the runway in January to save money.”I’m confident that those that needed those bottles of water got them during the response phase and these were excess bottles of water that were, again, transferred to save money for the American taxpayer in January,” Kaniewski said.

As Hurricane Florence Approaches, Document Shows Trump Admin Funneled Nearly $10 Million From FEMA to ICE – As Hurricane Florence threatens the East Coast, a newly released document shows that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) transferred almost $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show reported Tuesday night.The document was released by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who said he believed the transfer of $9,755,303 occurred this summer.”$10 million dollars comes out of FEMA when we’re facing hurricane season, knowing what happened last year, and then look what we’ve had since?” Merkley told Maddow, referring to Hurricane Lane’s near miss with Hawaii, a tropical storm that hit Mississippi, and the oncoming Hurricane Florence. The money was earmarked for more detention beds and for ICE’s “transportation and removal program,” Maddow said. DHS confirmed that the transfers were made, but said they did not come from any of FEMA’s “disaster response and recovery efforts,” Maddow reported. “The money in question – transferred to ICE from FEMA’s routine operating expenses – could not have been used for hurricane response due to appropriation limitations,” Houlton said.However, Maddow and Merkley noted that the document does appear to show money coming out of “response and recovery.”

In Hurricane Florence’s Path: Giant Toxic Coal Ash Piles – Dozens of toxic coal ash piles across the Southeast are in the path of what is forecast to be days of torrential rains and flash flooding from Hurricane Florence.Environmental advocates are warning that the giant impoundments, often built beside waterways, are at risk of spills or collapsing.They’ve seen what extreme rainfall can do: When Hurricane Matthew crossed North Carolina two years ago, it caused a breach in a cooling pond, and coal ash leaked from a nearby coal ash basin at a power plant on the Neuse River.That was a Category 1 hurricane. Florence was headed toward the coastal Carolinas as a much more powerful storm, and it carried another threat: Meteorologists warned that Florence was looking a lot like Harvey, a slow-moving storm that parked itself over Houston last year and inundated parts of that city with 60 inches of rain.The National Weather Service on Wednesday warned of “life-threatening, catastrophic flash flooding and significant river flooding” over portions of the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic states from late this week into early next week as Florence arrives and moves inland.’

Hurricane Florence has gas stations running dry as residents make a mad dash to fuel up – Gasoline shortages are spreading in North and South Carolina as locals brace for the impact of Hurricane Florence or evacuate their communities.While most stations still have fuel, some are running out and long lines have formed at others as supplies dry up.In Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, 11 percent of stations are out of gas, according to fuel-station finding appGasBuddy. In Wilmington, North Carolina, 10.5 percent of stations are out.Motorists lined up at a Carolina Petro station near the coast in Wilmington on Wednesday.Margie Garrabrand was among them. “I have a home in town so I’ll be staying in town,” she said.Outages are worsening in South Carolina, as well. In Charleston, 9.9 percent of stations don’t have fuel. In both states, outages have more than doubled over the last 24 hours. In North Carolina, 4.8 percent of stations were out of fuel as of Wednesday morning, while 2.1 percent of stations were out in South Carolina, according to GasBuddy. To be sure, analysts don’t expect gasoline to be extremely hard to find as Florence barrels toward the coast.But shortages are expected to get worse – especially in South Carolina – after new forecasts projected the storm would hit the state harder than expected. When “more of the purchases are condensed” into a small window, “gas stations are not able to keep up,” said Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst for GasBuddy.

Hurricane Florence deluges Carolinas, makes landfall as Category 1 — Hurricane Florence crashed ashore Friday in North Carolina, packing 90 mph wind and swamping the coast with torrential rain. Nearly half a million homes and businesses lost power, and 200 people have been rescued, authorities said.The hurricane had weakened to a Category 1 storm with maximum sustained wind of 90 mph as of 6 a.m. ET, the National Hurricane Center said. Florence was expected to swamp almost all of North Carolina in several feet of water, Gov. Roy Cooper told reporters. The National Weather Service said as much as 7 inches of rain had fallen overnight in some coastal areas.Florence was moving slowly toward the west at near 6 mph and was expected to head west-southwestward through Saturday, forecasters said. The slow movement ad life-threatening storm surges were expected to add to the misery.”Already getting reports of quite a bit of storm surge in the water and that’s one of the most deadly parts of these hurricanes,” NHC Director Ken Graham said during a livestream.The long period of winds are driving the storm surge inland, up several rivers in North Carolina, where 7 feet of flooding or more is expected as far west as Greenville.”In a situation like this with the hurricane force winds, all this water is blown right up into these river basins and, as a result, it piles up,” Graham said. “You start getting flooding well inland.”More than 415,000 homes and businesses were without power Friday morning, The Associated Press reported, citing poweroutage.us, which tracks the nation’s electrical grid.More than 7,000 members of the military were on alert to help with rescue and recovery. In Jacksonville, North Carolina, home of the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune, about 70 people were rescued from a hotel after officials found a basketball-sized hole in a wall and other life-threatening damage, AP reported. Near New Bern, North Carolina., 150 were awaiting help, according to The News & Observer.About 10 million people could be affected by the storm and more than 1 million were ordered to evacuate the coasts of the Carolinas and Virginia, jamming westbound roads and highways for miles. There are also tornado warnings across most of North Carolina.

North Carolina didn’t like science on sea levels … so passed a law against it – When North Carolina got bad news about what its coast could look like thanks to climate change, it chose to ignore it. In 2012, the state now in the path of Hurricane Florence reacted to a prediction by its Coastal Resources Commission that sea levels could rise by 39in over the next century by passing a law that banned policies based on such forecasts. The legislation drew ridicule, including a mocking segment by comedian Stephen Colbert, who said: “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.” North Carolina has a long, low-lying coastline and is considered one of the US areas most vulnerable to rising sea levels. But dire predictions alarmed coastal developers and their allies, who said they did not believe the rise in sea level would be as bad as the worst models predicted and said such forecasts could unnecessarily hurt property values and drive up insurance costs. As a result, the state’s official policy, rather than adapting to the worst potential effects of climate change, has been to assume it simply won’t be that bad. Instead of forecasts, it has mandated predictions based on historical data on sea level rise. “They need to use some science that we can all trust when we start making laws in North Carolina that affect property values on the coast.” The legislation was passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature and allowed to become law by the then governor Bev Perdue, a Democrat who neither signed nor vetoed the bill.The law required the coastal resources commission to put out another study in 2015, looking at expected sea level rise. That report looked only 30 years ahead, rather than a century. It found that the rise in sea level during that time was likely to be roughly 6in to 8in, with higher increases possible in parts of the Outer Banks. Some outside studies have offered more dire warnings. A report last year by the Union of Concerned Scientists said 13 North Carolina communities were likely to be “chronically inundated” with seawater by 2035.

A Record 7 Named Storms Are Swirling Across The Globe – Has ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ Arrived? – Is something extremely unusual happening to our planet? At this moment, Hurricane Florence is just one of seven named storms that are currently circling the globe. That matches the all-time record, and it looks like that record will be broken very shortly as a couple more storms continue to develop. Back in 2004, a Hollywood blockbuster entitled “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted a world in which weather patterns had gone mad. One of the most impressive scenes showed nearly the entire planet covered by hurricane-type storms all at once. Of course things are not nearly as bad as in that film, but during this hurricane season we have definitely seen a very unusual number of hurricanes and typhoons develop. As I mentioned above there are currently seven named storms that are active, but an eighth is about to join them, and that would break the all-time record… And actually there is an additional storm that is also developing in the Pacific which could bring the grand total to nine. Overall, there have been 9 named storms in the Atlantic and 15 names storms in the Pacific since the official start of the hurricane season.That is not normal.In fact, one veteran meteorologist has said that he has “NEVER seen so much activity in the tropics”…Far from being the biggest threat facing the US coastline this hurricane season, Florence will be followed by several other storms that rapidly strengthening in the Atlantic. As one veteran meteorologist remarked, “in my 35 years forecasting the weather on TV, I have NEVER seen so much activity in the tropics all at the same time.”Meanwhile, the biggest storm on the planet is actually in the Pacific Ocean.Super Typhoon Mangku is a Category 5 hurricane, and it absolutely dwarfs Hurricane Florence…The devastating force of Hurricane Florence is nothing when compared to the category 5 hurricane sweeping over the Pacific Ocean, Super Typhoon Mangkhu. With winds close to 180mph, the fierce hurricane is feared to land over a mountainous terrain in the northern Philippines on Friday night, before moving over the South China Sea and potentially impacting Hong Kong and Vietnam.

Scientists get ready to begin Great Pacific Garbage Patch cleanup — A team of scientists and engineers will on Saturday begin an ambitious cleanup of plastics in the Pacific Ocean targeting a stretch of water three times the size of France known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A 600m-long floating barrier will be launched off the coast of San Francisco and, powered by currents, waves and wind, will aim to collect five tonnes of plastic debris each month. The marine apparatus known as System 001 is the brainchild of the Dutch inventor Boyan Slat who founded The Ocean Cleanup at the age of 18 in 2013. Along with 70 staff he has spent the last five years testing 273 models and six different prototypes as part of the $20m (£15.5m) Netherlands-based project before arriving at the current design – nicknamed “Wilson” in reference to the famous volleyball from the film Castaway. System 001 graphic The structure comprises 60 adjoining units forming a giant C-shaped tube attached to a three-metre deep impenetrable skirt which will collect plastic waste of 1cm diameter and larger, as well as discarded fishing nets, as it skims the ocean’s surface. The cleanup system will be towed out past Alcatraz and beneath the Golden Gate Bridge into the Pacific Ocean where it will undergo two weeks of operational testing at around 250 nautical miles (463km) offshore before starting its mission. The system will be equipped with location-broadcasting technology in order to stop vessels from running into it. The team expects to remove the accumulated debris every six weeks using a support vessel before transferring the plastic waste to the Netherlands to be recycled.

Official defends Trump plan to revamp Endangered Species Act – A top Trump administration official on Monday defended a plan to revamp the Endangered Species Act, saying the proposed changes would result in more effective, quicker decisions on species protection. Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt dismissed criticism by environmental groups that the plan would “gut” crucial protections for threatened animals and plants. “That’s laughable,” he said, adding that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and other officials “respect the law” and know the law. While he disagrees with critics, Bernhardt said he recognizes that any plan to change the 45-year-old law was bound to create controversy. “People are passionate about the Endangered Species Act, and that’s a good thing,” he said. Bernhardt told an audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation that the Obama administration too often “strayed” from the law to focus solely on species protection without regard for costs to nearby land owners or businesses. “The reality is there is a cost” to listing a species as endangered or threatened, Bernhardt said. “It’s not a free choice by society.” The “true costs” of the species law “are often borne by folks who just happen to be in a certain geographical area” where an endangered animal lives, he added. Conservatives have long complained that the law hinders drilling, logging and other activities while failing to restore endangered species to unprotected status.

Zinke Increases Hunting and Fishing Areas in 30 Wildlife Refuges – Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is expanding or opening hunting in 30 National Wildlife Refuges, the Department of the Interior (DOI) announced Friday. The move will open more than 251,000 acres and raise the total number of places where hunting is permitted to 377 and where fishing is permitted to 312. The expansion will be in effect in time for the 2018-2019 hunting season. Federal law mandates that hunting and fishing can only take place in wildlife refuges if it does not conflict with conservation, The Hill pointed out. Refuges to be opened to certain types of hunting and fishing for the first time include Florida’s Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Refuge to turkey hunting, Illinois’ Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge to migratory bird and game hunting, Maine and New Hampshire’s Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge to turkey hunting, Michigan’sShiawassee National Wildlife Refuge to additional migratory bird, small game and furbearer hunting, Minnesota’s Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge to some gamebird and small mammal hunting, Montana’sSwan River National Wildlife Refuge to big game hunting, New Jersey’s Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge to wild turkey and squirrel hunting, New Mexico’s Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge to Eurasian-collared dove and Gambel’s quail hunting, North Dakota’s J. Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge andLostwood National Wildlife Refuge to moose hunting, Ohio’s Cedar Point National Wildlife Refuge to white-tailed deer hunting, Ohio’s Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge to certain gamebird, small mammal and furbearer hunting, Pennsylvania’s John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum to white-tailed deer hunting and Wisconsin ‘s Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge to certain gamebird, small mammal and furbearer hunting.

Millions of Acres of ‘Public’ Land Are Not Legally Accessible – Nearly 10 million acres of federal land in the rural West lie locked behind private holdings that prevent the public from using the property for recreational activities like hiking or hunting, a new report says. The inaccessibility of this federal property is slowing down rural economies that depend on income from the outdoor recreation industry, said a representative of the organization that commissioned the report.“At 9.52 million acres, the massive scale of the landlocked problem represents a major impediment to public access and the growth of the $887-billion outdoor recreation economy,” said Joel Webster, Western lands director with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The study, “Off Limits But Within Reach: Unlocking the West’s Inaccessible Public Lands,” was conducted by the Conservation Partnership and a private mapping company.“These are lands that all Americans own, and yet public access is not readily available or guaranteed,” Webster said. The problem is that these federal lands are surrounded by private property and have no public easement that allows hunters, anglers, cyclists or other users to gain access to the public land.

The Colorado River is evaporating, and climate change is largely to blame – Over the last century, the river’s flow has declined by around 16 percent, even as annual precipitation slightly increased in the Upper Colorado River Basin – a vast region stretching from Wyoming to New Mexico. New research published in the journal Water Resources Research argues that over half of this decline is due to sustained and rising temperatures in the region, which ultimately means more water is evaporated from the river, diminishing the flow. But it’s really been in the last twenty years that matters have deteriorated into a major drought, edging the region toward a potential water-rationing crisis. It’s the worst drought in Colorado River history.“The river since 2000 has been in an unprecedented decline,” Brad Udall, coauthor of the new study and senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University, said in an interview. “There’s no analog, from when humans started gauging the river, for this drought,” said Udall. To be clear, tens of millions of Americans are not yet imperiled by the drought, but trouble lies in the years ahead.If trends continue, Udall previously projected considerable declines of Colorado River flow by around 20 percent in the next 30 years. By the century’s end, this number could increase to 35 percent. The Southwestern U.S. cities dependent on the Colorado River for life and prosperity will have to adapt to a world that’s now warming at an accelerating pace. “We need to adapt to drier circumstances,” Karl Flessa, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona who studies water policy in the U.S., said in an interview. In practice, this means using significantly less water both in communities and agriculture (which drinks some 80 percent of the Colorado River), Flessa, who had no involvement in the study, said.

California has 129 million dead trees. That’s a huge wildfire risk. — California has a problem to the tune of 129 million dead trees, spread across 8.9 million acres. That’s 6,450 times the number of trees in Central Park, truly “astronomical,” in the words of Heather Williams, a spokesperson for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.In dry, hot times like these, the record number of decaying ponderosa pines, sugar pines, and other towering species can become kindling for errant sparks, fallen power lines, cigarette butts, and lightning strikes.The bumper crop of kindling helps explain why this has been the worst year on record forCalifornia wildfires. Already, more than 876,000 acres have burned in California, compared to 228,000 last year at the same time. The Mendocino Complex Fire, now almost fully contained at more than 459,000 acres, is the single largest fire on record in state history. The largest fire before that, the Thomas Fire, was just put out in January this year. These recent fires have barely made a dent in the glut of dead trees, CalFire says, and peak fire season in Southern California is still to come later this year.The die-off, meanwhile, that’s created so much fuel is a symptom of the years-long drought that has parched the Western United States. With limited water, trees have shriveled up or succumbed to bark beetle infestations, with some of the most severe declines in central California. And as the climate warms and more people move into high-risk areas, the damages from wildfires are projected to increase.

Forest-thinning measures likely dead in Congress, despite Trump, California Republicans – For more than a month, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue have been calling for a rollback of environmental regulations on forest-thinning projects they argue will help reduce the risk of wildfires, including the ones ravaging California.“For too long, our forest management efforts have been thwarted by lawsuits from misguided, extreme environmentalists,” Zinke and Perdue wrote in a Sept. 4 op-ed in The Sacramento Bee. “The time has come to act without flinching in the face of threatened litigation.”

Firefighters battle to gain on blazes across Northern California — Interstate 5, the state’s main north-south transportation artery, will remain closed indefinitely by the raging Delta Fire, authorities said Sunday. The freeway has been shut down since Wednesday afternoon in both directions for a roughly 45-mile stretch from 10 miles north of Redding to 3.6 miles south of Mount Shasta. With I-5 closed, drivers – many of them truckers – are forced to take a lengthy detour on highways 229 and 89 that adds two hours or more to the trip. The Delta Fire is burning mostly to the northwest and north, Vaccaro said. The fire, which has scorched 40,903 acres and was just 5 percent contained Sunday night, burned intensely throughout Sunday with high temperatures and dry vegetation. The fire’s eastern flank has connected with already burned areas of the Hirz Fire, where containment lines are restraining both fires. Fire officials said those shared lines account for the 5 percent containment. In Napa County, the Snell Fire, which ignited Saturday near Lake Berryessa, grew to almost 2,000 acres in 24 hours.

2018 now worst fire season on record as B.C. extends state of emergency – The B.C. government has extended the provincial state of emergency because of wildfires that have now burned more area than any other season on record. As of Tuesday, more than 12,984 square kilometres of the province had burned, pushing past the previous record set just one year earlier. As 534 fires continued to burn on Wednesday morning, the province announced that it has extended the state of emergency through to the end of the day on Sept. 12. About 3,200 people have been removed because of the wildfires, and another 21,800 are on alert. In the catastrophic wildfire season of 2017, which saw 65,000 people forced from their homes, 12,161 square kilometres of British Columbia went up in flames. Scientists suggest there are several reasons for the severity of the last two wildfire seasons in B.C., including a lack of controlled burning and aggressive firefighting efforts that have allowed potential fuels to build up across the province. But they say a change in weather patterns driven by climate change has pushed things over the edge, bringing warmer, drier weather and more lightning to B.C. This year, 1,467 fires have been started by lightning and another 443 by human activity.

Hot nights: Summer low temperatures were warmest on record in the lower 48 – Americans seeking to cool off after long, hot days this summer found little relief in the dark of night. Windows were shut, and air-conditioners kept humming as low temperatures averaged over the nation were the warmest in over 120 years of records.In its latest climate report, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the hot nights pushed the average summer temperature to its fourth-warmest level on record, tied with 1934.The average high temperature ranked 11th warmest in records that date back to 1895, but the average low was a record-warm, 2.5 degrees above average, and 0.1 degrees above the previous record in 2016.“Every state had an above-average summer minimum temperature with five states record warm,” the report said. As greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere keep increasing, overnight low temperatures are warming “nearly twice as fast as afternoon high temperatures,” according to NOAA. “[T]he 10 warmest summer minimum temperatures have all occurred since 2002,” it wrote.Such warm nights have important consequences. They increase heat stress on the homeless and those without air conditioning, which can lead to heat-related illness and death. At the same time, they require increased use of air-conditioning for those with access, which adds more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.Day and night combined, almost the entire nation notched above average temperatures during the June to September summer months.From the Great Plains to the East Coast, the warmth was accompanied by frequent downpours. In the Northeast, in particular, the combination of warmth and above normal rainfall led to record-challenging humidity levels. The waterlogged air, more difficult to cool, was a key factor in the record high nighttime temperatures.

Heat killed a record number of people in Phoenix last year as days, nights grow warmer – Heat killed 172 people in the Phoenix area last year, a record for a second consecutive year as rising temperatures take a worsening toll in the country’s hottest major city. Health officials recently revised the 2017 tally of heat-associated deaths in Maricopa County, raising it from 155 after concluding a number of pending investigations. The updated toll is 11 percent higher than the 150 heat-related deaths recorded in 2016, and more than double the 85 deaths tallied in 2015. The climbing figures show the Phoenix area has a great deal of work to do in expanding efforts to prevent heat-related deaths and illnesses. The area has been getting hotter because of the combined effects of human-caused climate change and the local urban heat-island effect. Those effects have pushed more days and nights above temperature thresholds that threaten outdoor workers, the elderly and other vulnerable people. So far this year, health officials have confirmed 18 heat-related deaths. Although that’s fewer than at this time last year, the causes of 128 deaths are still under investigation. At the same time last year, 33 deaths were confirmed and 131 deaths were under investigation. The first confirmed death this year occurred in May. Officials don’t expect to have a final tally until the heat season is over, well into fall. “People need to be aware of the choices that they’re making as far as their activities and taking appropriate steps to mitigate those if they can’t abstain from those activities.”

Limiting Warming to 2°C Would Prevent ‘Worldwide Increases’ in Heat-Related Deaths — Restricting global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels would prevent large increases in temperature-related deaths across much of the globe, a new study finds.And keeping warming to 1.5°C – the aspirational target of the Paris agreement – would further limit the number of people dying from temperature extremes in some parts of the world, including in southeast Asia and southern Europe.However, in some countries with a cooler climate, such as the UK, Ireland and Japan, overall temperature-related deaths would be higher at 1.5°C of warming than 2°C. This is because the additional 0.5°C of warming is expected to bring a bigger drop in winter deaths than the increase in deaths in hot summers, the researchers say.The findings – which draw on data taken from 451 locations in 23 countries – show that, overall, taking steps to meet the 1.5°C limit could prevent “a hell of a lot of people” from dying as a result of temperature extremes in tropical countries, a study author tells Carbon Brief. During a heatwave, the number of “heat-related deaths” – whereby exposure to heat either causes or significantly contributes to a death – tends to increase. For example, research shows that, during a heatwave, the risk of death from a heart attack is higher. Heatwaves are also associated with increased rates of suicide.However, research also suggests that, as temperatures warm, numbers of “cold-related” deaths – which are caused by exposure to cold weather and winter illnesses – could decrease in some regions. Whether or not this “cold effect” could partially offset the expected rise in heat-related deaths has long been debated by scientists. The new study, published in Climatic Change Letters, seeks to solve this conundrum by comparing the expected number of heat- and cold-related deaths in 23 countries under different levels of global warming. (see graphic)

Global hunger levels rising due to extreme weather, UN warns – Progress made in the past decade has been reversed, with climate extremes such as droughts and floods identified as a main cause. Global hunger has reverted to levels last seen a decade ago, wiping out progress on improving people’s access to food and leaving one in nine people undernourished last year, with extreme weather a leading cause, the UN has warned. Hunger afflicted 821 million people last year, the third annual rise since 2015, with most regions of Africa and much of South America showing worsening signs of food shortages and malnutrition. More than half a billion of the world’s hungry live in Asia. The reversal of progress made in slowing malnutrition in the first half of this decade has caused serious concern among international agencies. Climate shocks, such as droughts and floods, were identified by the UN as “among the key drivers” for the rise in 2017, along with conflict and economic slowdowns. Nearly 100 million people were left dependent on humanitarian aid during the year. The UN report covers last year, and does not take account of 2018’s extreme weather which has brought heatwaves and high temperatures to much of the northern hemisphere, accompanied by droughts in some parts of the globe and floods in others. However, the changing climatic trends are likely to spell trouble for years ahead. According to the report, there are more undernourished people in areas of the world that are highly exposed to extremes of climate. The authors note that there have been more frequent spells of extreme heat in the last five years, and that the nature of rainfall is changing in some areas, with rainy seasons starting earlier or later. Staple crops such as wheat, rice and maize are particularly at risk from climate extremes. “It is shocking that, after a prolonged decline, this is the third consecutive year of rising hunger,”

UN sees 70% chance of El Nino event this year – The World Meteorological Organisation forecast “a 70 percent chance of an El Nino developing by the end of this year,” a WMO statement said. El Nino is triggered by periodic warming in the eastern Pacific Ocean which can trigger drought in some regions, heavy rain in others. “WMO does not expect the anticipated El Nino to be as powerful as the 2015-2016 event, but it will still have considerable impacts,” the statement said. The organisation sees increased odds of higher surface temperatures in most of Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, Africa and along much of South America’s coastline. Interior parts of South America, Greenland, many south Pacific islands and some in the Caribbean were identified as possible exceptions. WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas noted that 2018 “is on track to be one of the warmest on record,” after especially high temperatures in July and August across several parts of the world.

As global warming raises sea levels, Bangkok struggles to stay afloat — Bangkok, built on once-marshy land about 1.5 metres (five feet) above sea level, is projected to be one of the world’s hardest hit urban areas, alongside fellow Southeast Asian behemoths Jakarta and Manila. “Nearly 40 per cent” of Bangkok will be inundated by as early as 2030 due to extreme rainfall and changes in weather patterns, according to a World Bank report. Currently, the capital “is sinking one to two centimetres a year and there is a risk of massive flooding in the near future,” said Tara Buakamsri of Greenpeace. Seas in the nearby Gulf of Thailand are rising by four millimetres a year, above the global average. The city “is already largely under sea level”, said Buakamsri. In 2011, when the monsoon season brought the worst floods in decades, a fifth of the city was under water. The business district was spared thanks to hastily constructed dikes. But the rest of Thailand was not so fortunate and the death toll passed 500 by the end of the season. Experts say unchecked urbanisation and eroding shorelines will leave Bangkok and its residents in a critical situation. With the weight of skyscrapers contributing to the city’s gradual descent into water, Bangkok has become a victim of its own frenetic development. Making things worse, the canals which used to traverse the city have now been replaced by intricate road networks, said Suppakorn Chinvanno, a climate expert at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Shrimp farms and other aquacultural development — sometimes replacing mangrove forests that protected against storm surges — have also caused significant erosion to the coastline nearest the capital. This means that Bangkok could be penned in by flooding from the sea in the south and monsoon floods from the north,

China launches first homemade polar icebreaker – (Xinhua) — China has launched its first domestically built polar research vessel and icebreaker “Xuelong 2” or “Snow Dragon” which will be operational in the first half of 2019.The vessel was deployed in Shanghai on Monday and will go through a series of tests and interior decoration before beginning official operations, according to its builder Jiangnan Shipyard Group.The launch of the vessel has extensively boosted China’s polar research and expedition capabilities, said the builder.The vessel is 122.5 meters long and 22.3 meters wide, with a displacement of 13,990 tonnes and a navigation capability of 20,000 nautical miles. It can sail on 60-day expeditions with 90 crew members and researchers.”Xuelong 2″ is able to turn quickly, has high safety standards, and strong icebreaking abilities. It also has two-direction icebreaking capabilities with both its bow and stern.Construction of the vessel started in December 2016.

The danger of Arctic Methane – As the Arctic regions warm up, undersea and underground methane reservoirs will increasingly begin to out-gas into the atmosphere. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and increases in atmospheric methane will significantly speed up global warming and its effects. In the Arctic regions of Northern Canada and Siberia, there exists a layer of permafrost which acts as a “lid” or a “seal” over vast reservoirs of methane gas. This is especially the case in an area known as the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), an underwater shelf in the Arctic Sea to the North of Eastern Siberia. This is an area of reasonably shallow sea, with a mean depth of 50 metres. Below the bottom of this shallow sea is a layer of “subsea permafrost” which has remained permanently frozen for many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. Beneath this layer of subsea permafrost is what is known as a “sedimentary basin” – a geological feature which is essentially made up of sediment depositions over a very long time (most likely to be from the many rivers that flow out of Eastern Siberia into the Arctic Ocean). Along with river sediments, the basin was also filled up with the biomass of plants and animals from ages past. Over time, this biomass was subjected to heat and pressure, and turned into methane. The situation now is that heat from global warming is now beginning to melt the ice cap. Data from the past few decades has shown that the Arctic ice cap is quickly melting, and there is a reasonable expectation that the ice cap will completely melt during a northern summer some time in the next 10-15 years. Once the ice cap has melted and phase transition is no longer an issue, the temperature of the Arctic ocean will begin to steadily increase. Moreover, a greater mixture of the water column will occur due to the effects of wind and waves – presently this process is prevented over much the north pole during winter by the presence of sea ice, which stratifies water temperature. With a greater mixing of warmer water with water from the bottom, a heat pulse will begin to melt the subsea permafrost. As this subsea permafrost melts, cracks called gas migration pathways will open up, leading to a release of the methane trapped under the ice seal into the water. With only 50 metres of sea level, the methane will quickly exit the water and enter the atmosphere, where it will spread over the globe. It is estimated that there are 5 gigatonnes of methane currently in our atmosphere. It is also estimated that the ESAS contains 100s to 1000s of gigatonnes of Methane beneath the permaforst seal. The chances are that 50 gigatonnes of methane could be released into the atmosphere within the next few decades, at most 100 years. A tenfold increase in atmospheric methane would lead to a major acceleration in warming.

Trump Administration Wants to Make it Easier to Release Methane Into Air – – The Trump administration, taking its third major step this year to roll back federal efforts to fight climate change, is preparing to make it significantly easier for energy companies to release methane into the atmosphere.Methane, which is among the most powerful greenhouse gases, routinely leaks from oil and gas wells, and energy companies have long said that the rules requiring them to test for emissions were costly and burdensome.The Environmental Protection Agency, perhaps as soon as this week, plans to make public a proposal to weaken an Obama-era requirementthat companies monitor and repair methane leaks, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. In a related move, the Interior Department is also expected in coming days to release its final version of a draft rule, proposed in February, that essentially repeals a restriction on the intentional venting and “flaring,” or burning, of methane from drilling operations. The new rules follow two regulatory rollbacks this year that, taken together, represent the foundation of the United States’ effort to rein in global warming. In July, the E.P.A. proposed weakening a rule on carbon dioxide pollution from vehicle tailpipes. And in August, the agency proposed replacing the rule on carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants with a weaker one that would allow far more global-warming emissions to flow unchecked from the nation’s smokestacks. Industry groups praised the expected changes. “It’s a neat pair” of proposals on methane, said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, an association of independent oil and gas companies that is based in Denver. The Obama-era E.P.A. methane rule, she said, “was the definition of red tape. It was a record-keeping nightmare that was technically impossible to execute in the field.”

Carbon dioxide emissions fall as nation uses less coal and more natural gas –The electric power industry made such a dramatic shift last year away from coal and toward natural gas and renewable energy sources, contributing to the industry’s 4.6 percent decrease in emissions of carbon dioxide, the Energy Department reported. The decline was enough to offset emissions increases from all other business sectors. Electricity producers cut their emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere and increases worldwide temperatures, by relying more on natural gas, a cleaner, more efficient fuel source that uses less energy to generate each kilowatt hour of power. Electricity generation from wind and solar power is also on the rise which does not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. RELATED: NRG is back promoting solar power Less demand for electricity is also playing a role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the government reported. Electricity sales last year were the lowest they’ve been since the economic recession in 2009. The government attributed last year’s lower sales to milder weather. Cooler summers don’t require as much energy for air conditioning and warmer winters lowers the need for heating. Overall, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions decreased last year to 5.14 billion metric tons, about 1 percent lower than they were in 2016. Energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide have fallen in seven of the past 10 years, the Energy Department reported, and are 14 percent lower than what they were in 2005.

Is Nationalization an Answer to Climate Change? – Earlier this month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., proposed a slew of measures to rein in corporate power, the centerpiece of which was ensuring that 40 percent of corporate boards be comprised of workers, rather than just shareholders. While it’s a novel idea in the United States, this sort of corporate co-governance is standard fare in Germany, Europe’s largest economy – and a heartily capitalist one at that.None of that stopped the right from losing its collective mind about the idea. The National Review’s Kevin Williamson called Warren’s notion a plan to “nationalize every major business in the United States of America,” which would “constitute the largest seizure of private property in human history.” The actual plan, of course, would do no such thing. At its most radical, Warren’s proposed bill – titled the “Accountable Capitalism Act” – would essentially bring American capitalism more in line with its Western European counterparts, and also closer to what that economic system looked like here before the shareholder revolution encouraged corporations to focus narrowly on short-term profits.If the right is freaking out about a plan as modest as Warren’s, what will it do once the left actually starts putting nationalization on the table? The United Kingdom might find out soon enough, and in the process become one of the only countries to take the problem of climate change seriously, by letting the state – not just market tweaks – play a driving role in the transition away from fossil fuels. With Theresa May’s Conservative government looking increasingly weak, it’s possible that the opposition Labour Party in the U.K. – under the leadership of socialist Jeremy Corbyn – could take power in the coming years, or even months. Among the party’s top-line demands is nationalizing or renationalizing several basic services. Labour’s climate plans extend well beyond nationalization, too. The party hopes to factor climate and the environment into just about every level of Britain’s economic decision-making, including climate concerns in forecasts created by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, which reports to the Treasury – a rough amalgam of the U.S.’s Office of Management and Budget. “What we’re trying to do is say that if we can do it – the oldest industrial nation, where the first industrial revolution started – if we can do it, it can provide an example for others,” McDonnell said. “But it needs a recognition that you cannot rely upon market forces to do this.”

Yellen Touts Carbon Tax as ‘Textbook Solution’ to Climate Change – Former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen says a tax on carbon dioxide emissions would do more to combat climate change than a slew of federal environmental regulations being undone by the Trump administration. Yellen joins former Walmart Inc. Chairman Rob Walton, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Secretary of State George Shultz in delivering a pitch for the carbon tax-and-dividend plan, released Monday along with an analysis of its potential emissions reductions. “From the standpoint of an economist, the most efficient way to tackle climate change is to tax emissions — to create a disincentive to emit carbon dioxide,” Yellen said in an interview before the report’s release. “It’s the right solution to a problem, and it’s collected in a way that is practical and feasible.” The proposal has the backing of a broad coalition of prominent conservatives, economists and corporations that have united as the Climate Leadership Council and developed a multiyear strategy for advancing the initiative on Capitol Hill. Corporate supporters, which have a roughly $2.4 trillion market cap, include Exxon Mobil Corp. and three other oil giants as well as the largest U.S. automaker, General Motors Co.; utility, Exelon Corp., and telecommunications firm, AT&T Inc. Will Judges Have the Last Word on Climate Change?: QuickTake The campaign is the broadest, most serious effort in years to put a price on the carbon dioxide emissions that drive climate change. The proposed tax aims to increase the cost of energy derived from oil, natural gas and coal, thereby discouraging the use of those fossil fuels and encouraging the free market to develop low-carbon power alternatives.

With a shrinking EPA, Trump delivers on his promise to cut government – WaPo — During the first 18 months of the Trump administration, records show, nearly 1,600 workers left the EPA, while fewer than 400 were hired. The exodus has shrunk the agency’s workforce by 8 percent, to levels not seen since the Reagan administration. The trend has continued even after a major round of buyouts last year and despite the fact that the EPA’s budget has remained stable. Those who have resigned or retired include some of the agency’s most experienced veterans, as well as young environmental experts who traditionally would have replaced them – stirring fears about brain drain at the EPA. The sheer number of departures also has prompted concerns over what sort of work is falling by the wayside, from enforcement investigations to environmental research.According to data released under the Freedom of Information Act and analyzed by The Washington Post, at least 260 scientists, 185 “environmental protection specialists” and 106 engineers are gone. Several veteran EPA employees, who have worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations, said the agency’s profound policy shifts under Trump ­hastened their departure. Ann Williamson, a scientist and longtime supervisor in the EPA’s Region 10 Seattle office, left in March after 33 years at the agency, exasperated by having to plan how her office would implement President Trump’s proposed cuts and weary of what she viewed as the administration’s refusal to make policy decisions based on evidence. “I did not want to any longer be any part of this administration’s nonsense,” she said.

Kavanaugh’s views on EPA’s climate authority are dangerous and wrong –Donald Trump’s latest Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh accepts that humans are causing global warming and we need to take action to stop it. The problem is that he doesn’t trust the experts at EPA to do so and wants to erode their authority to regulate carbon pollution. When discussing Chevron and climate change, we usually focus on the company’s legal liability. However, in Kavanaugh’s context, ‘Chevron deference’ is even more important. The term refers to the fact that courts will generally defer to government agency interpretations of laws as long as Congress hasn’t spoken directly to the issue at hand. David Doniger, director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council noted that Kavanaugh doesn’t believe Chevron deference applies on issues of major importance. In a recent net neutrality case, Kavanaugh argued, “While the Chevron doctrine allows an agency to rely on statutory ambiguity to issue ordinary rules, the major rules doctrine prevents an agency from relying on statutory ambiguity to issue major rules.” That’s Kavanaugh’s position on climate change. In oral arguments before his DC Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2016 Clean Power Plan case, Kavanaugh said: This is huge case … it has huge economic and political significance … it’s fundamentally transforming an industry by telling existing units you in essence have to pay a penalty, a huge financial penalty in order to continue to exist, in order to shift from coal plants to solar and wind plants, at the same time the coal mining industry is in essence greatly harmed, as well. But while regulating carbon pollution would have a major impact on the fossil fuel industry, the same is true of most pollutant regulations. It’s nevertheless EPA’s job to regulate pollutants, and the agency has been doing exactly that since its inception.

FBI Mysteriously Closes New Mexico Observatory – An observatory in New Mexico has been unexpectedly closed due to an unnamed “security issue,” prompting evacuations and a visit from the FBI. The Sunspot Observatory is now currently closed to both staff and the public, with no word on why or when it will be open again. “We have decided to vacate the facility at this time as precautionary measure,” said spokesperson Shari Lifson to the Alomogordo Daily News. “The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy who manages the facility is addressing a security issue at this time.” Lifson said that the facility was first evacuated on September 6 and has remained closed since then. According to Lifson, the observatory has no date for reopening yet. As part of the investigation into the security issue, the observatory has contacted the FBI, which has been reported on the scene with multiple agents and a Blackhawk helicopter. According to local sheriff Benny House, the agency has been working with local law enforcement but refuses to share any details. “The FBI is refusing to tell us what’s going on,” said House. “We’ve got people up there that requested us to standby while they evacuate it. Nobody would really elaborate on any of the circumstances as to why.”

Europe’s renewable energy strategy will destroy forests and harm climate -Leading climate scientists have denounced the EU’s decision to push wood as a “renewable” energy source. They say the move will likely result in both a boost in greenhouse gas emissions across Europe and devastation of some of the world’s most ancient forests. Not only are forests home to much of the planet’s biodiversity, they absorb climate-damaging CO2 from the atmosphere and are therefore considered a vital buffer against climate change.Despite this, earlier this summer European officials decided – against the advice of hundreds of scientists – that wood could be considered a low-carbon fuel, meaning that trees can be cut down directly to burn.

German forest activists brace for eviction in anti-coal fight – German activists living in treehouses to protect an ancient forest from being razed for a nearby coal mine were bracing Thursday for a forced eviction by police, in a major escalation of the long running environmental battle. Hundreds of police officers descended on the area in the early morning, after local authorities ordered the Hambach Forest in western Germany to be cleared immediately, citing fire hazards.Dozens of protesters are holed up in some 60 treehouses, some as high as 25 metres off the ground. The occupation began in 2012 and their presence had until now been quietly tolerated.But the state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, Armin Laschet, told local broadcaster WDR late Wednesday that this was “an illegally occupied area” and accused the protesters of being violent.The activists, who are protesting the expansion of energy giant RWE’s massive open-pit lignite mine, one of Europe’s largest, have vowed to peacefully resist the evacuation.

Trump Says He’ll Save Coal Power Plants, But Even Utilities Know He’s Blowing Smoke – The Trump administration’s latest idea to “bring back coal” is to let individual states decide how – or even whether – to cut air pollution from coal-burning power plants. The plan is meant to encourage electric utilities to invest in upgrading their dirty, aging coal plants or build new ones.It’s a reckless scheme that would threaten the health of Americans and worsen climate change – and even the utilities aren’t buying it.The Washington Examiner queried some of the nation’s biggest utilities and couldn’t find any who would “commit to improving their coal plants, or re-evaluate planned coal plant retirements because of the Trump administration’s new rule.” Instead, the companies plan to continue shutting down money-losing coal plants and instead relying on electricity generated by natural gas and renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power.

Major Pa. anthracite coal mine project to be financed by $1 million grant – Coal could be coming out of the ground as early as next month at what is described as the largest current development in the commonwealth’s anthracite region. The rain has to let up for that to occur, Gregg Driscoll, president and chief executive officer of the Blaschak Coal Co., said Tuesday. The company, based in Mahanoy City, is in the process of reopening an old surface mine north of Route 61 between Mount Carmel and Centralia in Columbia County. “We’re excited about it,” he said. The state recently approved a $1 million Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program grant to help fund the project. The company sought $4.5 million. Blaschak, owned by Milestone Partners Inc., a Radnor-based investment firm, expects to spend $13 million to reopen and provide equipment for the mine, Driscoll said. It already has invested a little more than $10 million, he said. Preparation work includes removing material placed in the pit by the owner, Mallard Contracting, as part of a reclamation process, Driscoll said. Blaschak has signed a 20-year-lease with the Helfrick family that owns Mallard and anticipates mining between 200,000 and 300,000 tons of ready-to-burn anthracite annually, he said.

Nearly 200 clean-up workers sickened or dead from 2008 Tennessee coal ash spill — Almost a decade after the worst coal ash spill in US history, clean-up workers are dying from exposure to arsenic and radium.The spill took place in December 2008 at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston Fossil Fuel Power Plant, in the Swan Pond community of Roane County, Tennessee, near the city of Knoxville. The disaster smothered 300 acres of land and over two-dozen homes in 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash, releasing 140,000 pounds of arsenic into the nearby Emory River – more than twice the reported amount of arsenic discharged into US waterways from all US coal plants in 2007.A recent USA Today Network-Tennessee investigation into the cleanup, testing, and treatment of workers revealed what can only be described as a horrendous social crime against the working class. Last year, more than 50 workers and workers’ survivors filed a lawsuit against Jacobs Engineering, the company hired by the TVA to oversee the cleanup, citing the company’s failure to provide workers with the necessary protective clothing, as well as failing to reveal the toxic nature of the coal ash. By March of this year, there were over 180 new cases of dead and dying workers.

Australian coal exports hit record high – Australia’s thermal coal exports have grown 14 percent on the back of high demand from Asia. Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) data released on Tuesday revealed that the value of thermal coal exports rose 14 percent in July to 2.45 billion Australian dollars (1.74 billion U.S. dollars). Export volume rose to an all-time high of 19.87 million tonnes; a rate that, if upheld, would see Australia export 238 million tonnes of thermal coal per year. Andrew Cosgrove, a mining analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, said that coal prices would remain high for the remainder of 2018 because of demand in China and India.

Paris climate deal doesn’t stop Australia building new coal plants, Canavan says – Australia does not need to quit the Paris climate agreement because our commitments are non-binding, and new coal plants can continue to be constructed, according to the resources minister, Matt Canavan. People needed to be clear that the treaty Tony Abbott committed Australia to in 2015 “doesn’t actually bind us to anything in particular”. Abbott said in 2015, when he announced Australia would be signing up, that the government was making a “definite commitment” to a 26% reduction in emissions by 2030 and “with the circumstances that we think will apply … we can go up to 28%”. But Canavan said on Friday the Paris commitment was a three-page document that allowed Australia flexibility to build new coal plants. The resources minister said rather than focusing on the situation in 2030, “what I want to focus on is solving the crisis we have in energy today”.

Cambodia shows no sign of backing down on coal — At the 23rd UN Climate Change Conference (COP23) in November last year, many countries around the world made their pledges for the coal power phase-out to curb the global greenhouse gas emissions, and ultimately keep global temperature increases within 2°C or, if possible, to 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Environmental groups also called upon Southeast Asian countries to join the effort in order to keep the region safe from climate change‘s threats.Coal-fired power plants are the most polluting way to produce electricity, and burning coal is the most prominent contributor to climate change. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around 7 million people die every year due to air pollution, which is mainly caused by “the inefficient use of energy by households, industry, the agriculture and transport sectors, and coal-fired power plants.” However, according to the report by ASEAN Center for Energy (ACE), in Southeast Asia, coal is projected to rise from 47 gigawatts (GW) in 2013 to 261 GW in 2035, which means each country is moving in the opposite direction to construct more coal-fired power plants.Cambodia is one example. As a least developed country, it becomes even more reliant on coal-fired power, deeming it as the key factor to bringing an end to energy shortage in the future amid rapid economic growth.According to Cambodian National Strategic Development Plan 2014-2018, the Royal government of Cambodia has committed to an ambitious goal of achieving nationwide electrif ication by 2020, providing all villages across the country access to electricity.

Yucca Mountain Halted Again as GOP Aims to Retain Senate – Supporters of the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada face a familiar fate despite bipartisan momentum to restart progress on the site: Once again, their hopes appear dashed by a Silver State senator. For years the Senate spoiler was the chamber’s top Democrat, Harry Reid, who departed in 2017. This year Republican Dean Heller played the role, a vocal opponent of the project who faces an uphill re-election bid in a state that went for Hillary Clinton and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in 2016. The outcome: Funding backed by the House to restart the Yucca process was dropped. A top Yucca advocate pointed to Heller’s race as the reason for stripping out the funding. “A single senator’s short-term political calculations again triumphed over long-term, bipartisan policy priorities,” Illinois Rep. John Shimkus said in a statement.

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