Environmental News For The Week 04August 2019

Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666

This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics published last week. This is usually a Tuesday evening regular post at GEI (but can be posted at other times).

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Families seek answers for US rise in childhood cancers – Right up to his death from acute myeloid leukemia in June 2015 at the age of 12, Oliver Strong was a standout athlete and goalkeeper, a healthy, vibrant and popular boy with a zest for living that inspired his teammates, friends and family. So when Oliver died suddenly at a Miami children’s hospital, just 36 hours after doctors first diagnosed the disease, his parents Simon and Vilma started looking for answers. What they found was disturbing. Cases of pediatric cancer in the United States surged by almost 50% from 1975 to 2015, according to alarming but under-reported statistics by the National Cancer Institute, and in 2018 up to 16,000 children from birth to age 19 will have received a new diagnosis. Yet what really elevated the disquiet of Oliver’s parents was increasing concern over the role that carcinogenic environmental toxicants, including industrial waste and pollutants, were believed to be playing in the rise of childhood cancer. “There’s almost an unspoken scientific consensus that it’s always environmental,” said Simon Strong, who with his wife set up Oliver Forever Strong – a foundation in their son’s memory. Oliver’s Forever Strong has now teamed up for an ambitious research study with scientists at the Texas Children’s Hospital, home to the nation’s largest pediatric cancer center, and the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr Michael Scheurer, director of the childhood cancer epidemiology and prevention program at Texas Children’s Hospital, said: “[This research] … will allow families who might not live near one of the existing study centers to participate as they are comfortable. “We realize individuals won’t know if they’ve been exposed to a certain chemical or specific agent so we try to gather an overview of their environment, where have they lived over the course of time, when the child was conceived, during mom’s pregnancy, during early childhood, up to the point they developed their cancer. Are those residences located near Superfund sites, or in areas with high levels of air pollution or water contaminants? “In the end, if we see that several kinds of cancers share some risk factors that’s important information, but we want to start with a very homogeneous group of cancers and start looking into these patients first. Signposts will pop up along the way.”

How a 6,000-Year-Old Dog Cancer Spread Around the World – HIGH IN THE Himalayas, a heavy-coated dog trots behind the hem of a Buddhist monk’s robes. On the streets of Panama City, another dog collapses into a sliver of shade, escaping the heat of the midday sun. On their bodies a cancer grows. Their tumors each appear unique – their swollen, crumbling contours flush with fresh blood vessels emerging from beneath a tail here or between the legs there. But the cells dividing inside each one, continents apart, are actually the same organism. If you can call a clump of 6,000-year-old cancer cells an organism. These ancient cells were once part of a dog that roamed the frozen Siberian steppe, a husky-like creature that lived in the time before humans invented the wheel or the plow. Then they mutated, finding a way to evade the canine immune system, a way to outlive their body by finding another. This cancer-cum-sexually transmitted dog parasite still thrives today, the only remnant of that now-extinct Siberian dog race. For millennia, it has been jumping between bodies, spreading like a virus around the world. Canine transmissible venereal tumor, or CTVT, is now found in modern dogs from Malawi to Melbourne to Minneapolis. It’s the longest-lived cancer known to humans. But until now, no one had looked deeply into its DNA to trace its evolutionary origins and discover the secrets of its viral success. For the past decade and a half, veterinarians from nearly every country on the planet have been gathering the material to do that – shaving off slices of these tumors as they’ve come across them, sealing them up in test tubes, and shipping them off to the laboratory of Elizabeth Murchison at the University of Cambridge, in the UK. Murchison is perhaps better known for her work investigating a different contagious cancer that nearly crashed the world’s population of Tasmanian devils. For a cancer to become contagious, it has to clear two serious barriers. First, the cancer cells themselves have to find a way to physically get from one individual to another. (This is different, to be clear, from infectious pathogens which can cause cancers, like HPV.) And second, the cells have to be able to evade the immune system of the new host once they get there. Tasmanian devils pass their cancer around through the violent face-biting that typifies their fierce mating rituals. Dogs spread theirs through sexual contact – the tumors grow on the animals’ organs and shed cells during the act.

RNA recovered and sequenced from 14,000-year-old mummified wolf – Under the right conditions, DNA has been known to last for thousands of years, allowing scientists to study the genomes of ancient Egyptians, the very first Brits, and even early human ancestors. RNA, on the other hand, degrades much more quickly and was thought impossible to recover in older samples. But now researchers have done exactly that, isolating and sequencing the RNA of a 14,000-year-old wolf found frozen in the Siberian permafrost. DNA is where genetic information is stored long-term in an organism, and it’s so effective at its job that scientists are currently investigating it as adata storage system that could far outlive conventional discs and magnetic drives. But RNA is the “working copy” of genes, giving it a much higher turnover – possibly as short as two minutes. As a result, it was long believed that recovering RNA “transcriptomes” from ancient cells was nigh on impossible. But there have been a few exceptions. The oldest RNA to be sequenced and verified is 700-year-old maize, while the oldest recovered but not able to be sequenced came from the 5,000-year-old Tyrolean Iceman. This sample came from a specimen nicknamed the Tumat Puppy, which is the mummified remains of a Pleistocene era wolf or dog, dated to around 14,300 years old. The team isolated and analyzed RNA taken from the animal’s liver tissue, and compared it to tissue from two much more recent wolf samples, from the 19th and 20th centuries. The team successfully sequenced the older animal’s RNA, and confirmed that it was representative of the creature’s RNA as a whole by matching it to liver-specific transcripts from the more modern wolves. That makes this the oldest transcriptome ever sequenced, by at least 13,000 years.

World’s first human-monkey hybrid created in China, scientists reveal –Scientists say they have created the world’s first human-monkey hybrid in a laboratory in China.The researchers, who want to use animals to create organs for human life-saving transplants, say creating the hybrid was an important step. And they pledged to continue their experiments using primates. The team revealed that they had injected human stem cells capable of creating any type of tissue into a monkey embryo. The experiment was stopped before the embryo was old enough to be born. But the scientists – who were Spanish but held the trial in China to get round a ban on such procedures at home – said a human-monkey hybrid could have potentially been born.The embryo had first been genetically modified to deactivate genes that control organ growth.Ethical concerns were raised over the trial, partly over fears that human stem cells could migrate to the brain. Angel Raya, of the Barcelona Regenerative Medicine Centre, said experiments on organisms with cells from two species faced “ethical barriers”. He told El Pais: “What happens if the stem cells escape and form human neurons in the brain of the animal? Would it have consciousness? And what happens if these stem cells turn into sperm cells?”

Should the Rich Be Allowed to Buy the Best Genes? — I’m at a conference in Quebec City on CRISPR, the molecular tool designed to edit genes, and it has the same vibe as the meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club and the West Coast Computer Faire did in the 1970s, except that the hip young innovators are programming with genetic code rather than computer code. Many of the star pioneers are here, including Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, who in 2012 co-discovered how to combine two snippets of RNA with an enzyme to make a programmable scissors that could cut DNA at a precise location, and Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute, who raced her to show how the tool could edit genes in humans and is now in a battle with her for patents to the technology. There is general agreement among the scientists at dinner that, when it’s safe and practical, heritable edits ought to be used to fix bad single-gene mutations, such as Huntington’s disease and sickle-cell anemia. But they recoil at the idea of using gene editing for human enhancements, such as trying to give our kids more muscle mass, or height, or perhaps someday higher I.Q.’s and cognitive skills. The problem is that the distinction is difficult to define – is preventing obesity a cure or enhancement? – and even more difficult to enforce. “Look at what parents are willing to do to get kids in college,” Feng Zhang says. “Some people will surely pay for genetic enhancement.” “A big problem with enhancement is equal access,” “Should rich people be allowed to buy the best genes they can afford?” That could lead to the dystopia described in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, in which the modification of embryos produces a caste system ranging from intelligence-enhanced leaders to stunted menial laborers. Our world is already suffering from widening gaps in wealth and opportunity, and a free market for genetic enhancements could produce a quantum leap in these inequalities and also, literally, encode them permanently. “In a world in which there are people who don’t get access to eyeglasses,” Feng Zhang says, “it’s hard to imagine how we will find a way to have equal access to gene enhancements. Think of what that will do to our species.”

Drug-Resistant Superbug Spreading Throughout European Hospitals – Antibiotic-resistant superbugs have been spreading in European hospitals, according to the BBC, citing a recent study. The spread of Klebsiella pneumoniae is “extremely concerning” according to reserarchers with the Sanger Institute, who warn that other bacteria could become similarly resistant to “last resort” drugs known as carbapenems ‘because of the unique way bacteria have sex.’ “The alarming thing is these bacteria are resistant to one of the key last-line antibiotics,” said Dr. Sophia David of the Sanger Institute, adding “The infections are associated with a high mortality rate.” “It’s already worrying that we’re seeing 2,000 deaths in 2015 – but the concern is that if action isn’t taken, then this will continue to rise.” It can live completely naturally in the intestines without causing problems for healthy people. However, when the body is unwell, it can infect the lungs to cause pneumonia, and the blood, cuts in the skin and the lining of the brain to cause meningitis. – BBC Sanger’s study of carbapenem resistance in K. pneumoniae is the largest to date, with 244 hospitals participating from Ireland to Israel. Researchers analysed the bacterium’s DNA – its genetic code – from samples from infected patients.“Our findings imply hospitals are the key facilitator of transmission [and suggest that] the bacteria are spreading from person-to-person primarily within hospitals,” said Dr David.“The fact that we see the same high-risk clones in many different hospitals around Europe also shows there’s something special about those strains.” – BBC Researchers are concerned that K. pneumoniae will continue to spread, or even worse, pass along its resistance to other species of bacteria. According to the report, “two bacteria can meet up and have bacterial sex – called conjugation – and a short string of genetic information, called a plasmid, is shared between them.” Sanger’s study shows that “the instructions that give K. pneumoniae carbapenem resistance written on to plasmids.” “These have the ability to spread very rapidly through bacterial populations,” said David.

Yes, Flesh-Eating Bacteria Are in the Warm Coastal Waters – but It Doesn’t Mean You’ll Get Sick – The so-called flesh-eating bacteria, Vibrio vulnificus, is most commonly found in the warm waters of the states bordering the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico but can also be found along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. As ocean temperatures rise, it will spread with those warming waters to new ocean habitats where colder waters previously kept it in check. We have seen outbreaks of disease from similar types of Vibrio related to rising ocean temperatures as far north as Alaska. Most cases of infection occur between May and October, when coastal waters are warmest. This could change, however, as summer weather starts earlier and lasts longer. The first large outbreak I worked on in Las Vegas was caused by contaminated oysters, and it made me realize just how easily food from the ocean can show up in the desert and make people sick if it isn’t harvested, handled and prepared properly. News reports tend to focus on people dying or losing limbs from the “flesh eating” bacteria. It’s not front-page news when someone has a mild skin infection or eats a bad oyster and spends a couple days in the bathroom. We don’t often identify the most mild illnesses because people typically don’t seek medical care for them.Even so, V. vulnificus infections are rare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 205 infections occur each year, of which 124 were reported in 2014, including 21 deaths. To put this in some perspective, over 32,000 people died that year in motor vehicle crashes. Most cases tend to be males over 40 years of age and nearly all of them have some sort of underlying chronic health condition, such as liver or kidney disease, alcoholism or diabetes. Even for high-risk people, simply swimming alongside the bacteria is not enough to make you sick. The bacteria must find a way to get into your body to multiply and cause damage. For some people, this involves eating food contaminated by the bacteria – typically raw oysters. Oysters eat by filtering out small particles in the water, including bacteria, so they can contain much higher concentrations of Vibrio than the ocean itself. Because it spreads so quickly, it can overwhelm the body before the immune system has a chance to stop the infection. Systemic infections are treatable with antibiotics, but it is important that treatment start quickly, as the death rate can be over 50%.

Smog Alert- Dirty Air Kills 30,000 Americans Each Year, New Study Claims – New findings from the Imperial College London estimate that air pollution causes heart attacks, strokes, and lung disease that kill over 30,000 Americans each year, which is about the same number of deaths from car accidents each year. The study, published last week in the journal PLOS Medicine, found a connection between cardio-respiratory and excess particulate matter pollution, known as PM2.5, is about 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair — comes from automotive, power generation, and industrial engines. Millions of Americans are inhaling PM2.5 daily, which build up in small blood vessels in the lungs, and over an extended period, can cause lung disease. These dangerous particles also are absorbed into the bloodstream that can increase the risk of heart disease, the researchers suggested.Researchers noted that PM2.5 levels have dropped in the last two decades, but in some areas around the country – the levels remain seriously high. Los Angeles remained one of the worst cities for PM2.5 along with several regions in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. Inner cities deemed low-income areas across the US also had dangerous levels of PM2.5.Researchers said this “inequality in mortality burden” occurred because of the low-income population was already prone to higher rates of preexisting medical conditions. “I think the big conclusion is that lowering the limits of air pollution could delay in the US, all together, tens of thousands of deaths each year,” Majid Ezzati, the study’s lead author and a professor of global environmental health told CNN.

Questions About Agricultural Emissions Answered – As countries work to cut their emissions overall, agricultural emissions need to fall, too. To better understand agriculture’s relationship with global emissions, we took a closer look at the data, using Climate Watch to answer five important questions.

• 1. What causes agricultural emissions? The majority of agricultural production emissions come from raising livestock. More than 70 billion animals are raised annually for human consumption. The biggest single source is methane from cow burps and manure. Enteric fermentation – a natural digestive process that occurs in ruminant animals such as cattle, sheep and goats – accounts for about 40% of agricultural production emissions in the past 20 years. Manure left on pasture also causes agricultural emissions. It emits nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with a much stronger global warming impact per ton than carbon dioxide. These two processes from animal agriculture produce more than half of total agricultural production emissions. Rice cultivation and synthetic fertilizers are also major sources, each contributing more than 10% of agricultural production emissions. While we focus on agricultural production emissions in this blog post, it’s important to remember that agriculture is also a leading driver of land-use change (for example through the conversion of forests to croplands or pasture). Recent WRI research estimated that agriculture and land-use change collectively accounted for nearly one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010.
• 2. What’s agriculture’s role in global and national emissions? Emissions from agricultural production currently account for 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions and have risen 14% since 2000. In 24 countries around the world, agriculture is the top source of emissions.
• 3. Which countries are responsible for the most agricultural production emissions? In the 20-year period from 1996-2016, China was responsible for the most emissions from agricultural production, followed by India, Brazil and the United States. Together, these top four agricultural emitters were responsible for 37% of global agricultural production emissions.

It’s the second dirtiest thing in the world – and you’re wearing it – – “The clothing industry is the second largest polluter in the world…second only to oil,” the recipient of an environmental award told a stunned Manhattan audience earlier this year. “It’s a really nasty business…it’s a mess.” While you’d never hear an oil tycoon malign his bonanza in such a way, the woman who stood at the podium, Eileen Fisher, is a clothing industry magnate. Fisher’s critique may have seemed hyperbolic, but she was spot-on.When we think of pollution, we envision coal powerplants, strip-mined mountaintops and raw sewage piped into our waterways. We don’t often think of the shirts on our backs. But the overall impact the apparel industry has on our planet is quite grim.Fashion is a complicated business involving long and varied supply chains of production, raw material, textile manufacture, clothing construction, shipping, retail, use and ultimately disposal of the garment. While Fisher’s assessment that fashion is the second largest polluter is likely impossible to know, what is certain is that the fashion carbon footprint is tremendous. Determining that footprint is an overwhelming challenge due to the immense variety from one garment to the next. A general assessment must take into account not only obvious pollutants – the pesticides used in cotton farming, the toxic dyes used in manufacturing and the great amount of waste discarded clothing creates – but also the extravagant amount of natural resources used in extraction, farming, harvesting, processing, manufacturing and shipping.While cotton, especially organic cotton, might seem like a smart choice, it can still take more than 5,000 gallons of water to manufacture just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Synthetic, man-made fibers, while not as water-intensive, often have issues with manufacturing pollution and sustainability. And across all textiles, the manufacturing and dyeing of fabrics is chemically intensive. Globalization means that your shirt likely traveled halfway around the world in a container ship fueled by the dirtiest of fossil fuels. A current trend in fashion retail is creating an extreme demand for quick and cheap clothes and it is a huge problem. Your clothes continue to impact the environment after purchase; washing and final disposal when you’re finished with your shirt may cause more harm to the planet than you realize.

Radioactivity found in drinking water north of Columbia – State regulators are pressing a small utility with a history of troubles to explain why elevated levels of radioactivity showed up in the drinking water the company piped to customers last year in Fairfield County.The Jenkinsville Water Co. violated state drinking water standards for radioactivity from July through December of last year, even though the company had installed a treatment system to filter out the contamination. Radioactivity levels have dropped to within safe standards in recent months, but not by much – and state regulators say they are concerned about the 2,500 people who rely on Jenkinsville Water.“You are responsible for providing safe potable water to your customers,’’ according to a July 23 letter to Jenkinsville from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. Water quality “data indicates a necessity for you to initiate an investigation and some form of corrective actions to resolve the violations.’’ The letter gave Jenkinsville a month to tell the public about the violations. In the meantime, DHEC is considering making an enforcement case against Jenkinsville Water that could result in fines or other sanctions. The violations have been referred to DHEC’s enforcement staff, agency spokeswoman Laura Renwick said in an email.Jenkinsville, a community of working class neighborhoods and higher-end lake houses north of Columbia, has had problems with radioactivity in the water before. Since 2010, the water company has been sanctioned by DHEC four separate times for failing to comply with state drinking water standards, including two for radioactivity. The company began treating the water at one problematic well after finding radioactivity exceeded safe drinking water standards in 2013 and 2014. Some of the problems cleared up after the treatment process began, but radioactivity levels spiked last year in the public supply well on Clowney Road, DHEC records show.

‘Forever chemicals’ have been found in bottled water brands sold at Whole Foods and CVS, and it’s part of a larger contamination problem – Bottled water is often considered a safe alternative when tap water is found to contain contaminants like arsenic and lead. But a recent spate of investigations has found that not all bottled water is free of potentially toxic chemicals.In June, testing from the Center for Environmental Health found “high levels” of arsenic in bottled-water brands owned by Whole Foods and Keurig Dr Pepper. Those findings confirmed earlier research from Consumer Reports, which found levels of arsenic in the bottled water that exceeded the allowable limit set by the FDA.Regulators are also becoming increasingly concerned about the presence of another chemical, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), in bottled water.In July, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health warned residents about PFAS in bottled water sold at the state’s Whole Foods and CVS locations. The advisory specifically mentioned bottled water sourced from local distributor Spring Hill Farm Dairy. Spring Hill agreed to adopt a new filtration system, but on August 2, the company announced it was closing instead. “This whole ordeal has been too much for a small, fourth-generation family business,” the company said in a statement.The International Bottled Water Association now requires its member companies to test for PFAS, but the industry group doesn’t represent all bottled-water manufacturers.

Why do we drink so much bottled water? – In her wonderful book Bottlemania, Elizabeth Royte quoted a Pepsico marketing VP who told investors back in 2000: “when we are done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.” Or as the Attorney General on Idiocracy wondered, “Water? Like out the toilet? And then there are all those plastic bottles. How will they deal with that problem? Royte quotes a Coke exec: “Our vision is to no longer have our packaging viewed as waste but as a resource for future use.” – anticipating the circular economy by two decades. Bottled water has been around for a long time, but the business exploded with the development of the Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottle in 1989, which was cheaper and lighter than glass or older plastics. So now there was a way to supply bottled water profitably, but what about the demand side? This is where the true marketing brilliance came into play. We have been trained that we have to have water constantly, as if our body can’t actually hold it. I am surprised that we don’t see people with Camelback packs, walking with the sipping nozzle in their mouths. We are all told that we have to drink according to the 8×8 rule, 8 full 8 ounce servings of water per day. And of course, that we have to carry it with us. And it is not true. Obviously if it is 108° in a heat wave, you are going to drink more water. We are not being doctrinaire here. But as Jessica Brown writes on the BBC, our bodies are pretty sophisticated at telling us how much water we need. “If you listen to your body, it’ll tell you when it’s thirsty,” says Courtney Kipps, consultant sports physician and principal clinical teaching fellow of Sports Medicine, Exercise and Health and UCL, and medical director of Blenheim and London Triathlons. “The myth that it’s too late when you’re thirsty is based on the supposition that thirst is an imperfect marker of a fluid deficit, but why should everything else in the body be perfect and thirst be imperfect? It’s worked very well for thousands of years of human evolution.”

In Gary, Indiana, students lament revival of controversial ‘energy’ facility – Evan and Erin Addison and Andrew Arevalo spent much of their eighth grade year organizing, lobbying, rallying and reporting to prevent a “dump” – as they describe it – from being built across the street from Steel City Academy. The upstart Gary, Indiana, charter school sits amidst verdant woods and wetlands at the site of a former mental health facility. With guidance from principal Katie Kirley, the boys and other students made sure that City Council members and other elected officials knew how the truck traffic, emissions and other impacts of the proposed solid waste facility would harm students. And they underscored that while the project was called Maya Energy and billed as an environmentally friendly waste-to-energy operation, actual business plans filed with the state called for no energy generation.In the face of mounting public opposition, in October the City Council rescinded its support for the project, and Steel City Academy celebrated. But in February, theCity Council reversed its position in the face of a lawsuit from the company, clearing the way for Maya Energy to move forward. Now as they get ready for their sophomore year, the students grapple with disappointment and cynicism, mixed with determination to keep fighting. “I thought we had it over and done with – I thought they wouldn’t come back,” said Evan Addison, 15, a minute older than his twin brother, Erin. “I knew politicians, maybe not all of them, but it’s kind of known they’re there for money and don’t always try to do what’s right. But it was a surprise because I thought we had beat them.” “It’s upsetting,” said Arevalo, 15. “I learned that people can lie and still get their way.” For the past few years, the boys have been recording their daily lives and producing a podcast, with the fight against Maya Energy playing a central role. They recorded as they delivered records requests to City Hall, and attended rallies and public meetings. The New York Times named their work one of the nation’s 10 best student podcasts. In a recent piece on National Public Radio, they talked about their work and the latest turn of events. The council’s decision hinged on the company’s argument, in the lawsuit filed in January, citing a state law prohibiting the revocation of land use proposals within three years of an initial approval, if secondary permit applications are underway. The council’s February 7-0 decision reinstated the company’s needed zoning variance and cleared the way for it to continue seeking a solid waste permit from the state, which was awarded several weeks later. The lawsuit also alleged defamation and charged that the city caused the company undue financial hardship.

Scrap Collector: US stands as lone OECD opponent of Basel plastic amendment –In a June interview with Waste Dive, global waste activist Von Hernandez highlighted the recently ratified Basel Convention amendment – which requires importing countries to give prior informed consent before plastic scrap exports can enter their borders – as a reason to retain optimism in the face of rapid environmental degradation. The U.S., it seems, disagrees. The country has formally opposed the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) plans to adopt the amendment – the only one of 36 member nations to do so. Our free newsletter will bring you the latest waste industry news & trends. Per organization policy, new Basel Convention definitions are automatically adopted after a 60-day period unless objected to by one or more OECD members. The U.S.’s move, according to a press release from the Basel Action Network, will trigger “a lengthy debate within the OECD with a view to reaching consensus” – without which the U.S. could bar the OECD’s 35 other member nations from adopting the rules.Accepting the restrictions “would impede trade for recycling and could reduce the level of recycling among OECD countries,” U.S. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler wrote in a July 3 objection letter, noting that OECD members “have the capacity to manage waste in an environmentally sound manner.””As a result [of adopting the amendment], in OECD countries, plastic recycling could decrease and landfilling of plastic scrap could increase, reducing the environmental and economic benefits that are achieved through recycling,” an EPA spokesperson told Waste Dive via email.

Trump Campaign Has Made Nearly $500K Selling Plastic Straws – Last week, EcoWatch reported that the campaign to re-elect President Donald Trump was selling packs of 10 plastic straws for $15. Commentators noted that the straws came with an unusually high price tag of $1.50 per pop, but apparently it was a price Trump supporters were willing to pay. The campaign has sold more than $456,000 worth since July 19, The Guardian reported. Parscale hit upon the idea for the straws when a paper straw fell apart on him shortly after he boarded a Jet Blue flight, Politico reported. He tweeted his annoyance, but his wife encouraged him to take it further. The idea to sell Trump-brand plastic straws was born.Politico described what happened after Parscale emailed his staff with the plan: In short order, the campaign sent an email to supporters with the subject line, “Making straws great again.” By the time Parscale landed in Florida, the presidential straws were already in production and an advertising campaign was up and running. The first batch was sold out within hours. The straws are typical of the Trump campaign’s marketing strategy, according to Politico. It makes bank on novelty items that take advantage of Trump’s domination of the news cycle and the grievances of his supporters. Other offerings have included “Stand Up for America” football jerseys, inspired by Trump’s criticism of football players who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality, and “Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff” T-shirts, mocking vocal Trump opponent Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

Lawmakers propose sweeping national plastic waste legislation – A little more than a month after they urged President Trump to develop a federal plastic waste strategy, Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., and Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Calif, are taking matters into their own hands. The lawmakers released an outline last week of a sweeping plan to address plastic pollution, with a goal of introducing the bill this fall. Stakeholders are invited to submit comments by Aug. 21, 2019. The upcoming legislation – which aims to “prevent plastic pollution from consumer products from getting into animal & human food-chains, landscapes, and waterways across the United States and into our oceans” – pushes for a wide-ranging set of measures, including:

• Extended producer responsibility (EPR). As a condition of sale, producers will be required to design, manage and finance end-of-life programs for products and packaging. Industry will also be incentivized to develop more sustainable alternatives.
• Nationwide container deposit requirements. Non-refunded deposits would go into a federal fund to assist with collection infrastructure. Major beverage retailers would be required to install and operate reverse vending systems to promote container collection.
• Carryout bag fee. The fee would be deposited into a federal fund.
• Single-use plastic bans. The ban would apply to items such as expanded polystyrene, bags, cups, lids, cotton buds, cutlery, plates, straws, packaging and stirrers. Exceptions will be made for individuals with disabilities until adequate alternatives are developed.
• Labeling requirements. Plastic consumer products would require clear, standardized labeling indicating correct disposal method.
• Awareness-raising measures. States would be encouraged to educate consumers on the impact of single-use plastics as well as available reuse systems and waste management options.
• Recycling targets. Standardized single-use plastic bottle collection targets would be established for states and communities. A requirement would also be set for bottles, packaging and other products to be made from 100% recyclable materials.
• Federal waste reduction assistance. Proceeds from a federal fund, carry-out bag fees, unused container deposit requirements and other sources would go toward pollution reduction, remediation programs and innovation research.
• “Clean Cities Program.” The program would use smart technologies and social media to help local governments identify pollution hotspots and implement source reduction solutions.

States that prohibit local governments from implementing “more aggressive measures” to reduce plastic consumption (i.e., single-use product fees for consumers) would lose funding from the federal fund.

Coke and Pepsi abandon the plastics lobby –Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, two major sellers of plastic bottles, have made sweeping sustainability commitments. Now they are stepping away from a plastics lobbying group. Both soft drink companies are trying to increase the amount of recycled plastic they use in bottles. They want to improve recycling infrastructure and ensure their packages are recyclable. But the Plastics Industry Association has encouraged states to make plastic bans illegal. Participation in the group could tarnish Coca-Cola and Pepsi’s images as companies working to find solutions to plastic pollution. The association took positions that “were not fully consistent with our commitments and goals,” Coca-Cola said in a statement last week, noting that it withdrew from the group earlier this year. Pepsi said it had joined the association to learn about innovation as it works to “achieve a circular economy for plastics.”

Waste Only: How the Plastic Industry is Fighting to Keep Polluting the World — Gathered in the gilded ballroom of a Dallas hotel, the representatives of big plastics manufacturers, recyclers, raw materials providers, extruders, brand owners, and others in the plastics business grappled aloud about their role in the crisis. Especially difficult, said Kohl, who directs packaging innovation of PepsiCo’s snacks and foods, was the widely circulated picture of a dead plastic-filled albatross. “This is very emotional for our senior leaders,” Patty Long, interim president and chief executive officer of the Plastics Industry Association, the group that convened the Texas meeting, also acknowledged the pain of being the public face of an industry held responsible for the devastation of the natural world. Long admitted that she squirmed her way through another social media phenomenon that, along with the albatross, has changed the course of the war over plastics: the video of the sea turtle with a plastic straw jammed in its nostril. Long isn’t the only one. Since it was posted in 2015, the eight excruciating minutes in which marine biologists yank at the plastic straw with pliers while the creature squirms and bleeds, has been viewed 36 million times. All in all, Long admitted, it had been a tough year, in which some 376 anti-plastics bills were introduced, and the perception of the plastics industry has continued to “spiral down exponentially.” The Plastics Industry Association is taking its cratering image seriously, working to offset it with pro-plastics presentations for elementary and middle school students, a plastics ambassadors program and, so young people can “feel good about” working in the industry, Long said, a “future leaders in plastics” group. But discomfort over the dead albatross, the bloody turtle, and industry’s public image notwithstanding, the companies that make billions from plastics have no intention of slowing down. Instead, the industry is gearing up for the fight of its life, which may explain why an expert in actual warfare gave the keynote at the plastics conference.

Paris authorities cover up lead contamination in schools caused by Notre Dame fire – The fire caused almost 400 tons of lead roofing to be carried away by smoke onto nearby schools, maternity centers, houses and sidewalks. It was not until May 13, almost a month after the fire, that the Paris municipality, run by Socialist Party (PS) mayor Anne Hidalgo, organized the first lead contamination tests. A report published by Médiapart on July 18, based on access to the reports, revealed that “while the rates were more than the required threshold, the authorities did not communicate them, placing in danger those near the [Seine] river and nearby factory workers.” According to a 2016 advisory by the General Health Directorate (DGS), a concentration of 70 micrograms of lead per meter squared (μg/m2) “signifies a risk of lead poisoning to exposed children.” Lead poisoning causes severe permanent brain damage in infants. Out of 196 tests, 31 showed levels equal to or greater than the 70 μg/m2 threshold, the report states, and sometimes 10 times more. In one school’s dining room, windows were found to have lead levels of 4773 μg/m2. The local administration has not taken any steps to reduce these levels and has only recommended blood tests for pregnant women and children under seven. Speaking to Médiapart, Arnauld Gauthier, an official from the city’s Health Department, denied the levels were excessively high, arguing that regulations really require a lead concentration of 1000 μg/m2 before an area is considered dangerous. This is a lie. This latter level is not used for inhabited buildings. It is actually used to test the safety of recently completed industrial construction projects. In fact, DGS regulations state that if an inhabited building, such as a school, is found to have levels above 70 μg/m2, it requires a deep cleaning. Nonetheless, when asked whether the schools would be appropriately cleaned over the summer break, Gauthier replied that nothing beyond the regular summer cleaning was planned.

A little bit means a lot: Why minute toxins in the environment matter — It used to be a mantra in environmental circles that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” That simply isn’t tenable anymore, and it probably never was. The reasons are many:

• We now know that many compounds are biologically active at extremely low levels.
• We know that chemicals, radiation, and biological agents can and do act synergistically to magnify their effects on humans, animals and plants.
• We know that chemicals that were thought to degrade quickly in the environment such as glyphosate may persist for long periods.
• Most people now understand that the industries producing chemical and radiation hazards have spent huge sums to propagandize the public and intimidate and control scientists in order to convince us that the industry’s products and the pollution associated with them are not harmful.
• Furthermore, in many cases, the dangers have been known from the beginning and been covered up.

A little history regarding leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbons, bisphenol A, and wireless radiation will highlight these conclusions. Let us start with leaded gasoline which was invented in the early 1920s to increase the performance of gasoline engines – essentially to get rid of the “knocking” noise which also indicates inefficient combustion.The now infamous inventor of leaded gasoline, chemist Thomas Midgely, certainly knew that the lead compound in question, tetraethyl lead, was poisonous. How? Midgely himself came down with lead poisoning from exposure to the substance.Later, five workers manufacturing the compound died from lead poisoning. And yet, a task force convened by the U.S. Public Health Service concluded that the levels of lead emitted from vehicle exhaust pipes would be too diffuse to cause problems. The members concluded this even though every driver tested by the panel was positive for lead in his or her blood. The tests took place after leaded gasoline was being widely used. Clair Patterson, best known for his work in establishing the age of the Earth. discovered vastly increased lead levels in industrially contaminated soils and air. Atmospheric lead was 1,000 times the natural background level. His findings were published in 1965.

Life Expectancy Falters In The UK – A special report in the Observer newspaper in the UK on 23 June 2019 asked the question: Why is life expectancy faltering? The piece noted that for the first time in 100 years, Britons are dying earlier. The UK now has the worst health trends in Western Europe. Aside from the figures for the elderly and the deprived, there has also been a worrying change in infant mortality rates. Since 2014, the rate has increased every year: the figure for 2017 is significantly higher than the one in 2014. To explain this increase in infant mortality, certain experts blame it on ‘austerity’, fewer midwives, an overstrained ambulance service, general deterioration of hospitals, greater poverty among pregnant women and cuts that mean there are fewer health visitors for patients in need.While all these explanations may be valid, according to environmental campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason, there is something the mainstream narrative is avoiding. She says:We are being poisoned by weedkiller and other pesticides in our food and weedkiller sprayed indiscriminately on our communities. The media remain silent.”The poisoning of the UK public by the agrochemical industry is the focus of her new report – Why is life expectancy faltering: The British Government has worked with Monsanto and Bayer since 1949. What follows are edited highlights of the text in which she cites many official sources and reports as well as numerous peer-reviewed studies in support of her arguments.

Roundup Roundup: Judge Slashes Punitive Damages Award in Glyphosate Lawsuit – Jerri-Lynn Scofield -Alameda County Superior Court Judge Winifred Smith on Thursday slashed a punitive damages award from $2.055 billion to $87 million in a lawsuit that concluded Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide caused cancer. This is the second time this month and the third time overall that a judge has reduced a jury’s punitive damages award in a glyphosate lawsuit. The moves to reducing damages are not unexpected – as I previously discussed (see Glyphosate Use Surges in Midwest, Lawsuits Mount: What Will the Supremes Say?). And the punitive damages awarded originally in this case were for the eye-popping amount of $2 billion. A series of precedents over the last couple of decades has drastically circumscribed overall punitive damages awards on constitutional grounds, and now largely limits them to single-digit multipliers of economic damages (see, e.g., State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co. v. Campbell (2003)). The seemingly arcane area is just one in which judges have handed down business-friendly decisions. Other areas include: limitations on class actions, upholding mandatory arbitration clauses; and narrowing grounds for personal jurisdiction to sue an out-of-state corporation in a court in the plaintiff’s home state. Taken together, these legal decisions increase the formidable obstacles ordinary people face in getting one’s day in court – let alone prevailing in a lawsuit. The increased pro-corporate bias of the judicial system in turn reduces accountability and the pressures on corporations to do the right thing, else they might lose a lawsuit and payout a substantial judgment. I should mention that this pro-business legal shift is a bipartisan affair: Democrat appointees also support and affirm these judgements. Yet despite slashing the amounts of damages, the latest case represents a solid win for plaintiffs. And the damages awarded, a mix of compensatory and punitive damages, remain substantial: $86.7 million. (Although I must mention, the appeals process is far from exhausted, and it’s far too early to assess how these lawsuits will play out – and how much money Bayer will ultimately fork out.) Bayer – which assumed Roundup legal liabilities when it acquired US manufacturer Monsanto last year – is faced with more than 13,000 pending glyphosate actions. The company has lost three cases far in California courts – all in the Bay Area – and won zero. As Deutche Welle reports in US judge reduces $2 billion Monsanto Roundup verdict against Bayer, the legal verdicts have “[pounded] its share price and [left] the entire company with a stock market capitalization less than the $63 billion it paid for Monsanto in a takeover completed last year.” Bayer continues to affirm – at least in its public statements – that its legal strategy will be upheld on appeal. As the FT reports in US judge slashes $2bn verdict against Bayer in Roundup case: In a statement, Bayer said it welcomed the judge’s decision as a “step in the right direction”, but that it would still file an appeal to have the entire verdict overturned. The German group has insisted all along that glyphosate-based pesticides are safe for use.

Swarms of grasshoppers invade Las Vegas: ‘Everybody was going crazy’ – A migration of mild-mannered grasshoppers sweeping through the Las Vegas area is being attributed to wet weather several months ago. The insects are harmless but tourists were stunned by what some are calling the “Great Grasshopper Invasion of 2019.” Nevada state entomologist Jeff Knight blamed the massive migration of grasshoppers on wetter than normal weather.”It was crazy. We didn’t even want to walk through there. Everybody was going crazy,” Diana Rodriquez told CBS affiliate KLAS. “We were wondering like what’s going on.” One video showed shows thousands of grasshoppers descending on the Las Vegas Strip, the station reported. Nevada state entomologist Jeff Knight told reporters the number of adult pallid-winged grasshoppers traveling north to central Nevada is unusual but not unprecedented and they pose no danger. Knight says the insects don’t carry disease, don’t bite, and probably won’t damage anybody’s yard before they’re gone in several weeks. He says they’re usually attracted to ultraviolet light sources. Knight recalls several similar migrations in his more than 30 years at the state Department of Agriculture, including one about six or seven years ago. This year, the Las Vegas area recorded more rain in six months than the annual average of just under 4.2 inches per year.

New BLM Appointee Believes Founding Fathers Wanted All Public Lands to Be Sold off — Control over nearly 250 million acres of public lands was placed Monday in the hands of a former Reagan administration official who has argued that all federal lands should be sold to fossil fuel and other corporate interests in accordance with the goals of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt appointed attorney William Perry Pendley as acting head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), sending fears throughout conservation groups that many of the country’s minerals and resources will soon be handed over to oil and gas companies. Pendley wrote in 2016 that “the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold,” and as recently as this month he lauded fossil fuel extraction as an “energy, economic, and environmental miracle.” “This appointment shows Trump and Bernhardt are only interested in selling off public lands to the highest bidder,” said Chris Saeger, executive director of the Western Values Project, in a statement. “Pendley is an outspoken advocate for the transfer of public lands to the state. Anything they’ve ever said about not selling off public lands has just been a political smokescreen to distract from their real intentions: handing over public lands to their special interest allies.” Pendley’s appointment comes on the heels of the Interior Department’s decision to spread the BLM’s Washington, DC-based headquarters across a number of western states, a move which critics say is aimed at giving the agency less control over federal decision-making about federal lands. The news of Pendley “ascending to the top of BLM just as it is being reorganized strongly suggests the administration is positioning itself to liquidate our shared public lands,” Phil Hanceford, conservation director for The Wilderness Society, told the Associated Press. Under the Trump administration, Pendley has been critical of the Interior Department’s shrinking of Bears Ears and Grand Escalante National Monuments – because he feels the president has not been aggressive enough in offering the public lands for what he views as their sole purposes: “ranching, mile, oil and gas, or energy activities,” according to a 2016 interview. “We now have someone in charge of the BLM who would prefer to sell those places off rather than doing the job of caring for them on behalf of all Americans,”

China’s pig herd predicted to shrink by 50% due 50% due to swine fever – China’s pig herd could halve by the end of 2019 from a year earlier as an epidemic of African swine fever sweeps through the world’s top pork producer, analysts at Dutch bank Rabobank forecast on Tuesday. The bank said China’s herd, by far the world’s biggest, was already estimated to have shrunk by 40% from a year ago, well above official estimates which have ranged from 15% to 26%. The forecast comes amid industry speculation that the decline has been much worse than confirmed by agriculture officials, who this month launched an investigation of local authorities’ efforts to contain the disease. Rabobank said China’s pork production in 2019 was expected to fall by 25 percent from the previous year, a smaller drop than pig herd loss due to the large number of animals slaughtered in first half of 2019. Output of pork, China’s favorite meat, will likely drop by a further 10% to 15% in 2020, it said in a report. Production may take more than 5 years to recover to levels prior to the deadly outbreaks as challenges including a lack of solutions to prevent the disease and a lack of capital will restrict restocking, it added. Reuters reported earlier this month that as many as half of China’s breeding pigs have either died from African swine fever or been slaughtered because of the spreading disease. Rabobank, which late last year estimated China’s pig herd at 360 million animals, said in April that up to 200 million pigs could be culled or die due to the disease, while pork output could fall by 30 percent.

Boar wars: how wild hogs are trashing European cities — Listed on the World Conservation Union’s most invasive species list, the wild boar does well in just about any environment, from semi-arid plains to alpine forests and marshy grasslands. But more and more, they are drawn to city life. In Barcelona and Berlin, Houston and Hong Kong, groups of wild boar have been seen roaming around town at all hours. In Rome, where I live, boars rooting through uncollected piles of trash have come to symbolise the decline of the city.The arrival of wild boar in town squares and city parks is forcing us to confront a new reality: we are bumping up against the limits of urbanisation. This is a crisis we have largely inflicted on ourselves. City sprawl is driving the species out of its dwindling natural habitats and forcing it to live alongside us. At the same time, we entice it with the tides of garbage and wasted food that wash around our cities. For years, boar have been fattening up on our crops. And now they follow us into our dirty, sprawling cities. Although their numbers are increasing as they migrate to the cities, the move is making them – and us – sick. Boars carry a host of diseases, including tuberculosis, hepatitis E and influenza A, that can make the jump to humans. In addition to spreading disease, wild boar each year cause thousands of road accidents. In January, a group of wild boar crossed a highway south of Milan, leading to a three-car pile-up which killed one driver and injured several more. The boar destroy property, devour ground-nesting animals – including endangered turtles’ eggs – and crops, such as fragile vine roots and shoots. Italian farmers estimate the boar inflict €100m (£90m) worth of crop damage annually. As the animals’ toll on public health and the economy climbs, communities from Texas to New South Wales have begun to wage war on the species – a campaign fought in public parks, on golf courses, on farmland and on street corners at dusk.

Just ‘Days’ Left to Save 6 to 19 Remaining Vaquitas There are only between six and 19 vaquitas left, a new study has concluded, and, unless swift action is taken, the endangered species could go extinct within a year.The world’s smallest porpoises, found only in Mexico’s Gulf of California, are threatened because they are caught by mistake in illegal gillnets. The study, published in Royal Society Open Science Wednesday, found that 10 had died this way from March 2016 to March 2019. “Every day wasted is making a difference. The key thing is that we need action now,” study co-author Len Thomas, an ecological statistician at the University of St. Andrews’ Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling, told Vice. “There are only days to do this.”The world’s most endangered marine mammal, the #vaquita, is now literally on the brink of extinction due to bycatch in an illegal fishery. We estimate only 9 remained in summer 2018 (confidence interval 6-19). Deaths continuing, *immediate* action needed.https://t.co/SacfgOgbf0 pic.twitter.com/EU1ADPplMz – Len Thomas (@len_thom) July 31, 2019 Researchers from St. Andrews in Scotland, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Mexican government counted the vaquitas by listening for their echolocation clicks. It is easier to monitor the porpoises acoustically than visually, The Weather Channel explained. Since they began acoustic monitoring in 2011, the researchers have determined that the vaquita population has fallen by 98.6 percent.That decline is due to the use of gillnets, large vertical nets that fishermen leave in the water to collect the totoaba whose bladders are important in traditional Chinese medicine, The Guardian explained.Mexico banned fishing with gillnets in 2015, but despite this, the practice has continued. The researchers found that the vaquita population declined by 48 percent in 2017 and 47 percent in 2018. Their numbers are now dangerously low.”Based on the uncertainty inherent in the models, the number could be as few as six,” Thomas told The Guardian.

European Heat Wave July 2019 – In July 2019, Europe experienced the second of two extreme and unprecedented summer heat waves. Three countries set all-time record highs on July 24: Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. On July 25, Paris hit 108.7°F, breaking its all-time high temperature record of 104.7°F (40.4°C) by 4°F. During the first round of extreme heat in late June, eight European countries and hundreds of cities and municipalities experienced their highest recorded June temperature. Rapid attribution analysis found that climate change made the record June 2019 heat in France up to 100 times more likely and up to 7.2°F (4°C) hotter. A climate change attribution study looking at extreme heat during the summer of 2018 found the concurrent heat events in the Northern Hemisphere could not have happened without climate change. Attribution studies are increasingly showing that these kinds of extreme heat events would not even be possible without climate change.

• Extreme heat and heat waves are some of the clearest impacts of climate change on extreme weather.
• Four out of five record-hot days globally are now amplified by global warming.[2]
• Rapid attribution analysis found that climate change made the record June 2019 heat up to 100 times more likely in France and up to 7.2°F (4°C) hotter.[3]
• Hot nights are particularly characteristic of climate change on a warming planet.
• Hot nighttime temperatures reduce the number of critically important relief windows during heat waves.
• The hottest summers since 1500 AD in Europe were: 2018, 2010, 2003, 2016, 2002.[4]

United Kingdom sets all-time high temperature record – The heat wave that scorched Europe last week has broken another record: The reading of 101.7 degrees Fahrenheit in Cambridge, England, was the United Kingdom’s all-time highest temperature, scientists officially announced Monday. This breaks the previous record of 101.3 degrees, which was set during the August 2003 heat wave. The temperature was recorded Thursday and confirmed Monday after “quality control and analysis” by the Met Office.”Exceptionally high temperatures gripped large parts of central and western Europe last week, and the U.K. joins Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands in breaking national temperature records,” the U.K. Met Office said in a statement. The hot, dry air originated in Africa and was pumped north across the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe. This was a similar set-up to the heat wave that blasted Europe at the end of June. According to the Met Office, which is Britain’s national weather service, heat waves are extreme weather events, but research shows that with climate change they are likely to become more intense.

Highest temperature ever recorded in the UK — As the world warms, yet another all-time national heat record has been set. The 38.7°C [101.66°F] recorded in Cambridge Botanic Garden on 25 July during the recent European heatwave has now been confirmed to be the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK. The UK’s Met Office checked the instrument and site before confirming the record, which is why it has taken a few days to confirm. New all-time national records were also set on 25 July in Germany (42.6°C/108.68°F), Belgium (41.8°C), Luxembourg (40.8°C) and the Netherlands (40.7°C). Many more places across Europe also recorded the highest temperatures ever for those locations. The July heatwave in Europe came just a few weeks after a June heatwave set records. Many other parts of the world have also had record heat. So far this year 11 countries have recorded their hottest ever temperatures, according to weather records compiler Maximiliano Herrera. None have recorded coldest ever temperatures. None of the new heat records are likely to last long. The world has so far warmed around 1°C [1.8°F] and is currently on track to warm 3 or 4°C [7.2°F] by 2100.

Met Office: UK’s 10 hottest years on record occurred since 2002 – The UK’s 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 2002, the Met Office has said. Its statistics stretching back to 1884 reveal a worrying trend, as the planet as a whole deals with the climate crisis.In a further indication of how the climate is heating up, the records show that none of the UK’s 10 coldest years have occurred since 1963.“The world has warmed 1C since pre-industrial times, meaning that hot years are the new normal,” said Dr Michael Byrne from the University of St Andrews. “Not only is the UK getting warmer, but also wetter, with 13% more summer rain compared to last century. With global emissions of greenhouse gases on the rise, the UK will continue to get warmer and wetter as global warming accelerates.“The science of climate change is now clear. The UK government must ramp up preparations and ensure that our infrastructure and citizens are prepared for what is to come.” The data formed part of the Met Office’s latest annual state of the climate report, published in the International Journal of Climatology. The temperature series for the UK has been extended back by 26 years from 1910, as the data was added as part of ongoing work to digitise historical weather records.

Think the heatwave was bad? Climate already hitting key tipping points – With temperature records tumbling daily in last week’s European heatwave, that foretaste of a radically hotter world underscored what is at stake in a decisive phase of talks to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement, a collective shot at avoiding climate breakdown.With study-after-study showing climate impacts from extreme weather to polar melt and sea level rise outstripping initial forecasts, negotiators have a fast-closing window to try to turn the aspirations agreed in Paris into meaningful outcomes.“There’s so much on the line in the next 18 months or so,” said Sue Reid, vice-president of climate and energy at Ceres, a U.S. non-profit group that works to steer companies and investors onto a more sustainable path.“This is a crucial period of time both for public officials and the private sector to really reverse the curve on emissions,” Reid told Reuters.In October, the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned emissions must start falling next year at the latest to stand a chance of achieving the deal’s goal of holding the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.With emissions currently on track to push temperatures more than three degrees higher, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is working to wrest bigger commitments from governments ahead of a summit in New York in September.Telling world leaders that failing to cut emissions would be “suicidal,” the Portuguese diplomat wants to build momentum ahead of a fresh round of climate talks in Chile in December.By the time Britain convenes a major follow-up summit in late 2020, plans are supposed to be underway – in theory at least – to almost halve global emissions over the next decade. “In the next year-and-a-half we will witness an intensity of climate diplomacy not seen since the Paris Agreement was signed,”

Europe’s record heatwave threatens Greenland ice sheet (Reuters) – The hot air that smashed European weather records this week looks set to move towards Greenland and could cause record melting of the world’s second largest ice sheet, the United Nations said on Friday.Clare Nullis, spokeswoman for the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, said the hot air moving up from North Africa had not merely broken European temperature records on Thursday but surpassed them by 2, 3 or 4 degrees Celsius, which she described as “absolutely incredible”.”According to forecasts, and this is of concern, the atmospheric flow is now going to transport that heat towards Greenland,” she told a regular U.N. briefing in Geneva.”This will result in high temperatures and consequently enhanced melting of the Greenland ice sheet,” she said. “We don’t know yet whether it will beat the 2012 level, but it’s close.”Nullis cited data from Denmark’s Polar Portal, which measures the daily gains and losses in surface mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet.”In July alone, it lost 160 billion tonnes of ice through surface melting. That’s roughly the equivalent of 64 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Just in July. Just surface melt – it’s not including ocean melt as well.”The Greenland Ice Sheet covers 80% of the island and has developed over many thousands of years, with layers of snow compressed into ice.The dome of ice rises to a height of 3,000 meters and the total volume of the ice sheet is approximately 2,900,000 cubic kilometres, which would raise global sea levels by 7 metres if it melted entirely, according to the Polar Portal website.Greenland had not had exceptional weather this year until June, but its ice had been melting rapidly in recent weeks, she said.The warmer air also had implications for Arctic ice extent, which was nearly the lowest on record as of July 15, Nullis said.

Heatwave: think it’s hot in Europe? The human body is already close to thermal limits elsewhere -I am a scientist who researches climate hazards. This week I have published research on the potential for a catastrophic cyclone-heatwave combo in the global south. Yet over the past few days I have been approached by various media outlets to talk not about that hazard, but about the unfolding UK heatwave and climate change. .It is by now very well established that hot extremes are more likely in the changed climate we are living in. Yet there is a seemingly unquenchable thirst for this story to be retold every time the UK sweats. Narratives around such acute, local events detract from critical messages about the global challenges from extreme heat.Make no mistake, maximum temperatures of 35°C or more are hot by UK standards, but such conditions are familiar to around 80% of the world’s population. The headline-grabbing 46°C recently experienced by Britain’s neighbours in France is indeed unusual, but still falls short of the 50°C recorded in India earlier this summer, and is somewhat temperate relative to the 54°C confirmed for both Pakistan (in 2017) and Kuwait (in 2016). People in these hotter climates are better at coping with high temperatures, yet such heat still kills. Deadly heatwaves are, of course, no stranger to Europeans. The infamous 2003 event claimed as many as 70,000 lives, and 2010 saw more than 50,000 fatalities in western Russia. Fortunately, lessons were learned and authorities are now much better prepared when heat-health alerts are issued. But spare a thought for less fortunate communities who are routinely experiencing extraordinary temperatures. In places like South Asia and the Persian Gulf, the human body, despite all its remarkable thermal efficiencies, is often operating close to its limits.

In a World With More and Intense Heat-Waves, a Review of What Heat Does to Us – Sweating and breathing are two important ways in which the body copes with heat. However, these measures are temporary; sustained heat prevents the blood from shedding heat at the skin. If ambient humidity is high, the body will also get quickly dehydrated. If the combination of temperature and humidity, called the wet-bulb temperature, exceeds 35º C, all systems fail. This is the upper limit of survivability; even a wet-bulb temperature of 30º C is very dangerous, according to a 2017 study. Exposure to severe heat leads directly to heat exhaustion, an illness characterised by dizziness, fatigue, headache and fainting. This is usually treated by cooling the body under a shade and supplying electrolytes. If it isn’t treated, however, heat exhaustion can lead to heat-stroke, where the body shuts down the sweating mechanism, leading to mental confusion, seizures and probably loss of consciousness. Apart from direct effects such as illnesses and mortality, researchers have also studied the morbidity associated with chronic heat and have found that it is not peripheral. In fact, it has insidious, wide-ranging effects on organs and exacerbates pre-existing conditions such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart- and/or diabetes-related conditions, and kidney disease and chronic kidney disease (CKD). “The main diseases of concern are asthma, rhinosinusitis, COPD and respiratory tract infections,” according to one 2014 paper published in the journal European Respiratory Review. “Groups at higher risk of climate change effects include individuals with pre-existing cardiopulmonary diseases or disadvantaged individuals.” Indeed, in 2016, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, were able to ascertain that indoor heat and air pollution could together increase the respiratory morbidity in people with COPD. Heat can be additionally dangerous if one’s environs don’t cool in the evening because this deprives the body of respite after a day’s work. Heat-induced deaths have been increasing around the world together with an increase in night-time temperatures.

At least 11 people, including an amusement park mascot, have died across Japan in an unexpected heat wave – At least 11 people, including a theme park mascot, have died due to an unexpected heat wave sweeping Japan.An additional 5,664 people around the country were taken to hospital with heat-related medical issues last week, the Japanese government said Tuesday,according to the Kyodo news agency.Temperatures unexpectedly rose after the end of the country’s rainy season, with most of the country’s monitoring posts recording highs of over 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). The city of Nagoya, central Japan, is due a high of 37 C (98.6 F) on Thursday and Friday, according to the JMA.Yohei Yamaguchi, a 28-year-old part-time amusement park worker, died from heatstroke after practising a dance outdoors in a 16-kilogram (35.3-pound) mascot costume on Sunday night, Kyodo reported.Yamaguchi had been practicing the dance on an outdoors stage in Hirakata amusement park for about 20 minutes from 7:30 p.m., and lost consciousness around 8 p.m., Kyodo and The Asahi Shimbun reported, citing local police.He died shortly after being rushed to hospital, Asahi reported. Temperatures were about 28.7 C (83.7 F) at the time, the newspaper said, citing the meteorological agency.

Minnesota Weather: Temperatures Dip To 37 Degrees In International Falls, Breaking 121-Year-Old Record – While the calendar says Minnesota is in the middle of summer, it felt like fall in northern Minnesota on Tuesday morning. A new daily low temperature record was set in International Falls, where the mercury dipped to 37 degrees, breaking the record (38 degrees) set back in 1898. A new record low up north this morning. 37° in @Int_Falls_MN, breaks the old record of 38° that stood since 1898. #mnwx Typically, low temperatures in International Fall, which sits along the Minnesota-Canada border, hover around the mid-50s this time of year.Temperatures in the area don’t typically reach the 30s until late September, early October.In the Twin Cities, temperatures were cool Tuesday morning but not record-breaking. Highs Tuesday are expected to be below average, in the mid-70s, despite sunny skies.

Record Cold in July: Unusually Strong Midsummer Cold Front Refreshes Plains, South (RECAP) – An unusually potent push of cool, dry air by late-July standards set daily record lows across the Plains and South this week, a welcome break from summer’s heat and humidity. A particularly humid heat wave just ended, with parts of the Northeast seeing triple-digit heat for the first time in years, all-time record-hot daily lows tied in Boston and Rockford, Illinois, and heat indices of 120 degrees in parts of the upper Midwest. Instead of its usual midsummer location in the northern U.S., the jet stream plunged sharply into the East and South this week, pulling cooler and drier air deep into the South. Dew points in the 50s plunged as far south as the Texas Gulf Coast and some other parts of the Deep South at times. Dew-point values this low in summer are rare in Houston. Since the 1940s, the dew point in Houston has only been below 60 degrees less than 1% of the time during July. Kansas City, Missouri (57 degrees), Dodge City, Kansas (55 degrees), and Springfield, Illinois (54 degrees), tied daily record lows on Tuesday morning.A few more daily record lows were tied or broken Wednesday morning in Houston (68 degrees – tie), Austin, Texas (67 degrees), San Antonio (64 degrees – tie), Abilene, Texas (62 degrees), Little Rock, Arkansas (62 degrees – tie) and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (59 degrees).On Thursday, Austin, Texas (at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport), saw its coolest July morning on record when temperatures dropped to 58 degrees. Houston dipped to 66 degrees, not a daily record but still the city’s coolest July reading in 25 years. Daily record lows were also set on Thursday morning in McAlester, Oklahoma (58 degrees), Corpus Christi, Texas (69 degrees), Wichita Falls, Texas (63 degrees), Memphis (62 degrees – tie), Charlotte, North Carolina (61 degrees), Macon, Georgia (60 degrees), Tupelo, Mississippi (60 degrees), Little Rock (60 degrees) and Jackson, Tennessee (55 degrees). It was Little Rock’s coolest July temperature since 1990.Little Rock set a daily record low on Friday for the third consecutive day, when temperatures dipped to 62 degrees. This is only the second time Little Rock has set or tied a daily record low for three consecutive days in July. San Angelo, Texas, also saw three days in a row of daily record lows when the temperature dropped to 60 degrees on Friday. Three consecutive days of daily record lows also occurred in Waco, Texas, this week, after experiencing its first temperature at or above 100 degrees on Monday. On Friday morning, additional daily record lows were set in Corpus Christi, Texas (68 degrees), San Antonio, Texas (66 degrees), Austin (at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, 61 degrees), Wichita Falls, Texas, (61 degrees) and Oklahoma City (60 degrees). Victoria, Texas also set a new daily record with a low of 64 degrees, which shattered the previous record by 5 degrees. Houston saw lows in the 60s three straight mornings, which hasn’t happened there in July in25 years, according to the National Weather Service.

Millions displaced and hundreds killed by monsoonal floods in South Asia – Heavy monsoonal rains that began in early July have battered the lives of millions of people in Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Though the weather situation has improved, social conditions will worsen in the coming period, with livelihoods and dwellings devastated and increased risks of disease outbreaks. While current reports indicate that around 600 people have been killed across these countries, the real figure may well be higher because many casualties go unreported. UN estimates show that over 25 million people have been displaced, with the majority being poor people living a hand-to-mouth daily existence. India is the worst affected. According to an NDTV report on Monday, 170 people were killed and nearly 11 million impacted by flooding in the Indian states of Assam and Bihar. More than 100 of these deaths occurred in Bihar, India’s poorest state. In the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 32 people were killed by lightning strikes on Sunday, while 2,283 villages in 18 of the 33 flood-hit districts of the state remain under water. Food production has been shattered and thousands of villagers rendered homeless. Last Thursday an express train near Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra state, was stranded for more than 12 hours when a river burst its banks and submerged rail lines. Indian navy helicopters and emergency boats rescued around 1,000 passengers. In Assam, over 180 animals, including 16 rhinos, died in Assam’s Kaziranga National Park. At least 113 deaths have been reported in Nepal, with 38 people still missing due to serious flooding and landslides in the mountainous state. Massive destruction has occurred in the eastern parts of the country. Many bridges and roads have collapsed or been washed away. The repair bill is estimated to be more than 300 million Nepal rupees ($US2.7 million). In Bangladesh, over 75 people were killed and more than six million displaced in 28 districts, but with many still reported missing, the death toll will be higher. The Jamuna River embankment was breached on July 17, flooding at least 40 villages and inundating the dwellings of over 200,000 people.

Flood Relief: India Gathers Satellite Imagery from Several Space Agencies – India has acquired satellite imagery from eight international space agencies, including China, to monitor the extent of floods which have devastated three states, killed over 190 people and affected over 7 million people. On Friday morning, the new Chinese ambassador-designate to India, Sun Weidong tweeted that following ISRO’s request to international agencies, China had provided India with data for flood-hit regions to assist in flood relief efforts. “Hope all gets well soon,” he wrote.MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar subsequently noted that India had “activated” the International Charter: Space and Major Disaster on July 17 to acquire satellite imagery from different space agencies of the floods.This request was made through the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) on behalf of ISRO, which is a member of International Charter Space and Major Disasters. Set up under the UN’s Space based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response (UN-Spider), state space agencies are part of a collaborative network to share data and products based on the requests made by members.“Whenever there is a natural disaster, NRSC and member space agencies of other 32 countries which are a part of Charter can activate the Charter and then the Charter seeks the information pertaining to disaster- hit area available with all the 33 member space agencies. This is the standard practice,” explained Kumar. “Due to the heavy floods in India, the Charter was activated on July 17 by NRSC. Under the Charter, so far data has been received from 8 countries, including USGS, CNES, ESA, ROSCOSMOS, Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) and 3 others. ISRO has also provided information to other Space Agencies in response to similar requests,” he added. The above-average rainfall has led to floods in Assam, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The north-eastern state has been the hardest hit, with the death toll reaching 75. There is apprehension about further floods, after Bhutan released excess water from Kuricchu Hydropower reservoirs which could lead to rise in water level in seven districts in Assam.

Taps Run Dry in Zimbabwe’s Capital City Leaving 2 Million People With Running Water Only Once a Week – Water is life. And, life without water is a daily nightmare endured in Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare, where more than two million people only have running water once a week, according to the New York Times.The water shortage there means residents ration bathroom trips and stand in interminable lines to fill buckets and cans at communal boreholes. One mother profiled by the New York Times got in line at 3 a.m. By the afternoon, she was still standing in line. The boreholes are a problem too since they are so polluted. “Water-borne diseases linked to these boreholes are on the rise, but people have had to take in their own hands water supply because the utility has failed to provide water,” said Jean-Marie Kileshye-Onema, network manager of WaterNet, as Climate Change News reported. The water rationing started in June in the country’s two major cities, Harare and Bulawayo. The economics of water purification are also working against Zimbabwe. The city government has had to work a critical shortage of purifying chemicals, which cost in excess of $3 million per month, according to CNN. “We are using more chemicals and we have not been able to procure enough safe chemicals as a result, we are targeting to provide water to our residents with a minimum of once a week’ supply of the precious liquid,” said Mabhena Moyo, Harare’s Acting Water director, as CNN reported. The shortage, which started in January but has been exacerbated in July, is due to an awful drought year from the climate crisis. Poor water management has also squandered the remaining water. An estimate of 45 to 60 percent of the water that’s left in Harare reservoirs is lost through leakage and theft, said Herbert Gomba, the mayor of Harare, as the New York Times reported. “There is a rotational water supply within the five towns,” said Michael Chideme, Harare city council corporate communications manager, to Climate Change News. “Some people are getting water five days a week especially in the western suburbs, but the northern suburbs are going for weeks without a drop in their taps.” The water crisis has raised fears of a cholera outbreak or other waterborne diseases, especially in areas where residents have lived without water for three months, said Community Water Alliance, an NGO, as CNNreported.

Living without water: the crisis pushing people out of El Salvador – Victor Funez fills a three-gallon plastic pitcher with water from a tap in the cemetery, balances it on his head and trudges home, where his wife waits to soak maize kernels so she can make tortillas for breakfast. The tap is the family’s only source of water, so Funez makes the journey along the dusty dirt road 15 to 20 times each day. “My husband’s job is to fetch the water so I can do the housework. It’s like this every day, all day,” said Bianca Lopez, 46. “We can live without electricity – we have candles and lamps – but water, that’s essential.” La Estación is a makeshift community of 59 households along disused railway tracks that cut across Nejapa – a semi-urban municipality on the northern outskirts of El Salvador’s capital. This tiny Central American state is one of the most murderous in the world, plagued by warring gang factions and security forces who shoot to kill. Relentless bloodshed and chronic unemployment have driven wave after wave of migration as Salvadorans seek a better life.But in recent years, widespread water shortages are increasingly helping fuel unrest and forced displacement.“Marginalized communities struggle day to day to get access to enough water. It’s not a question that this could one day cause social conflict – it already is … the whole country is close to crisis,” said Silvia de Larios, the former director of ecosystems and wildlife at the ministry of environment and natural resources (known by its Spanish acronym, Marn).

Over 80,000 Quakes Have Hit California Since July 4th, Aftershocks Headed “Toward The Garlock Fault” – The recent seismic activity in the state of California has taken a strange turn. According to the Los Angeles Times, there have been more than 80,000 earthquakes in the state since July 4th, and most of those quakes were aftershocks of the two very large events that hit the Ridgecrest area early in the month. Over the past couple of weeks, however, a very unusual pattern has begun to emerge. We have started to see aftershocks creep toward two of the largest fault lines in southern California, and this is making seismologists very nervous. The fact that we are seeing aftershocks “approaching the Owens Valley fault” is definitely alarming, but of far more concern is the fact that the Ridgecrest aftershocks are also headed “toward the Garlock fault”. The following comes from a local California news source…According to a Los Angeles Times article , aftershocks of the magnitude 7.1 earthquake near Ridgecrest have been creeping into areas close to two major earthquake faults which is concerning for some seismologists on whether it could trigger another huge temblor.“Some aftershocks have rumbled northwest of the Searles Valley earthquake, approaching the Owens Valley fault. That fault triggered an earthquake of perhaps magnitude 7.8 or 7.9 in 1872, one of the largest in California’s modern record,” the article explains. “The Ridgecrest aftershocks have also headed southeast toward the Garlock fault, a lesser-known fault capable of producing an earthquake of magnitude 8 or more. The fault along the northern edge of the Mojave Desert can send shaking south and west into Bakersfield and Ventura and Los Angeles counties.”In the end, this could turn out to be nothing, but there are a couple of reasons why we want to keep a very close eye on the Garlock fault.First of all, the Garlock fault is the second largest fault line in the entire state of California, and it is a major threat to southern California.Secondly, the Garlock fault runs directly into the San Andreas fault, and many believe that a major quake along one could potentially trigger a major quake along the other.

SpaceX’s launch of an experimental rocket ship set fire to about 100 acres of wildlife refuge in south Texas – Late Thursday night, SpaceX launched an experimental rocket ship known as Starhopper into the air for the first time – but the launch produced more fiery excitement than anyone bargained for.Starhopper is a test-bed for a much larger launch system called Starship, which the company is designing to send people to the moon and Mars. SpaceX is building and testing the vehicle near a small, remote beach community called Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas. Company founder Elon Musk hailed the test flight, which sent the rocket soaring to about 65 feet (20 meters), as a success early Friday morning. He also poked fun at the vehicle’s simplistic design. “Starhopper flight successful. Water towers *can* fly haha!!” Musktweeted. He later shared aerial drone footage of the flight, below. However, flaming debris spread by Starhopper’s powerful rocket engine almost immediately started brush fires near the launch pad. Emergency workers used a firetruck and other tools to control the flames over the next couple of hours. Despite their efforts, some of the fire spread into the nearby Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area. “A brush fire occurred after our first successful Starship prototype hop. The SpaceX team is working with the Brownsville Fire Department to manage the incident, which is well under control,” a SpaceX spokesperson told Business Insider in an email on Friday morning.

‘Unprecedented’: more than 100 Arctic wildfires burn in worst ever season – The Arctic is suffering its worst wildfire season on record, with huge blazes in Greenland, Siberia and Alaska producing plumes of smoke that can be seen from space.The Arctic region has recorded its hottest June ever. Since the start of that month, more than 100 wildfires have burned in the Arctic circle. In Russia, 11 of 49 regions are experiencing wildfires.The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nations’ weather and climate monitoring service, has called the Arctic fires “unprecedented“.The largest blazes, believed to have been caused by lightning, are located in Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk and Buryatia. Winds carrying smoke have caused air quality to plummet in Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia.In Greenland, the multi-day Sisimiut blaze, first detected on 10 July, came during an unusually warm and dry stretch in which melting on the vast Greenland ice sheet commenced a month earlier than usual.In Alaska, as many as 400 fires have been reported. The climatologist Rick Thomas estimated the total area burned in the state this season as of Wednesday morning at 2.06m acres. Mark Parrington, senior scientist with the Climate Change Service and Atmosphere Monitoring Service for Europe’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme, described the extent of the smoke as “impressive” and posted an image of a ring of fire and smoke across much of the region. Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at the London School of Economics, toldUSA Today fires of such magnitude have not been seen in the 16-year satellite record. The fires are not merely the result of surface ignition of dry vegetation: in some cases the underlying peat has caught fire. Such fires can last for days or months and produce significant amounts of greenhouse gases. “These are some of the biggest fires on the planet, with a few appearing to be larger than 100,000 hectares,” Smith said. “The amount of [carbon dioxide] emitted from Arctic circle fires in June 2019 is larger than all of the CO2 released from Arctic circle fires in the same month from 2010 through to 2018 put together.” In June alone, the WMO said, Arctic fires emitted 50 megatonnes of CO2, equal to Sweden’s total annual emissions.

Arctic wildfires: What’s caused huge swathes of flames to spread? – Wildfires are ravaging the Arctic, with areas of northern Siberia, northern Scandinavia, Alaska and Greenland engulfed in flames. Lightning frequently triggers fires in the region but this year they have been worsened by summer temperatures that are higher than average because of climate change.Plumes of smoke from the fires can be seen from space. Mark Parrington, a wildfires expert at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (Cams), described them as “unprecedented”. There are hundreds of fires covering mostly uninhabited regions across eastern Russia, northern Scandinavia, Greenland and Alaska. But smoke is affecting wider surrounding areas, engulfing some places completely. Cities in eastern Russia have noted a significant decrease in air quality since the fires started. The smoke has reportedly reached Russia’s Tyumen region in western Siberia, six time zones away from the fires on the east coast. In June, the fires released an estimated 50 megatonnes of carbon dioxide – the equivalent of Sweden’s annual carbon output, according to Cams. Arctic fires are common between May and October and wildfires are a natural part of an ecosystem, offering some benefits for the environment, according to the Alaska Centers website. But the intensity of these fires, as well as the large area they have taken up, make these unusual.”It is unusual to see fires of this scale and duration at such high latitudes in June,” said Mr Parrington. “But temperatures in the Arctic have been increasing at a much faster rate than the global average, and warmer conditions encourage fires to grow and persist once they have been ignited.”Extremely dry ground and hotter than average temperatures, combined with heat lightning and strong winds, have caused the fires to spread aggressively. The burning has been sustained by the forest ground, which consists of exposed, thawed, dried peat – a substance with high carbon content. Global satellites are now tracking a swathe of new and ongoing wildfires within the Arctic Circle. The conditions were laid in June, the hottest June for the planet yet observed in the instrumented era. The fires are releasing copious volumes of previously stored carbon dioxide and methane – carbon stocks that have in some cases been held in the ground for thousands of years. Scientists say what we’re seeing is evidence of the kind of feedbacks we should expect in a warmer world, where increased concentrations of greenhouse gases drive more warming, which then begets the conditions that release yet more carbon into the atmosphere. A lot of the particulate matter from these fires will eventually come to settle on ice surfaces further north, darkening them and thus accelerating melting.

Russian army ordered to tackle massive wildfires Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the army to help tackle massive wildfires raging in Siberia and other regions in the east. The decision was taken after Mr Putin was briefed on the growing crisis by the head of the emergencies ministry.About three million hectares (7.4 million acres) have been affected, in what Greenpeace is describing as an “ecological catastrophe”.Many local residents say not enough is being done to tackle the fires. More than 700,000 people have signed a petition calling for tougher action and for an emergency to be declared across the vast Siberia region.There has been widespread anger after comments by emergencies officials that they are not planning to tackle wildfires in remote uninhabited areas because there is no direct threat to people. On Wednesday, President Putin ordered service personnel of the defence ministry to join in the firefighting efforts in Siberia. Ten planes and 10 helicopters with firefighting equipment are being deployed in the region.

Trump Calls Putin To Offer Help Battling Siberian Fires – U.S. President Donald Trump has offered to help Russia battle widespread forest fires in Siberia as he seeks to repair Washington’s fractious relationship with Moscow. Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin to make the offer, the Kremlin said on its website. Putin expressed his “sincere gratitude” to Trump for the concern and said he may accept the offer if the situation demands it. Forest fires have been raging for several days across vast areas of Siberia, forcing thousands of people to evacuate. Russia has declared a national emergency in five Siberian regions and deployed the military to help battle the blazes. Putin highlighted the call by Trump as a guarantee that the United States and Russia will someday be able to restore full relations. The two leaders agreed to continue to speak by phone and meet in person. The phone call came two days ahead of the official U.S. withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia. Trump “expressed concern over the vast wildfires afflicting Siberia,” a brief White House statement said. “The leaders also discussed trade between the two countries.”

Greenland Is Melting Away Before Our Eyes – Amid an ongoing heat wave, new data show the Greenland ice sheet is in the middle of its biggest melt season in recorded history. It’s the latest worrying signal climate change is accelerating far beyond the worst fears of even climate scientists.The record-setting heat wave that sweltered northern Europe last week has moved north over the critically vulnerable Greenland ice sheet, triggering temperatures this week that are as much as 25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Weather models indicate Tuesday’s temperature may have surpassed 75 degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of Greenland, and a weather balloon launched near the capital Nuuk measured all-time record warmth just above the surface. That heat wave is still intensifying, and is expected to peak on Thursday with the biggest single-day melt ever recorded in Greenland. On August 1 alone, more than 12 billion tons of water will permanently melt away from the ice sheet and find its way down to the ocean, irreversibly raising sea levels globally. A tweet from the Danish Meteorological Institute, the official weather service of Greenland, said “almost all the ice sheet, including Summit” measurably melted on Tuesday. According to a preliminary estimate, that melt covered 87 percent of the ice sheet’s surface, which would be the second-biggest melt day in Greenland’s recorded history. Separate weather monitoring equipment at Summit Camp at the top of the 10,000-foot-thick Greenland ice sheet confirmed the temperaturebriefly reached the melting point. Downhill, meltwater was seen dramatically streaming off the edge of the ice sheet in massive waterfalls. Climate scientist Irina Overeem, who placed a meltwater monitoring station in western Greenland eight years ago, recorded a dramatic video of a rushing torrent of water. In a comment posted on Twitter, she said “I have my fingers crossed for it not being washed away.” In an email to Rolling Stone, Overeem described the nature of life in Greenland these days: After recording that video, she spotted a warning of the major glacial water runoff on the announcement board of the main supermarket in the capital city. A similar glacial flood in 2012 was so intense it washed away bridge.

Greenland is melting in a heatwave. That’s everyone’s problem –Extreme heat bowled over Europe last week, smashing records in its wake. Now, the heatwave that started in the Sahara has rolled into Greenland — where more records are expected to crumble in the coming days.That means the heatwave is now Greenland’s problem, right? Not quite. When records fall in Greenland, it’s everyone’s problem. Greenland is home to the world’s second-largest ice sheet. And when it melts significantly — as it is expected to do this year — there are knock-on effects for sea levels and weather across the globe. What happens in Greenland will be felt across the world. Box said that this year’s melt is flooding the North Atlantic with freshwater, which could affect the weather in northwestern Europe. The result could be stronger storms, he added, citing flooding in the UK in 2015 and 2016. “Whatever happens in Greenland radiates its impact down,” he said. It will still be some time before the full “meltiness” of 2019 is measured. But it’s already poised to rival the proportions of 2012 — and we haven’t even reached the end of summer.In July alone, Greenland’s ice sheet lost 160 billion tons of ice, according to Clare Nullis, spokeswoman for the UN World Meteorological Organization. That’s roughly the equivalent of 64 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, she told reporters on Friday. One of the most remarkable things about the 2019 heatwave is not just the number of records it broke across Europe — but the margin by which it did so, she said. “Normally when you get a temperature record broken, it’s by a fraction of a degree,” said Nullis. “What we saw yesterday was records being broken by two, three, four degrees — it was absolutely incredible.”

Warm Water Is Melting Glaciers 100 Times Faster Than We Thought — According to a new study, scientists have been estimating the impact of a critical aspect of glacier melt all wrong, and in fact it’s 100 times worse than previously believed. This finding has implications for our understanding of sea level rise as a result of climate change, which threatens to flood islands and coastal cities and displace millions of people. In a paper published in Science on Thursday, researchers from the University of Oregon took a look at how the LeConte Glacier in Alaska was melting underwater. Rather than rely on models to estimate the rate of underwater melt – when warm ocean water causes the underside of a glacier to melt – they took direct measurements. According to their findings, the underwater melt rate of the glacier was 100 times faster than the models predicted. Melting underwater 100 times faster doesn’t mean that the glaciers are retreating overall at the same rate, however. For these Alaskan glaciers, losing mass is a combination of surface melting, icebergs breaking off, and underwater melting. However, co-author Rebecca Jackson said, underwater melting accelerates the process of glacial melting, a process that scientists are only beginning to understand and quantify. “The real importance of the underwater melting is that it’s the spark that accelerates the retreat, it creates a feedback loop,” Because we didn’t fully understand it, this feedback loop hasn’t been readily factored into our projections of sea level rise caused by melting glaciers.

US Eyeing Militarization of Antarctic as Well as Arctic – A top U.S. military general said Tuesday that the country will be looking at militarizing the Antarctic just as it has the Arctic.Air Force general Charles Brown, commander of Pacific Air Force, made the remarks in an address at The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in Arlington, Virginia.Brown pointed to moves already made by Russia and China, a self-declared “near-Arctic state,” and noted both nations “have a presence in the Antarctic right now” as well as the Arctic. At several points, Brown mentioned 2048, which is set to be a key moment for the Antarctic – a region “within increasingly convenient reach“ – because it’s when the Antarctic Treaty can go under review.Brown called the Arctic “kind of a precursor to the way I look at the Antarctic.” He continued, “The capabilities we have in the Arctic are the same capabilities we probably want to have in the Antarctic.”He added that icebreakers were a lacking capability – “Russia has much more than we do.” And, because the U.S. military will still need the few it has to operate in the Arctic, “we may need more” to bring them to Antarctica.

Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months – Do you remember the good old days when we had “12 years to save the planet”?Now it seems, there’s a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis, among other environmental challenges.Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5C this century, emissions of carbon dioxide would have to be cut by 45% by 2030.But today, observers recognise that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.The idea that 2020 is a firm deadline was eloquently addressed by one of the world’s top climate scientists, speaking back in 2017 “The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute.The sense that the end of next year is the last chance saloon for climate change is becoming clearer all the time. “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival,” said Prince Charles, speaking at a reception for Commonwealth foreign ministers recently. The Prince was looking ahead to a series of critical UN meetings that are due to take place between now and the end of 2020. One of the understated headlines in last year’s IPCC report was that global emissions of carbon dioxide must peak by 2020 to keep the planet below 1.5C. Current plans are nowhere near strong enough to keep temperatures below the so-called safe limit. Right now, we are heading towards 3C of heating by 2100 not 1.5.

Trump campaign calls Democratic environmental plans ‘reckless and dangerous’ – The Hill – President Trump’s reelection campaign released a statement Thursday in which campaign manager Brad Parscale called Democratic environmental plans “reckless and dangerous.” The statement, released after two days of Democratic debates in which climate change was addressed by many candidates, did not name any particular candidate or plan. “Democrats will destroy the economy and kill millions of jobs in states across the country with their vendetta against coal, oil, and natural gas,” Parscale said. “Their radical plan to eliminate those industries will devastate workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Mexico, Colorado, and elsewhere.” “Jobs gone, auto and manufacturing industries crushed, lives ruined,” he added. “Reckless and dangerous.” Many of the 2020 Democratic candidates have released plans to tackle climate change. Front-runner Joe Biden has proposed a plan that includes achieving “a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions” by 2050 and taking “action against fossil fuel companies and other polluters.” The former vice president defended his plan Wednesday night against criticism from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), who called it “middling” and “just too late.” Other candidates’ environmental plans include Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) proposed $2 trillion investment in clean energy technology and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) call to ban fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Democrats swore off donations from lobbyists and fossil fuel execs. But some are skirting their own rules. — Among Sen. Cory Booker’s donors to his presidential campaign is a vice president of a leading pharmaceutical company. The senior vice president of Comcast who oversees the company’s lobbying efforts hosted a fundraiser for former vice president Joe Biden. An oil company development and finance manager remains one of former congressman Beto O’Rourke’s most generous donors, including to his presidential campaign. These Democratic presidential hopefuls accepted these contributions, even though they had rejected the help of fossil fuel, pharmaceutical and lobbying industries. According to their campaigns, they did nothing wrong, because their pledges cover only a small group of high-level executives and registered lobbyists. But critics see something darker: a willingness by campaigns to bend their own rules, allowing money and influence to seep in. Booker (D-N.J.), Biden and O’Rourke are not alone. Every Democratic primary candidate this year has sworn off financial support from certain industries despised by the Democratic base, a reaction to increasing skepticism among voters of the influence of special interests on politics. Yet federal filings show campaigns have accepted plenty of money from influential donors in those industries – as long as the donor’s job title falls outside the narrow, and at times technical, definitions in candidates’ pledges.Such donations underscore how campaigns are navigating the expectations of voters and activists while working to draw tens of millions to survive a crowded and lengthy primary. But critics say these contributions show that candidates have taken symbolic pledges with arbitrary definitions.

Carbon Dividends: A Plan for Earth’s Survival that Can Survive U.S. Politics? Interview By Lynn Parramore, Institute for New Economic Thinking… Every day it becomes clearer that we have to break our addiction to extracting dirty stuff from the ground to burn for energy. But how to pull it off without triggering political and economic chaos? Economist James K. Boyce, a senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the author of a new book exploring that question, The Case for Carbon Dividends. In a conversation with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, he outlines a plan that could not only reduce carbon emissions, but help bridge the gap between the rich and the rest. And it might even survive the political system.

Climate Equity: What Is It? – While action against climate change languishes, the rhetoric keeps getting more intense. For several years now it hasn’t been enough to demand climate policy; we need climate justice. We will not only eliminate fossil fuels in a decade or three, we will solve the problems of poverty and discrimination, and all in a single political package. It sounds good, but what does it mean? You might look for an answer in new legislation introduced by AOC and Kamala Harris, the Climate Equity Act. As reported yesterday, it establishes a federal Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability, whose job would be to evaluate all proposed regulations according to their impact on low income communities. No doubt this would bring more attention to issues at the intersection of green politics and social justice, which is all to the good, but creating new layers of oversight still doesn’t answer the question, what is climate justice? Is justice about taking care of, say, the bottom 20% of the income distribution? The bottom half? Some other number? And what counts as an impact? The first thing to notice is that, by limiting matters of justice to low income communities, the bill reinforces a politics that divides the world into the socially excluded, the poorest and most vulnerable, on the one hand and everyone else on the other. The majority of voters are effectively enlisted as allies of those at the bottom. This is the consequence of drawing the line where they do. A very different politics was proposed by Occupy, placing 99% of us in one camp and the top 1% in the other. The second thing is, again as reported, the bill does not specify what impacts are critical or what criteria should be applied to them; it is a plan to have a plan. Presumably the justice accountability specialists will know how to do this, which is useful since, apparently, we are still debating it. The limitations of AOC-Harris become clearer when you consider what the centerpiece of any meaningful climate policy has to be: suppressing the use of fossil fuels, which will entail putting a steep price on them. We are talking hundreds of dollars per metric ton of carbon, which translates to several dollars per gallon of gas at the pump and similar added costs for heating, electricity and other energy uses and sources. Will this have a devastating effect on low income communities? Absolutely, and it will be nearly as unbearable for everyone below the top fifth or so. This is not everything a carbon policy has to do, but it is the one part that is non-optional. It does not single out low income communities for protection, however, and one could argue that every dollar that goes to someone in the middle of the distribution in the form of a rebate is one less dollar for those near the bottom. If climate justice is simply about that bottom tier, the politics of AOC-Harris are deeply misguided. On the other hand, we can avoid a lot of superfluous bureaucracy by simply insisting that all, or close to all, carbon revenues be returned to those who pay them in higher energy prices, and that this be done according to a progressive formula like equal lump sums. That would mean we would stop beating around the bush when it comes to identifying policy impacts and adopt a majoritarian conception of social justice.

Can we avert a climate change apocalypse by hacking the planet’s atmosphere? And should we? -Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is the most researched of a suite of technologies aimed at cooling the Earth known as “solar geoengineering”.Other forms of geoengineering aim to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere – using anything from fans t – o forests.SAI was inspired by the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions such as the 1991 explosion of Mount Pinotubo.Volcanic eruptions shoot sulfur dioxide up into the stratosphere where it forms tiny droplets of sulfuric acid that float around the globe for a year or two acting like tiny mirrors to reflect sunlight. It’s a last-ditch effort to save the world from dangerous warming because we haven’t been able to get our greenhouse emissions under control.You might think this giant planetary sunshade sounds far-fetched, but some scientists starting to research this technology think we may well need such “a brutally ugly technical fix”.However others argue that such a speculative technology – known as “stratospheric aerosol injection” – poses even greater risks than climate change itself. (Supplied: Extinction Rebellion)Indeed, this technology was listed in a 2018 Global Catastrophic Risks report on the major threats against humanity.But the report also listed climate change. And three years after the historic Paris climate agreement was signed we face an uphill battle to stop the world from dangerous warming. So, could creating a global sunshade be used to avert a climate change disaster or make things worse?

China Is On Track To Beat Its Peak-Emissions Pledge In the past 20 years, China has become a key player for global greenhouse gas emissions. Due to its large population, rapid economic development launched it into position as the top-emitting nation, despite having per-capita emissions that are about half those of the United States. Many Western countries have had roughly stable emissions levels, but China’s have still been rising. This means that China’s future trajectory will have a huge influence on the global trajectory. China’s pledge, submitted as part of the international 2015 Paris Agreement, was to ensure its emissions peaked and stabilized before the end of the deal’s window in 2030. This is no small feat considering that the country’s emissions had more than doubled in the last 10 years or so. Of course, that could include everything from a 2016 peak to a 2029 peak, and a lot of effort has gone into analyzing emissions trends in Chinese industry and electrical generation. A new study led by Haikun Wang, Xi Lu, and Yu Deng doesn’t look directly at industry or the grid. Instead, it examines the relationship between economic growth and emissions to project that China’s should peak in the early 2020s. The analysis uses data from 50 Chinese cities for a representative sampling of the factors at work across the country. The cities combine to account for about 35% of national emissions, 30% of the population, and 50% of total gross domestic product (GDP). These cities vary widely, from types of industry to affluence to sources of power on the local grid. But the researchers see evidence that these metropolises follow an economic relationship known as the environmental Kuznets curve – emissions per capita stops increasing once a certain GDP per capita is reached. The idea is basically that dirty growth eventually provides the resources to switch to cleaner options. After adjusting for things like location (whether a city’s electricity is supplied mainly by coal or by nuclear and renewables) and the population density of cities of different sizes, the researchers calculated that emissions reach a peak when per-capita emissions hit about 10 tons of CO2 per year. That happens at an average per-capita GDP of US$21,000.

Does Extinction Rebellion have the solution to the climate crisis? –The success of Extinction Rebellion, a British campaign of civil disobedience aimed at addressing the climate crisis, has been something to behold. In April, the group, which was formally launched only last October, blocked Waterloo Bridge, which spans the Thames, for more than a week. Across London, activists glued themselves to buildings, climbed on trains, chained themselves to company headquarters, and occupied key intersections, leading to some thousand arrests and messages of support from around the world. The Metropolitan Police commissioner, Cressida Dick, said that she had never encountered a protest like it. By the end of the month, Extinction Rebellion activists were meeting with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and on May 1st, in accordance with one of their demands, Members of Parliament declared a climate and environment emergency, becoming the first national legislature to do so. In June, M.P.s agreed to another Extinction Rebellion request: to convene a citizens’ assembly, made up of a representative sample of the British population, to discuss the climate crisis. Although the assembly’s recommendations will not be legally binding, as the protesters wished, Extinction Rebellion’s language and its policy agenda have moved into the mainstream at remarkable speed.

England Region to Place UN Accredited Climate Crisis Teacher in Every State School – The newly elected mayor of England’s northernmost region wants to put a UN-accredited climate change teacher in every state funded primary and secondary school, making his region the first in the world to do so, as the London Economic reported.Jamie Driscoll, a Labour-party politician, declared a climate emergency on his first day in office after he was elected to be the first mayor of the North of Tyne Combined Authority in May. Since then has pushed to make sure environmental education is taught at every school in his region, which includes Northumberland, Newcastle and North Tyneside in the northeastern corner of the country.Each state-funded school in the combined authority area will have the opportunity to train one member of staff to teach lessons on global warming and the climate crisis, as a UN accredited climate change teacher, meeting an important UN benchmark for sustainable development, according to the North of Tyne Combined Authority’s official website.”We have partnered with the creators of the eduCCate Global UN CC Teacher Academy, to make sure every school in the North of Tyne has access to a fully-funded teacher training program to get a UN accredited climate change teacher,” said Driscoll in a statement on the region’s website. “This is our opportunity to be the first region in the world to meet this UN Sustainable Development Goal. It’s also a manifest commitment to give every child a world-class environmental education, and to make such progress so soon is fantastic.”The course training takes 15-20 hours for teachers to complete. It’s online and delves into climate change science, adaptation planning, health, forests, climate change finance and international negotiations, as theGuardian reported. “Anyone below the age of 20 is part of the ‘climate generation’ living all or most of their lives having to deal with climate change,” said Angus Mackay, director of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, in a press release. “The UN Climate Change Teacher Academy is an excellent idea because it will give children an intuitive understanding of the issues and it is solutions based.”

Steel industry to suffer major losses from rising carbon prices and climate regulations, report says – The world’s largest steel corporations are not reducing emissions at the rate required to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, a failure that on average puts 14% of the companies’ potential value at risk, according to a new analysis of corporate earnings profiles. The 20 companies, which together represent 30% of global steel production, are currently expected to reduce emissions by less than 50% by 2050, falling behind the 65% reduction standard set by the International Energy Agency. “Steel represents the most emissions-intensive industry – it’s a huge footprint,” said Luke Fletcher, a senior analyst at CDP, the international nonprofit that wrote the new report and works with companies to disclose financial risks of climate change on their bottom line. The report illustrates the failure of polluting corporations to keep up with climate regulations and the financial losses they could suffer as carbon prices rise and the planet warms. For decades, the steel sector has produced essential metal for construction, cars and food cans. However, it’s also responsible for 7% to 9% of all direct fossil fuel emissions, according to the World Steel Association, and is currently the largest industrial source of climate pollution. Under a 2 degrees Celsius scenario where global carbon prices rise to $100 per metric ton by 2040, the companies on average face a 14% hit risk, ranging from 2.5% to 30% for individual companies, the report shows. Leaders at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have pushed governments to implement higher prices on carbon in order to force fossil fuel polluters to pay for the carbon dioxide they emit into the atmosphere. Cutting emissions alone, they say, is not enough to effectively combat climate change.

With new study, critics push back on PJM’s proposed 10-hour storage rule – A proposal by the nation’s largest grid operator could make it much tougher for batteries to make inroads against fossil fuel peaker plants.PJM Interconnection, whose territory spans from Illinois to New Jersey, is preparing to open its long-range capacity market to energy storage projects. The change will allow battery owners to earn extra payments in exchange for guarantees the grid operator can tap into them at a future date.Under the rules, though, PJM would only recognize the full value of batteries that can supply continuous power for 10 or more hours. That’s drawn criticism from clean energy and storage industry groups who say the 10-hour threshold is “unworkable, arbitrary and discriminatory” against the industry.Those groups are now armed with a new study, commissioned by the Energy Storage Association and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It makes the case that smaller duration batteries provide the same reliability benefits as “fully dispatchable resources” such as fossil fuel power plants. t’s the latest development in a debate over the functioning of PJM’s capacity market. (PJM has recently been criticized for other proposed capacity market changes that clean energy advocates also say prioritize fossil fuels.) PJM proposed the rule as part of a required filing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission showing how it will increase access for energy storage in its markets. Storage already has a small presence in PJM’s markets, but the commission’s order, which directs all the country’s grid operators to plan for storage, will likely ramp that presence up.

Texas ranks first in U.S.-installed wind capacity and number of turbines – As of the beginning of 2019, 41 states had at least one installed wind turbine. Of these 41 states, Texas had the largest number of turbines, with more than 13,000, and the most installed wind capacity, at 24.2 gigawatts (GW). As wind technology has advanced, turbines have grown larger in the United States, and the capacity of individual turbines has increased with size. States where wind adoption occurred early, such as California, have a high number of turbines relative to their wind generation capacity compared with states where wind was adopted later, such as Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Illinois. Based on data in the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Annual Electric Generator Inventory, the earliest U.S. wind turbines still operating were installed in California in July 1975. Despite having the second most installed wind turbines, California accounts for only 6.1 GW of total installed capacity, fourth among the states. In 2018, California reduced its number of turbines but still increased its wind capacity by repowering some turbines to improve their efficiency. Although California has the oldest operable turbine (44 years), Tennessee has, on average, the oldest operating wind turbines, with an average project age of 17 years. California, Wyoming, Minnesota, and Arkansas round out the top five states in terms of oldest project ages, from an average 16 years old in California to an average 12 years old in Arkansas. Wind turbine hub heights have increased over time because turbine blades have gotten longer. Turbines with longer blades and a greater rotor diameter typically have higher nameplate capacity. Older turbines, such as those in California or Tennessee, generally are shorter and have shorter blades than newer turbines, which have higher hub heights to accommodate longer blades.

Customers Sue Over California Wildfire Liability Law – California rapidly passed a new law earlier this month that aims to strike a balance between guarding the state’s investor-owned utilities against insurmountable liability costs from wildfires while also protecting fire victims and ratepayers from skyrocketing costs. The new statute – AB 1054 – has come under legal fire, with two ratepayers filing a lawsuit last week deeming the measure unconstitutional because it forces utility customers to pay into a fund that helps companies pay off their wildfire-related liabilities and costs. With the climate crisis making catastrophic fires more likely, the question of who ultimately pays for the damage becomes even more complicated. Currently the costs are borne by three different parties – the utility companies that often spark the fires with their equipment, the insurance companies that absorb the losses, and taxpayers. All three are increasingly strained. One utility company is already bankrupt, insurers are refusing to renew policies in the riskiest areas, and the public is feeling the pinch with higher taxes, insurance premiums and utility rates. “The challenge is the losses are going to happen regardless. Someone has to pay,” “We can try to mitigate the losses. There are strategies that will mitigate and lessen some of these costs but they’re not going to solve the problem.” The new law, AB 1054, was passed as an urgent matter by the state and is intended to help stabilize utility companies facing crippling wildfire liabilities. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which filed for bankruptcy in January, reported $30 billion in liabilities from the 2017 and 2018 wildfires that killed more than a hundred people and burned hundreds of thousands of acres. PG&E announced plans to reorganize under Chapter 11 and to bring in fresh leadership with a new board of directors and new CEO. But the company, still facing immediate financial and legal woes, has also pushed for help from state lawmakers. The state last year passed legislation alleviating PG&E’s liability burden for the 2017 fires across the northern wine region. Under that law, PG&E is allowed to pass on much of the damage costs to ratepayers.

Carmakers and California Agree on Emissions Rules – Jerri-Lynn Scofield – Four major carmakers – BMW, Ford, Honda, and Volkswagen – agreed last week to comply “voluntarily” with tougher California state emissions rules. These carmakers account for 30% of the global car market, according to The Verge, Major automakers buck Trump’s emissions rollback by signing deal with California.As I’ve written previously, the Trump Administration was on a collision course with the state over its August 2018 plans to rollback standards previously due to come into force in 2021 (see Trump Regulators and California on Collision Course on Rolling Back Fuel Efficiency Standards).As the Wall Street Journal reports in Auto Makers Agree to Stricter California Tailpipe-Emissions Standards: The Trump administration last year proposed easing Obama-era fuel-economy standards by freezing them at the 2020 levels, or around 37 miles a gallon, through 2026. The current rules, implemented in 2012, call for increases in fuel economy of around 5% annually through mid-decade, to a level of 46.7 miles a gallon.The Feds and California had been engaged in negotiations to agree a compromise, but those talks collapsed in February, according to an Ars Technica report, Car makers, California agree to emissions rules Trump admin is trying to kill. The California standards with which the four carmakers have now agreed to comply are looser than the rules that were supposed to come into effect in 2021, but tighter than the proposed Trump rollback. According to a statement released last week by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), California and major automakers reach groundbreaking framework agreement on clean emission standards: The terms of the framework will deliver the same greenhouse gas reductions in five years as the original Obama standards would have achieved in four. This provides a path forward that allows California and other states to meet their climate and clean air goals, and maintains a national approach for participating automakers who will sell these cleaner cars nationwide. The framework also supports the long-term electrification goals of California and the carmakers.

Lithium Industry Buildup Is Outracing the Electric-Car Boom – Lithium miners are bulking up for a booming future when electric cars go mainstream. But speed bumps loom, with prices tumbling on a burst of new production and demand growth slowing in China. Between mid-2015 and mid-2018, prices for lithium, the soft, silvery-white metal crucial for rechargeable batteries, almost tripled as the world’s fleet of electric vehicles hit the 5 million mark, and the auto industry began to fret over the supply of raw materials. That sparked the opening of six lithium mines in Australia since 2017 as companies raced to gain from an evolving technology. But while the EV boom is coming, it isn’t here yet. Sales growth is slowing in China, the top market, and the drive to fill the battery supply chain has cooled. The result: A 30% price plunge for lithium that’s spurring concern over where the bottom may lie. “The latest EV data did reveal slowing growth, inferring that on top of excess supply, demand is now a problem,” Vivienne Lloyd and other analysts at Macquarie Capital Ltd. wrote in a report this month. “The key interest for investors should be who is likely to survive.” On Monday, shares were largely down for lithium producers worldwide. Charlotte, North Carolina-based Albemarle Corp. fell 1% at 10:06 a.m. in New York trading, while Philadelphia-based Livent Corp. slipped 0.9%. The American depository receipts of Santiago-based Soc. Quimica y Minera de Chile SA fell 0.8%, while in Australia, Pilbara Minerals Ltd. fell 2.1% and Galaxy Resources Ltd. dropped 1.8%. Mineral Resources Ltd. declined 2.6% after it confirmed the price for material from its Mt Marion mine will fall this quarter. In the first quarter of 2019, sales of electric vehicles in China, the largest market for EVs, grew by about 90% compared with a year earlier. While that sounds impressive, it’s half the growth seen between 2017 and 2018, according to Nikolas Soulopoulos at BloombergNEF in London. Meanwhile, lithium output in Australia, the world’s leading producer, is expected to rise about 23% over the next two years. And last month, the mining minister for No. 2 Chile, Baldo Prokurica, said the current administration was seeking to double that country’s production within four years.

Why Consumers Aren’t Buying Electric Cars – Enthusiasm among drivers is lacking about autonomous vehicles and even electric cars, J.D. Power’s latest Mobility Confidence Index has revealed.The results of the survey would be surprising – and bordering on shocking – for the proponents ofEVs and all the headline space these vehicles are getting, with analyst forecasts for their adoption overwhelmingly optimistic. Unlike them, consumers are not as optimistic about the future of plug-in cars and self-driving vehicles.According to the survey, electric cars scored a mobility confidence index reading of 55 on a scale of 100. Self-driving cars scored even lower, at 36 points, which would hardly be a surprise since this technology has yet to mature, and developing trust in it would be a long process.“Out of the box, these scores are not encouraging,” said J.D. Power’s executive director of Driver Interaction & Human Machine Interface Research. “As automakers head down the developmental road to self-driving vehicles and greater electrification, it’s important to know if consumers are on the same road – and headed in the same direction. That doesn’t seem to be the case right now. Manufacturers need to learn where consumers are in terms of comprehending and accepting new mobility technologies – and what needs to be done.”Indeed, the results are worrying, especially for EVs which have been hailed as the drivers of a transport revolution. According to the survey, there are still a lot of people who wouldn’t buy an EV: just 39 percent said they would buy one. Even more people don’t believe EVs are as reliable as ICE cars: 51 percent. One thing the majority of respondents in the survey were positive about in EVswas their beneficial effect on the environment. Among the top problems noted by respondents were the length of time it takes an EV to charge and the length of its range. According to the majority, the former needs to be shortened and the latter extended before they would consider buying an electric vehicle.

$287B Transportation Bill Would Subsidize AltFuel Stations – The newly introduced America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act of 2019 would provide grants for electric, natural gas and hydrogen fueling stations. On Monday a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced the America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act of 2019 (ATIA), which authorizes $287 billion in transportation funding over five years and includes $1 billion to provide grants for electric, natural gas and hydrogen fueling stations. The legislation – introduced by U.S. Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Tom Carper (D-Del.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) – is the largest highway legislation in history, according to a written statement from the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW). Among its “Climate Change” provisions in this section-by-section breakdown of the legislation, ATIA would create a competitive grant program to support deploying alternative fuel vehicle charging and fueling infrastructure for drivers of electric, hydrogen and natural gas vehicles. It would allocate the following amounts each fiscal year from the federal Highway Trust Fund, which is financed by federal fuel taxes and related excise taxes:

• Fiscal 2021: $100 million
• Fiscal 2022: $100 million
• Fiscal 2023: $200 million
• Fiscal 2024: $300 million
• Fiscal 2025: $300 million

“America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act will move our country toward a safer, more connected, efficient and climate-friendly transportation system, one that can endure the test of time and keep up with the demands of a 21st century global economy,” stated Carper. According to Ben Kellison, Wood Mackenzie research director, electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure represents the strongest need within the alternative fuels segment. “With over 1.75 million electric vehicles in North America at the end of 2018, a nearly 60-percent increase from 2017, the need for expanded EV charging infrastructure is greater than that of the other two fuels,” Kellison said in a WoodMac statement emailed to Rigzone.

US Refiners to Learn Fate of Biofuel Waiver Bids— Some small refiners in the U.S. won’t have much longer to wait to hear if they were exempted from biofuel mandates. The Environmental Protection Agency will start deciding on 2018 waivers in the “next few weeks, month at the most,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said on Monday at an event at Monroe Energy LLC’s Trainer refinery in Pennsylvania. Wheeler’s visit followed an invitation from the state’s Republican Senator Pat Toomey, who is renewing efforts with Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein to scrap the ethanol requirement in the Renewable Fuel Standard, calling it a “heavy-handed federal mandate” that drives up gas and food prices. The so-called Renewable Fuel Standard has been a source of contention between agriculture and oil refiners, two constituencies that form part of President Donald Trump’s base. The fight over the small refinery exemptions has been particularly contentious. Wheeler’s visit to the refinery comes just a month after Trump toured an Iowa ethanol plant to laud his administration’s move to allow year-round higher sales of the corn-based fuel. In the wake of Wheeler’s visit, the Fueling American Jobs Coalition — which represents a group of independent refiners — said it’s critical that the cost of complying with the standard is kept at a reasonable level, as reflected in renewable identification numbers. “Attempts to drive up RINs costs serve only to enrich a handful of traders and middlemen; they do nothing to benefit America’s refineries or farmers,” it said in a statement. At the same time, the Renewable Fuels Association, a Washington-based trade group, extended an invitation for Wheeler to visit an ethanol plant to give him an opportunity to “hear the other side of the story.” Wheeler and Toomey also spoke about bankrupt Philadelphia Energy Solutions LLC’s refinery, which is shutting following a fire last month. “There is interest in that site. One of the ways” to improve the chances of it coming back is to have some certainty in their costs and fix the “arbitrary” price fluctuations in RINs, Toomey said.

THE U.S. CORN ETHANOL BOONDOGGLE: Producing 1 Million Barrels Per Day Of Unprofitable Energy — The U.S. Corn Ethanol Industry, the largest in the world, is now losing a serious amount of money producing unprofitable biofuel. While the situation for the ethanol producers was bad in 2018, due to losses stemming from falling margins, it’s even worse this year. This has prompted one of the country’s largest ethanol producers, ADM – Archer Daniels Midland, to sell some of its ethanol assets with the possibility of spinning off its entire ethanol business operation. While higher corn prices and falling revenues have negatively impacted the U.S. Ethanol Industry recently, that is only a small part of a much bigger problem. You see, the EROI (Energy Returned On Investment) for corn-based ethanol, is so low, there’s virtually little if any, net energy produced from the 16 billion gallons of the biofuel supplied by the U.S. industry last year… or any year prior. The main problem as I see it is that the leadership today is not providing the market with wise advice on our energy situation. Instead, we are ignorantly heading over the energy cliff without a care in the world. Unfortunately, this will end badly That being said, according to the Alternative Fuels Data Center, U.S. ethanol production has more than doubled from 6.5 billion gallons in 2007 to 15.8 billion gallons in 2017: As we can see in the chart, the United States is by far the largest ethanol producer (Blue bars), followed by Brazil (Orange bars) at a little more than 7 billion gallons per year. The United States and Brazil account for 85% of global ethanol production. Now, how much corn does the U.S. Ethanol Industry consume to produce nearly 16 billion gallons of its biofuel per year? Well, according to the information from the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) and WorldofCorn.com, the Ethanol Industry consumed nearly 40% of the entire U.S. corn crop last year: Of the total 14.4 billion bushels of the U.S. corn crop in 2018, the domestic ethanol industry devoured 5.5 billion bushels or 38% of the entire supply. So, how much land is needed for U.S. ethanol production?? The USDA states that the farming industry harvested 81.7 million acres in 2018 to supply that 14.4 billion bushels of corn. Thus, the U.S. Ethanol Industry needed 31 million acres of corn just to produce its biofuel last year. How much land is 31 million acres?? That’s nearly 48,500 square miles. Thus, the Ethanol Industry needed the crop acreage of the following states total area to produce its fuel:

1. Rhode Island
2. Delaware
3. Connecticut
4. New Jersey
5. Massachusetts
6. New Hampshire
7. Vermont
8. Maryland (90%)

Three Dartmouth alumni oppose $200 million biomass plant – – Three prominent scientists who are graduates of Dartmouth College want the school to abandon the $200 million biomass heating plant proposal, saying the project would be bad for the environment. George Woodwell, William Schlesinger and John Sterman sent a letter to the college, seeking to have Dartmouth abandon the centerpiece of the school’s green-energy initiative. Woodwell, who founded the Woods Hole Research Center, said the school needs to become an all-electric campus instead of burning wood-based biomass fuels. “The college can do it, and it can afford to do it,” Woodwell said. Schlesinger is the former dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, and Sterman is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of its Sustainability Initiative. The biomass plant would be used, instead of the current steam plant, to heat the college with hot water. The college right now burns through about 3.5 million gallons of No. 6 fuel oil every year to heat its 120 buildings with steam. The biomass plant is part of President Phil Hanlon’s pledge to reduce Dartmouth’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2025 and 80% by 2050. The new plant is estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by 2025. Woodwell said burning biomass fuel instead of heating oil would not reduce the school’s greenhouse gas emissions, but increase them. Wood is less efficient than oil when it comes to releasing energy, and the school would need to burn through more wood, releasing more carbon. Additionally, Woodwell said, large-scale harvesting of wood products to meet the demands of the school’s heating needs would effectively make wood a nonrenewable energy source

T. Boone Pickens ETF to Replace Crude Stocks With Renewables – Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens’ eponymous fund is swapping out one of its crude investment vehicles for renewables, seeing an opportunity in clean energy as fossil fuels get pummeled in the capital markets. BP Capital Fund Advisors LLC plans to revamp an oil-focused exchange-traded fund with a shift to renewables in mid-August, according to a Friday filing. The underlying index was co-developed by BP Capital’s investment adviser and Morningstar Inc., and is made up of North American companies that are “leaders in the transition to a low-carbon economy,” according to a regulatory filing. “A guy that was a good old-fashioned wildcatter is now saying that solar and wind and geothermal and biomass, that we need to embrace it,” Toby Loftin, the firm’s founder, said in an interview in Houston. “He’s been saying that for 11 years publicly, but this just puts the cherry on top.” BP Capital, a spinoff of Pickens’ shuttered hedge fund, launched the oil ETF just last year, offering investors exposure to companies that benefited from a rise in global crude prices. Brent oil futures are down about 15% in the last year while BP Capital’s ETF, which trades under the ticker BOON, is down almost 20%. Meanwhile, both the WilderHill Clean Energy Index is up 19% in the past 12 months and a Bloomberg Intelligence index of large solar companies is up 1.7%.

Gold Miners Murder Indigenous Leader, Force Villagers in Brazil’s Amazon to Flee – Gold miners invaded indigenous territory in Brazil‘s Amazon, killing one leader and prompting villagers to flee for safety, The New York Times reported Saturday. The violence confirms fears that right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro‘s promises to open protected lands to mining and other extractive industries will have devastating consequences for indigenous communities. “The president is responsible for this death,” opposition Sen. Rodolfe Rodrigues told The New York Times. Rodrigues received an urgent voice message from leaders of the Wajãpi tribe, who live in the state of Amapfl in Northern Brazil. “They are armed with rifles and other weapons,” community leader Jawaruwa Waiãpi said in the message. “We are in danger. You need to send the army to stop them.” Federal police arrived in the area Sunday, and both police and the federal prosecutors’ office said they would investigate the incident, BBC News reported. The murdered leader was identified as 68-year-old Emyra Wajãpi. His body was found with stab wounds in a river Wednesday, according to Brazil’s indigenous rights agency Funai. Armed miners entered the village of Yvytotõ Friday, occupying a home and prompting the villagers to flee 40 minutes on foot to Mariry village, according to accounts from BBC News and Survival International. The Guardian reported that villagers fled Mariry to the larger village of Aramirã, where shots were fired on Saturday. “The garimpeiros [miners] invaded the indigenous village and are there until today. They are heavily armed, they have machine guns. That is why we asking for help from the federal police,” 26-year-old tribe member Kureni Waiãpi, who lives in Pedra Branca do Amapari, said, as The Guardian reported. “If nothing is done they will start to fight.” As the villagers sent their message pleading for help Saturday, Bolsonaro once again expressed his desire to open indigenous reserves to mining, speaking of the resources located in the Raposa Serra do Sol and Yanomami reserves, where mining invasions are common. Rodrigues said the weekend’s incident was the first invasion of Waiãpi land in 30 years, according to BBC News.

Blackjewel Miners Block Railroad To Demand Pay From Bankrupt Coal Company – Some coal miners left without pay by the bankruptcy of coal company Blackjewel LLC are protesting by blocking a coal train in eastern Kentucky. The stand-off began early Monday when five miners blocked the train from leaving the Cumberland, Kentucky, plant. Despite police asking them to leave, miners spent the night blocking the railroad to protest Blackjewel moving coal while miners have yet to be paid. Blackjewel miner Bobby Sexton traveled from Corbin, Kentucky, to support his fellow miners who, like himself, have not received their last paycheck from the company,which filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 1.“We want answers, we want our money, we want paid,” Sexton said. “We’re gonna make a stand.” The standoff follows a tumultuous month for the country’s sixth-largest coal producer and its 1,700 employees. Blackjewel controls 24 active coal mines and processing and prep facilities in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia and two large surface mines in Wyoming. The unfolding bankruptcy proceedings have been chaotic. While most of the company’s Wyoming employees have received back wages, the majority of the company’s 1,110 Appalachian miners have not been paid.Appalachian employees are owed nearly $ 11.8 million in payroll and taxes, as well as $1.2 million in employee retirement contributions.

EPA proposal scraps limits on coal plant waste — The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed scrapping restrictions on arsenic-laden waste from coal-fired power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed lifting some regulations on coal ash, the residue left after burning coal, which is filled with hazardous substances that can leach into the water supply and cause health problems. “I can say without hesitation that this is an extremely dangerous proposal that will do lasting harm to communities near coal ash reuse sites and coal ash waste piles,” said Lisa Evans, senior counsel with Earthjustice. Coal ash is used in a variety of ways, largely as a replacement for soil. It can be used to create level ground for construction projects or sprinkled over landfills as a protective cover. But coal ash has been deemed responsible for contaminating water with arsenic, which is linked with some types of cancer. The latest proposal from the EPA would eliminate restrictions from 2015 that limited coal ash use to 12,400 tons per site. The Trump administration proposal would allow projects to use as much coal ash as they want but would have to file a demonstration that shows the project won’t cause harm if it’s close to certain features like groundwater or wetlands. But Evans said that’s not a realistic safeguard. “That demonstration doesn’t have to be defended to any regulatory agency or be posted for public notice or be written by any engineer or environmental professional,” Evans said. “You’ve got a fairly meaningless demo having to be created.”

Pritzker signs bill to deal with coal ash – Gov. JB Pritzker signed legislation Tuesday aimed at preventing coal ash pollution in Illinois communities. Among other things, the new law prohibits coal ash discharge into the environment and requires Illinois Environmental Protection Agency approval for closure of ash impoundments and guaranteed financial assistance from owners or operators of those impoundments for future closure or maintenance costs. The bill was spearheaded by Sen. Scott Bennett and Rep. Carol Ammons, two Champaign Democrats. Bennett’s district includes coal ash ponds from the now-retired Vermilion Power Station that threaten to contaminate groundwater and the Middle Fork of the Vermilion River. “Coal ash is a public health issue and a pollution issue,” Pritzker said in a statement. “This new law will protect our precious groundwater and rivers from toxic chemicals that can harm our residents.” City Water, Light and Power operates ash ponds near Lake Springfield, the source of Springfield’s drinking water. The utility plans to close them, but it was criticized in a report by several environmental groups last year for not having a closure plan and not being transparent with residents about possible contamination. CWLP called the report misleading and said the ash ponds did not pose a risk to drinking water. It provided a statement Tuesday from chief utility engineer Doug Brown about the effect of the new law on the utility.

Justice signs power plant bill amid controversy over lawsuit – WV MetroNews – The bill to financially relieve a power plant in Pleasants County has been signed by Gov. Jim Justice, but not without controversy. At the bill signing ceremony on Tuesday, Justice denied he knew of the $3 million payout on a coal deal dispute between his company and the power plant’s owner when he supported the $12.5 million tax cut bill for FirstEnergy Solutions.“There’s not one cell in me that knew anything about a lawsuit that existed with my companies,” he said to the crowd. “Maybe I should have known but not one cell.”FirstEnergy Solutions filed for bankruptcyin 2018 and operates over the Pleasants Power Station. The bill cuts the business and occupation tax for that plant.John Judge, the CEO of FirstEnergy Solutions, had previously said the Pleasants Power Station in Willow Island would likely close within the year if it had to continue paying the tax.Justice and his office have said there is no evidence that the federal lawsuit has anything to do with the tax relief signed into law on Tuesday.“Never beyond never. I will never ever do anything for me over the goodness of our state and especially you,” Justice said.Some lawmakers were left questioning their vote after finding out about the lawsuit days after.

NC, VA meetings to detail Duke Energy coal ash settlement (AP) – Meetings scheduled for next month will explain an agreement between government officials and Duke Energy wrapping up the restoration obligations the country’s largest electricity company faces for a massive spill of burned coal residues five years ago. Federal, North Carolina and Virginia agencies announced Friday two public information sessions to answer questions on Aug. 6 in Danville, Virginia, and Aug. 7 in Eden, North Carolina. The leak of waste Duke Energy stored after burning coal for power coated about 70 miles (110 kilometers) from a power plant on the Dan River, on the border of the two states. Duke Energy spokesman Bill Norton said the company won’t disclose how much it has spent on restoration, which includes buying more than 500 acres to be incorporated into parks by both states.

First nuclear fuel order placed for Vogtle expansion project – Georgia Power has ordered the first nuclear fuel load for Unit 3 at the Vogtle nuclear expansion project. A group led by Georgia Power is spending close to $25 billion adding two new reactor units to the facility. The nuclear fuel order will be the first placed for a newly designed U.S. reactor in more than 30 years, the utility noted. Consisting of 157 fuel assemblies with each measuring 14 feet tall, the fuel will eventually be loaded into the Unit 3 reactor vessel to support startup once the reactor begins operating. After this initial fueling, approximately one third of the total fuel assemblies will be replaced during each refueling outage after the units begin operating, similar to the process used at existing Vogtle units 1 and 2. The fuel order for Vogtle Unit 3 comes just months after the placement of the containment vessel top, which was witnessed by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, North America’s Building Trades Unions President Sean McGarvey, members of Congress and all five members of the Georgia Public Service Commission. The vessel top placement signifies that all modules and large components have been placed inside the unit. In addition, the placement of three low-pressure turbine rotors and the generator rotor inside the Unit 3 turbine building have also been completed. The turbine rotors, weighing approximately 200 tons each and rotating at 1,800 revolutions per minute, will pass steam through the turbine blades to power the generator and supply electricity to the grid. The high-pressure turbine rotor will be installed in the coming weeks.

FirstEnergy’s Perry Nuclear Power Plant had an Emergency Shutdown Saturday, Still Not in Operation – The nuclear power plant in Perry, Ohio, operated by the FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC), had an emergency shutdown Saturday evening. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) event log shows that at 7:29 p.m. on July 27, the reactor automatically shut down after a “main turbine trip.” Via the event log’s summary, the trip was “not complex,” but its cause is still unknown and is being investigated by FENOC. The PR firm handling FirstEnergy’s media inquiries told Scene Tuesday that that plant was still shut down. FENOC was “making preparations” for restarting the reactor after the outage, which they say occurred during routine weekly testing. “FirstEnergy Solutions will continue to make the safety of our communities and employees our top priority,” read a prepared statement. When Scene inquired how long it would be before the reactor was up and running – hours? days? – a spokeswoman said that because the Perry plant operates in the “competitive market,” they do not disclose expected outage lengths.

Nuclear plant law may fuel 2020 ballot fight – Both sides agree that Ohio’s new energy law is a “bailout,” but a fight may lie before voters over who’s being bailed out. Gov. Mike DeWine last week signed House Bill 6 into law to require consumers, beginning in 2021, to pay surcharges on their monthly bills to subsidize operations of two nuclear power plants along Lake Erie, six utility-scale solar fields, and a pair of coal-fired plants in southern Ohio and southeast Indiana. This week, a committee calling itself Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts filed 2,866 signatures to submit proposed petition language to Attorney General Dave Yost for his review. The attorney general has until Aug. 8 to weigh in on the accuracy of the written summary that would be shown to would-be petition signers to put the law on the ballot in November, 2020. The committee refers to it as “bailing out a multi-billion corporation,” referring to FirstEnergy Solutions, the two nuclear plants’ owner. Supporters of the law also call it a bailout – of consumers. They argue that customers will see net savings on their bills as current mandates for renewable power and energy efficiency are scaled back and then ended. That debate is likely to be at the heart of any campaign ahead. But first, once it gets the green light from Mr. Yost, the committee must gather at least 265,774 signatures of registered voters by Oct. 21 that can stand up to review by county boards of election. Because of the lateness in this election year, the question could not appear on the ballot until the general election of 2020. The law would not take effect in the meantime.

U.S. Nuclear Arms Plant Files Reported Missing – The U.S. Department of Justice won’t turn over 60 boxes of files about a nuclear arms plant in Colorado because it says it can’t find the files. The missing documents were presented to a grand jury during a two-year criminal investigation that looked into environmental crimes committed at Rocky Flats, which produced plutonium triggers for the nation’s nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War, as the Denver Post reported.The nuclear plant, just outside of Denver, operated from 1952 to 1989 when it shut down amid the grand jury investigation. While running, it had a history of fires, leaks and spills. Files about the plant, however, have remained a state secret since the grand jury investigation concluded in 1992.The site was cleaned and opened up last year as a national wildlife refuge. But a coalition of environmental activists, former nuclear workers, nearby residents and public health advocates filed a motion in federal court asking that the files be made public, as the Associated Press reported.”This is not a quest for guilt,” Patricia Mellen, one of the group’s attorneys said, as the Associated Pressreported. “We need the information to protect the public. That’s the issue.”The group will file a motion to ask a federal judge on Wednesday to demand that the U.S. Department of Justice find the missing documents within 30 days. They say the documents could show whether the government did enough to clean up the site before turning part of it into a wildlife refuge and opening it to hikers and bicyclists.

Despite denials, study claims 2017’s mysterious radioactive cloud did come from Russia -In early October 2017 a number of European radiation monitoring bodies began to report spikes in atmospheric radioactivity. The information quickly spread across an informal network of monitoring stations known as the Ring of Five (Ro5). Georg Steinhauser, from the University of Hanover, explains the anomalous nature of this radioactive release was immediately apparent. And, within days, a number of reports from detection laboratories across Europe had verified this considerable, and unusual, event. “The Ro5 members operate monitoring stations on a routine basis, as the surveillance measurements of the national radiation protection authorities,” Steinhauser tells New Atlas. “We did not anticipate any release, but we observed it immediately, when it happened.”The radioactive isotope being detected was ruthenium-106 (106Ru). Not only was the atmospheric presence of this rare isotope highly unusual, but the fact it was measured in isolation was particularly strange. This suggested the leak came from a very specific source, most likely a nuclear reprocessing plant. “106Ru is a typical signature of nuclear fission waste material (i.e. it is created following the fission of either uranium or plutonium) and is present in spent fuel rods etc,” explained Paddy Regan, a nuclear physicist from the University of Surrey, back in late 2017. “If it was a reactor leak or nuclear explosion other radioisotopes would also be present in the ‘plume’ and from the reports, they are not.” At the time, all eyes quickly focused on the Mayak nuclear processing facility in the southern Ural mountains of Russia. However, Russian authorities stridently denied any leak could have occurred.

Massive Radiation Leak Dwarfing Fukushima Traced To Russian Research Facility – A massive, unexplained cloud of radiation that swept across Europe in 2017 has been traced to one of Russia’s largest nuclear facilities, according to NewScientist. Located between the Volga river and the Ural mountains, the leak coming from the Mayak nuclear development facility released up to 100 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere as the Fukushima disaster. Italian scientists were the first to raise the alarm on 2 October, when they noticed a burst of the radioactive ruthenium-106 in the atmosphere. This was quickly corroborated by other monitoring laboratories across Europe. Georg Steinhauser at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany says he was “stunned” when he first noticed the event. Routine surveillance detects several radiation leaks each year, mostly of extremely low levels of radionuclides used in medicine. But this event was different.“The ruthenium-106 was one of a kind. We had never measured anything like this before,” says Steinhauser. –NewScientistAfter the radioactivity was detected, the Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Security in Paris soon concluded that the most likely source of the leak was the Mayak facility – something Russian officials denied at the time, instead suggesting that the source may have been emissions from a radionuclide satellite battery burning up during re-entry. The team which tracked down the source of the emission ruled out a satellite because no space organizations reported missing any at the time, and the pattern of radiation in the atmosphere didn’t match that of a satellite’s reentry. The report claims that despite being so much higher than the Fukushima release, the radiation level in the Mayak incident wasn’t high enough to impact human health.

Astronomers Stunned After ‘City-Killer’ Asteroid ‘Snuck Up On Us Pretty Quickly’ – A giant ‘city-killer’ asteroid that just whizzed past earth seemingly appeared “out of nowhere” has stunned astronomers after only being discovered last week, days before it flew within around 45,000 miles from earth – or less than 20% of the distance to the moon, according to the Washington Post. “I was stunned,” said Alan Duffy – lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia. “This was a true shock.” This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.” –Washington Post “It snuck up on us pretty quickly,” said Michael Brown, an associate professor at Australia’s Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy, adding later “People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.” The asteroid was discovered by separate astronomy teams in the United States and Brazil – while information on the ‘city-killer’ was announced only hours before it shot past Earth. “It shook me out my morning complacency,” said Brown. “It’s probably the largest asteroid to pass this close to Earth in quite a number of years.”

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