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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CDC Warning- A Respiratory Virus Is Attacking Both Children And Adults – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning of a respiratory virus that is currently attacking both children and adults. The CDC says that everyone should watch out for Respiratory Syncytial Virus or “RSV.” RSV may start out by noticeable symptoms that are very similar to those of the common cold and most people will recover in less than two weeks believing they only had a cold. Some symptoms are coughing, wheezing, loss of appetite, runny nose, and a fever. Those symptoms are very similar to those of the common cold, and most people have actually had RSV before possibly believing it to be a cold.RSV can spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes. You can get infected if you get droplets from a cough or sneeze in your eyes, nose, or mouth, or if you touch a surface that has the virus on it, like a doorknob, and then touch your face before washing your hands. Additionally, it can spread through direct contact with the virus, like kissing the face of a child with RSV. -CDCHowever, the CDC says that RSV can be serious for infants and the elderly. As of now, the government agency says there is no vaccine to prevent the virus either. There is a medicine that can help protect some of the babies. This medicine (called palivizumab) is a series of monthly shots.RSV is the most common cause of bronchiolitis (inflammation of the small airways in the lung) and pneumonia (infection of the lungs) in children younger than 1 year of age in the United States. It is also a significant cause of respiratory illness in older adults. But the virus is rather common. According to the CDC’s own website, almost all children will be infected with RSV by their second birthday, building natural immunities to the infection.
Ebola Cases Rising Steadily in Congo’s Latest Outbreak – Following another outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo late last week, the number of infected people continues to rise steadily, with confirmed cases in North Kivu and Ituri provinces. The current epidemic, which began in August, is considered the second deadliest to hit the DRC, and officials say it is so far showing no signs of abating. As of Dec. 19, the World Health Organization reported a total of 560 cases and 360 confirmed deaths. Ebola, which causes fever, severe headaches, and, in some cases, hemorrhaging, is highly contagious and is transmitted person-to-person via contact with blood or body fluids. The latest outbreak has a high probability of spreading to nearby provinces in the DRC and to neighboring countries like Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and South Sudan due to loose border control. The outbreak comes at a time when people are not only getting ready for Christmas celebrations but also when the country is preparing for upcoming the presidential election on Dec. 30. The two events mean an increase in the movement of people in and out of the infected areas, which is likely to exacerbate the spread of the virus. Complicating matters is ongoing violence from local militias as part of Eastern Congo’s 25-year-old civil war. During the election, millions of people will use touch-screen voting machines, heightening the chance of contamination. To offset this, health officials have established checkpoints with contact-free temperature-sensing devices at the entrance to polling stations in Ebola-infected areas. In addition, hand sanitizer has been distributed for mandatory use at all polling stations.
Power Plants Responsible For Pediatric Cancers, Suit Alleges – Residents of east Orange County filed a lawsuit on Thursday alleging that Orlando’s coal-burning power plants have poisoned their homes and public spaces with metal, chemical and radioactive residues that have triggered a local spike in rare cancer cases. An area spanning nearly 30,000 residents and 15,000 homes, including the communities of Avalon Park, Stoneybrook, Eastwood, Cypress Springs, Andover Lakes/Cay and Turnberry Pointe/Cay, is identified as harmed in the lawsuit. “The danger of such exposure is borne out by an epidemiologic analysis based on data from the Florida Cancer Disease Registry and a site investigation, which found a higher incidence of, for instance, pediatric brain and blood cancers including two exceedingly rare pediatric brain cancers,” states the lawsuit by Cohen Milstein, a national firm that specializes in cases of environmental threats to communities. “The only source of these cancer-causing Contaminates is the Stanton Power Plant, which has a unique Contaminate fingerprint,” it states. Article continues below“The only source of these cancer-causing Contaminates is the Stanton Power Plant, which has a unique Contaminate fingerprint. – Lawsuit filed Thursday, blaming power plants for cancer cases. Filed in state Circuit Court in Orlando, the suit contends that Orlando Utilities Commission’s two coal-burning power plants, which have been operating since 1987 and 1996, have blanketed a large area of east Orange with chimney emissions and windblown dust from raw coal and uncovered piles of coal ash. “It’s critical that OUC stop its ongoing pollution,” said Steve Morrissey of a second, national law firm behind the lawsuit, Susman Godfrey. Utility spokesman Tim Trudell said the power plants are highly regulated by state and federal agencies. “OUC meets or exceeds all permitting requirements as environmental stewardship is one of the key principles of our organization,” he said. “Due to the pending litigation, we cannot get into any additional detail at this time.”
Fears of health crisis as Delhi suffers worst air pollution this year – Pollution in Delhi has reached its worst level this year in the past two days, prompting authorities to rate conditions as “severe to emergency”, which indicates the potential for a public health crisis. Senior government officials said the main reasons for the increase in smog were unusually cold air, fog and a lack of wind. Such conditions trap vehicle fumes and pollution from coal-fired power plants, industry and domestic fires over the city. Data from the government’s Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) showed the air quality index, which measures the concentration of poisonous particulate matter, was an average of 449 on Monday, only slightly better than 450 on Sunday. The index measures the concentration of PM 2.5, particles that can be carried deep into the lungs. The previous highest recording this year was 447 on 15 June, when there was a dust storm. Anything above 100 is considered unhealthy. India’s weather department said the index reached 654 in some parts of the city, and visibility was down to as little as 200 metres. Environmentalists said the authorities’ inaction was inexcusable and a concerted effort was needed to reduce pollution from vehicles and industry. “If this is not an emergency, then what is?” asked the Delhi-based environmentalist Vimlendu Jha. The “severe to emergency” rating means the air is not only hazardous for citizens with existing respiratory problems but can also seriously affect healthy people.
‘A Disaster’- Critics Pounce on Trump USDA’s New GMO Labeling Rule – Food safety advocates are expressing sharp disappointment with the final federal GMO labeling rule, released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).While industry-friendly Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue asserted in a press statement that the new standard for foods produced using genetic engineering (GE or GMO) would boost “the transparency of our nation’s food system” and ensure “clear information and labeling consistency for consumers about the ingredients in their food,” groups like the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) – and even food giants like Nestlé – say it does nothing of the sort.”It is obvious that this rule is intended to hide, not disclose, information about genetically modified foods,” said IATP senior attorney Sharon Treat.Among the concerns being raised is that the rule, published Friday in the Federal Register and with implementation set to begin in 2020, refers not to the widely recognized phrase “genetically-modified food” but rather “bioengineered (BE) food.” “USDA’s prohibition of the well-established terms, GE and GMO, on food labels will confuse and mislead consumers,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director at the Center for Food Safety. To make the disclosure, food producers have four options: text, a friendly-looking symbol, an electronic or digital link, or a text message. According to Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter, the symbol suggests “to consumers the product is natural and sustainable, when genetically engineered foods are anything but.” The option for the use of electronic codes, meanwhile, discriminates against those without access to a smartphone, tablet, or reliable internet access, and while the companies would also need to provide a telephone number for a consumer to call, that is onerous, the groups say.
Chinese Gene-Editing Trials Have ‘Lost Track’ of Patients: Report – A Chinese gene-editing experiment has lost touch with patients whose DNA was altered, alarming Western scientists who say subjects should be monitored for many years, The Wall Street Journal reports. The gene-editing tool known as Crispr-Cas9 allows scientists to edit the DNA of patients in hopes of eliminating harmful mutations, such as those that cause cancer. However, Chinese scientists have reportedly leapfrogged in experimenting with gene-editing on humans in the last few years. Beijing has no federal body that oversees gene-editing trials, meaning standards vary across experiments. The approach has been troubling to doctors and scientists in the U.S., who fear the promising science could be overshadowed by haphazard implementation. Last month, a Chinese scientist claimed he has created the world’s first gene-edited babies. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of chemistry and molecular & cell biology at the University of California Berkeley who is credited as a co-inventor of the Crispr technology, responded to the claim. “Because the data have not been peer-reviewed, the fidelity of the gene-editing process cannot be evaluated,” Doudna cautioned.
EU reports on pesticides are copy-pasted from industry dossiers – Remember the copy-paste scandal, when Greenpeace uncovered that the EU report on glyphosate was, over many pages, identical to the application dossier submitted by Monsanto and other pesticide companies? Now a team of journalists working for the German news brand BR24 has checked whether this is also true for other pesticides. After all, both the BfR and EFSA said that this was common practice. And it is. The team checked 25 EU risk assessment reports prepared by different Rapporteur Member States, and in particular the human health parts. It found that many national authorities had done what the BfR had done for glyphosate – they copied large chunks of text from the application dossiers over to the EU report, without any indication of the source. The journalists also got an interview with EFSA director Bernhard Url who said, again: “We assume that the authority checks whether something corresponds to reality before taking it over.” They also got an insider to speak out, anonymously, who confirmed that the authorities didn’t have the time to check all the studies.
Insects are slipping into the US and causing nearly $5 billion in damages every year – From a distance, the hemlock trees by the Wappinger Creek in Millbrook, New York, look just fine. But forest ecologist Gary Lovett knows better. He pulls back the twigs and exposes some tiny, white fluffy balls.”These are the protective coating that’s created over the top of the hemlock woolly adelgid, a tiny aphid-like insect,” said Lovett.”They’re very tiny, so one of them won’t bother the tree. But when we have millions and millions of them on a tree, it eventually kills the tree,” explained Lovett, who is with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, about a two-hour drive north of New York City. The hemlock woolly adelgid, native to East Asia, is slowly killing trees from Maine to Georgia. It’s among the latest in a line of invasive pests slipping into the US. But according to some studies, invasive pests are costing the US economy close to $5 billion a year. Trees don’t just die in forests, they die in cities and our yards. “Most of the cost is being borne by homeowners and by local governments, municipalities,” Lovett said. Consider the nearby city of Poughkeepsie, New York, which has a problem with the emerald ash borer, another invasive pest native to Asia, infecting its ash trees. Poughkeepsie city administrator Mark Nelson brought up a computer map with about 300 dots, color-coded ash trees owned by the city. Red and yellow dots mean the emerald ash borer has found a new host. “I think it’s safe to say that of the city-owned trees, 90 percent are infected,” said Nelson. The city has to pay to take the trees down, or eventually, they’ll die and fall. (You could imagine the horror story lawsuits were that to happen.) So the city recently took down 50 ash trees. The cost: $82,000.
‘We are at war’: New York’s rat crisis made worse by climate change – The discarded slices of pizza that litter New York’s streets have long fuelled its sizeable population of rats, but now the city’s growing swarm has a new reason to enjoy their home – warming temperatures. City officials have reported an increasing number of calls from residents complaining about rats, and have warned that milder winters are helping them feed and mate longer into the year. And as winters warm up, more frequent outdoor activity by humans is adding to the litter rats thrive upon. Rat-related complaints have been on the rise over the past four years, with 19,152 calls made to the city last year, an increase of about 10% on 2016. There are no reliable figures on the number of rats in New York – estimates range from 250,000 to tens of millions – but the surge in rat activity has been replicated in other cities. Houston, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia have experienced large increases in calls to pest control. Veteran anti-rat strategists have, in part, blamed climate change. “It’s a complex issue but we are seeing rat population increases around the world now,” said Bobby Corrigan, a sought-after rat-catching consultant who once spent a week living in a rat-infested barn in Indiana as part of his PhD research.“Requests for my services are through the roof, I can’t keep up with them,” he said. “You speak to any health commissioner from Boston to DC and the trend is upwards.“In winter rats slow down their reproduction because it’s so cold, but they are probably having one more litter a year now because it’s getting warmer. A litter is around 10 babies and that’s making a difference.” The increase in rat sightings has spawned viral videos of rats eating pizza and navigating escalators – but has also raised health concerns. A death was recorded in the Bronx last year due to leptospirosis, a rare disease transmitted via rat urine. New York rats trapped and tested by Columbia University researchers were found to be reservoirs of E coli and salmonella, with some even carrying Seoul hantavirus, which can cause kidney failure.
‘Global Warming’ Blamed For Drastic Decline In World’s Reindeer Population – In the run-up to Christmas, some upsetting news has emerged regarding wild populations of reindeer and caribou in the Arctic. Over the past two decades, their numbers have fallen from nearly five million to just 2.1 million animals, according to the latest Arctic Report Card released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, that represents a decline of 56 percent since the mid-1990s. Some herds are faring better than others and researchers have found that in some cases, several herds have crashed by more than 90 percent. The drastic decline is due to a complex mix of factors such as hunting, disease, a lack of food and climate change. Even though the Arctic is getting warmer which results in more vegetation for the animals, increasing levels of drought, flies and parasites are taking a toll on them. Reindeer and caribou are the same species – Rangifer tarandus – but there are notable differences between them. Caribou are larger elk-like animals that have never been domesticated while reindeer are smaller and were domesticated in northern Eurasia about 20,000 years ago. The grim findings of the report hardly come as a surprise given that the WWF released a global assessment of the health of animal populations all over the world earlier this year, finding that average vertebrate (bird, fish, mammals, amphibians) population has shrunk 60 percent since 1970.
Giraffes just silently went to the list of endangered animals facing extinction – Two subspecies of giraffes were recently added to the list of “critically endangered” species for the first time ever, as per the latest report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which administers the world’s official endangered species list. The IUCN reported on Saturday that they have moved the giraffe from the list of ‘Least Concern’ to that of ‘Vulnerable’ status in their Red List of Threatened Species report. The next slots after ‘vulnerable’ are ‘endangered’, ‘critically endangered’, ‘extinct in the wild’, and ‘extinct’. Thus, if we do nothing about it, giraffes could become extinct in the wild in the medium-term future.
‘A Lot of These Species Are Right on the Edge’: More Than 50 Australian Plant Species Could Go Extinct in 10 Years – Scientists published the first major assessment of the health of Australian plant species in two decades, and the results are urgent, The Guardian reported Tuesday.More than 50 of Australian plant species could go extinct within the next decade, but only 12 of them are listed as “critically endangered” under the nation’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Thirteen of the at-risk species are not listed at all.”Some of these species, it would just take a grader truck from a council to accidentally run over them to destroy a whole population,” lead study author and University of Queensland postdoctoral researcher Jennifer Silcock told The Guardian. “Some of these areas are only a couple of metres wide.”The papers’ authors argued that their findings indicate that the Australian government should re-evaluate its lists of endangered species and coordinate them with the guidelines established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.The paper, published in the Australian Journal of Botany, drew its conclusions from previous publications and from 125 interviews with experts in the field. Here are some of the key takeaways by the numbers.
- 1,135 species were considered.
- 80 of those do not currently appear on any Australian state or federal lists.
- 418 are in “documented, suspected or projected” decline.
- 296 are at risk for extinction if current trends continue.
- 55 are at “high risk of extinction.”
Ecocide as Creative Destruction – According to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), since 1970 60% of the mammals, birds, fish and reptiles on the planet have been driven to extinction. To the extent that the WWF has it right, climate change accounts for less than 10% of these losses (graph below). As important and logistically complex as resolving climate change is, it is but one of a host of environmental ills in equal or greater need of resolution. Habitat degradation and loss and animal exploitation (e.g. trawl-net fishing) explain most of this animal extinction. Habitat loss is primarily due to deforestation to feed factory farm animals. According to the Guardian, these animal losses would require 5 – 7 million years to recover from. But as of today, the causes of extinction continue unabated with no plausible plans being put forward by national governments to address it. Of the mass extinction of animals that the WWF is reporting, most comes from habitat loss and degradation. Climate change explains less than 10% of the losses. The point isn’t to downplay climate change, but to express the breadth of the environmental crisis that the world now faces. While the role of global warming will increase in time, mass extinction is at present a related but separate crisis in need of resolution. Source: wwf.org.uk.As reported here and here, the animal extinction isn’t anomalous. Over approximately the same time frame, 60% – 80% of insects have also been made extinct. The precise balance of causes is debatable, but putting climate change forwardas the primary cause reframes the concept of a ‘carbon budget’ in wildly alarming terms. If the one-degree Celsius warming experienced to date explains the insect extinction, where does that leave the IPCC’s1.5 degree warming ‘budget?’ The appeal of assigning climate change as the cause of mass extinction is that solving climate change would in theory solve it. However, Raj Patel of the University of Texas-Austin is one of a number of environmental theorists who argue that industrial agriculture – including deforestation, monoculture planting and the use of pesticides, explains the insect and animal extinctions quite well. That oceanic dead zones ring industrial economies supports the interpretation that they are caused by agricultural runoff.
Plastic Water Bottles, Which Enabled a Drinks Boom, Now Threaten a Crisis – Bottled water, which recently dethroned soda as America’s most popular beverage, is facing a crisis. From a report:A consumer backlash against disposable plastic plus new government mandates and bans in places such as zoos and department stores have the world’s biggest bottled-water makers scrambling to find alternatives. Evian this year pledged to make all its plastic bottles entirely from recycled plastic by 2025, up from 30% today and among the boldest goals in the industry. Executives at parent company Danone hope the move will help it regain market share and win over plastic detractors who are already pressuring the makers of straws, bags and coffee cups. There’s a big problem. The industry has tried and failed for years to make a better bottle. Existing recycling technology needs clean, clear plastic to make new water bottles, and bottled-water companies say low recycling rates and a lack of infrastructure have stymied supply. Danone, for its part, is betting the reputation of its flagship water brand on a new technology that claims to turn old plastic from things like dirty carpets and sticky ketchup bottles into plastic suitable for new water bottles. […] Bottled-water sales have boomed in recent decades amid safety fears about tap water and a shift away from sugary drinks. Between 1994 and 2017, U.S. consumption soared 284% to nearly 42 gallons a year per person, according to Beverage Marketing Corp., a consulting firm.Further reading: Microplastics Found In 93 Percent of Bottled Water Tested In Global Study, and Amazon Wants To Curb Selling ‘CRaP’ Items it Can’t Profit On, Like Bottled Water and Snacks: Report.
As anti-plastic movements sweep the globe, change doesn’t always come easy – Grist – Australia’s two largest supermarket chains made waves earlier this year when they announced plans to ban single-use plastic bags in stores across the country. Environmentalists hailed the move, which according to new figures released this month, may have saved more than 1.5 billion bags from going into overstuffed kitchen drawers or landfills in less than six months. The National Retail Association, a nonprofit group that represents the grocery industry, said in early December the entire country has seen an astonishing 80 percent drop in single-use plastic bags since Coles and Woolworths implemented the bans in July. The two supermarkets, which together own more than 60 percentof the grocery market in Australia, have each said they’ve kept more than 700 million plastic bags out of circulation this year. But despite the good news, the proposal didn’t happen without some controversy. Angry shoppers prompted outbursts in checkout lines in several Coles stores and the supermarket giant backflipped just weeks after implementing its ban amid vehement complaints. Coles stores quickly said they would provide heavier-duty, reusable bags for free for the foreseeable future, after some media outlets dubbed the phenomenon “bag rage.” The reversal, however, created an even bigger outcry among environmental groups who claimed the chain had only increased the plastic problem by making single-use bags more durable and resistant to breaking down. The supermarket quickly backflipped again, saying it would provide those reusable bags for free for a short time before charging customers for them once more. ’’Both supermarket chains now provide several types of heavy-duty plastic bags for purchase that shoppers can pay for at a cost of about 11 cents apiece, or upwards of several dollars for nicer versions that double as coolers or are made of jute.
Amid the Seas of Empty Asphalt, After Christmas – Today is the day after Christmas, the day when families across the country burst out from their households of holiday cheer in order to once again brave the lines and lots of shopping malls, exchanging gifts and chasing year-end deals. It is, in other words, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, a “peak” shopping day for which big box stores are equipped with acres of asphalt. This peak parking planning might seem a welcome relief to the mom in the minivan circling ever further out in search of a single open spot. But for many, if not most, commercial retail development, that parking will not be used to capacity even at peak. During the highest peak parking day of this retail year, the dread Black Friday, Chuck Marohn and the Strong Towns crew engaged in a very useful exercise, snapping photos of their local parking lots on the morning of Black Friday in order to gauge just how much peak supply was serving supposed peak demand. In many cases, the Strong Towns monitors found lots half-empty – or worse. Any failures at peak demand only serve to emphasize how woefully disconnected our zoning and town planning often is from the real demands of good policy, however. For even if every lot were ideally full on peak days, that would leave acres of empty, nearly unusable space for the other 362 (or so) days of the year.
Brazil’s Amazon forest is in the crosshairs, as defenders step up – Early this week, about 500 of Chico Mendes’s early allies and a new generation of successors convened in Xapuri to celebrate his life and legacy, to pray and recall the deaths of hundreds of less prominent victims of frontier violence at that time and since, and to speak of solidarity at Mendes’s grave. The prime concern was the disruptive outcome of Brazil’s tumultuous election and the kickoff of the presidency of the far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro, on January 1. By now, anyone worried about the fate of the Amazon rain forest or the indigenous and traditional communities depending on this vast, rich ecosystem knows the litany of potentially devastating steps Bolsonaro has threatened to take. He won on a platform mainly built around change and order, appealing to Brazil’s “beef, Bible, and bullet” political bloc. A big theme for this former military officer was taming and exploiting the country’s vast Amazon expanse. Beneath and within the extraordinary biological bounty of the lacework of rivers and towering forest canopies, enormous mineral and timber and hydropower resources remain unexploited. Bolsonaro disparaged Brazil’s minorities and indigenous tribes and discounted their land claims, pledged to loosen forest and environmental regulations and enforcement, to open reserves to mining, and to ban international environmental groups. “There is fear,” said Mary Allegretti, a Brazilian anthropologist who worked closely with Mendes from the early stages of the Acre land struggle, described rising tensions. Since Bolsonaro’s election, they’d been feeling increasing pressure from ranchers. Outside the reserve boundary, they have fewer legal protections. “Farmers are feeling more comfortable making threats,” Allegretti said in a Skype interview. “There are a lot of small conflicts around the reserves. It’s a clear consequence of the new government and ideology.”
‘Openly Declaring Their Illegal Whaling Activities,’ Japan Abandons Global Effort to Protect Whale Population –After denying for several days reports that they were planning to leave the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Japanese officials said Wednesday that the country would withdraw from the 89-member panel in order to defy its ban on commercial whaling. The move will eliminate the country’s long-held “pretense” of hunting whales only for research purposes, said the conservation group Sea Shepherd, as Japan officially declares itself a “pirate whaling nation.” “This means that Japan is now openly declaring their illegal whaling activities,” Paul Watson, founder of the group, told the New York Times. Since the IWC introduced its ban on commercial whaling in 1986, Japan has used regular so-called “research whaling” trips off the coasts of Antarctica as a loophole to continue its whale-hunting. The country has killed an average of 333 minke whales on its expeditions, including more than 120 pregnant female whales last year. Instead of traveling to the Southern Ocean every year, Japanese whalers will now resume hunting in Japan’s territories and exclusive economic zone beginning in July 2019, selling whale meat on the open market. Greenpeace Japan noted that the country’s timing of the announcement would not stop green groups from condemning its plan to openly slaughter whales for profit. “It’s clear that the government is trying to sneak in this announcement at the end of year away from the spotlight of international media, but the world sees this for what it is,” “The declaration today is out of step with the international community, let alone the protection needed to safeguard the future of our oceans and these majestic creatures.”
Tsunami kills at least 222 in Indonesia, more than 800 injured – – A tsunami following a volcanic eruption in Indonesia on Saturday (Dec 22) has killed 222 people, with hundreds more injured, officials said on Sunday. National disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said 843 people were injured and 28 were missing, as of 4pm local time. “This number will continue to rise, considering not all places have been checked,” Dr Sutopo told a media briefing in Yogyakarta. The tsunami was caused by “an undersea landslide resulting from volcanic activity on Anak Krakatau” and was exacerbated by an abnormally high tide because of the current full moon, he said. “The tsunami hit several areas of the Sunda Strait, including beaches in Pandeglang regency, Serang, and South Lampung,” the agency said. Video footage posted to social media by Dr Supoto showed panicked residents clutching flashlights and fleeing for higher ground. The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) said the tsunami was detected at four locations in the provinces of Banten and Lampung at 9.27pm local time on Saturday. TV images showed the seconds when the tsunami hit the beach and residential areas in Pandeglang on Java island, dragging with it victims, debris, and large chunks of wood and metal. Coastal residents reported not seeing or feeling any warning signs, such as receding water or an earthquake, before waves of 2-3 metres washed ashore, according to media. Authorities said a warning siren went off in some areas.
Devastating ‘Volcano Tsunami’ Strikes Indonesia, Killing at Least 222 (Videos) – After a wave [no pun intended] of devastating tsunamis during the summer and the fall, 2018 was already on track to be one of the deadliest years for tsunami-prone Indonesia since 2004 – when a massive tsunami struck the region, killing nearly 250,000 people, most of them in Indonesia. But with only days to go until the new year, a massive wave has struck the beaches around Sunda Strait in Indonesia on Saturday night, killing at least 222 people, according to Indonesian officials.Meanwhile, roughly 850 people have been injured, while some two dozen are still missing. Sunda Strait separates the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Its coast is located about 62 miles from Jakarta.The area worst hit by the volcano was the Pandeglang region of Java’s Banten province, which includes Ujung Kulon National Park and popular beaches, the disaster agency said.A harrowing account of the devastation from the Associated Press described broken chunks of concrete and splintered sticks of wood strewn across hard-hit coastal areas. Beach getaways popular with Jakarta residents had been leveled and turned into near ghost towns. Destroyed vehicles remained capsized or piled on top of one another. Debris from bamboo shacks floated across the beaches. The deadly wave is believed to have been caused by undersea landslides resulting from volcanic activity at Krakatoa, according to Indonesia’s disaster agency. Krakatoa is located in the Sunda Strait, and has been spewing ash and periodically erupting for the past several months. One video that swiftly went viral, a tsunami wiped out the stage and pummeled the audience during a performance by the Indonesia pop band Seventeen at a venue on Tanjung Lesung beach in Pandeglang. The band later released a statement affirming that its bass player, guitarist and road manager had been found dead, while two other band members and one of their wives remained missing.
Death toll rises from Indonesian tsunami — The death toll from the Sunda Strait tsunami disaster continues to rise. The Indonesian National Board for Disaster Management (BNPB) announced yesterday that at least 429 people have been killed, over 1,480 injured and more than 150 remain missing. Thousands of homes and over 70 hotels and 60 shops were heavily damaged or destroyed. Scientists have confirmed that the tsunami was caused by a 64-hectare landslide on the nearby island volcano of Anak Krakatoa. It produced the massive and fast-moving waves that hit towns and popular beach resorts on both sides of the Sunda Strait at about 9.30 p.m. on December 22. The volcano lies in the middle of the western side of the narrow strait. Survivors received no warning of the tsunami with waves estimated to have been between 2 and 5 metres high. The Pandeglang district, on the Javan side of the strait and not far from Jakarta, suffered the largest numbers of casualties. Some 290 people were killed and over 14,390 rendered homeless – that is, the overwhelming majority of 20,000 people displaced by the catastrophe. Heavy monsoonal rains and flooding are now complicating emergency rescue and relief with teams from the Indonesian military, the Indonesian Red Cross and NGOs unable to reach remote areas. Damaged bridges and flooded rivers have made roads impassable, holding up convoys delivering heavy machinery and emergency relief supplies – food, medicine, shelters, latrines and generators – and forcing disaster officials to use helicopters to drop supplies and evacuate residents. Emergency relief doctors have told the media that supplies of medicine and clean water are dwindling and that children are becoming dehydrated and falling ill. Thousands of survivors are living in unhealthy conditions in areas hit by the tsunami.
Dramatic collapse of Indonesian volcano – The scale of the dramatic collapse of the Indonesian volcano that led to last Saturday’s devastating tsunami in the Sunda Strait is becoming clear. Researchers have examined satellite images of Anak Krakatau to calculate the amount of rock and ash that sheared off into the sea. They say the volcano has lost more than two-thirds of its height and volume during the past week. Much of this missing mass could have slid into the sea in one movement. It would certainly explain the displacement of water and the generation of waves up to 5m high that then inundated the nearby coastlines of Java and Sumatra. Indonesia’s disaster agency says more than 400 people are confirmed dead with 20 or so still missing. In excess of 40,000 have been displaced. What was once a volcanic cone standing some 340m high is now just 110m tall, says the PVMBG. In terms of volume, 150-170 million cubic metres of material has gone, leaving only 40-70 million cubic metres still in place.
Satellite images show collapse of Indonesian island volcano – Radar data from satellites, converted into images, shows Indonesia’s Anak Krakatau island volcano is dramatically smaller following a weekend eruption that triggered a deadly tsunami. Satellite photos aren’t available because of cloud cover, but radar images from a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency satellite taken before and after the eruption show the volcano’s southwestern flank has disappeared. Dave Petley, head of research and innovation at Sheffield University, who analyzed similar images from a European Space Agency satellite, said they support the theory that a landslide, most of it undersea, caused the tsunami that killed at least 430 people Saturday evening. “The challenge now is to interpret what might be happening on the volcano, and what might happen next,” he wrote in a blog. Indonesian authorities are warning people to stay away less than a mile from the Sunda Strait coastline because of the risk of another tsunami. JAXA’s post-eruption image shows concentric waves radiating from the island, which experts say is caused by ongoing eruptions. Anak Krakatau, which means child of Krakatau, is the offspring of the infamous Krakatau volcano that affected global climate with a massive eruption in 1883. Anak Krakatau first rose above sea level in 1929, according to Indonesia’s volcanology agency, and has been increasing its land mass since then.
Sicily Is Shaken By Earthquake As Mount Etna Erupts Once Again – An overnight earthquake, triggered by Mount Etna’s eruption two days ago, caused injuries and damage in Eastern Sicily early Wednesday morning. The volcano has been spewing ash and lava has flowed down its slopes since it began erupting on Monday. The quake registered 4.8 magnitude, according to Italian news agency ANSA, which reported 600 people were displaced by the temblor. Officials said the quake was one of about 1,000 tremors – most of them small – related to Etna’s eruption, The Associated Press reports. NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli reports that Italy’s Civil Protection Agency set up temporary shelters for those whose homes were damaged or who were too frightened to go home. At least 10 people were injured, according to the AP, and others sought medical care for panic attacks or shock. A section of a major roadway was closed, as was the railway along the Ionian coast, ANSA reported. Images of the area showed churches and buildings strewn with rubble, fallen signs in front of shops, and toppled statues. On Monday, ANSA reported that a new fracture had opened on Etna’s southeast crater, from which ash was spewing. Authorities closed down airspace over the airport in the nearby city of Catania. “Etna remains a dangerous volcano, and this country of ours is unfortunately fragile,” government Undersecretary Vito Crimi said Wednesday, according to the AP. Many people reportedly slept in their cars after the quake.
Why is FEMA is wasting our money? – The Government Accountability Office this month released a report titled “2017 Disaster Contracting: Action Needed to Better Ensure More Effective Use and Management of Advance Contracts.” Translation: FEMA isn’t managing contracts with relief providers very well. FEMA signs advance contracts with companies to provide help after a disaster. It’s a smart way to do things. During the recovery, especially in the first few days, if the agency had to negotiate a bunch of contracts on the fly, it would slow down aid delivery and probably cost more. If the deal is sealed in advance, companies can quickly and cost-effectively deliver food, water, tents, blankets, communications equipment, debris-removing machinery, etc.At least that’s the theory. The GAO found that in practice it isn’t working well. In 2017, advance contracts locked in $4.5 billion to Hurricanes Irma, Harvey and Maria as well as California wildfires. But FEMA consistently failed to ensure that it got what it paid for. According to the GAO, the agency relied on outdated management strategies, trained its contracting officers poorly, and did not communicate clearly with states and localities about what was available. Those flaws led to contracts being underutilized in Florida, Puerto Rico and other places. Taxpayers, meanwhile, paid for services and relief efforts that didn’t happen. The GAO concluded that miscommunication was a big factor in problems, especially between the feds, states and localities. Local officials on the ground simply did not know what contracted services were available because FEMA had not communicated it well.
Extreme Heat Wave Roasting Australia at Record Breaking 120.74 F –It’s been the opposite of a white Christmas in Australia, as a major heat wave scorches the Land Down Under. Temperatures in the country’s southeast are around 14 C (approximately 24 F) higher than normal for late December, and some parts of the states of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia topped 40 C (104 F) for a fourth day in a row Thursday, CNN reported.”We may well break some records across northern Victoria in terms of consecutive days across 40C for this heatwave, so it is certainly a noteworthy event,” Victoria Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) senior forecaster Rod Dixon told Australia’s ABC News.In Western Australia, records did break when the city of Marble Bar hit a temperature of 49.3 C (approximately 120.74 F), the hottest since record keeping began there, Western Australia’s BOM announced on Twitter.The immediate cause of the heat wave is a high pressure system.”The cause of the heat is a dome of high pressure settling in over much of the continent over the past few days,” CNN meteorologist Gene Norman explained.However, climate change is also expected to increase the severity and length of heat waves. In the north part of the state of New South Wales (NSW) alone, there are projected to be 10 more heat wave days per year by 2030 and 30 more by 2070, according to the government’s Adapt NSW page.Heat waves in Australia kill more people than any other extreme weather event, including flooding, bushfires and cyclones, according to the NSW government. They can also increase the risk of some hazards. “In addition to the sweltering temperatures, there is an enhanced fire risk in Victoria, with total fire bans declared for Thursday in the Mallee and Wimmera regions. South Australia has bans in place in 10 areas including the Mount Lofty Ranges and Yorke Peninsula. Western Australia has total fire bans in 13 districts, where temperatures are expected to exceed 45 C in parts,” Norman told CNN.
2018 – the hottest La Niña year ever recorded — Once the final official global annual surface temperature is published, 2018 will be the hottest La Niña year on record, by a wide margin. It will be the fourth-hottest year overall, and the fourth consecutive year more than 1°C (1.8°F) hotter than temperatures in the late-1800s, when reliable measurements began. 2009 will be bumped to second-hottest La Niña year on record, at 0.87°C (1.6°F) warmer than the late-1800s, but about 0.16°C (0.29°F) cooler than 2018. El Niño events bring warm water to the ocean surface; La Niña events are cool at the surface. Since scientists measure global surface temperatures over both land and oceans, new hottest year records are usually set during El Niño events. For this reason, it’s best to compare like-with-like. In the case of 2018, given that it was a La Niña year, it’s most useful to compare it with prior years in which global surface temperatures were cooled by La Niña events.2018 was a fairly weak La Niña year similar to 2009 and 2012, but the global temperature was about 0.16-0.18°C (0.29-0.32°F) hotter in 2018 despite solar activity’s also remaining relatively low.
Now you can catch a cold from a guy who died 30,000 years ago- It seems that the permafrost on which Alaskans build their lives, to say nothing of their homes, their gas stations, their churches, and their oil rigs, is losing its permanence at an alarming rate, according to a number of recent reports. This change in the Arctic landscape (the analysis of disappearing sea ice is even scarier) ultimately could affect 70 percent of Alaska’s infrastructure, and it is entirely attributable to the Great Chinese Climate Hoax. From Nature.com: We show that nearly four million people and 70% of current infrastructure in the permafrost domain are in areas with high potential for thaw of near-surface permafrost. Our results demonstrate that one-third of pan-Arctic infrastructure and 45% of the hydrocarbon extraction fields in the Russian Arctic are in regions where thaw-related ground instability can cause severe damage to the built environment. Alarmingly, these figures are not reduced substantially even if the climate change targets of the Paris Agreement are reached. Well, we’re not in the Paris Agreement any more, so there’s nothing for us to worry about, right? Results show that by 2050 3.6 million people, which constitutes about three quarters of the current population in the Northern Hemisphere permafrost area, may be affected by damage to infrastructure associated with permafrost thaw (Fig. 1, Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2, Supplementary Table 1). A substantial proportion of the fundamental human infrastructure is potentially under risk: 48 – 87% (mean = 69%) of the current pan-Arctic infrastructure is located in areas where near-surface permafrost is projected to thaw by mid-century (Fig. 2a, Supplementary Tables 2 and 3, Supplementary Data 1) There are also other alarming consequences to losing the permafrost. First, there’s a huge amount of carbon down there and its release would be disastrous. In addition, nobody’s really sure how many dormant diseases are waiting to be released as the permafrost melts. From Phys.org: The thawing of the permafrost also threatens to unlock disease-causing bacteria and viruses long trapped in the ice. There have already been some cases of this happening. In 2016 a child died in Russia’s far northern Siberia in an outbreak of anthrax that scientists said seemed to have come from the corpses of infected reindeers buried 70 years before but uncovered by melting permafrost. Released from the ice, the anthrax seems to have been passed to grazing herds. Scientists have also warned that other dormant pathogens entombed in frozen soil may be roused by global warming, such as from old smallpox graves. In 2014 scientists revived a giant but harmless virus, dubbed Pithovirus sibericum, that had been locked in the Siberian permafrost for more than 30,000 years. You, too, can catch a cold now from someone who died 30,000 years ago.
There’ll be a domino effect as we trigger ecosystem tipping points – There are lots of tipping points in ecosystems and the climate, and many are interconnected. That means the massive changes we are wreaking will have many unexpected consequences. “The world is a much more surprising place then generally assumed,” says Garry Peterson of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden. As an example, in 2016 the retreat of a glacier in Canada led to a river changing direction. Peterson’s team has analysed 300 ecosystems with potential tipping points or regime changes. For instance, as rainfall increases grasslands can suddenly turn into forests, and vice versa. The study suggests that almost half of them are linked. For example, more extreme rainfall from global heating can greatly increase soil erosion, especially on degraded farmland, and carry more phosphorus into rivers, lakes and the sea. This can trigger algal blooms and red tides, and amplify the decline in oxygen that occurs as waters warm. This leads to even bigger aquatic “dead zones” with low oxygen, which can have further knock-on effects. What the team’s work shows is that crossing one tipping point increases the risk of crossing another and so triggering a whole cascade of effects. And we may not even recognise the danger until it is too late, Peterson says. Take the West Antarctic ice sheet, which will raise sea level three metres if it melts. The idea that we might be nearing the tipping point beyond which it will collapse was ridiculed when it was suggested in the 1970s. Now it appears we’ve already passed the tipping point. Scientists specialise in narrow areas and often fail to spot the connections between different earth systems, Peterson says.. Computer modellers often specifically exclude things that lead to sudden, discontinuous changes because they make the models too unstable. That is a serious mistake, he thinks. “We should be preparing for a much more unstable future.”
Risks of ‘domino effect’ of tipping points greater than thought, study says – Policymakers have severely underestimated the risks of ecological tipping points, according to a study that shows 45% of all potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another. The authors said their paper, published in the journal Science, highlights how overstressed and overlapping natural systems are combining to throw up a growing number of unwelcome surprises. “The risks are greater than assumed because the interactions are more dynamic,” said Juan Rocha of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. “The important message is to recognise the wickedness of the problem that humanity faces.” The study collated existing research on ecosystem transitions that can irreversibly tip to another state, such as coral reefs bleaching and being overrun by algae, forests becoming savannahs and ice sheets melting into oceans. It then cross-referenced the 30 types of shift to examine the impacts they might have on one another and human society. Only 19% were entirely isolated. Another 36% shared a common cause, but were not likely to interact. The remaining 45% had the potential to create either a one-way domino effect or mutually reinforcing feedbacks. Among the latter pairings were Arctic ice sheets and boreal forests. When the former melt, there is less ice to reflect the sun’s heat so the temperature of the planet rises. This increases the risks of forest fires, which discharge carbon into the air that adds to the greenhouse effect, which melts more ice. Although geographically distant, each amplifies the other.
Greenland’s Rapid Ice Melt Persists Even in Winter, Study Finds – In the latest troubling study regarding how the climate crisis is affecting the world’s iciest regions, a new report by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) found that the second-largest ice sheet in the world is currently melting even in winter. The study follows a report released earlier this month showing that Greenland’s ice melt rate is currently faster than it’s been in about 7,000 years. The island’s 650,000 cubic miles of ice is melting 50 percent faster than it did in pre-industrial times.”Greenland is a bit like a sleeping giant that is awakening,” Edward Hanna, a climate scientist at the University of Lincoln, told Inside Climate News this week. “Who knows how it will respond to a couple of more degrees of warming? It could lose a lot of mass very quickly.” “Greenland is a bit like a sleeping giant that is awakening. Who knows how it will respond to a couple of more degrees of warming? It could lose a lot of mass very quickly.” – Edward Hanna, University of LincolnThe ice sheet’s persistent melting even in winter has come about because huge waves below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, created by unusually strong winter winds, are pushing warm water up to Greenland – creating an environment that’s hostile for the country’s icy ecosystem, explains SAMS.These “coastally trapped internal waves” are “pushing warm water into the fjord and towards the glacier, causing melting hundreds of metres below the ocean surface,” Dr. Neil Fraser, an ocean physicist who led the study, told the BBC.Greenland’s huge ice sheet also makes it a huge contributor to rising sea levels, SAMS noted, accounting for more than 20 percent of the annual increase in sea levels. Accelerating, year-round run-off that persists even in the coldest months of the year is “the greatest contributor to sea level rise,” Sarah Das, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Inside Climate News.
Ozone depletion increases Antarctic snowfall, partially mitigates ice sheet loss – Ozone layer depletion has increased snowfall over Antarctica in recent decades, partially mitigating the ongoing loss of the continent’s ice sheet mass, new University of Colorado Boulder research finds. The findings, published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, show a distinct signal linking stratospheric ozone loss above Antarctica with increased precipitation, even as those gains have been outpaced by an even greater ice loss rate due to warming oceans, contributing to sea level rise. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is the world’s largest ice sheet and freshwater reservoir, containing the potential for hundreds of feet of sea level rise if all ice were to melt. “Calving icebergs and melting ice shelves have gotten lots of attention because they’re the most visible impact of ongoing climate change to Antarctica,” said Jan Lenaerts, lead author of the research and an assistant professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. “But the input side of the equation, which is precipitation falling in the form of snow, hasn’t drawn the same level of study.” An ozone “hole,” or a seasonal thinning of the ozone layer, forms above Antarctica in the austral summer, influencing atmospheric circulation and creating stronger circumpolar westerly winds. The results complement a separate NASA-led study, which was led by Medley and published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, which uses observations from ice cores to show that Antarctic snowfall has increased in the last 200 years and especially so in the past 30 years, suggesting that precipitation changes can be linked to man-made causes such as greenhouse gas emissions as well as the ozone hole.
‘The damn thing melted’: Climate change and US interests in the Arctic – In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, Navy Secretary Richard Spencer announced that a rewrite of the Navy’s Arctic strategy was underway. Asked by a reporter after the hearing what prompted the new strategy just four years after the Navy issued its U.S. Navy Arctic Roadmap 2014-2030, Spencer stated “the damn thing melted.” Secretary Spencer was right. The Arctic is melting. Just this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its annual Arctic report card for 2018. NOAA’s headline “Effects of persistent Arctic warming continue to mount” was an understatement. Among the agency’s findings, air temperatures in the Arctic are warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and sea ice “remained younger, thinner, and covered less area than in the past.” The implications of these changes for U.S. national interests cannot be ignored.
Diseases From Millions of Years Ago Are Awakening Because of Melting Ice – Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they are releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that, having lain dormant, are springing back to life. As the Earth warms, more permafrost will melt. Under normal circumstances, superficial permafrost layers about 50cm deep melt every summer. But now global warming is gradually exposing older permafrost layers. Frozen permafrost soil is the perfect place for bacteria to remain alive for very long periods of time, perhaps as long as a million years. That means melting ice could potentially open a Pandora’s box of diseases. The temperature in the Arctic Circle is rising quickly, about three times faster than in the rest of the world. As the ice and permafrost melt, other infectious agents may be released. “Permafrost is a very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark,” says evolutionary biologist Jean-Michel Claverie at Aix-Marseille University in France. “Pathogenic viruses that can infect humans or animals might be preserved in old permafrost layers, including some that have caused global epidemics in the past.” Scientists managed to revive an 8-million-year-old bacterium that had been lying dormant in ice, beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. In the same study, bacteria were also revived from ice that was over 100,000 years old. Because the Arctic sea ice is melting, the north shore of Siberia has become more easily accessible by sea. As a result, industrial exploitation, including mining for gold and minerals, and drilling for oil and natural gas, is now becoming profitable. “At the moment, these regions are deserted and the deep permafrost layers are left alone,” says Claverie. “However, these ancient layers could be exposed by the digging involved in mining and drilling operations. If viable virions are still there, this could spell disaster.”
CBO Dismisses Costs Of Global Warming, Posing Hurdle For Climate Legislation– In a baffling repudiation of the federal government’s own scientists, the Congressional Budget Office last week said that climate change poses little economic risk to the United States in the next decade. The statement, which went so far as to highlight dubiously positive effects of rising global temperatures, poses a potential hurdle for future legislation to curb surging greenhouse gas emissions, experts said, and amounts to textbook climate change denial. Buried on page 292 of a 316-page report titled “Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2019 to 2028,” the CBO said, “Many estimates suggest that the effect of climate change on the nation’s economic output, and hence on federal tax revenues, will probably be small over the next 30 years and larger, but still modest, in the following few decades.” “That’s just completely false,” Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University, said by phone Wednesday. “There are no references to these ‘many estimates,’ and the following part of the paragraph cherry-picks.” The report ― first noted on Twitter by investigative reporter David Sirota ― goes on to tout positive effects like “fewer deaths from cold weather” and “improvements in agricultural productivity” as some of “the more certain effects of climate change on humans over the next several decades.” The stunning remarks directly contradict the National Climate Assessment, which found that, by 2100, crop damage, lost labor and extreme weather will cost the U.S. economy upward of $500 billion a year. That’s “more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states,” according to the report, drafted by researchers at 13 federal agencies. In a lengthy statement to HuffPost, the CBO referred to three of its own past reports, including one that said, “Even under scenarios in which significant climate change is assumed, the projected long-term effects on GDP would tend to be modest relative to underlying economic growth.” “All told, CBO projects that the increase in the amount of hurricane damage attributable to coastal development and climate change will probably be less than 0.05 percent of GDP in the 2040s.”
Nearly Two Billion Dollars spent on Anti-Climate Science Legislative Lobbying 2000 to 2016 – Robert Brulle at Drexel University reminds us of what makes Congress work, . Data for Brulle’s latest work comes from the 1995 Lobbying and Disclosure Act that requires all lobbying efforts that take up more than 20 percent of the time be reported. Nearly 2 million records were evaluated from 1986 to 2016. Key words utilized in this study were: climate change, global warming, greenhouse, Keystone, renewable energy, carbon, clean energy, Kyoto, cap and trade, CAFE, fuel economy, and renewable electricity. About $2.08 billion (in 2016 dollars) was spent on climate lobbying between 2000 and 2016. This is about 3.9 percent of total lobbying dollars spent of $53.5 billion. The electrical sector spent 26 percent of the total. The fossil fuel sector spent 17.7 percent, and the transportation sector 12.1 percent. The research also identified 231 different organizational types that do not fir into standard categories.Brulle says that the “spending of environmental groups and the renewable energy sector is dwarfed by the spending of the electrical utilities, fossil fuel, and transportation sectors.” Lobbying expenditures from 2000 to 2016 for environmental and renewable energy groups amounted to only five to seven percent of the total, or less than $145 million. An interesting note about lobbying goals was referenced from Brumbach 2015, where some players lobbied with “sophisticated strategies to simultaneously attempt to appear to support such [climate] legislation, while actually supporting efforts to undermine it.” Brulle notes, “as soon as the threat passed, lobbying for climate legislation by the corporations … ceased.” Lobbying spending has not be the same over the years, but changed depending on different factors. Brulle’s work found, “Starting with the 109th Congress, there was a rapid increase in the number of hearings, bills introduced, and lobbying expenditures. Brulle goes on, “The 110th Congressional session showed a fourfold increase in lobbying expenditures. With both the Senate and House in Democratic Party control, there was also a much larger number of bills and hearings related to climate change. Climate lobbying expenditures doubled from their levels in the previous Congress with the 111th Congress. By this time, the Democratic Party controlled both houses, as well as the Executive Branch, and moved to fulfill its promise of passing climate legislation in this session. This session marks the peak of Congressional attention to major climate legislation.”
The Farm Bureau: Big Oil’s Unnoticed Ally Fighting Climate Science and Policy – Advocacy groups with close ties to the oil billionaires Charles and David Koch had urged House leaders to get the anti-carbon-tax resolution approved.When the measure passed, by a big margin, it proved – not for the first time, nor the last – the Farm Bureau’s role as a powerful defender of the nation’s fossil fuel interests.For more than three decades, the Farm Bureau has aligned agriculture closely with the fossil fuel agenda. Though little noticed next to the influence of the fossil fuel industry, the farm lobby pulled in tandem with the energy lobby in a mutually reinforcing campaign to thwart the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, legislation like the Waxman-Markey economywide cap-and-trade plan, and regulations that would limit fossil fuel emissions.In pursuit of their common goals, the fossil fuel industry and the Farm Bureau worked to sow uncertainty about the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change and the economic consensus on how to solve the problem. Fossil fuel companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a network of think tanks and friendly lawmakers who gave climate denial political credibility as part of a decades-long misinformation campaign. The Farm Bureau provided a national grassroots network that was hard for Congress to oppose.This article, part of a series exploring agriculture’s role in climate change and the influence of the Farm Bureau, examines the close ties between the two industries as they fought to undermine climate policy.
EPA Runs Out of Funds as Government Shutdown Drags On — The partial government shutdown that began nearly a week ago is likely to drag into the New Year, CNN reported Friday. If so, that would be bad news for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is set to run out of funds on Friday, according to an email from acting administrator Andrew Wheeler obtained by The Hill. “In the event an appropriation is not passed by midnight Friday, December 28th, EPA will initiate orderly shutdown procedures,” Wheeler wrote.The EPA had carryover funds to keep up normal operations when the shutdown began Dec. 21, but those funds will run out Friday. What that means is that more than 700 workers considered “essential’ will have to work without pay, while more than 13,000 other employees will be furloughed, The Huffington Post explained. Wheeler said furloughed employees would be instructed to change their voice mails, enable out-of-office emails and complete their time cards. All travel for furloughed employees would be canceled.The shutdown could also impact EPA activities that normally protect the nation’s environment and public health. The Huffington Post listed some activities the shutdown could impact, according to the agency’scontingency plan.
- The cleanup of Superfund sites
- Inspections of drinking water systems
- Inspections of hazardous waste management sites and chemical facilities
- Reviews of pesticides
In the case of Superfund sites, the EPA will evaluate them to see which pose the greatest public health risks if cleanup efforts are delayed.
The Real-Life Effects of Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks: 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation – For nearly two years, President Trump has pursued an aggressive, far-reaching effort, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, to free American business from what he and many of his supporters view as excessive environmental regulation. The consequences are starting to play out in noticeable ways in communities across the United States. An investigation by The New York Times showed how Mr. Trump’s deregulatory policies are starting to have substantial impact on those who experience them close up – and often are economically dependent on the industries the president is trying to help. In the vast farmlands of central California, day care centers have to take account of pesticide-spraying schedules. The local government’s revenues on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota have grown to $330 million from $20 million over the last 15 years because of vast fossil fuel reserves that can now be pumped from the ground using fracking. National forests 400 miles away can be clouded with haze produced by a coal-fired power plant near Houston. No parts of the federal government during the Trump era have been more aggressive in rolling back rules than the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which between them regulate much of the intersection between the environment and the economy. Together their rule changes have touched nearly every aspect of environmental protection, including air pollution caused by power plants and the oil and gas industry, water pollution caused by coal mines, and toxic chemicals and pesticides used by farmers nationwide. In short, what is at stake is the quality of the air we breathe and the food we eat, the cleanliness of the rivers that flow past us, and the pace at which the climate is changing. Two years after Mr. Trump took office, the policy shifts are not nearly complete; dozens of other rules have been targeted for rollback. If there is a single industry that has been at the center of the fight – both during the Obama expansion of rules and the Trump rollbacks – it is coal. Mr. Obama targeted the industry as a way to combat climate change. Mr. Trump has defended and promoted it as part of his populist political and economic strategy. Mr. Trump’s approach has been to slow demands for further steps to curb air and water pollution caused by coal-burning power plants. What has not changed is the decline of coal – both coal mines and coal-burning power plants. Even as Mr. Trump has used his executive powers to help the industry, coal production in the United States continues to decline. Another factor is that environmental change happens slowly. So the real impact of the Trump-era policies may not be fully apparent until years after Mr. Trump leaves office.
The Green New Deal, explained – If the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to be believed, humanity has just over a decade to get carbon emissions under control before catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable. The Republican Party generally ignores or denies that problem. But the Democratic Party claims to accept and understand it. It is odd, then, that Democrats do not have a plan to address climate change. Their last big plan – the American Clean Energy and Security Act – passed the House in 2009 but went on to die an unceremonious death before reaching the Senate floor. Since then, there’s been nothing to replace it. Plenty of Democratic politicians support policies that would reduce climate pollution – renewable energy tax credits, fuel economy standards, and the like – but those policies do not add up to a comprehensive solution, certainly nothing like what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is necessary. Young activists, who will be forced to live with the ravages of climate change, find this upsetting. So they have proposed a plan of their own. It’s called the Green New Deal (GND) – a term purposefully reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal in the 1930s – and it has become the talk of the town. Here are Google searches from the past few months: As we will see, the exact details of the GND remain to be worked out, but the broad thrust is fairly simple. It refers, in the loosest sense, to a massive program of investments in clean-energy jobs and infrastructure, meant to transform not just the energy sector, but the entire economy. It is meant both to decarbonize the economy and to make it fairer and more just. But the policy is only part of the picture. Just as striking are the politics, which seem to have tapped into an enormous, untapped demand for climate ambition.
Green Deal, Big Deal, Same Old Deal – Why is the green deal a scam? Because like every other corporate “solution” it assumes productionism, consumerism, capitalism, industrial electrical generation and consumption (the great majority for industry), and the dominion of The Car. George Bush said the proper response to 9/11 was to Keep Shopping. And today’s climate scientists, Big Green NGOs and “progressive”/”socialist” politicians say the proper response to the climate crisis is to Keep Shopping. More and Better Capitalism. And of course Keep Driving. But these are the very things driving the ecological crisis. More of the same ecological assaults cannot result in anything but more of the same ecological destruction. There is one and only one way to avert the worst of the climate crisis: Stop industrial emissions; stop destroying sinks; rebuild sinks. And this is the only way to avert the worst of the general ecological crisis. But all corporate system “solutions”, including the “green new deal”, propose to continue massive emissions (industrial “renewables”, to give the most egregious example, can exist only on a foundation of fossil fuels and are ecologically destructive in themselves), continue the massive destruction of sinks (one of the main purposes of the Paris scam was to enshrine the “biomass” assault as a system-legitimated climate action), and pay only the most modest lip service to rebuilding sinks.
Science and Culture- Imagining a climate-change future, without the dystopia – Most popular narratives about climate change are negative, playing off people’s anxieties. In the movie The Day After Tomorrow, a climate disaster precipitates the fall of civilization. Margaret Atwood’s novel MaddAddam is set in a society shattered by an ecological catastrophe. In Aaron Sorkin’s HBO TV series The Newsroom, an Environmental Protection Agency researcher proclaims, “a person has already been born who will die due to catastrophic failure of the planet.” The “cli-fi” genre is so popular that the Chicago Review of Books has an entire column (“Burning Worlds”) dedicated to it. But a group of scholars is trying to resist such negative thinking, even while grappling with serious consequences for both humans and ecosystems. People from government, academia, and nonprofits are joining community representatives as part of the Urban Resilience to Extremes (UREx) Sustainability Research Network to rethink how society envisions and plans for climate’s effects in the decades to come (1). At a 2017 workshop, issues ranging from flooding to droughts to social justice were on the agenda.“It’s difficult to know where you are going if you don’t have a clear vision of what that [future] should look like, in particular, a positive vision that you could get excited about and motivated to really make a transformative change,” says Timon McPhearson, director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School in New York City. McPhearson and his colleagues at UREx are helping city planners assemble positive, and yet realistic, futures – without downplaying the dire implications of climate change. At the end of the workshops, they arrive at a set of implementable goals and timelines to achieve their strategy. Maggie Messerschmidt, a participant in a UREx workshop and a program manager at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), says TNC polling suggests that people are much more likely to act when future scenarios are placed in a positive light, emphasizing terms such as “resilience,” “sustainability,” and “nature-based solutions” (2). “It is important for us to share a positive narrative,” she says, “and that’s been important to the way we think and construe our solutions.”
Under current policies, residential batteries increase emissions in most cases — This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions – assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs.Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly.The results are similar to those published in Nature Energy in the beginning of 2017, although that study looked at a narrower region (99 homes in Texas) and modeled different battery software configurations.The UCSD study looks at representative homes under 16 different utilities across the country. Each utility has its own emissions profile and unique demand requirements (depending on the weather in the region). The study also looked at three different configuration possibilities:
- A demand-shifting configuration, where the battery is used to minimize costs when electricity rates vary by time of day;
- A solar self-consumption configuration, where the user has solar panels and wants to maximize the amount of energy they get from those panels; and
- An energy arbitrage configuration, where the residential battery owner can buy and sell electricity at retail rates depending on what’s cheaper at the moment.
US hydropower droughts cause rise in greenhouse gas emissions – Scientists at Stanford University have discovered that recent droughts in western states such as California, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington have caused a rise in greenhouse gas emissions due to the need for fossil fuels to replace hydropower in particularly dry periods. Between 2001 and 2015 droughts caused a 10% rise in average annual carbon dioxide emissions as power generators brought fossil fuels projects back online to balance the power lost from hydropower, according to a study published on 21 December in Environmental Research Letters.Stanford School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences professor, climate scientist and senior author of the study Noah Diffenbaugh said: “Water is used in electricity generation, both directly for hydropower and indirectly for cooling in thermoelectric power plants.“We find that in a number of western states where hydropower plays a key role in the clean energy portfolio, droughts cause an increase in emissions as natural gas or coal-fired power plants are brought online to pick up the slack when water for hydropower comes up short.” The study shows that sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides also increased in some of the states observed, with the largest increases of sulphur dioxide taking place in Colorado, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. For nitrogen oxides, the biggest contributions came from California, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. In that 14-year time frame, switching from hydropower projects to fossil fuels in dry periods led to an additional 100mt of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.
Mercury Limits on Coal Plants No Longer ‘Appropriate,’ EPA Says – The Trump administration is proposing to reverse an Obama-era conclusion that limits on mercury pollution from power plants are too costly and no longer “appropriate and necessary,” a finding that could make it difficult to impose more stringent curbs in the future. The Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to leave the 2012 standards in place, responding to a clamor from utilities that have already spent at least $18 billion complying with the requirements. But in another reversal of former President Barack Obama’s environmental policies, the agency now finds that the mercury mandates cost far more than the potential benefits that would spring from paring emissions of the toxin. According to the new EPA analysis, the costs of complying with the rule are projected at $7.4 billion to $9.6 billion annually, while monetized benefits are estimated to be $4 million to $6 million annually. That’s a sharp reduction from the EPA’s previous estimate that the requirements would result in widespread benefits, not just from paring mercury emissions but also by indirectly reducing nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, leading to fewer asthma attacks, heart attacks and premature deaths. Under President Donald Trump, the EPA now is effectively ignoring those so-called co-benefits and focusing only on the direct potential benefits from slashing mercury emissions. Coal-fired power plants are the largest U.S. source of mercury, a metal that is converted in soil and water into a neurotoxin that can lower IQ, cause motor function deficits, damage the nervous system, and lead to more heart attacks.
With ‘Unconscionable Rollback,’ Trump EPA Lays Groundwork for Coal Industry to Release More Mercury Into the Air — In a move decried by environmentalists as “both stunningly immoral and completely unnecessary,” the Trump administration just proposed “an unconscionable rollback to serve the coal industry at the expense of all Americans, especially our children,” that could also stymie future efforts to impose federal public health regulations. “Gutting MATS will put toxic pollution back in our air and cause thousands of people to die unnecessary premature deaths every year.” – James Pew, Earthjustice Building on President Donald Trump’s two-year track record of gutting his predecessor’s environmental rules, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a new analysis claiming that a regulation limiting how much mercury and other pollutants oil- and coal-fired power plants can emit isn’t “appropriate and necessary,” disputing the agency’s conclusions under former President Barack Obama. As the New York Times reported Friday: Trump’s new proposal does not repeal the regulation, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), but it would lay the groundwork for doing so by weakening a key legal justification for the measure. The long-term impact would be significant: It would weaken the ability of the EPA to impose new regulations in the future by adjusting the way the agency measures the benefits of curbing pollutants, giving less weight to the potential health gains.Janet McCabe, who ran the EPA’s air office under Obama, told the Times, “There is a likelihood that this rule-making will be the administration’s flagship effort to permanently change the way the federal government considers health benefits.” When crafting the regulation, the Obama EPA considered not only the direct gains of curbing mercury pollution, but also public health impacts such as fewer asthama attacks and premature deaths. Under notoriously pro-coal Trump, the agency is now, as Bloomberg News put it, “effectively ignoring those so-called co-benefits and focusing only on the direct potential benefits from slashing mercury emissions.”
Coal Ash Dumps Are Contaminating Groundwater in 22 States – Ten years ago today, the earthen wall of a coal ash impoundment in Kingston, Tennessee, ruptured, sending 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash slurry rushing across the countryside, destroying homes and chocking streams and wetlands with the toxic leftovers from burning coal for electricity. Luckily, no one died in the flood, but more than 30 workers have died after cleaning up the spill. Another 200 workers are now sick or dying from blood cancer and other illnesses linked to heavy metals such as arsenic, selenium and mercury that are found in coal ash. The Kingston disaster was the worst coal ash spill in United States history and inspired environmentalists to push for tighter regulations over the past decade, but pollution from coal ash remains a widespread and ongoing problem. Across the country, coal ash, boiler slag and other combustion waste from power plants is stored in open air pits and impoundments, where rainfall creates a toxic slurry full of heavy metals. At least 67 coal ash dumps in 22 states are currently leaking harmful chemicals into groundwater and will require cleanup efforts in the coming year, according to recent data posted by power companies and compiled by environmental groups, who expect that additional leaking pits have yet to be publicly identified. The Kingston spill is not the only coal ash disaster in recent memory. In 2014, a Duke Energy coal sludge pond in North Carolina leaked thousands of tons of coal ash and millions of gallons of contaminated water into the Dan River, turning the water and ominous grey and compromising drinking water and ecosystems for miles. Environmental groups have tussled with Duke Energy in courtrooms for years over leaky coal ash pits the company maintains across North Carolina and were on guard as Hurricane Florence ravaged the state this September. Environmentalists say at least one Duke coal ash pond overflowed during the storm and contaminated the Cape Fear River with heavy metals, At the helm of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the coal industry who shares Trump’s zeal for keeping coal central to the US energy portfolio. Wheeler’s most recent targets for elimination include limits on carbon dioxide from new and modified power plants and rules reducing air emissions of mercury – a potent neurotoxin and a danger to public health.
Philippines becoming a rich world dumping ground – Asia Times – Over 5,000 tons of hazardous waste from South Korea was recently discovered in the Philippines, marking the latest case of foreign dumping to stir outrage among Filipino officials and environmental groups as the island nation struggles to handle its own gargantuan garbage problem. The toxic discovery, made on President Rodrigo Duterte’s home island of Mindanao, represents the third time in recent years that the Philippines has been revealed as a dumping ground for hazardous foreign trash. South Korea, one of Manila’s strongest allies and top investors, has been the culprit on two occasions. The South Korean hazardous garbage was consigned to Verde Soko Philippines Industrial Corp, a company nominally engaged in plastic recycling. The firm declared the shipment, made in July, as “plastic synthetic wastes”, but customs officials found other kinds of waste, including hospital refuse and adult diapers. The company has yet to start its recycling operation due to the controversy but has claimed the discovered hazardous trash is “raw material” for processing into plastic pellets and briquettes that could be shipped back to South Korea or China to produce plastic chairs and tables. Verde Soko also maintains it has complied with all government requirements to set up a recycling plant at an economic zone in Mindanao’s Misamis Oriental province. It’s not the first time the Philippines has been dumped on by the developed world. Around five years ago, Canada dumped over 100 container vans filled with plastic bottles, plastic bags, household garbage, used adult diapers, sanitary napkins and hospital wastes in Manila.
There’s no easy fix for our nuclear past – The Hanford nuclear complex in eastern Washington lies in a green-gold sagebrush steppe, so big you can’t see the edges of it. There’s almost no trace that this is the biggest nuclear waste dump in the country. The scale of nuclear waste is like that: sprawling out into the metaphysical distance, too big for the human mind to hold.. If you were to pull a shot glass full of liquid out of one of the tanks buried near us, it would kill everyone with 100 yards instantly. And the danger would not disappear: Plutonium has a half-life of 24,100 years. The plant is supposed to start processing the most toxic waste in 2036. But construction has stalled out and most of the waste sits in underground tanks, some of which have begun to fail. “Suppose all these things are starting to fall apart faster than we can clean them up,” Price says. “It becomes a really interesting moral question.” Over the past year, a series of accidents has put the spotlight on Hanford, its aging infrastructure and the lack of a long-term solution. In May 2017, part of the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility, which holds rail cars full of solid waste, collapsed. Later that year, workers tearing down the Plutonium Finishing Plant were contaminated with plutonium and americium particles when an open-air demolition went wrong. In December, others inhaled radioactive dust at the same site, halting work indefinitely. Then, in June of this year, the Department of Energy (DOE), which is responsible for the site, released a proposal to reclassify some of the high-level waste as less toxic, with what’s called a “Waste Incidental to Reprocessing” evaluation, so they could clean it up sooner and more cheaply. “There’s a lot more work to do than there is money to get it accomplished,” Price said. “We’ve really come to a fork in the road.” As the possibility of more waste looms, Hanford has become a flashpoint for people who fear that there’s no safe way to deal with our nuclear legacy. In this era of climate change and large-scale environmental degradation, the site raises the question: Can we ever clean up the mistakes of our past?
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