Environmental News For The Week Ending 19October 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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Johnson & Johnson recalls baby powder due to asbestos concerns — Johnson & Johnson announced on Friday that it’s initiating a voluntary recall in the United States of its popular Johnson’s Baby Powder due to low levels of asbestos contamination. Johnson & Johnson shares plunge on reports of asbestos in baby powder 01:10 The recall, which is limited to one lot of baby powder bottles produced and shipped in the United States last year, comes in response to a US Food and Drug Administration test that found levels of chrysotile asbestos contamination in samples from a bottle purchased online, according to the company. “I understand today’s recall may be concerning to all those individuals who may have used the affected lot of baby powder,” Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Ned Sharpless said in a statement on Friday. “I want to assure everyone that the agency takes these concerns seriously and that we are committed to our mandate of protecting the public health.” “The FDA continues to test cosmetic products that contain talc for the presence of asbestos to protect Americans from potential health risks,” Sharpless said.

Toxic Metals Found in 95 Percent of Baby Foods – Heavy metals that may damage a developing brain are present in 95 percent of baby foods on the market, according to new research from the advocacy organization Healthy Babies Bright Futures (HBBF), which bills itself as an alliance of scientists, nonprofit organizations and donors trying to reduce e xposures to neurotoxic chemicals during the first three years of development. Researchers commissioned by HBBF looked at 168 different baby foods that spanned 61 brands commonly found on grocery store shelves. From that large sample, 95 percent were contaminated with one or more of four toxic heavy metals – arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury.The high prevalence of the toxic metals meant that 26 percent of the foods tested had all four of the heavy metals.”Arsenic, lead and other heavy metals are known causes of neurodevelopmental harm,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and director of the Program in Global Public Health and the Common Good in the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society at Boston College, in an HBBF issued statement. “Low level exposures add up, and exposures in early life are especially dangerous. The cumulative impact of exposures is what makes this a significant concern that demands action.”Foods with the highest concentration of neurotoxins tended to be rice-based products, sweet potatoes and fruit juices, according to the report.”Even in the trace amounts found in food, these contaminants can alter the developing brain and erode a child’s IQ. The impacts add up with each meal or snack a baby eats,” said the analysis, as CNN reported.Four of seven infant rice cereals had a toxic form of arsenic in excess of the FDA’s threshold of 100 parts per billion (ppb).”These popular baby foods are not only high in inorganic arsenic, the most toxic form of arsenic, but also are nearly always contaminated with all four toxic metals,” the analysis said, as CNN reported. The report also found that 83 percent of baby foods tested had more lead than the 1-ppb limit endorsed by public health advocates, and one of every five foods tested had over 10 times that amount. “Even very low exposure levels cause lower academic achievement, attention deficits and behavior problems. No safe level of exposure has been identified,” the report said.The results are not far off from an FDA study that found one of the four toxic metals present in 33 of 39 baby foods, according to CNN.. However, this new report looks at a much broader range of products and brands than previous studies have.

Study finds topsoil is key harbinger of lead exposure risks for children – Tracking lead levels in soil over time is critical for cities to determine lead contamination risks for their youngest and most vulnerable residents, according to a new Tulane University study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Lead dust is invisible and it’s tragic that lead-contaminated outdoor areas are unwittingly provided for children as places to play,” says lead study author Howard Mielke, a pharmacology research professor at Tulane University School of Medicine. “Young children are extremely vulnerable to lead poisoning because of their normal crawling, hand-to-mouth, exploratory behavior.” Exposure to lead is often irreversible, particularly for children, and includes behavioral or learning problems, decreased IQ, hyperactivity, delayed growth, hearing problems, anemia, kidney disease and cancer. In rare cases, exposure can lead to seizures, coma, or death. In metropolitan New Orleans, children living in communities with more lead in the soil and higher blood lead levels have the lowest school performance scores. Lead was recently cited as a top risk factor for premature death in the United States, particularly from cardiovascular disease, and is responsible for 412,000 premature deaths each year. The research team began tracking the amount of lead in New Orleans soil in 2001, collecting about 5,500 samples in neighborhoods, along busy streets, close to houses and in open spaces including parks. The team from Mielke’s Lead Lab collected another round of soil sampling 16 years later. Researchers then compared the soil lead with children’s blood lead data maintained by the Louisiana Healthy Homes and Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program from 2000-2005 and 2011-2016. Researchers found that lead in blood samples decreased by 64% from 2000-2005 to the 2011-2016 time period and that decreasing lead in topsoil played a key factor in the declining children’s blood lead levels. The team found black children were three times more likely than white children to have higher blood lead levels, which could be explained bysocioeconomic status and education, the type and age of housing and proximity to major roads and industry. “While the metabolism of the city could theoretically affect all residents equally, in reality social formations produce inequitable outcomes in which vulnerable populations tend to bear greater burdens of contaminant exposure,” Mielke says.

American STD Cases Rise To Record High — Health officals are voicing serious concern after it emerged that the U.S. is experiencing a significant spike in sexually transmitted diseases.As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, 2.4 million cases of gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis combined were recorded in 2018, an all-time high. The data was part of the Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance Report which was published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday. The scale of the problem can be seen by the pace of new infections documented since 2014. Chlamydia went up 19 percent, gonorrhea rose 63 percent, primary and secondary syphilis grew 71 percent while congenital syphilis soared 185 percent.Numerous factors are being blamed for the increase, particularly funding cuts for local health departments that have caused staff shortages and clinic closures, as well as a decrease in condom usage. Reuters quoted the CDC’s directer of STD Prevention, Gail Bohan, who sad that “the resurgence of syphilis, and particularly congenital syphilis, is not an arbitrary event, but rather a symptom of a deteriorating public health infrastructure and lack of access to health care.”That is resulting in less people going to get screened despite the fact that antibiotics can cure chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis.Cases are highest among adolescents and young adults with over half occurring among young people aged between 15 and 24.The CDC called for urgent action to curb the problem, with the report stating that “it is imperative that federal, state and local programs employ strategies that maximize long-term population impact by reducing STD incidence and promoting sexual, reproductive, maternal, and infant health”.

Continued rise in STDs highlights bipartisan attack on American healthcare system – The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) increased sharply in 2018, according to an annual report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The increase continues a trend that has persisted for at least a decade and is the result of a conscious, bipartisan attack on the health of the working class. The CDC report “is a cause for deep concern about dangerous gaps in our public health infrastructure,” according to a press release from the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association. The data indicate “neglect of critical public health investments” that has “damaging impacts to public, as well as individual, health,” the groups said. The transmission STDs is entirely avoidable if individuals have knowledge of and access to the appropriate preventive measures. If an infected person goes without treatment, however, STDs can cause infertility, facilitate HIV transmission, and create stigma. The CDC report mainly focuses on three STDs: chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis. Chlamydia was the most common of the three in 2018, when 1,758,668 cases were reported to the CDC. Chlamydia incidence is highest among teenagers and young adults. In 2018, the overall rate of reported cases among females between ages 15 and 24 increased 1.0 percent over the 2017 level and 11.8 percent over the 2014 level. Similarly, rates among men increased 37.8 percent from 2014 to 2018. Reports of chlamydial infection have been increasing since at least 2000. “During 2000 – 2011, the rate of reported chlamydial infection increased from 251.4 to 453.4 cases per 100,000 population,” according to the report. This represents a staggering 80 percent increase during this period. Gonorrhea was the second most common STD in 2018. “Rates of reported gonorrhea have increased 82.6 percent since the historic low in 2009,” the report notes. From 2017 to 2018 alone, the rate of infection increased 5.0 percent (6.0 percent among men and 3.6 percent among women). The increase in gonorrhea infection is particularly alarming, since N. gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes it, can develop resistance to antibiotics quickly. In its investigation of syphilis, the report examines all stages of the disease, including primary and secondary syphilis (i.e., the most infectious stages) and congenital syphilis (i.e., infection transmitted to a baby from its mother). In 2018, the total case count of reported syphilis in all stages was the highest recorded since 1991. The number of reported cases increased 13.3 percent from 2017 to 2018. Furthermore, incidence has increased almost every year since its historic low in 2001, when the disease had been on the brink of eradication.

Diseases are spreading with climate change. Panic doesn’t have to. – When the first locally acquired case of Valley fever was diagnosed in Washington in 2010, health officials were stunned. The disease had only appeared in the state in patients who had recently traveled to the warm and dry corners of the Southwest. But since that time, the disease has been found east of the Cascade Mountains, where an active agricultural industry, and hot, dry summers provide conditions for the disease to thrive. “It’s probably salted all across eastern Washington,” Hill said. Now, new research suggests that Valley fever will continue to spread as the climate changes. This growth is a reflection of a greater trend across the nation as mosquito-borne West Nile virus and tick-borne Lyme disease also expand their range.As more Western communities come into contact with new diseases, public health officials are grappling with how to report risks without generating unnecessary fear. Recent history has shown that poor communication only aggravates the problem, leading to public panic and a loss of trust in the government’s ability to handle outbreaks. Valley fever, or coccidioidomycosis, is caused by the soil-dwelling fungusCoccidioides. It’s most common in hot, dry places like California’s San Joaquin Valley and Arizona. When activities like construction or plowing disturb the soil, the fungus can become airborne, releasing invisible spores that can lodge inside the lungs of humans and other animals. Over half of those infected will catch a mild illness that mimics the flu. But in rare cases – less than 1% – the infection spreads from the lungs to the rest of the body, with consequences that can be deadly. With climate change, more states are becoming hotter and more arid, creating the perfect environment for the fungus to grow, said Morgan Gorris of the University of California Irvine. Gorris and her colleagues published a study this August predicting that by 2100,the fungus’ range could grow from 12 to 17 states, including Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. The number of people who contract the disease may also increase from around 10,000 to 15,000 cases a year.

E-Cig Vaping Led to Lung Cancer in Mice: What Does This Mean for Humans? – A new study found that long-term exposure to nicotine-containing e-cigarette vapor increases the risk of cancer in mice.This study adds to a growing body of research highlighting the potential negative health effects of vaping.The researchers caution in a statement that, because this is a mouse study, the results are not meant to show directly what happens in people who vape. But they argue that the results are concerning enough that, “E-cigarette smoke must be more thoroughly studied before it is deemed safe or marketed that way.” And it comes as the number of vaping-related lung injuries in the U.S. has grown to 1,299 cases, with 26 confirmed deaths. In those cases, federal officials believe cartridges containing THC may be to blame. In the new study, one group of mice were exposed to nicotine-containing e-cigarette vapor for 20 hours per week for 54 weeks.After this time, 22.5 percent of the mice developed a type of lung cancer called an adenocarcinoma.Also, 57.5 percent of these mice developed a rapid growth of cells in the bladder, known as urothelial hyperplasia. This is a type of abnormal tissue growth seen in cancer.Another group of mice breathed nicotine-free e-cigarette vapor for the same duration. None of these mice developed lung cancer, while 6.3 percent (one mouse) developed bladder hyperplasia. The researchers also had a control group of mice who breathed only filtered air. One of these mice (5.6 percent of the total) developed a lung tumor after 54 weeks. None showed signs of abnormal cell growth in the bladder. Dr. Margarita Oks, a pulmonologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said this study shows that e-cigarettes may also carry some of the same health risks as combustible cigarettes.”The reason that the vaping industry has been so successful is because of the claim that vaping is safer than smoking cigarettes,” said Oks, who was not involved in the new research. “This study is showing otherwise, albeit in a mouse model.”

Congress Blames ‘Russian Bot Armies’ For Spread Of Vaping ‘Health Crisis’ – Fearmongering pertaining to the influence of ‘bot armies’ swarming social media platforms has returned to the American discourse – but this time, it’s not about politics. Instead, Congressional investigators are looking into whether e-cigarette companies, the public-health boogeymen of the moment, have been marshaling armies of fake “bot” accounts to carry out an illicit marketing campaign intended to make e-cigarettes seem like a totally benign alternative to smoking and chewing tobacco. Of course, that’s not what the science dictates. The official position of government health officials is that they don’t yet know the extent of the deleterious health effects from vaping, and that, while vaping is likely a healthier alternative compared to smoking, it probably isn’t benign – though it will likely be years until we know for sure. According to a WSJ report, the House Energy and Commerce Committee along with the Attorney General of Massachusetts, is interested in learning whether the major vape companies – including Juul labs and Reynolds American – sought to use ‘bots’ to spread false information. Once again, bots are being used as a ‘boogeyman’, but this time they’re being blamed by the government for helping instigate the vaping ‘health crisis’. However, just like the furor over Russian ‘bots’ on Twitter, it appears investigators are – by leaking the story to WSJ – blowing the influence of bots pitching vaping products out of proportion. As one industry lobbyist accurately explained, bot campaigns are a cheap and ineffective way to get a message out (you get what you pay for). Robert Mueller’s indictment of a Russian troll farm appears to dramatically inflate the influence of ‘bot armies’ and these types of social-media based tactics.

WeWork Removes Thousands Of Phone Booths Due To Elevated Formaldehyde – It isn’t just WeWork’s now-pulled IPO that’s toxic at the company: according to a Business Insider report, the company emailed its tenants on Monday telling them that there was “potentially elevated levels of formaldehyde” in phone booths throughout WeWork offices in the U.S. and Canada. Why they used the word potential is unclear – according to the report, the company admitted that “tests for high levels of formaldehyde came back positive late last week.”The email stated that the company was removing 1,600 phone booth from locations that “may be impacted” in addition to 700 other booths that have yet to be tested for formaldehyde. At some WeWork spaces on Monday, there were taped signs reading: “CAUTION: DO NOT USE” over the phone booths. The company stated in its email that it had received complaints of “odor and eye irritation”. The EPA says that formaldehyde can cause respiratory symptoms and eye, nose and throat irritation. Colleen Wong, a tenant at WeWork’s Rosslyn location in Arlington, Virginia said: “I always noticed, from the first time I entered a phone booth, a strong chemical odor. I assumed it was a new building / equipment type smell. Kind of like glue or a new car.” “They had a chemical smell, like when you get something new in the mail,” a WeWork member from Minneapolis told Bloomberg.

Air Pollution Caused 400,000 Early EU Deaths in 2016, Study Finds – Air pollution in Europe led to more than 400,000 early deaths in 2016, according to the most recent air quality report published by the European Environment Agency (EEA). The report, released Wednesday, found that almost every European who lives in a city is exposed to unhealthy air, Reuters reported. “It is simply unacceptable that any of us should need to worry about whether the simple act of breathing is safe or not,” EEA air quality expert Alberto Gonzfllez Ortiz, who authored the report, told Reuters that, while European air quality was improving, it was not improving fast enough. In fact, the reduction in particulate matter (PM2.5) – the dangerous small particles that enter the lungs and bloodstream and have been linked to a growing list of both physical and mental health problems – has largely stalled since 2014, The Guardian reported. “We do not see any big improvement, or worsening, year on year,” Ortiz told The Guardian. “It is PM2.5 that we should worry most about, and it is coming from domestic heating, industry and transport.” Particulate matter alone was to blame for the around 412,000 air pollution deaths recorded in 2016, the most recent year for which accurate data exists. However, that number is decreasing over time. It was down by about 17,000 from 2015, the report found. Overall, yearly particulate matter deaths have fallen by about half a million since 1990.On a country by country basis, particulate matter levels were the highest in Italy, Poland and the Balkans countries, The Brussels Times reported. However, concentrations were too high on a long-term basis at 69 percent of EU monitoring stations in 2017, the report found. Only Estonia, Finland and Norway did not record any unsafe levels. Levels of nitrogen dioxide – a dangerous gas found in car exhaust – have decreased more steadily than PM2.5, but around 10 percent of EU monitoring stations still recorded unhealthy levels in 2017, according to The Guardian. Also in 2017, 16 out of 28 EU member nations reported at least one case of nitrogen dioxide levels spiking past the EU’s legal mean annual concentration limit of 40 micrograms per cubic meter of air,Reuters said. In London, some stations recorded more than 50 micrograms.

Air Pollution Linked to Risk of ‘Silent’ Miscarriage — A typical adult takes around 20,000 breaths per day. If you live in a megacity like Beijing, with many of those lungfuls you’re likely to inhale a noxious mixture of chemicals and pollutants. According to BreatheLife, the air in the Chinese capital is 7.2 times above safe pollution levels, based on guidelines set out by the World Health Organization.For expectant mothers, that means an increase in the risk of “silent” miscarriages, suggests a new large-scale study published in Nature Sustainability.Air pollution is already known to raise the risk of premature birth, low birth weight and life-threatening health complications for pregnant women, like preeclampsia, which is marked by high blood pressure, or gestational hypertension.But its impact on “silent” or missed miscarriages – where the fetus died or did not develop, but has not been physically miscarried – has been more difficult to establish. A collaborative effort from 16 different authors at several universities in China, the study retrospectively examined the records of more than a quarter million pregnant women in Beijing from 2009 to 2017 in light of the womens’ exposure to air pollution. Among the women whose clinical records were studied, 17,497 – which is 6.8% – were found to have experienced these types of miscarriages. The researchers found the probability of missed miscarriages increased with higher concentrations of air pollutants, taking into consideration different ages, occupations and air temperature.

America’s Dairyland May Have a PFAS Problem — First there was Fred Stone, the third-generation dairy farmer in Maine who discovered that the milk from his cows contained harmful chemicals. Then came Art Schaap, a second-generation dairy farmer in New Mexico, who had to dump 15,000 gallons of contaminated milk a day. While the pollutants in these cases were different, they both belong to the same class of chemicals: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS for short. Numbering in the thousands, the chemicals are used to make a variety of products such as nonstick pans, stain-resistant rugs, water-repellent clothing and food packaging. Industries have been manufacturing most PFAS since the 1940s, but the effects these chemicals have on human health started surfacing only in the past decade or so. Exposure has been linked to serious conditions, including testicular and kidney cancer, colitis, thyroid disorders and suppressed immune systems in children. Many states are just beginning to look for PFAS contamination in drinking water and elsewhere, andplaces like Michigan, where state officials are actively testing for (and finding) these chemicals, are starting to look like contamination hot spots. In reality, the PFAS problem is much more widespread. While Teflon plants and military bases that use firefighting foams are common PFAS sources, another culprit is emerging: sludge produced by sewage treatment plants. Farmers all over the country use such sludge to fertilize their land, potentially contaminating the crops and livestock they produce. And it could be happening in the Midwest, too. Just 30 feet below Marinette, Wisconsin, levels of PFAS were as high as 33,000 parts per trillion (ppt), more than 470 times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s health advisory level for drinking water of 70 ppt – a concentration many experts and states still consider a threat to human health. Tyco Fire Technology Center run by Johnson Controls International knew back in 2013 of its PFAS problem, according to records it submitted to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), but it wasn’t until 2016 that the company documented the chemicals on its property and in the groundwater nearby. The public found out about it only in 2017, four years after Tyco’s original admission, when the company acknowledged to the DNR that its pollution could be spreading. Doug Oitzinger, the former mayor of Marinette knocked on a neighbor’s door to see if anyone had told her about the pollution pooling below her home. She said she hadn’t heard a thing. “We foolishly thought that we had institutions that would protect us from this sort of thing, that this couldn’t happen anymore,” said Oitzinger. “What we’ve discovered is that those institutions didn’t protect us.”

The smell will knock you off your feet’: mass mussel die-offs baffle scientists – Each fall since 2016, wildlife biologist Jordan Richard has returned to the same portion of the Clinch River in Tennessee, braced for the worst – tens of thousands of newly dead mussel shells gleaming from the surface of the water.The mass die-off isn’t recognizable at first. But once Richard sees the first freshwater mussel, which look quite different to their marine cousins of moules frite fame, he scans the river and finds another every five to 10 seconds.“The smell will knock you off your feet,” Richard said. “You see what was a healthy looking river, but now there’s just dead bodies scattered everywhere.” Mussels are the backbone of the river ecosystem because they control silt levels and filter water. And they are facing a mysterious affliction in hotspots in the US and abroad.Richard, who works for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is part of a team investigating the bizarre declines in Tennessee and Virginia, as well as Oregon and Washington. The group includes biologists, pathologists and epidemiologists from the University of Wisconsin and the US Geological Survey. They say others are researching similar episodes in Spain.Of the roughly 300 freshwater mussel species in North America, 71% are considered endangered, threatened or of concern, largely because of human degradation of rivers. They are also vulnerable to the climate crisis, because ofheat and changes to precipitation. In the southeast US alone, nearly two dozen species of mussels are thought to have gone extinct.

African Swine Fever Devastates China’s Pig Herd In September – In August, we reported that at least half of China’s breeding pigs have died from African swine fever or been slaughtered to contain the spreading of the disease. New figures published Monday from the Ministry of Agriculture of the People’s Republic of China showed the pig-apocalypse continues to get worse. The country’s herd in Sept. collapsed 41.1% YoY. China is losing millions of pigs to an outbreak of African swine fever https://t.co/VypseSLjPK pic.twitter.com/1IWZmpNBJX – Inkstone (@InkstoneNews) October 4, 2019 While government estimates are more conservative, the recent plunge in pig herds across the country could be around 50% to 55% by late 4Q19, Rabobank told Reuters.The supply of the country’s favorite meat has collapsed by 40% to 50% this year, depending on what statistics you read. This has already devastated rural communities and pushed up food prices to crisis levels. “Something like 50% of sows are dead,” Edgar Wayne Johnson, a veterinarian who has spent 14 years in China, told Reuters in June.As the chart below shows, the Pork Index Guangdong Daily priced in dollars per kilogram has soared to record highs in Oct., adding pressure on Beijing to contain food-price inflation during the trade war with the US. Pork prices are likely to remain elevated for some time, said Betty Wang, a senior economist at ANZ. She said farmers had culled so many pigs that it would take a while for supplies to build up again. “If people feel that food inflation is going up, it may spur policy actions,” she added, although it wasn’t clear just how Beijing can find a quick and easy substitute to domestic farms.

Kim Jong Un May Be Hiding a Hog Apocalypse From the World –By official accounts, the pig contagion wreaking havoc across Eastern Asia has virtually skipped over North Korea, with a single outbreak reported there in May. But wayward feral pigs have stoked concern that Kim Jong Un’s reclusive state is hiding an African swine fever disaster. Five wild boars were found dead in or near border areas separating the two countries this month before being tested positive for the viral hemorrhagic disease, officials in South Korea said. The finding reflects the freedom with which animals roam the 4-kilometer (2.5 mile) wide buffer zone that divides the nations and creates an involuntary park and refuge for fauna. It also hints at a spillover of the deadly virus from North Korea, where unofficial reports indicate the disease is spreading out of control. South Korea has deployed helicopters to disinfect parts of the 250-kilometer-long border-barrier, near which more than a dozen outbreaks have occurred on farms since the virus was first reported there a month ago.African swine fever has spread to almost all areas of North Korea, and pigs in the western province of North Pyongan have been “wiped out,” said Lee Hye-hoon, who chairs the National Assembly’s intelligence committee, citing South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. The virus killed 22 hogs in May on a cooperative farm about 260 kilometers north of Pyongyang, near the border with China, North Korea’s agriculture ministry said in a May 30 report to the World Organization for Animal Health, or OIE. But since then, there have been no follow-up reports to the Paris-based veterinary body, and scant coverage of the event in state media.

South Korea to Deploy Snipers to Hunt Down North’s Sick Pigs – South Korea will send military snipers and civilian hunters to its northern border Tuesday to eliminate wayward, contagion-carrying pigs from Kim Jong Un’s reclusive neighboring state. The government will also use thermal vision drones to search for hogs infected with African swine fever near the civilian control line, a buffer region near the strip of land dividing the Korean Peninsula, the agriculture ministry said Sunday. The intensified measures aim to exterminate feral pigs in areas including Incheon, Seoul, Goseong and Bukhan River.Five wild boars were found dead in or near border areas this month before being tested positive for the viral hemorrhagic disease, officials in South Korea said. The finding reflects the freedom with which animals roam the area, and hints at a spillover of the deadly virus from North Korea, where unofficial reports indicate the disease is spreading out of control. African swine fever has reached almost all areas of North Korea, and pigs in the western province of North Pyongan have been “wiped out,” said Lee Hye-hoon, who chairs the National Assembly’s intelligence committee, citing South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.

A terrible pandemic is killing pigs around the world, and U.S. pork producers fear they could be hit next – WaPo – U.S. authorities have started active preparations in response to the rising threat of an outbreak of African swine fever, the deadly disease that has decimated the Chinese pig population and is spreading across Asia.The Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service led several functional exercises and drills late last month, working off a scenario of an outbreak of the virus in Mississippi that traveled across state lines before it was discovered. Fourteen states participated in the drill. “We got everyone involved in terms of state troopers, diagnostic labs, private veterinarians and state officials, trying to figure out where the virus was,” said Dave Pyburn, the senior vice president of science and technology for the National Pork Board. “As far as controlling it here, the closer we can get to that index case [the first identified case in an outbreak], the better we can control it.” Experts say the most likely vector for the disease arriving in North America is tainted animal feed. According to the World Organization of Animal Health, the disease has spread to more than 50 countries. As many as half of China’s pigs, an estimated 300 million, have died of the virus or been exterminated since the disease took hold 13 months ago. In the past months it has advanced to Vietnam, Laos and South Korea. At the beginning of September, the Philippines confirmed African swine fever in at least seven villages near Manila, requiring 7,000 pigs to be euthanized. And at the end of September, East Timor reported more than 100 cases to the World Organization for Animal Health. With these developments, the American pork industry has begun mobilizing. Experts say the risk of a domestic outbreak of African swine fever is increasing. “It’s a higher probability, that’s for sure,” Pyburn said. “What are the odds? I don’t have a precise number I can give. But take a look at what this virus is doing around the globe today. And then look at the way goods and people travel. This would have a devastating effect on our industry. It’s the nastiest disease we have on the planet.”

Climate change threatens hundreds of North American bird species with extinction, study says – Nearly two-thirds of North American birds studied will go extinct if global warming hits 3 degrees Celsius (5.4˚F), a new report from the National Audubon Society finds. Orioles, eagles, grouse and gulls are among 389 types of bird — 64% of 604 species assessed on this continent — that are highly or moderately vulnerable to climate change, the study says. The stark warning follows research published last month that showed the US and Canada had lost 2.9 billion birds in about the last 50 years. The Baltimore Oriole is one of the species of birds that could be severely hit by all the impacts of climate change. The existential threat to birds also impacts humanity. As canaries warned coalminers of invisible death in the industrial era, now birds of every shape and size can be life-or-death alerts in the age of global warming.But if humanity can somehow escape the proverbial coal mine in time and hold warming to the Paris Accord target of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7˚F), 76% of the most vulnerable species should survive, the Audubon study states.”Our findings in this report are the fifth alarm in a five-alarm fire,” says David O’Neill, Audubon’s Chief Conservation Officer, in the study called Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink. Golden eagles are among the 389 types of bird that may not be able to survive in North America, the report says. He called for immediate action to slow the warming of the planet to save birds and much more. “It’s a combination of changes in temperature, precipitation and vegetation,” says Brooke Bateman, Audubon’s Senior Climate Scientist. “And birds are going to have to move and shift to keep up with these changes. And then on top of the range shifts, we also have the pressure of changes in sea level rise, urbanization, extreme weather events that are going to affect these species no matter where they go.”

Two-thirds of U.S. birds face extinction due to climate-linked ’emergency’: Audubon (Reuters) – Two-thirds of bird species in North America, already disappearing at an alarming rate, face extinction unless immediate action is taken to slow the rate of climate change, the National Audubon Society said on Thursday. “We are in the midst of a bird emergency,” Audubon’s Chief Executive David Yarnold said at a news briefing. “This is as much about the future that we face and our children face as the birds face.” If the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming isn’t slowed, 389 out of 604 species in North America will face extinction, a report by the conservation group said. As the climate warms, birds would be forced to relocate to find a more favorable habitat, and they may not survive this journey, the report said. But if the expected rise in temperatures of 3 degrees Celsius by 2080 is slowed to 1.5 degrees Celsius, nearly 40% of those species would no longer be considered vulnerable, researchers said. Most threatened are species that live in the cold Arctic zone and those living in coastal areas. “More than 50% of coastal birds will have to adjust their ranges,” said Audubon senior scientist Brooke Bateman. Birds imperiled by the Earth’s predicted temperature rise include such widely recognized and beloved species as the piping plover, Baltimore oriole and golden eagle, Audubon said. While some species are predicted to die due to rising temperatures, other birds that thrive in warmer, southern climates will relocate to northern locales, a move already underway, Bateman said. Her father now regularly sees Carolina wrens, the state bird of South Carolina, near his home on New York’s Long Island, she said. American robins, once recognized in northern U.S. states as a harbinger of spring when they return from their southern migration to avoid winter’s chill, instead are staying put during increasingly warm North American winters, she said. Audubon’s report sounds the alarm just weeks after a similar one about threats to the avian population drew widespread attention.

To stop an insect die-out, the world needs pollinator-friendly policies, scientist warns (interview transcript) Insects are among the most successful creatures on the planet. Some estimates date their origins to 400 million years ago. Of the 7-8 million species documented on Earth, around three quarters are likely bugs. Insects like bees, butterflies and even certain species of beetle and ant incidentally pollinate our crops when they collect protein-rich pollen and sugary nectar, ensuring we have enough to eat. But they’re in decline and that would have serious consequences for the world. DW spoke to Josef Settele, a professor and entomologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in the eastern German city of Halle, about whether we need to worry about our food and how politics and business could intervene to halt the insect decline. Settele was in the global spotlight in May 2019 when the United Nations IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services was published. In the report, the entomologist and his colleagues determined that around 1 million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction. Insects are being hit particularly hard. The scientists estimate that around 10% of all insect species are threatened with dying out over the next few decades – and that’s a conservative calculation.

Officials Warn: If You See This Fish That Breathes Air On Land, “Kill It Immediately” -Wildlife officials in Georgia are issuing a blunt message to anglers: if you come in contact with a certain invasive fish species that has suddenly appeared in the state, be sure to kill it immediately. The fish in question is the northern snakehead fish, which can breathe on air and survive for days on dry land.The Georgia Department of Natural Resources is sounding the alarm on the fish after an angler reportedly caught one in a private pond in Gwinnett County. The Wildlife Resources Division of the agency is confused as to how the snakehead, which has never before been seen in the state, has suddenly come to exist in Georgian waters, NBC reports. If you find a northern snakehead in Georgia, kill it immediately and contact a DNR Regional Office. https://t.co/dbxWM0gaZQ – Georgia DNR Wildlife (@GeorgiaWild) October 10, 2019In a press release, the department describes the snakehead as a long, thin fish with a long dorsal fin along its back and a brown, blotchy appearance. The fish can grow to up to three feet in length and is capable of living on land, breathing air, and surviving in low oxygenated systems. They are usually found in freshwater.The non-native invasive species is native to the Yangtze River basin in China, but has also been reported in 14 states throughout the United States. For some time, snakeheads were sold in pet stores and live food fish markets, as well as in restaurants, in various major U.S. cities. In 2002, they were added to the list of injurious wildlife under the Lacey Act in 2002. The Lacey Act lists at least 726 species as “injurious,” including zebra mussels, Burmese python, and numerous species of salmon and salamander. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), injurious species “have been determined to be injurious to the health and welfare of humans, the interests of agriculture, horticulture or forestry, and the welfare and survival of wildlife resources of the U.S.” The United States Geological Survey also said that some snakeheads were even released by hobbyists or religious groups who practice “prayer animal release,” an activity whereby individuals purchase animals and then release them “to earn merits with a deity.”

The men fighting Florida’s python epidemic – Dusty “Wildman” Crum and Mike “Cowboy” Kimmel are participants in the Python Elimination Programme of the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD). They work as bounty hunters in the Everglades, a sultry wilderness that covers the southernmost reaches of the Sunshine State, and are paid to catch and kill as many Burmese pythons as they can find. But laying their hands on fast-moving, highly dangerous, camouflaged reptiles in a swamp that extends for thousands of square miles is about as easy as it sounds.The pair don’t always work together. When they hunt alone, they get to keep all the bounty for themselves. But you never know when you might find yourself facing a giant python. And Wildman’s mother worries about him when he ventures out alone. No one knows precisely how many pythons inhabit the Everglades. The authorities estimate that there are around 100,000, but there could be more. And no one can offer a clear explanation of how they got there. As their name suggests, Burmese pythons are not native to Florida. They come from South-East Asia, where they are endangered. Most experts point towards the destruction of a ramshackle breeding facility by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, during which many pythons escaped. The population has grown thanks to the addition of a large number of pet snakes released by their owners over the course of many years.Pythons are not the most obvious choice of animal sidekick. They are not soppily affectionate. They do not sing, perform tricks or tumble around with balls of string. You can’t take them for a walk in a park. Nevertheless, many people appreciate their company. According to the American Pet Products Association, in 2016 just under 1% of American households – which still amounts to nearly a million – kept at least one snake as a pet. Having fallen for an adorable baby snake, however, many pet-owners are unable to cope with a fully grown one. Pythons can reach lengths of up to 23ft (seven metres). They become dangerous long before that. In 2011 in Florida, an 8ft python was found coiled around a dead toddler in her cot, its fangs embedded in her forehead. This is how a python dines: it bites first, then coils around its victim, squeezing hard to cause suffocation. Finally it dislocates its jaw to swallow the meal whole. Using its tail, it can cram more than its own body weight down its throat.

Trump Advisory Panel Suggests Bringing More Private Business Into National Parks – An advisory panel appointed by Trump’s first Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, has recommended privatizing National Parks campgrounds, allowing food trucks in and setting up WiFi at campgrounds while also reducing benefits to seniors, according to the panel’s memo.The advisory committee, the Subcommittee on Recreation Enhancement Through Reorganization, passed its recommendations along to Interior Sec. David Bernhardt. It is part of the Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee, which Zinke to “advise the Secretary of the Interior on public-private partnerships across all public lands,” according to The Hill.The draftees suggest that the Senior Pass, which is an $80 lifetime pass to people 62 and over and entitles them to a 50 percent discount on campgrounds, have some blackout dates that would void their discounts. The memo also suggests generating revenue by renting out cabins and having vendors rent out tents and other camping equipment within the national parks.The memo lists food trucks and mobile vendors as part of its innovative management strategy and it suggests offering mobile connectivity throughout parks, not just at campgrounds.The Federal government has a long history of not providing adequate funding to the National Parks System, which has created a $12 billion maintenance backlog, according to The Hill. Drafters of the plan say their suggestions are a roadmap to a much-needed upgrade of deteriorating infrastructure that will attract a younger, more diverse audience.

Early Blizzard Wallops Vulnerable Crops – WSJ – Farmers who delayed planting in waterlogged fields this spring face a new threat as they race to harvest their crops: snow. Heavy snowfall and high winds in the past several days buffeted northern Farm Belt states where many farmers delayed historic planting last spring. The early blizzard bookended a trying year for U.S. farmers. Crop prices generally remain under pressure because of high supplies and slackened demand as a result of the U.S.-China trade war. And many crops now threatened by a freeze are immature because they were planted late…

Historic Midwest Blizzard Has Farmers Seeing “Massive Crop Losses…As Devastating As We’ve Ever Seen” –An unprecedented October blizzard that hit just before harvest time has absolutely devastated farms all across the U.S. heartland. As you will see below, one state lawmaker in North Dakota is saying that the crop losses will be “as devastating as we’ve ever seen”. . Due to endless rain and horrific flooding early in the year, many farmers in the middle of the country faced very serious delays in getting their crops planted. So we really needed good weather at the end of the season so that the crops could mature and be harvested in time, and that did not happen. Instead, the historic blizzard that we just witnessed dumped up to 2 feet of snow from Colorado to Minnesota. In fact, one city in North Dakota actually got 30 inches of snow. In the end, this is going to go down as one of the worst crop disasters that the Midwest has ever seen, and ultimately this crisis is going to affect all of us. According to the USDA, only 15 percent of all U.S. corn and only 14 percent of all U.S. soybeans had been harvested as of October 6th… Only 58% of U.S. corn was mature as of Oct. 6 and just 15% was harvested, according to the latest data from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). North Dakota’s crop was furthest behind, with just 22% of corn mature and none harvested as of Sunday, while South Dakota’s corn was 36% mature with 2% harvested. U.S. soybeans were only 14% harvested as of Sunday, 20 percentage points behind the average pace, USDA data showed. North Dakota and Minnesota beans were just 8% gathered while Iowa’s and South Dakota’s crop was only 5% harvested. So that means that the vast majority of our corn and the vast majority of our soybeans were exposed to this giant storm, and the losses are going to be off the charts. According to North Dakota state lawmaker Jon Nelson, we should expect “massive crop losses – as devastating as we’ve ever seen”… Unharvested wheat in the region probably will be a total loss, he told the Associated Press.

Indigenous farming practices failing as climate change disrupts seasons – THE HOPI TRIBESMEN of northern Arizona are born meteorologists. When snake weed blooms in the spring, they know they’re in for bumper summer rains. When the desert stays largely barren, they prepare for drought. As far back as tribal lore goes, Hopi farmers have sustained themselves and their crops by diligently reading their arid mesa surroundings. This summer, however, their millennia-old forecasting techniques failed them, and not for the first time in recent years. The weeds sprouted in great numbers in April. The usual rains in August did not come at all. Were it not for local grocery stores and the seed stockpiles they maintain in anticipation of the occasional bad year, many Hopi might well have gone hungry. “These indicators have always been dang reliable. We have over 2000 years of replication. We know our fields, like many indigenous people,” says Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi farmer who grows corn, beans, squash, and melons on the tribal reservation several hundred miles north of Phoenix. “But when I talk to my people, they say our winters are getting longer, so people plant a little later, and that can wreak havoc. Now we’re kind of in a bad situation.” They’re not alone. Climate change is upending millions of people’s lives, yet few communities are seeing their crops and worldviews crumble quite like those that rely on indigenous weather forecasting. Dependent in many cases on millennia-old trial and error, as well as analyses of the landscape to gauge planting cycles, their fields are withering as the conditions on which the calendars are predicated change. Without that accumulated wisdom to fall back on – bird migrations, wind direction, stars, and more – farmers are feeling particularly defenseless just as other consequences of climate change complicate their lives.

Great Lakes Flooding: The Warning Signs That Homes Must Be Moved – Every fall, I take my environmental studies class camping at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on Lake Michigan. Some years the beach extends more than three meters to the water. This year, in many spots, there was no beach at all. The story is the same throughout the Great Lakes. During my summer research trip to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, I lost track of the number of submerged docks and buildings; swimming near the shore of Lake Huron was a bad idea because of the high risk of electrocution from inundated boathouses that still had the juice flowing.Water levels in the Great Lakes have always fluctuated. But climate change is throwing past patterns out of whack. Almost every Great Lake reached record levels in 2019. And the latest studies predict that levels might reach even higher in 2020.But instead of engineered solutions, we should be concentrating on getting out of the way. My research looks at the ways that Canada and the U.S., along with the bilateral International Joint Commission, have tried to understand and control water in the Great-Lakes St. Lawrence River Basin for well more than a century. Both countries have made large diversions in and out of the Great Lakes, such as the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, as well as numerous smaller diversions and canals. In the 1950s, dams along the St. Lawrence transformed this gigantic river into a hydropower pool and navigation channel and, controversially, to help regulate water levels in Lake Ontario. Control works in the St. Marys River partially regulate Lake Superior. Niagara Falls is treated like a tap to generate both hydropower and beauty. Then there is the 100-plus years of perpetually dredging channels and harbours for navigation. Meanwhile, communities have steadily encroached on the water. We turned seasonal sandbars into subdivisions. Metropolises like Toronto and Chicago extended their footprints hundreds of meters into the lake. And it’s not only large dams, diversions and cities that have impacts. Thousands of small individual actions add up, such as the breakwalls, retaining walls and the rip-rap (graded stone or crushed rock) property owners erect to protect boathouses, cottages and other structures. These engineered interventions have myriad ecological impacts and unintended consequences, such as invasive species and impaired water quality. They’ve also instilled a societal hubris that we can – and should – control water on a large scale in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system.However, natural forces – rain, snow, ice cover, temperature, evaporation – are the biggest determinant of water levels in the Great Lakes. Water needs breathing space. We need to move out of the way, rather than try to move water out of our way.

Trump Admin Moves Closer to Slashing Protections for World’s Largest Temperate Rainforest — The Trump administration has moved one step closer to opening Earth’s largest intact temperate rainforest to logging. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service announced it would draft an environmental impact statement exempting Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from the 2001 Roadless Rule, which prohibits road construction and timber harvesting on 58.5 million acres of National Forest land. The administration’s proposal would open more than half of the Tongass National Forest’s 16.7 million acres to logging, The Washington Post reported. Environmental advocates immediately raised the alarm about the proposal. The Tongass is an important habitat for wildlife, including salmon, and an important tool for fighting the climate crisis. It stores around 8 percent of all the carbon sequestered in U.S. national forests in the lower 48 states, Earthjustice pointed out. “The world’s largest remaining intact temperate rainforest containing vital old-growth trees is under attack because of efforts to undo the Roadless Rule,” Osprey Orielle Lake, Executive Director of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), told Earthjustice. The Washington Post first reported that the Trump administration would seek to open the forest to development in August, and President Donald Trump himself has asked Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue to exempt the forest from logging limits. In doing so, he acted in accordance with the wishes of Alaska’s Republican congressional delegation, who has asked him to open up the forest. “As Alaskans know well, the Roadless Rule hinders our ability to responsibly harvest timber, develop minerals, connect communities, or build energy projects to lower costs – including renewable energy projects like hydropower, all of which severely impedes the economy of Southeast,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said in a statement reported by The Washington Post. However, the Post noted that timber provides less than one percent of southeast Alaska’s jobs. Seafood processing, on the other hand, provides eight percent and tourism 17 percent. Around 40 percent of West Coast wild salmon spawn in the Tongass. “The push for an Alaska-specific roadless rule has always been just pretext for continuing to subsidize Southeast Alaska’s old-growth timber industry, and it will do so at the expense of recreation and fishing, Native communities, and wildlife,” Andy Moderow, Alaska director at Alaska Wilderness League, said in the Earthjustice press release.

Trump administration proposes expanding logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest –The Trump administration Tuesday proposed allowing logging on more than half of Alaska’s 16.7 million-acre Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in North America. President Trump instructed federal officials to reverse long-standing limits on tree cutting at the request of Alaska’s top elected officials, on the grounds that it will boost the local economy. But critics say that protections under the “roadless rule,” finalized just before President Bill Clinton left office in 2001, are critical to protecting the region’s lucrative salmon fishery and tourism operations. The U.S. Forest Service said it would publish a draft environmental impact statement this week that, if enacted, would exempt the Tongass from the 2001 roadless rule. The Washington Post first reported the president’s plan to expand logging in the Tongass in August. The Forest Service had initially planned to make more-modest changes to nearly 9.5 million acres where roads are prohibited. Under the administration’s “preferred alternative,” that entire area would be open for development. Congress has designated another 5.7 million acres of the forest as wilderness, which must remain off limits to such activities under any circumstances. Tongass, which lies in southeast Alaska, is home to massive old-growth stands and provides habitat for a range of wildlife. Roughly 40 percent of wild salmon that swim along the West Coast spawn in the Tongass, generating a fishery that the Forest Service estimates is worth $986 million a year. The agency said in a statement that the Tongass – which ranks as the single largest holding in the federal forest system – covers 80 percent of the land along the 500-mile Southeast Alaska Panhandle. “It is rich in natural resources and cultural heritage,” the statement said. While President George W. Bush sought to reverse Clinton’s roadless policy in the Tongass in 2003, a federal judge reinstated it in 2011, and the decision was upheld on appeal. In a statement, Forest Service officials said the new plan – which lists five alternatives including greater restrictions on logging – will be subject to public comment for 60 days. Those comments “will inform the department” as Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue “moves toward a final decision,” an official added. But Trump, who has spoken with Alaska Gov. Michael J. Dunleavy (R) multiple times on the subject, has asked Perdue to exempt the Tongass from logging limits, according to several federal officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. On Tuesday, Dunleavy hailed the decision as “further proof that Alaska’s economic outlook is looking brighter every day.”

‘A problem in every national forest’- tree thieves were behind Washington wildfire – When two men discovered a rare and valuable towering bigleaf maple tree in Washington state’s Olympic national forest last year, they allegedly set about trying to steal it. But there was a problem – the tree was home to a bee hive. The men reportedly tried to use a wasp killer to get rid of it. When that didn’t work, one allegedly poured gasoline on it, and lit it on fire. The result, according to a federal indictment unsealed this week, was an August wildfire that raged across the eastern half of the ancient forest, setting 3,300 acres of public land ablaze and costing $4.5m to fight. Known as the Maple fire, the smoke from the blaze also served to exacerbate an already bad summer for the region’s air quality. There were fires raging in Canada and eastern Washington, and as smoke from these blazes struck Seattle, at some points the city reportedly had the worst air quality in the world. Justin Andrew Wilke and Shawn Edward Williams have been charged with multiple federal felonies related to timber theft and could face years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines if convicted. The bigleaf maple’s wood was covered in a distinct pattern, which if harvested is extremely popular for woodworking and potentially worth thousands of dollars. Before the fire, the pair had allegedly spent months illegally harvesting these high-value maple trees and selling the wood, which is used to make furniture and musical instruments. Wilke was also specifically charged with “setting timber afire” and “using fire in furtherance of a felony” – the latter comes with a mandatory 10-year sentence, according to Seth Wilkinson, the lead prosecutor on the case. “Timber theft, which involves destruction of a public resource, is in itself a really serious crime in this area,” said Wilkinson. “But this one is magnified many many times because of the consequences here, which involved the destruction of thousands of acres of national forest.”

Deadly Southern California Wildfires Destroy Mobile Homes, Force 100,000 to Flee – Three people have died in incidents related to two major wildfires in Southern California, The Los Angeles Times Reported Sunday. A man in his late 50s died of a heart attack Friday while talking with firefighters as the Saddleridge Fire raged in the Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley foothills. And two people died when the Sandalwood Fire burned through a mobile home park in Calimesa. Both blazes ignited Thursday, CNN reported. The Saddleridge Fire forced 100,000 people to flee their homes in Los Angeles. and closed several freeways,according to Reuters. It also led to poor air quality over northern Los Angeles, prompting dozens of public schools in the San Fernando Valley to close.The man who died was one who chose to ignore the evacuation order and attempt to fight the fire himself. The fire grew to 7,500 acres Friday, but is now 42 percent contained and all evacuation orders have been lifted, according to the latest update from the Los Angeles Fire Department. Forty structures have been damaged or destroyed. The Sandalwood Fire ignited when a garbage truck dumped burning trash that spread onto vegetation, Reuters reported. It burned 76 homes in Calimesa in Riverside County. Among those homes were dozens at a mobile park, where the fire’s two victims died. The Los Angeles Times shared the fate of one of them:Family members of Lois Arvickson confirmed the 89-year-old died in the fire. Don Turner, Arvickson’s son, and his wife, Kimberly, spent Thursday night at an evacuation center, desperate to hear news of his mother, who lived alone at the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park. She was on the phone with her son when the blaze, dubbed the Sandalwood fire, reached the park. Kimberly Turner said neighbors reported seeing Arvickson get in her car to leave, but they don’t know what happened next. The Turners saw TV news coverage that showed Arvickson’s home destroyed by fire and the car still in the driveway. The second victim, whose remains were found in the park, has not yet been identified, NBC Los Angeles reported. That fire is now 86 percent contained, according to the most recent update from The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE).

Wildfires and forced blackouts lead to multiple deaths in California –Over the weekend, wildfires continued to rage across California following a severe statewide windstorm, with three deaths reported so far from the blazes. At the same time, at least one death has been reported that is attributable to the utility monopoly Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), which forcibly cut power to over two million residents across the state last week in a desperate effort to mitigate the outbreak of wildfires. Twelve minutes after power was cut in Pollock Pines, near Sacramento, 67-year-old Robert Mardis Sr. died of a cardiac arrest after his continuous positive airway pressure machine lost power. While the coroner’s autopsy report does not attribute the death to the blackout, Mardis’s daughter Marie Aldea told the Los Angeles Times, “The power had just gone off, so he was going to his portable oxygen machine. We weren’t even able to get to the generator, it happened so quick.” The wildfires that hit the state after months of dry weather were fanned by the high winds, conditions that have become increasingly common and severe due to climate change. In the past decade – and over the last two years in particular – California’s wildfire season, which has long plagued the state to varying degrees, has reached nightmare proportions. As of this writing, six fires have broken out across California since Thursday. The largest is the Saddleridge Fire in northern Los Angeles, which has burned 7,965 acres and is only 41 percent contained. The fire has forced 100,000 people to evacuate, in the process killing one man who suffered from cardiac arrest. The Sandalwood Fire in Riverside, also in Southern California, has burned 1,011 acres and is 71 percent contained, killing two people from unspecified causes, including 89-year-old Lois Arvikson. The other four fires are all less than 500 acres and nearly fully contained. The exact cause of the different fires is yet to be determined, but the Los Angeles Fire Department has revealed that arson investigators cite one witness reportedly seeing sparks or flames from a power line near one of the fires, likely yet again implicating the utility monopoly Southern California Edison (SCE), which covers the Los Angeles metropolitan and southern Central Valley regions.

The Latest: PG&E says system had 100 incidents of damage — Pacific Gas & Electric says inspections have found more than 100 places where its system was damaged by recent strong winds that prompted last week’s deliberate power cut to northern and central California. PG&E says the damage included downed power lines and trees that hit lines. The utility says any one of those problems could potentially have sparked a wildfire – the issue that prompted the precautionary shutdown. It also says wind gusts hit 77 mph in Sonoma County and 50 mph or more in many other counties. The shutdown that began last Wednesday lasted two days and affected an estimated 2.1 million people. The disruption prompted anger and accusations that PG&E hadn’t done enough to weather-proof its system. Gov. Gavin Newsom is asking Pacific Gas & Electric Co., to pay the customers who lost power last week when the state’s largest utility cut electricity to prevent wildfires. The Democratic governor sent a letter Monday asking PG&E chief executive Bill Johnson to provide a bill credit or rebate worth $100 for residential customers and $250 for small businesses. Newsom says the shutoffs affected too many customers for too long, and it’s clear PG&E implemented them “with astounding neglect and lack of preparation.” He says that before the shutoff PG&E executives rejected offers of help from state and local emergency managers. The shutoff affected about 2 million people in 35 counties. Millions of Californians spent part of the week in the dark in an unprecedented effort by the state’s large electrical utilities to prevent another devastating wildfire. It was the fifth time Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has pre-emptively cut the power but by far the largest to date in the utility’s effort to prevent a deadly wildfire sparked by its power lines.

This Did Not Go Well – PG&E’s Rolling Blackout Sparked Chaos In Bay Area – Pacific Gas and Electric’s (PG&E) historic blackout plunging hundreds of thousands of customers into darkness last week was a massive communication breakdown that sparked criticism over the two-day blackout that was designed to avoid wildfires, reported The New York Times. PG&E officials said over the weekend that most of the power had been restored to everyone except for 2,500 customers across several Bay Area counties and promised to fix communication channels with customers. “We’ll get better in the next month and better in the next year,” PG&E CEO Bill Johnson said Saturday.“Communication to customers, coordination with state agencies, website availability, call center staff, that’s where you will see short-term improvements.”Last Wednesday, PG&E triggered rolling blackouts for nearly 735,000 homes and or businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area amid the threat of strong winds and dry conditions that would’ve damaged transmission wires and sparked d angerous wildfires, similar to what was seen last year. Most of the residents were restored by Friday afternoon, but 99.5% of its customers saw full power by Saturday. The shutdown caused widespread confusion about the planned power outage, and according to some experts, billions of dollars in economic losses were sustained by local businesses during the two-day blackout. PG&E’s website and communication network that relayed essential data about the blackouts crashed, leaving many without details about what was happening. “There were definitely missteps,” said Elizaveta Malashenko, a spokesperson for the state Public Utilities Commission who was in the PG&E control center. “It’s pretty much safe in saying, this did not go well.” PG&E’s approach to shutdown various grids during a powerful windstorm that hit the Bay Area was never tried before, nor such failure in attempting to manage a controlled blackout and effectively communicate what was happening customers.

Pacific Gas and Electric utility confronts mass outrage a week after Northern California power shutoffs – Outrage continues to mount a week after the Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) energy monopoly cut power to millions of residents throughout Northern California.After reports of high winds and low humidity last Wednesday possibly leading to more wildfires caused by outdated and poorly maintained electrical lines, PG&E cut off electrical power without advanced warning to more than 800,000 customers, leaving nearly two million residents in the dark. Service wasn’t fully restored until four days later on Saturday.During last week’s outage, traffic signals went dark, water was not pumped from ground wells, food spoiled, and medical devices failed to operate. The PG&E website frequently crashed leaving residents completely in the dark about the nature and extent of the outages aside from a few Twitter postings released by the company.PG&E is California’s largest utility, serving 4 out of every 10 people in the most populous state in the country.The Washington Post reported last week that anger against the utility – which has been responsible for a series of public disasters including the 2018 Camp Fire in which 85 people lost their lives and the 2010 San Bruno gas explosions which left 10 dead – boiled over into threatening letters and at least one office being pelted by eggs.The company also reported that a PG&E truck was shot at from a pickup truck driving alongside it. Local police began patrolling PG&E offices after these incidents with employees at the company’s San Francisco headquarters constructing makeshift barricades in front of the entrances as well.The deliberate outages last week likely led to at least one death, that of 67-year-old Robert Mardis Sr. whose positive airway pressure machine ceased operation while he slept.

Los Angeles fire began under power lines, cause not known – A destructive fire that exploded on the edge of Los Angeles began beneath a high-voltage transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison, fire officials said Monday. Los Angeles Fire Department arson investigators determined the origin of the Saddle Ridge Fire was beneath power lines on a dry, steep hillside above the city’s Sylmar neighborhood, Capt. Erik Scott told The Associated Press. The cause remained under investigation. The fire that started Thursday night burned nearly 8, 400 acres (13.1 square miles or 34 square kilometers), destroyed 17 structures and damaged dozens more. One man died of a heart attack during the fire in the Porter Ranch neighborhood, officials said. The fire department had said Friday that a witness saw sparks or flames coming from a power line near where the fire was believed to have started. At least two people told LA TV stations that they saw fire near power lines above Saddle Ridge Road around the time the blaze broke out. After several deadly blazes in the past two years have been blamed on trees and vegetation hitting power lines and other causes involving electrical equipment, utilities have been given authority to shut off power when fire risk is extremely high. Just two days before the Los Angeles fire broke out, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. had cut power to nearly 2 million people in Northern California to prevent a repeat of catastrophic fires in that part of the state, including a blaze that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people. SoCal Edison had warned it might cut power to close to 200,000 customers in communities throughout the region to prevent its equipment from sparking a wildfire. But it wasn’t clear Monday if the fire originated in an area that could have had the power shut off pre-emptively.

104 Fires In 24 Hours, Lebanon Is Burning – Beirut.com – Massive wildfires have erupted in Lebanon, swallowing everything in their way. Forests, homes, schools, universities, roads, and more have been completely engulfed in the flames, leaving little behind. People are being evacuated from their homes, not knowing whether they’ll find a way back. The fires, which originally started in Mecrel=’nofollow’ rel=’nofollow’ href, have thus far spread across neighboring areas like Debbieh, Na’ameh, Damour, Aramoun, and more. Meanwhile, more fires broke out in Akkar overnight and in the early hours of the morning. Civil defense teams alone are incapable of putting out the fires, thus Lebanon has resorted to Cypriot help. In any other nation, the president would declare state of emergency for fighting wildfires. Only in #Lebanon do people burn alive while leaders remain asleep. This is a nightmare. Pray for Lebanon.

460 Wild Fires Erupted In Lebanon, Some Of The Worst In History – After what can only be deemed as a “hellish” night, Lebanese people awoke this morning to acres of burned land – a painful sight to see. Forests, homes, cars, belongings, schools, universities, roads, and more had been destroyed in the aftermath of the raging fires that had erupted in Lebanon, swallowing everything in their way. For two nights, Lebanese people had been subject to some of the worst wildfires in history, which amounted to a total of 460, according to sources from the operation room at the Grand Serail. They gradually subsided on Tuesday night with the heavy rainfall that showered over Lebanon. It all started when a massive fire erupted in Mecrel=’nofollow’ rel=’nofollow’ href, a village in Chouf, on Sunday at around 1 AM. Unconstrained, the flames spread to nearby homes and resident areas, eventually reaching a mine field and resulting in multiple explosions. Despite the combined efforts of civil defense teams and locals in the area, the fires spread to neighboring villages, ignited by the sudden rise in temperatures and high winds. They reached Debbieh, Na’ameh, Damour, and Aramoun. Meanwhile, more fires broke out in several other areas in Lebanon, including Akkar, Ghazir, Hammana, Aley, Kfarhbab, Nabatieh, Bnachii, Miziara, Jeita, Cornet El Hamra, Kfarmatta, Zaatari, Jounieh, and Mansourieh, to name a few. According to Director-general of the Civil Defense, Raymond Khattar, these wildfires were “some of the worst in decades.” Choppers were sent over from Cyprus, Jordan, Italy, and Greece to help combat the fires, which complemented the undeniable efforts of Lebanese and Palestinian Civil Defense, the Lebanese Army, Lebanese Security Forces, and brave citizens.

Haunting Photos Of The Devastating Fires In Lebanon :: Beirut.com – Our hearts are aching as we watch these devastating fires continue to spread in the country. The footage circulating on social media is absolutely horrifying, here are some of them:

Typhoon Hagibis: Japan suffers deadly floods and landslides from storm – At least nine people are reported dead as Japan recovers from its biggest storm in decades.Typhoon Hagibis triggered floods and landslides as it battered the country with wind speeds of 225km/h (140mph). Rivers have breached their banks in at least 14 different places, inundating residential neighbourhoods.The storm led to some Rugby World Cup matches being cancelled but a key fixture between Japan and Scotland will go ahead on Sunday. Hagibis is heading north and is expected to move back into the North Pacific later on Sunday. It made landfall on Saturday shortly before 19:00 local time (10:00 GMT), in Izu Peninsula, south-west of Tokyo and moved up the east coast. Almost half a million homes were left without power. In the town of Hakone near Mount Fuji more than 1m (3ft) of rain fell on Friday and Saturday, the highest total ever recorded in Japan over 48 hours. Further north in Nagano prefecture, levees along the Chikuma river gave way sending water rushing through residential areas, inundating houses. Flood defences around Tokyo have held and river levels are now falling, reports the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Japan. Officials said some of those killed were swept away by landslides while others were trapped in their cars as floodwaters rose. Another 15 people are listed as missing and dozens are reported injured. More than seven million people were urged to leave their homes as the huge storm approached, but it is thought only 50,000 stayed in shelters. Many residents stocked up on provisions before the typhoon’s arrival, leaving supermarkets with empty shelves. “Unprecedented heavy rain has been seen in cities, towns and villages for which the emergency warning was issued,” Japan’s Meteorological Agency (JMA) forecaster Yasushi Kajiwara told a press briefing.Many bullet train services were halted, and several lines on the Tokyo metro were suspended for most of Saturday. All flights to and from Tokyo’s Haneda airport and Narita airport in Chiba have been cancelled – more than 1,000 in total.

Japan sends in thousands of troops after massive typhoon hammers Tokyo (Reuters) – Japan sent tens of thousands of troops and rescue workers on Sunday to save stranded residents and fight floods caused by one of the worst typhoons to hit the country in recent history. At least 30 people were killed in the typhoon that left vast sections of towns under water, public broadcaster NHK said. Another 15 were missing and 177 injured by Typhoon Hagibis, which paralyzed Tokyo on Saturday and dumped record levels of rain around Japan. About 100,000 homes were left without power. Rescue efforts were hindered after more than 20 rivers in central and northeastern Japan burst their banks and dozens more overflowed although their banks were still in tact, NHK said, adding that flooding rivers could cause more damage. Evacuation centers filled with residents, while some people perished as they sought shelter, NHK said, adding a 77-year-old woman fell about 40 meters to her death during an airlift. Some of the worst damage hit the central Japanese city of Nagano, where the Chikuma River inundated swaths of land and forced military helicopters to airlift people from homes. Kiyokazu Shimokawa, 71, speaking at an evacuation center, said he had waited all night with his wife and mother until they were finally rescued around 3 p.m. (0600 GMT) on Sunday. “I made the mistake of figuring that as long as we were on the second floor of the house, we’d be fine,” he told Reuters. “When we realized that maybe we should evacuate, it was too late – the water rose very quickly.” Typhoon Hagibis, which means “speed” in the Philippine language Tagalog, made landfall on Japan’s main island of Honshu on Saturday evening and headed out to sea early on Sunday. The storm sank a Panama-registered cargo ship that had anchored near Tokyo. The sunken ship was located early on Sunday. A newspaper reported that at least five of the 12 crew were dead and three were missing.In Fukushima, north of the capital, Tokyo Electric Power Co reported irregular readings from sensors monitoring water in its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant overnight. The plant was crippled by a 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

At Least 42 Dead After Japan’s Worst Typhoon in Decades -At least 42 people have died and 15 are missing after Typhoon Hagibis swamped Japan Saturday, bringing record rainfall that flooded more than 1,000 homes, The Washington Post reported. It was the worst storm to hit the country in decades, BBC News reported, and more than 110,000 people are now assisting with the rescue efforts.Kenichi Nakajima, a 58-year-old farmer from Sakado-shi- Akao, told The New York Times that the extent of the damage was “abnormal.””Recently, a girl made a speech about global warming, and as she was crying she said, ‘We have no future,'” he said, in reference to Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN Climate Action Summit in September. “She is absolutely right.” The climate crisis is making hurricanes and typhoons both wetter and more intense, since warmer ocean temperatures provide more fuel and warmer air can hold more moisture. Hagibis was classified as a “super-typhoon,” the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane, when it was 900 miles from Japan. When it made landfall at 7 p.m. Saturday in Ito, the winds had fallen to 130 miles per hour, according to The New York Times. But the rain was intense. In the town of Hakone, more than 3 feet fell in 48 hours, a record for Japan, according to BBC News. All that rain caused at least 142 rivers to flood across the country, NHK said, according to The New York Times. Levees on 21 rivers collapsed, including one on the Chikuma River that caused massive flooding in Nagano City.

IN PICTURES: The chaotic aftermath of Typhoon Hagibis – Japan Times – Typhoon Hagibis, the most powerful tropical storm to hit Tokyo in decades, plowed a large portion of Japan’s main island on Saturday evening and early Sunday, bring torrential rains and high-speed winds that paralyzed the capital and neighboring prefectures. Millions of residents in a dozen prefectures were affected by the highest level of emergency evacuation notices on Saturday night and early Sunday.Unlike last month’s Typhoon Faxai, whose high-speed winds caused extensive structural damage, flooding Flooding from storm surges and overflowing rivers appears to account for a large part of damage from Hagibis, the 19th typhoon of the season in Japan.Emergency workers around the country are currently working to rescue people still stranded in flood-inundated areas. Here are but a few scenes of the destruction from Typhoon Hagibis.

Latest tally puts death toll in wake of Typhoon Hagibis at 56 – The death toll from Typhoon Hagibis rose to 56 on Monday as search-and-rescue teams continued to operate in flood- and landslide-hit areas of central and eastern Japan.Another 16 people are missing and at least 100 sustained injuries as the typhoon raked parts of eastern Japan on Saturday and Sunday, according to the latest Kyodo News tally.Self-Defense Forces (SDF) personnel, police and firefighters carried out operations in various localities.At a disaster task force meeting, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the government will do its utmost to support those affected by the typhoon and its aftereffects, adding it will set up an interagency team to improve shelters and help evacuees find places to live. About 38,000 people across 17 prefectures had evacuated their homes by midday Monday, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, adding that a total of 3,700 homes had been flooded across the country. He instructed Cabinet ministers to ensure infrastructure such as electricity and water systems is quickly restored and to supply food, water and other materials without awaiting requests from local authorities.The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said more than 138,000 households were without water as of 5 p.m. Monday while utility companies said that about 53,000 households were still without power as of 9 p.m.In a separate meeting, Defense Minister Taro Kono told senior officials to ensure the SDF makes its best efforts in responding to the disaster.The season’s 19th typhoon dumped record rainfall, which led to rivers bursting their banks, flooding residential districts and triggering landslides in 19 prefectures. Evacuees who could not return home continued to shelter in sites such as local schools. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism said 37 rivers in Nagano, Fukushima, Ibaraki and four other prefectures burst their banks. In the central city of Nagano, workers used more than 20 pumping vehicles to help assess damage to the drainage system caused when the Chikuma River’s embankment collapsed.The typhoon also affected transportation systems. Although flood waters receded from a Hokuriku Shinkansen bullet train yard in the city of Nagano, where 10 bullet trains were affected, East Japan Railway Co. said it will take “substantial time” to resume full-scale operations on the Hokuriku Shinkansen Line connecting Tokyo and Kanazawa, in Ishikawa Prefecture.

Scientists Discover ‘Stormquakes,’ Small Earthquakes Triggered by Hurricanes and Other Major Storms – Powerful hurricanes and other storms can actually cause small earthquakes in the ocean, scientists have found. “We’re calling them ‘stormquakes,'” study lead author and Florida State University (FSU) assistant professor Wenyuan Fan told Florida State University News. “During a storm season, hurricanes or nor’easters transfer energy into the ocean as strong ocean waves, and the waves interact with the solid earth producing intense seismic source activity,” Fan explained. The study, published Monday in Geophysical Research Letters, documented more than 10,000 stormquakes off of Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, New England, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and British Columbia between 2006 and 2019. The quakes can reach a magnitude of 3.5, but no one has noticed them up until now.”This is the last thing you need to worry about,” Fan told USA Today. The researchers themselves weren’t setting out to document them when they began their work. “It was actually discovered by accident,” Fan told the Tampa Bay Times. Instead, Fan and his colleagues at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the U.S. Geological Survey were looking to trace low frequency earthquakes, according to National Geographic. They developed a method to track them by piecing together data from different regions, which is when they discovered some unusual seismic events. National Geographic explained why they were so strange: Surprisingly, the events were seasonal, never occurring between May and August. Earthquakes that release energy from Earth’s shifting crust, however, are usually indifferent to the changing seasons. What’s more, the curious quakes radiated from both the east and west coasts of North America. Earthquakes are common out west, rumbling as the earth shifts along a spidery network of fractures in the surface, but the eastern coast largely lacks these quake-generating features. Eventually, the researchers realized the small earthquakes took place at the same time as major storms. But not every major storm produces stormquakes. Hurricane Sandy, one of the most expensive storms in U.S. history, did not. The quakes seem to rely on distinct geological features, National Geographic explained. They occur in regions with broad continental shelves off the coast, which allow the waves from the stormquakes time to build on each other. They also occur in regions with ocean banks, flat underwater hills that channel the waves’ energy towards the ground.

Study: California’s big July quakes strain major fault (AP) – The earthquakes that hammered the Southern California desert near the town of Ridgecrest last summer involved ruptures on a web of interconnected faults and increased strain on a major nearby fault that has begun to slowly move, according to a new study. Ruptures in the Ridgecrest earthquake sequence ended a few miles from the Garlock Fault, which runs east-west for 185 miles (300 kilometers) from the San Andreas Fault to Death Valley. The Garlock Fault has been relatively quiet for 500 years. It now has begun a process called fault creep and has slipped 0.8 inch (2 centimeters) since July, the research found. The study by geophysicists from the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was published in the journal Science on Thursday, coinciding with the implementation of a statewide earthquake early warning system for the general public. Southern California’s largest earthquake sequence in two decades began July 4 in the Mojave Desert about 120 miles (190 kilometers) north of Los Angeles. A magnitude 6.4 foreshock was followed the next day by a magnitude 7.1 mainshock and then more than 100,000 aftershocks. Zachary Ross, assistant professor of geophysics at Caltech and lead author of the paper, said in a statement that it was one of the most well-documented earthquake sequences in history. Ross developed automated computer analysis of seismometer data to detect the huge number of aftershocks with precise location information, Caltech and JPL said in a press release. The JPL scientists mapped surface ruptures of the faults with data from Japanese and European Space Agency radar satellites. About 20 previously unknown crisscrossing faults were involved. Ross said the 6.4 quake simultaneously broke faults at right angles to each other, which he characterized as surprising. It was a commonly held idea that major earthquakes are caused by rupture of single long fault, but that has been reconsidered since a 1992 quake in the desert near Landers, California, ruptured several faults.

New study pinpoints the places most at risk on a warming planet – As many as five billion people will face hunger and a lack of clean water by 2050 as the warming climate disrupts pollination, freshwater, and coastal habitats, according to new research published last week in Science. People living in South Asia and Africa will bear the worst of it.Climate activists have been telling us for a while now that global warming isn’t just about the polar bears, so it’s hardly breaking news that humans are going to suffer because nature is suffering. But what is new about this model is the degree of geographic specificity. It pinpoints the places where projected environmental losses overlap with human populations who depend on those resources and maps them with a nifty interactive viewer.This model identifies not just the general ways climate change harms the environment and how people will feel those changes, but also where these changes will likely occur, and how significant they’ll be. It’s an unprecedented degree of detail for a global biodiversity model.Patricia Balvanera, a professor of biodiversity at National University of Mexico who wasn’t involved in the study, said the new model “provides an extremely important tool to inform policy decisions and shape responses.” The model looks at three specific natural systems that humans benefit from: pollination (which enables crops to grow), freshwater systems (which provide drinking water), and coastal ecosystems (which provide a buffer from storm surges and prevent erosion). Using fine-scale satellite imagery, the team of scientists mapped predicted losses to these natural systems onto human population maps. The resulting map allows you to see how many people could be impacted by environmental changes, and where.

PIOMAS October 2019 – Arctic Sea Ice by Neven – (see graphics) Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center: As usual, the minimum was reached during September, and as with other data sets (extent and area), this year’s minimum was second lowest on record. PIOMAS bottomed out at 4058 km3 on 14 September, which is 244 km3 lower than 2011 and 385 km3 higher than 2012. In total, 18,432 km3 of sea ice volume was lost, which is the fourth highest amount in the 2007-2019 period. What is interesting to note, is that the three years that lost more volume all started out with a lot more ice than 2019: PIOMAS SIV total meltAs can be seen on the PIOMAS Daily Arctic Ice Volume graph, the trend line quickly shot up after the minimum was reached, though 2019 is still second. Overall, September saw an increase of 398 km3, which is the highest increase in the 2007-2019 period (the average is 1 km3). This means that 2012 increased its lead over 2019, and all the other years crept closer. Here’s how the differences with previous years have evolved from last month: Wipneus’ version of the PIOMAS graph shows how this year deviated from 2012 quite quickly: Piomas-trnd4 Given these developments it is only logical that the anomaly trend line on the PIOMAS volume anomaly graph has shot up some more, almost reaching the linear trend: This is where things get interesting. We’ve seen that PIOMAS has gone up steeply since the maximum. JAXA extent, however, has done so more slowly. This means that the volume is spread out over a relatively smaller ice pack, and so average thickness goes up. When you divide PIOMAS volume by JAXA extent (a crude method to calculate average thickness), this is how it looks: PIJAMAS 201909302019 average thickness was among the lowest for a while, but shot up recently. Interestingly, the Polar Science Centre average thickness graph shows a different picture, with 2019 actually going lowest, but that’s probably because the trend line stops mid-month:

If warming exceeds 2°C, Antarctica’s melting ice sheets could raise seas 20 metres in coming centuries – Our research, published today, shows that up to one third of Antarctica’s ice sheet melted during the Pliocene geological epoch around three million years ago, causing sea levels to rise by as much as 20 metres above present levels in coming centuries. We were able to measure past changes in sea level by drilling cores at a site in New Zealand, known as the Whanganui Basin, which contains shallow marine sediments of arguably the highest resolution in the world. Using a new method we developed to predict the water level from the size of sand particle moved by waves, we constructed a record of global sea-level change with significantly more precision than previously possible. The Pliocene was the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were above 400 parts per million and Earth’s temperature was 2°C warmer than pre-industrial times. We show that warming of more than 2°C could set off widespread melting in Antarctica once again and our planet could be hurtling back to the future, towards a climate that existed three million years ago.

Solar Storms Can Devastate Entire Civilizations –Climate has inarguably become a hot topic of discussion in developed economies over the last decade, and it is getting hotter by the day as study after study warn we are close to doomed if we don’t change our ways urgently. Yet climate on Earth is not the only problem that humankind faces. There is another climate we need to pay attention to, and there is nothing we can do to change that.Solar storms, whose more scientific name is coronal mass ejections, were until recently believed to be a rare occurrence – only happening once every couple of centuries or so. However, there is reason to believe they may be a lot more frequent than that. In a world increasingly dependent on electricity, this is, to put it mildly, a problem.In 1859 the Sun spewed concentrated plasma that broke through its magnetic fields in the direction of the Earth. Commonly referred to as the Carrington Event, that coronal mass ejection hit the Earth’s magnetic field, which warped it and caused telegraphs around the world to fail. For a long time, the scientific consensus was that solar storms of this magnitude were a rarity.That was in the 19th century where telegraphs were cutting-edge tech. Now, we have power grids, airplanes, satellites, and computers, and all of them are potentially susceptible to the effects of another solar storm. We also know that solar storms of the magnitude of the Carrington Event or even worse occur more frequently. “The Carrington Event was considered to be the worst-case scenario for space weather events against the modern civilization… but if it comes several times a century, we have to reconsider how to prepare against and mitigate that kind of space weather hazard,” the lead research in a study that reached that conclusion, Hisashi Hayakawa, said after the release of the study earlier this month.

The world needs a massive carbon tax in just 10 years to limit climate change, IMF says –A global agreement to make fossil fuel burning more expensive is urgent and the most efficient way of fighting climate change, an International Monetary Fund study found on Thursday. The group found that a global tax of $75 per ton by the year 2030 could limit the planet’s warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), or roughly double what it is now. That would greatly increase the price of fossil-fuel-based energy – especially from the burning of coal – but the economic disruption could be offset by routing the money raised straight back to citizens. “If you compare the average level of the carbon tax today, which is $2 [a ton], to where we need to be, it’s a quantum leap,” said Paolo Mauro, deputy director of the fiscal affairs department at the IMF. The IMF report comes out as financial institutions increasingly grapple with the risks associated with climate change, including damage from sea-level rise, extreme weather events and billions in fossil fuel reserves that might be in excess of what can be burned while also limiting warming. The Federal Reserve, for example, is takinga closer look at how climate change may pose a risk to economic stability.In the United States, a $75 tax would cut emissions by nearly 30 percent but would cause on average a 53 percent increase in electricity costs and a 20 percent rise for gasoline at projected 2030 prices, the analysis in the IMF’s Fiscal Monitor found.But it would also generate revenue equivalent to 1 percent of gross domestic product, an enormous amount of money that could be redistributed and, if spread equally, would end up being a fiscally progressive policy, rather than one disproportionately targeting the poor.The impact of a $75-per-ton tax would also hit countries differently depending on burning or exporting coal, which produces the most carbon emissions per unit of energy generated when it is burned. In developing nations such as China, India and South Africa, a $75 carbon tax reduces emissions even more – by as much as 45 percent – and generates proportionately more revenue, as high as 3.5 percent of GDP in South Africa’s case, the IMF found.

Elizabeth Warren Wants Green Trade Deals. What Does That Mean? At the third Democratic primary debate last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren said that if she were elected president, she’d negotiate international trade deals “with environmentalists at the table.” Former Vice President Biden echoed her a few minutes later. The idea isn’t new: Departed climate candidate Jay Inslee also wrote provisions about getting environmentalists involved in trade into his climate plans.There has never been meaningful environmental language baked into a U.S. trade deal. This includes the “NAFTA 2.0″ deal that Trump negotiated with Canada and Mexico and that is currently pending in Congress, which, by design, doesn’t include the words “climate change” at all.Warren is promising to change that. “America should lead global efforts to combat climate change, and trade policy is a crucial tool for promoting international cooperation,” Warren’s campaign told Grist via email. “In my administration, representatives from environmental groups will serve on key advisory committees so that they participate in negotiations and help shape trade agreements.” So what are environmentalists’ priorities for a trade deal? Some demands from environmentalists make intuitive sense: They want to use trade deals to protect and enforce climate-friendly regulations and legislation, stop offshoring pollution to countries with lower regulations, and support a clean energy economy. But some of environmentalists’ biggest demands have less to do with policy itself and more to do with the process by which trade deals get made. Sierra Club trade program director Ben Beachy pointed out that during negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP (formed by Obama but scrapped by President Trump), the energy committee had representatives from Chevron, Haliburton, and the National Mining Association, but not one environmentalist. “When you say bring us to the table, we don’t want to be tokens,” said Charlie Cray, a political and business strategist at Greenpeace U.S. “It’s not enough to have environmentalists alongside lobbyists.”

Scientists endorse mass civil disobedience to force climate action – (Reuters) – Almost 400 scientists have endorsed a civil disobedience campaign aimed at forcing governments to take rapid action to tackle climate change, warning that failure could inflict “incalculable human suffering.” In a joint declaration, climate scientists, physicists, biologists, engineers and others from at least 20 countries broke with the caution traditionally associated with academia to side with peaceful protesters courting arrest from Amsterdam to Melbourne. Wearing white laboratory coats to symbolize their research credentials, a group of about 20 of the signatories gathered on Saturday to read out the text outside London’s century-old Science Museum in the city’s upmarket Kensington district. “We believe that the continued governmental inaction over the climate and ecological crisis now justifies peaceful and non-violent protest and direct action, even if this goes beyond the bounds of the current law,” said Emily Grossman, a science broadcaster with a PhD in molecular biology. She read the declaration on behalf of the group. “We therefore support those who are rising up peacefully against governments around the world that are failing to act proportionately to the scale of the crisis,” she said. The declaration was coordinated by a group of scientists who support Extinction Rebellion, a civil disobedience campaign that formed in Britain a year ago and has since sparked offshoots in dozens of countries. The group launched a fresh wave of international actions on Monday, aiming to get governments to address an ecological crisis caused by climate change and accelerating extinctions of plant and animal species. A total of 1,307 volunteers had since been arrested at various protests in London by 2030 GMT on Saturday, Extinction Rebellion said. A further 1,463 volunteers have been arrested in the past week in another 20 cities, including Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Sydney and Toronto, according to the group’s tally. More protests in this latest wave are due in the coming days.

Jane Fonda Arrested During Climate Protest on U.S. Capitol Hill Steps — Oscar-award winning actress and long-time political activist Jane Fonda was arrested on the steps of Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on Friday for peacefully protesting the U.S. government’s inaction in combating the climate crisis, according to the AP. Fonda, 81, was one of 16 people arrested for protesting and charged with “crowding, obstructing or incommoding” for demonstrating on the East Front of the Capitol, a misdemeanor under Washington, DC law. The city prohibits protestors from obstructing public building entrances, Capitol Police said, as The New York Times reported. Video of Fonda’s arrest appeared on social media.The protest was part of Fire Drill Fridays, a movement Fonda launched, inspired by Greta Thunberg’s Friday for Future strikes and named for the teenage activist’s quote, “We have to act like our house is on fire, because it is,” as Fire Drill Fridays wrote on Twitter. On her website, Fonda said she announced that she had moved to DC and that she planned to protest every Friday until the new year.”Inspired by Greta and the youth climate strikes as well as Reverend Barber’s Moral Mondays and Randall Robinson’s often daily anti-apartheid protests, I’ve moved to Washington, DC to be closer to the epicenter of the fight for our climate,” she wrote on JaneFonda.com. “Every Friday through January, I will be leading weekly demonstrations on Capitol Hill to demand that action by our political leaders be taken to address the climate emergency we are in. We can’t afford to wait.” Fonda’s recently shared with the Los Angeles Times how Thunberg’s commitment had inspired her into action. “She read the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report and she realized that the crisis was barreling straight at us, like a train, and looked around and people weren’t behaving appropriately,” she said to the Los Angeles Times. “It so traumatized her that she stopped eating.” Fonda said that every Thursday, on the eve of her protest, she will convene a panel of experts in a live stream to explain the climate crisis to interested viewers, according to the BBC. She has invited members of the Sunrise Movement – a group of young people who want to stop the climate crisis while creating millions of new jobs in a greener economy that does not rely on fossil fuels – as The Washington Post reported.

Extinction Rebellion Banned in London – One week into Extinction Rebellion‘s planned two weeks of International Rebellion to demand action on theclimate crisis, the London police have banned the group from the city. The Metropolitan Police made the announcement Monday evening, and immediately began to clear the protest encampments from Trafalgar Square, which had previously been designated as a legitimate protest area, according to The Guardian.”Any assembly linked to the Extinction Rebellion ‘Autumn Uprising’…must now cease their protest(s) within London (Metropolitan Police Service, and City of London areas) by 2100hrs [on Monday] 14th October 2019,” the police announcement said. Protestors were given 30 minutes warning to leave Trafalgar Square Monday night, 71-year-old demonstrator Pam Williams told BBC News.Extinction Rebellion said they would “let Trafalgar Square go,” but a few activists like Williams decided to glue themselves to the ground and face arrest.”I feel possibly that they’ve been approached by people we’ve upset today, maybe the finance sector or the banking sector,” Williams said, referring to a protest earlier Monday that blocked the crosswalk outside the Bank of England. “I’m refusing to leave and I’ve glued myself to the ground. Among those arrested in Trafalgar Square Monday night was Green Party Member of European Parliament Ellie Chowns. “The rules have been changed,” Chowns said, according to BBC News. “No longer is any space in London allowable for peaceful democratic protest. This is intolerable.” The police issued the ban under Section 14 of the Public Order Act of 1986, which gives police the authority to impose restrictions such as place, duration and number of participants on any assembly that “may result in serious public disorder,” property damage or intimidation. But Network for Police Monitoring coordinator Kevin Blowe told The Guardian that the ban did not follow due process, because such bans are supposed to be made by the home secretary. He also explained why he thought the ban could face a challenge in court: “Our reading of it is that the section 14 powers are supposed to be used with caution because people still have a right to protest and potentially this is unlawful, and there is no other way to put it. Take a look at what section 14 says: it’s about restricting a number of people for a particular duration of time. My feeling is that this has to be open to some form of potential legal challenge.” As of Monday, London police had arrested 1,445 people and charged 76 in relation to the ongoing extinction rebellion protests. The demonstrators are demanding that the UK government declare a climate emergency, halt biodiversity loss and achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and convene a Citizens’ Assembly to oversee these changes.

Climate Change Activists Target BlackRock Headquarters In London As Hundreds Occupy Financial District — New reports are emerging Monday morning that climate change activists are targeting BlackRock Investment Management offices in London. The report, shared by a Reuters field journalist, says activists are “gluing themselves to the front of the building and blocking the entrances.” Twitter account Matthew Jones, tweeted an image of the mob in front of what appears to be BlackRock’s headquarters in London, located at Drapers Gardens, 12 Throgmorton Avenue. #ExtinctionRebelion Mob rocking up outside Blackrock Offices. Looks like a lost Drama School Trip. pic.twitter.com/NhBNJdXTrf – Matthew Jones (@the_mjones) October 14, 2019 Matthew Jones labeled the tweet with the hashtag #ExtinctionRebelion. Reuters confirmed Extinction Rebellion is behind Monday’s BlackRock protest. “XR is targeting BlackRock because it’s the world’s biggest backer of climate and rainforest destruction,” the Extinction Rebellion group said in a statement. “BlackRock stokes the fires that are destroying our planet. It invests in companies that use deforestation to produce beef, soy, palm oil, rubber, and timber.” Last week, we said Extinction Rebellion protests are scheduled across 200 sites in London during October. These protests could bring the city to a standstill as protestors demand government officials, now mega-corporations, to take immediate action to combat climate change. The climate change activists aren’t just attempting to shut down major parts of London’s infrastructure, like roads, bridges, highways, rail, airports, and ports, but it now seems they’re now targeting investment firms. BlackRock is the top three shareholders in 25 of the world’s biggest publicly traded deforestation-risk companies; these companies are known for producing soya, beef, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber and timber, but also have a long track record in burning down forests to clear land for agriculture purposes. Climate change activists in London are already causing severe economic and social disruptions. Another breaking tweet reportedly shows Extinction Rebellion protesters “occupying” the London financial district, according to Twitter handle Neil Gordon.

Green Globalization, A Temporary Measure to Buy Time — As the climate crisis, mass extinction and general ecological collapse proceed, the political faction which pretends to want to do something about them will gain the upper hand with its “Green New Deal”, its promises of green capitalism, green metastatic cancer (AKA “growth”), green prodcutionism and consumerism, industrial-fake-renewables to continue to provide extreme energy consumption, and the rest of “the American way of life”. This will be sold as both the ecological and social panacea. The fact that it’s all a lie, that you can’t save the Earth by continuing to destroy it, that you can’t fix the socioeconomic evils of capitalism by doubling down on capitalism, won’t matter. The whole thing will be primarily a propaganda campaign, coupled with some temporary meager scraps thrown to the precariat and lumpenproles. The real purpose of this Green New Deal and any companion programs will be to buy time and perpetuate the global capitalist regime as long as possible while the elites consolidate their position for their plan to continue to rule as the rockslide of collapse gathers force and chaos. Just as the purpose of the original New Deal was to save capitalism, so today’s mainstream “green” proposals have only the purpose of saving capitalism and perpetuating the ecocidal binge. Big Green groups and progressive politicians are usually explicit about this. And then the Green New Deal program also is sold within the framework of anti-human globalization, and as a way to preserve and intensify globalization. The globalization cadres and mechanisms such as the World Bank already have long been deeply immersed in the scam-mongering of “offset” regimes, the Clean Development Mechanism (“sustainable development” is just one of the many oxymorons we encounter), the REDD greenwash of ecocide, and others. The mainstream climate-industrial movement will play a leading gatekeeper role here, doing all it can to ensure that the rising concern and fear and willingness among the people to take action for the Earth will remain kettled and controlled by astroturfs, will remain in the position of supplicating to the state (which is what all such “demands” on inherently ecocidal-genocidal governments boil down to), and will not break free of this domesticated reform mentality philosophically and in action in order directly to do what is necessary to assist Gaia’s Kinesis against these destroyers of the Earth while there’s still time and an ecological basis to sustain something of humanity as well as the more-than-human species now being driven extinct at an estimated rate of 200 a day.

Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers – Google has made “substantial” contributions to some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington despite its insistence that it supports political action on the climate crisis. Among hundreds of groups the company has listed on its website as beneficiaries of its political giving are more than a dozen organisations that have campaigned against climate legislation, questioned the need for action, or actively sought to roll back Obama-era environmental protections. The list includes the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative policy group that was instrumental in convincing the Trump administration to abandon the Paris agreement and has criticised the White House for not dismantling more environmental rules. Google is also listed as a sponsor for an upcoming annual meeting of the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella organisation that supports conservative groups including theHeartland Institute, a radical anti-science group that has chided the teenage activist Greta Thunberg for “climate delusion hysterics”. SPN members recently created a “climate pledge” website that falsely states “our natural environment is getting better” and “there is no climate crisis”. Google has defended its contributions, saying that its “collaboration” with organisations such as CEI “does not mean we endorse the organisations’ entire agenda” It donates to such groups, people close to the company say, to try to influence conservative lawmakers, and – most importantly – to help finance the deregulatory agenda the groups espouse.

BLM head: ‘What I thought, what I wrote, what I did in the past is irrelevant.’ -William Perry Pendley, the controversial acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, told a room full of journalists on Friday that his opinions on climate change and immigrants are “irrelevant” to his job overseeing 245 million acres of public land. Speaking on a panel at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference, Pendley, a conservative lawyer who has spent his career fighting federal land protections and environmental regulation, sparred repeatedly with reporters. He refused to comment about his past statements that cast doubt over basic climate science and compared immigrants to a “cancer.” He also repeatedly responded to questions by saying, “I disagree with your premise.” As recently as February, Pendley compared the climate crisis to a “unicorn” because “neither exists.” Asked to clarify his position on Friday, he deferred to his boss, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who has said he hasn’t lost sleep over soaring atmospheric carbon dioxide and blamed Congress for his own inaction on climate. Bernhardt had been scheduled to appear at the conference but canceled. “I’m not a scientist, I’m a lawyer,” Pendley said. “I defer to the secretary. He’s been very clear on this subject. He believes that climate change is real, that mankind has an impact, that we’re unable to project future climate conditions, but that we need to understand the consequences.” Asked again about his own views, Pendley balked: “Nope, I’m not going to clarify. Those are my personal opinions,” he said. “I’m a Marine. I follow orders.” In 2007, Pendley referred to undocumented immigrants as “spreading like a cancer” in a fundraising mailer for his legal fund resurfaced by CNN this week. When pressed on Friday about the statement, Pendley brushed off the question entirely. “My personal opinions are irrelevant,” he said. “I have a new job now. I’m a zealous advocate for my client. My client is the American people and my bosses are the president of the United States and Secretary Bernhardt. What I thought, what I wrote, what I did in the past is irrelevant. I have orders, I have laws to obey, and I intend to do that.”

US ‘green economy’ generates $1.3 trillion and employs millions, new study finds – The green economy is driving growth and job creation in the United States, but as the rest of the world catches up, the U.S. will have to enact new and supportive policies to remain competitive, a new study from University College London found. The green economy generates $1.3 trillion in annual sales revenue in the United States, while creating 9.5 million full-time jobs, climatologist Mark Maslin and researcher Lucien Georgeson said in their study published in the online journal Palgrave Communications. This growing part of the economy is increasingly important since the United States has a greater proportion of the working-age population employed by the green economy. It also has a higher sales revenue per capita generated by the green economy than China or any country in the OECD or G-20, the study said. But other nations are catching up and looking to capitalize on the potential. To remain competitive, the United States will have to develop energy, environment and education policies that support growth in areas like renewable energy. To arrive at their conclusions, Maslin and Georgeson focused on low carbon industries such as electric vehicles and energy management in buildings. They complied public and private data – often at a granular level – and then used data triangulation to synthesize the different data sets and samples. To put the numbers from the study in context, the 9.5 million jobs represents over 4% of the working age population in the United States, while $1.3 trillion is a little under 7% of annual GDP.

The Story of Plastic: A New Movie About Plastic Waste – One Green Planet – The Story of Plastic is a new movie all about plastic waste, from production to pollution. The movie is directed by Deia Schlosberg and is presented by The Story of Stuff Project.The Story of Stuff is known for its digital shorts on topics like plastic waste and consumption. The film includes scenes from around the globe and shows howcompanies contribute to the plastic problem.The film made its world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 6. The film tells a true “story” of plastic, going through the supply chain. It starts with how plastic is made and then shows it in landfills and other sites of plastic waste. The Story of Plastic shows how plastic recycling is essentially a myth better suited for glass and metals. Statistics like plastic’s 14% recycling rate are shown in the film. The film shows the impact plastic has on third world countries and where it’s being shipped to once it’s thrown into a trash can in the United States. Much of plastic is only seen as trash or as marine pollution. The film hopes to show plastic through all stages in order to put pressure on plastic production and stop it at the source. Watch The Story of Plastic teaser trailer:

Plastic bottles vs aluminum cans – who’ll win the global water fight? – (Reuters) – Global bottled water giants are ramping up trials of easily recyclable aluminium cans to replace plastic that pollutes the world’s seas. Sound like a slam-dunk for the environment? Not entirely. Aluminium cans might indeed mean less ocean waste, but they come with their own eco-price: the production of each can pumps about twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as each plastic bottle. French group Danone has become the latest company to make a move, telling Reuters it had started to replace some plastic bottles with aluminium cans for local water brands in Britain, Poland and Denmark. The shift, previously unannounced, comes as multinational rivals like Coca-Cola Co, PepsiCo and Nestle are also launching some canned versions of water brands. The beverage industry has been scrambling to react to public anger over scenes of huge piles of plastic waste contaminating oceans, pledging to step up recycling efforts. However it’s not black and white on the green front. By increasing recycling via cans, companies could fall back in efforts to reduce their carbon footprints, illustrating the tough juggling act they can face to keep environmentally conscious investors, campaigners and consumers on-side. “That’s the dilemma you’re going to have to choose between,” said Ruben Griffioen, sustainability manager of packaging materials at Heineken, adding the company was trying to reduce both plastic waste and emissions. Recycling plastic is more complex, leads to degradation and has lower reuse rates than aluminium – so the metal has been heralded as a greener alternative. Cans have on average 68% recycled content compared to just 3% for plastic in the United States, Environmental Protection Agency data shows.

Russia Scraps Climate Change Plan After Uproar From Businesses –The Russian government has abandoned key provisions of a new “climate change” legislation package after the country’s leading businesses – most operating in the “not quite” ESG arena – mounted a significant protest, according to Russian daily Kommersant (via the Moscow Times). The abandoned legislation included quotas on carbon emissions at Russia’s largest companies, along with a national carbon trading system and strict penalties for the country’s worst polluters. All that remains of the proposals are a plan to measure and collect emissions data as part of a so-called ‘green audit’ lasting five years. The campaign against a stricter package of measures was led by the influential Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) – one of the main lobbying groups for Russia’s largest businesses. The new laws were set to be introduced as part of Russia’s ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement. Originally, the Russian government proposed introducing new climate legislation in two phases. The first would be a five-year stock-taking exercise to measure company-level emissions and set appropriate quotas for reducing emissions. After that, Russia would then introduce a carbon cap on the country’s biggest polluters and penalties for those that exceed their quotas. Earlier plans also envisaged the creation of a national fund to support emissions reduction and a system of nation-wide carbon trading. –Moscow TimesAfter the RSPP’s lobbying efforts, the entire second phase was killed off, as the group successfully argued that the government should wait for the results of the climate audit before new laws and regulations affect various companies.”The idea of putting a price on carbon dioxide in Russia has fallen victim to the industrial lobby,” noted VTB Capital analysts in a Thursday research note, despite that “the Paris Climate Agreement envisages a greenhouse gas emission target which is higher than Russia’s current emissions. So introducing the quota system is unlikely to be punitive for businesses.” The gutted climate package effectively puts “any actively managed efforts by the government to reduce emissions on ice,” they added.

Fridays for Horsepower: German Motorists Oppose Fridays for Future – Der Spiegel —Motorists in Germany are banding together to oppose climate activists’ calls to limit the use of cars. Politicians are taking them seriously because, unlike the Fridays for Future movement and its leader Greta Thunberg, most members of the Fridays for Horsepower group can vote. Christopher Grau is a self-described “gearhead” and “technician,” but he still has a thing or two to learn about being an influencer. His performance wasn’t particularly good in his latest video — the picture was shaky and the sound terrible — but that didn’t stop more than 150,000 people from watching his hour-long diatribe against Germany’s current climate protection policy. Unlike many critics of Germany’s planned tax on CO2 emissions, though, he wasn’t railing against it because he found it halfhearted or weak. He was indignant that any such scheme exists at all. A friend then created a Facebook group called Fridays for Hubraum (Fridays for Horsepower) and made Grau an administrator. According to the group’s description, they intend to “counter the rampant climate mania with some fun.” And they wrote: “There are more of us.”The response has been overwhelming. The closed Facebook group already boasts more than 540,000 members. Grau appears to have unintentionally launched a collective movement for concerned motorists — and all it took to unite this new online resistance was a slogan.Wait, resistance? What exactly are they resisting? “Paternalism,” they say. Also the “pretension” and “holier-than-thou terror” embodied by Greta Thunbergand her followers. Grau’s group is a sign of the growing dismay felt by many German voters. It shows just how polarized German society is over the climate issue.

Growing preference for SUVs challenges emissions reductions in passenger car market – IEA – With major automakers announcing new electric car models at a regular pace, there has been growing interest in recent years about the impact of electric vehicles on the overall car market, as well as global oil demand, carbon emissions, and air pollution.Carmakers plan more than 350 electric models by 2025, mostly small-to-medium variants. Plans from the top 20 car manufacturers suggest a tenfold increase in annual electric car sales, to 20 million vehicles a year by 2030, from 2 million in 2018. Starting from a low base, less than 0.5% of the total car stock, this growth in electric vehicles means that nearly 7% of the car fleet will be electric by 2030.Meanwhile, the conventional car market has been showing signs of fatigue, with sales declining in 2018 and 2019, due to slowing economies. Global sales of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars fell by around 2% to under 87 million in 2018, the first drop since the 2008 recession. Data for 2019 points to a continuation of this trend, led by China, where sales in the first half of the year fell nearly 14%, and India where they declined by 10%.These trends have created a narrative of an imminent peak in passenger car oil demand, and related CO2emissions, and the beginning of the end for the “ICE age.” As passenger cars consume nearly one-quarter of global oil demand today, does this signal the approaching erosion of a pillar of global oil consumption?A more silent structural change may put this conclusion into question: consumers are buying ever larger and less fuel-efficient cars, known as Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs). This dramatic shift towards bigger and heavier cars has led to a doubling of the share of SUVs over the last decade. As a result, there are now over 200 million SUVs around the world, up from about 35 million in 2010, accounting for 60% of the increase in the global car fleet since 2010. Around 40% of annual car sales today are SUVs, compared with less than 20% a decade ago.

Electric cars could be just another ecological disaster – As sea levels rise and climate-change protests grow ever louder around the world, the owners of electric cars may feel they are doing their bit to avert a global-warming crisis. If so, they may be deluding themselves. Electric vehicles currently account for less than 0.5% of the world’s cars. That will change soon. A tipping point will come when there are sufficient charging points and drivers realize that a car that runs on fossil fuel has no resale value. And when that happens, whether the electric car is going to save us or destroy us will depend on what type of power we use to charge its batteries.When the UK announced in 2017 that the sale of new gasoline and diesel vehicles would be banned from 2040, there was a sharp intake of breath from the national grid. With 9 million vehicles being charged daily, the current maximum peak-time demand for electricity could increase by as much as 50%, which is beyond current capacity. As this scenario will be replayed wherever millions of electric cars are plugged in, the most pressing question will be: Where will we get the electricity to charge them? If it comes from renewable sources, all well and good. Some countries are already gradually increasing the share of renewables in their power mix. But the overall, global picture looks very different. According to oil company BP’s 2019 Statistical Review of World Energy, the contribution of solar and wind power to global electricity production in 2018 was just 9.3%. Coal is still king at 38% and coal usage is actually increasing, mainly in the rapidly expanding economies of India and China. This is despite a 25% increase in the use of renewables in both those countries last year, which BP warns is not enough to keep pace with rising demand for electricity. A sudden escalation in the production and use of electric cars will only compound this reality. Elsewhere, natural gas is becoming more important in electricity generation. In the Middle East, about 73% of electricity comes from natural gas. In Saudi Arabia, the mix is 60-40 between gas and oil, while the United Arab Emirates is almost entirely reliant on gas. But that doesn’t necessarily mean natural gas can help to limit global warming.

This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve – Truly defeating climate change will mean getting to net-zero carbon emissions and eventually negative emissions. That means decarbonizing everything. Every economic sector. Every use of fossil fuels. And actually, there are some sectors, some uses of fossil fuels, that we do not yet know how to decarbonize.Take, for instance, industrial heat: the extremely high-temperature heat used to make steel and cement. It’s not sexy, but it matters.Heavy industry is responsible for around 22 percent of global CO2 emissions. Forty-two percent of that – about 10 percent of global emissions – comes from combustion to produce large amounts of high-temperature heat for industrial products like cement, steel, and petrochemicals.To put that in perspective, industrial heat’s 10 percent is greater than the CO2 emissions of all the world’s cars (6 percent) and planes (2 percent) combined. Yet, consider how much you hear about electric vehicles. Consider how much you hear about flying shame. Now consider how much you hear about … industrial heat. Not much, I’m guessing. But the fact is, today, virtually all of that combustion is fossil-fueled, and there are very few viable low-carbon alternatives. For all kinds of reasons, industrial heat is going to be one of the toughest nuts to crack, carbon-wise. And we haven’t even gotten started.

The Great Biomass Boondoggle – The urgency of the climate crisis is inspiring some extreme and unproven ideas for how to hide carbon and cool the planet, such as ocean fertilization, turning CO2 into rocks, and seeding the atmosphere to dim the sun. Arguably one of the most reckless ideas, though, is already well underway: burning “forest biomass” – that is, trees – in power plants as a replacement for coal. The problem with this so-called green energy source is that instead of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, it increases the amount of CO2 coming out of the smokestack compared to fossil fuels, and the climate “benefit” is claimed by simply not counting the emissions.While policymakers in developed countries (the European Union, the United States, Canada, Japan, and Korea, among others) seem perfectly happy with this solution, scientists and activists are reacting with bewilderment and fury as entire forests are vaporized into the atmosphere in the name of renewable energy. Meanwhile, the burgeoning biomass and wood-pellet industries are dancing away with billions in renewable energy subsidies. To counter this atrocious trend, I founded an organization in 2010, the Partnership for Policy Integrity, to provide reliable science and policymaking clarity on the forest and climate impacts of burning forests for fuel. Since then, many environmental groups have joined the fight, but we still haven’t ended this parade of stupidity, because the forces are powerful and the pool of money is deep. Like many damaging forms of economic activity, the biomass industry started out small and at first flew under the radar. For decades, sawmills and pulp and paper manufacturers have burned sawdust, wood scraps, and black liquor (the condensed chemical slurry left over from wood pulping) to produce heat and power. Environmental groups were content to call this green energy considering that the alternative had been incineration or dumping black liquor into streams. And since these other outcomes would generate CO2 anyway, burning such materials was considered to provide carbon-neutral energy. Few people questioned why even the filthiest, most polluting biomass boilers at paper mills – some producing sulfur dioxide emissions to rival those of coal plants – were getting renewable energy subsidies, and over time these subsidies (along with federal renewable energy tax credits) became an important source of revenue for wood-consuming industries.

Praised just days ago, biofuels deal now panned – In an effort to mend fences with the powerful corn lobby, the Trump administration unveiled the draft of a new formula Tuesday to boost biofuels demand – but the proposal instead provoked only more consternation from the industry. Corn and soybean farmers are angry that Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has greatly expanded the number of waivers it gives to small refineries to exempt them from complying with the nation’s renewable fuel policy. Moreover, some of the waivers have gone to refineries operated by oil industry giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron, raising questions about whether they truly had financial hardships in complying with the rule. In response to arguments from the renewable fuel industry that these waivers reduce demand, Trump said less than two weeks ago a new rule on blending biofuels into the nation’s gas and diesel supply would make up for it. But when that proposed rule came out Tuesday, renewable fuel interests didn’t see that promise in there. “Only 11 days after President Trump’s landmark announcement, the EPA proposal reneges on the core principle of the deal,” Iowa Renewable Fuels Association Executive Director Monte Shaw said in a statement. “Instead of standing by President Trump’s transparent and accountable deal, EPA is proposing to use heretofore secret (Department of Energy) recommendations that EPA doesn’t have to follow.” The new rule bases the biofuels volumes that will be required for blending only on estimates from the U.S. Energy Department – rather than the actual exemptions themselves.

Private Utility Companies Keep Merging and Merging – The power seems to go out every so often in our largest cities these days. New York City experienced two blackouts over the summer during heat waves, and the Bay Area saw random, lengthy power outages to 2.5 million residents as a precaution against wildfires just last week. The commonality between these crises is that investor-owned utilities were behind them. These monopolies, driven by short-term financial pressures, resist equipment upgrades and maintenance, leading to a lack of preparedness during climate-fueled disasters like fires, hurricanes, and extreme heat. The Wall Street mentality of cutting corners has made our power systems dangerously unstable. While spurned ratepayers, blackout victims, and environmental activists have joined a chorus of discontent on privately held utilities – flanked by presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom have featured public ownership of utilities as a plank of their Green New Deal proposals – private utilities themselves are charging ahead with even more corporate consolidation. The year 2019 has seen a spate of mergers within the industry, none larger than the proposed $67 billion merger between Connecticut-based Avangrid and Pennsylvania’s PPL, reported on last Friday by the Financial Times.The proposed merger between PPL and Avangrid, which is still being discussed by the two firms, would form one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the country. Avangrid, a multibillion-dollar firm based in Connecticut, provides gas or electricity to more than three million customers across New York and New England. The company is also a major player in the renewable-energy sector. It’s the third-largest wind power provider in the country, and owns wind and solar farms across 22 U.S. states.PPL, itself the product of the merger of eight electric companies across the state in 1920, was formerly known as Pennsylvania Power and Light. It’s worth roughly $23 billion, with operations across Pennsylvania and Kentucky, as well as an electric distribution company in the U.K. It serves roughly ten million customers in total.

‘Utter hypocrisy’: Government refuses to stop spending billions on fossil fuel projects across world – The government has been accused of “utter hypocrisy” after rejecting calls from MPs to stop spending billions on overseas fossil fuel projects while claiming to be a leader in the fight against global warming.Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee had warned that Britain is sabotaging its climate credentials by paying out “unacceptably high” oil and gas subsidies in developing nations.But international trade secretary Liz Truss shunned the cross-party group’s recommendation that investment in fossil fuel projects abroad should end by 2021, saying the move would be “too abrupt”. A report published by the cross-party group in June found UK Export Finance (UKEF) – a government body that underwrites loans and insurance to help British firms secure business abroad – had spent £2.6bn in the last five years supporting global energy exports. Of this, £2.5bn went on fossil fuel projects, with the vast majority in low- and middle-income countries. The EAC said the funding was “the elephant in the room undermining the UK’s international climate and development targets”. It also warned the projects risked locking developing nations into fossil-fuel dependency “for decades to come”.

‘Coal for diesel’: Redevelopment menaces Chicago neighbourhood – Victories are rare for community activists in Little Village, a low-income, largely minority neighbourhood on Chicago’s west side. But seven years ago, activists scored an epic victory by managing to shut down the Crawford Generating Station – a coal-fired power plant that had spewed hazardous toxins and pollutants into the community for decades. The hope was that the shuttered coal plant would be converted into a park or a public space that residents could use. Instead, Hilco Redevelopment Partners, an industrial real estate development company, is tearing it down to make way for a yet another e-commerce distribution centre that promises to draw fleets of 18-wheeler trucks to an area already inundated with pollution. “They’re here to make a buck,” Edith Tovar, a community organiser with the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), told Al Jazeera. “The lives of black and brown people and indigenous people are not as valued as the lives of people who are not people of colour, and it shows.” Diesel fumes and dust blanket Little Village, an industrial corridor with a largely Latinx population. The neighbourhood is adjacent to Interstate 55, a major highway that provides hundreds of freight trucks with daily access to distribution centres in Little Village that serve the city and surrounding suburbs. Two-storey brick homes with neatly trimmed lawns sit across the street from the decommissioned Crawford plant – one of more than a dozen industrial sites located throughout the area. Two elementary schools are located just two blocks from multiple industrial sites – a plastic fabrication company, a distribution warehouse, a steel company and an asphalt plant. They are part of the landscape of commercial facilities, including an Amazon delivery station, that dot Little Village and the larger west and south sides of Chicago. “We’re trading coal for diesel,” said Tovar.

Two former coal miners sue manufacturers for lung disease | West Virginia Record – Two lawsuits were filed against Mine Safety Appliances Company alleging they were diagnosed with serious lung diseases after working as coal miners for many years. Mine Safety Appliances Company, 3M Company, American Optical Corporation, Cabot CSC LLC, Aearo Technologies, Raleigh Mine and Industrial Supply, Eastern States Mine Supply, House-Hasson Hardware Company, Persinger Division and ten unknown and unnamed individuals were all named as defendants in the suits. One of the lawsuits also names Moldex-Metric Inc., Kentucky Mine Supply Company and Marco Mine Supply. Phillip R. Collins and LaTonya Collins and Ebb N. Preece and Tamara Preece filed the lawsuits in Wayne Circuit Court late last month and early this month. Phillip Collins and Ebb Preece claim they worked as coal miners for many years and during their employments, they used respirators that were manufactured and sold by the defendants for protection against harmful dust. The plaintiffs claim despite wearing the respirators, they were developed complicated coal miner’s pneumoconiosis, which was caused by hidden defects in and the inadequate warnings provided with the respirators. The defendants negligently designed and manufactured the respirators’ exhalation valves, which the plaintiffs claim did not have adequate protection for normal wear and tear, according to the suits. The plaintiffs claim the defendants failed to provide adequate warning and/or instruction with regard to the respirators, failed to provide fitting instructions and failed to adequately monitor and/or test or prescribe monitoring and/or tests for persons who handled or worked with its respirators. The respirators were defective and harmful dust leaked through them and the plaintiffs breathed in harmful dust and debris, according to the suits. The harmful dust was not detectable to the human senses because it was too small and was odorless, the plaintiffs claimed.

Coal Industry Pushed State Regulators to Lobby for Power Rescue – – A series of letters from state energy regulators asking the Trump administration to act on coal plant closures was orchestrated by a coal lobbying group, emails show, raising questions about the independence of the public service commissioners.Utility commissioners in six states pressed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to act on an inquiry into whether coal plant retirements are threatening the electric grid. The state officials sent letters to FERC at the request of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, according to the emails and Jon McKinney, a consultant for the coal group working on the effort.Emails from McKinney to the West Virginia Public Service Commissionshow that in some cases, the letters by state officials closely tracked a “sample letter” provided by the trade group, which represents mining companies such as Murray Energy Corp. and Consol Energy Inc., as well coal-burning utilities American Electric Power Co. and Southern Co.The emails were provided to Bloomberg News by the Energy and Policy Institute, which obtained them through a public records request. Regulators in Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, Tennessee and Wyoming wrote similar letters.At issue is whether FERC decides if any further action is needed to prop up the grid after spurning a previous request by the administration to rescue money-losing plants.Watchdog groups such as Public Citizen say the coalition’s involvement in the letters “is a serious problem.” “State regulators are not there to do the bidding of a coal association,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “There appears to be evidence the coal industry is directing a campaign by state regulators to push FERC to provide market based subsidies to the coal industry.”

‘We are not the bad guys’: Origin cops climate, fracking grilling – Australian energy giant Origin faced a grilling from climate campaigners about coal-fired power plant emissions and from Aboriginal landowners opposing the company’s fracking plans in the Northern Territory during a day of intense pressure at its annual shareholder meeting in Sydney.Origin was hit with several shareholder resolutions ahead of its meeting on Wednesday criticising the national power provider’s positions on a range of environmental and social issues. The resolutions, calling for Origin to accelerate its exit from fossil fuels and abandon its controversial fracking project, prompted the board to argue many of the assertions “lack scientific rigour, peer review or are simply incorrect”. “In fact, we are proud at Origin of the leading position we have taken on environmental, social and governance matters,” said chairman Gordon Cairns, adding that Origin had been Australia’s first to set emissions targets approved by the Science-Based Target initiative, a globally recognised framework referencing the science needed to limit global warming in line with Paris targets. “We are actually on the same side here,” Mr Cairns said in response to the activists. “We are not the opposition, we are not the bad guys.” Resolutions put forward by minority shareholders called on Origin to commit to closing down its Eraring coal-fired power station in NSW, the largest in the country, earlier than its planned 2032 closure. . “Origin’s current targets and plans actually allow it to continue increasing emissions until 2032 … as a result, Eraring’s emissions have risen every year since 2014,” Market Forces legal analyst Will van de Pol said. “This trajectory is completely out of step with the action required to meet the Paris climate goals, increasing our company’s exposure to climate change transition risks.”

PUCO wrong to cap fee for energy-efficiency plan, state’s high court rules – The Ohio Supreme Court found state regulators didn’t have the authority to limit the amount that FirstEnergy could recover from programs meant to reduce electricity consumption. The company, along with some environmental groups, had argued that the cap was unnecessary to protect consumers against cost increases.State regulators were wrong to impose a cap on the costs that FirstEnergy could recover from programs meant to reduce electricity consumption, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.In November 2017, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approved FirstEnergy’s programs meant to help consumers become more energy efficient and to reduce demand for the 2017-19 period, and capped how much the Akron-based power company could recover for those programs at 4% of its annual revenue. Those programs were required under a 2009 state law.The PUCO and the Consumers’ Counsel argued the cap was necessary to ensure that consumers weren’t overcharged. The company, along with environmental groups, maintained the caps were unnecessary because other PUCO orders protected consumers against cost increases.The court, in a 5-2 ruling written by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, said the PUCO decision to cap the amount FirstEnergy could recover violated state law.The court said the justices found no “express or implied authorization in the language” of the law for the PUCO’s decision.The ruling comes months after the legislature adopted and the governor signed House Bill 6, the controversial measure that provides subsidies for the state’s two nuclear plants along with two coal-fired power plants. A provision in the bill eliminates the requirement that utilities maintain these programs.

FirstEnergy Solutions bankruptcy may end soon – Akron’s FirstEnergy Solutions says it expects to conclude its restructuring by the end of this year, because U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Alan Koschik is confirming its plan of reorganization. The company, still a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp. for now, made the announcement on Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 15, after the judge reportedly gave its plan a verbal go-ahead in court earlier that day.Koschik, of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio, “indicated he will confirm the plan that was supported by more than 93% of voting creditors,” FirstEnergy Solutions said in a news release. The company said it will “begin to implement the plan, subject to satisfaction of other conditions to the effectiveness of the plan, including all regulatory approvals.”FirstEnergy Solutions has been in bankruptcy since March 31, 2018, and had been expected to come out of reorganization in August as a separate company with a new name.That got quashed, however, when the judge refused to confirm the company’s plan, reportedly due to a dispute over how union retirement plans would be treated. Koschik said then that he would not approve a plan until that issue was resolved. Bloomberg Law reported on Aug. 15 that union workers will get the same benefits they would have received had the company not filed for bankruptcy.

Anti-bailout group seeks court injunction –The group seeking a voter referendum on Ohio’s new nuclear bailout efforts urged a federal judge on Thursday to prevent enforcement of a law the group contends is handing its opposition the information it needs to harass, intimidate, and even bribe its signature gatherers.Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts also contends that a requirement its paid organizers and managers of its petition effort file forms in advance with the secretary of state’s office is unfair because its opponents don’t face a similar mandate.The group has until Oct. 21 to file nearly 266,000 valid signatures of registered voters to put House Bill 6 on the November, 2020, ballot. Absent that, the law will take effect the next day.The law would impose surcharges on consumers’ electricity bills to create a $170 million-a-year fund. Of that, $150 million would support FirstEnergy Solutions’ nuclear power plants on the shore of Lake Erie – Davis-Besse in Oak Harbor and the Perry plant east of Cleveland.

Pushy petitioners attempt to prevent referendum on campus – OSU Lantern – Following students wearing headphones down 18th Avenue, cornering them at Thompson Library and ambushing them while eating at the Ohio Union are all tactics aggressive petitioners who swarmed campus have used on students in the last several weeks in an attempt to prevent a referendum on a nuclear bailout from being put on the ballot. House Bill 6, signed into law July 23, will provide a subgroup of Akron-based energy provider First Energy Corporation called First Energy Solutions with around $1 billion over seven years to keep two nuclear power plants in Northern Ohio from shutting their doors. Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts – a political action group opposed to HB 6 – began gathering signatures to put a referendum on the 2020 ballot that would repeal the law. In response, a campaign against the referendum includes a petition and especially assertive on-campus petitioners from political group Ohioans for Energy Security that asks state lawmakers to prevent foreign ownership of Ohio power plants. Gene Pierce, a spokesperson for Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, said in an email that the initiative is trying to sabotage the organization’s referendum efforts. “It’s meant to confuse people into thinking they’ve signed our petitions, and to drain the spot labor market from a vast pool of people who would otherwise be available to work for us,” Gene Pierce, a spokesperson for Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, said in an email. The petition against the referendum is paid for by Ohioans for Energy Security, which says that overturning HB 6 would allow China “control over Ohio” as well as give signers’ personal information to the Chinese government, according to their website and video campaigns. “Warning! Don’t give your personal information to the Chinese Government” a banner at the top of the site reads. “China is quietly invading our Energy Grid and coming for our Ohio jobs.” Pierce said these statements are false. “It’s a totally bogus claim. Foreign entities can invest in American companies, but when it comes to our energy grid they can not control a part of our grid..

Chase column: Nuclear power struggling to compete on a level playing field with natural gas and renewables – The Lima News Dr. Robert Chase – Guest Column – We’re now getting an idea of just how expensive building a nuclear plant can be. Ten years after owners of the only remaining nuclear plant being built in the United States first proposed the project, the owners say the total cost of building two additional units at the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia is likely to reach upward of $27 billion, more than twice the original estimate. Earlier, South Carolina electricity companies opted to abandon construction of two new units at the VC Summer nuclear plant when the project’s estimated cost ballooned to $25 billion. Both projects utilized Westinghouse’s AP 1000 reactor. Now bankrupt, Westinghouse is expected to get back on its feet sooner than had been thought. But with no further reactor orders from U.S. utilities – there haven’t been any new nuclear plants built in this country in 30 years – and the premature retirement of seven operating nuclear plants since 2014, Westinghouse won’t be anything like the company that once dominated nuclear power in the United States. A recent report from the MIT Energy Initiative said, “The recent experience of nuclear construction projects in the United States and Europe has demonstrated repeated failures of construction management practices in terms of their ability to deliver products on time and within budget.” Although there might be a market for advanced reactors like the small modular reactor (SMR) that would use standardized designs and be built in a factory to reduce capital costs and shorten construction times, U.S. nuclear companies are likely to face stiff competition from reactor manufacturers in Russia, China, and other countries that are engaged in a global race to commercialize SMRs. Despite nuclear power’s problems, the Department of Energy has held out the possibility of saving several financially-ailing nuclear plants by providing financial assistance to keep the reactors in operation. But government loan guarantees weren’t of much help for the Georgia and South Carolina projects, and it’s unlikely financially-stressed operating nuclear plants such as Perry and Davis-Besse in Ohio and Beaver Valley in Pennsylvania – all of which are competing against an abundance of cheap natural gas and renewable power – would be able to do any better. Creating a “nuclear renaissance” in this country won’t happen if nuclear plants need to be subsidized. Besides, demand for electricity has plateaued nationwide as a result of major improvements in energy efficiency, weakening the need for baseload power from nuclear power and coal.

Maine Yankee to issue update on Wiscasset nuclear waste – The Maine Yankee Community Advisory Panel on Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage will meet Tuesday to update Wiscasset residents on the status of the 64 containers of nuclear waste stored at the former Maine Yankee power plant site. The federal government was contractually obligated to remove the radioactive waste by 1998 after the plant was decommissioned in 1996. The advisory panel advocates for the removal of the spent nuclear fuel to a safe location outside New England. Eric Howes, Maine Yankee director of public and government affairs, will also give an update on the Sensible, Timely Relief for America’s Nuclear Districts Economic Development (STRANDED) Act, which was introduced by U.S. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois, in July. The act is aimed at providing financial relief to communities like Wiscasset stuck with storing nuclear waste. Should the STRANDED Act pass, Wiscasset would be eligible to receive $15 per kilogram of nuclear waste currently being housed at the site, which is the rate for impact assistance established under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. There are about 542 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel stored at Maine Yankee, meaning Wiscasset would collect over $8 million from the government. According to Maine Yankee, it costs roughly $10 million per year to maintain the 64 canisters of radioactive waste. The spent nuclear fuel is housed in 64 dry storage casks, which stand on 16 3-foot-thick concrete pads. Each concrete cask is comprised of a 2.5-inch thick steel liner surrounded by 28 inches of reinforced concrete.

EnergySolutions signs contract, acquires Three Mile Island nuclear power plant – EnergySolutions has signed a contract to acquire all licenses and assets of Three Mile Island. Under this agreement, the facility would be transferred to a subsidiary of EnergySolutions known as TMI-2 Solutions, LLC, and also facilitates applications to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities for approval of the transfer, followed by the decommissioning of Unit-2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI-2) located near Middleton, Pennsylvania. EnergySolutions, Inc. announced Tuesday it has signed the contract with FirstEnergy Corp. subsidiaries GPU Nuclear, Inc., Metropolitan Edison Company, Jersey Central Power & Light Company, and Pennsylvania Electric Company, acquiring all licenses and assets of TMI-2. “We are excited for the opportunity to safely decommission Unit-2 at Three Mile Island and restore the area to its natural state,” stated Ken Robuck, President and CEO of EnergySolutions. “We currently have four decommissioning projects, two of which will be completed in the next six months. Every project has provided valuable experience with best practices and lessons learned that we will incorporate into this project to safely decommission the facility.” In 1979, TMI-2 experienced a partial meltdown which resulted in the permanent closure of Three Mile Island. In the early 1980s, 99% of the nuclear fuel was removed from the plant, packaged and shipped to a storage facility at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The facility has remained in a safe and stable storage condition known as Post Defueling Monitored Storage (PDMS) for the past 26 years, according to the press release issued by EnergySolutions on Tuesday. “Every decommissioning project we have performed comes with a commitment to keep the public fully informed of the progress being made and to answer questions that members of the community may have,” stated Robuck. To perform the decommission, EnergySolutions and Jingoli – a construction company headquartered in New Jersey – formed a joint venture called ES/Jingoli Decommissioning, LLC. According to the press release, Jingoli has successfully managed and executed nuclear projects on behalf of a number of utilities in the U.S. and Canada, with experience in the nuclear field from pre-construction, construction management, project controls and decommissioning.

2,667 radioactive bags from Fukushima nuke disaster unleashed by Typhoon Hagibis – (Taiwan News) – As Typhoon Hagibis hammered Japan on Saturday (Oct. 12), thousands of bags containing radioactive waste have reportedly been carried into a local Fukushima stream by floodwaters, potentially having a devastating environmental impact.According to Asahi Shimbun, a temporary storage facility containing some 2,667 bags stuffed with radioactive contaminants from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was unexpectedly inundated by floodwaters brought by Typhoon Hagibis. Torrential rain flooded the storage facility and released the bags into a stream 100 meters away. Officials from Tamara City in Fukushima Prefecture said that each bag is approximately one cubic meter in size. Authorities were only able to recover six of the bags by 9 p.m. on Oct. 12, and it is uncertain how many remain on the loose while the possible environmental impact is being assessed.

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