Environmental News For The Week Ending 02August 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).

Please share this article – Go to very top of page, right hand side, for social media buttons.

Note: Because of the high volume of news regarding the coronavirus outbreak, that news has been published separately:

• 02 Aug 2020 – Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 02August 2020

• 02 Aug 2020 – Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 02August 2020

Summary: New US cases are at a 3 week LOW, running about 10% below the pace of last week. US deaths, on the other hand, are at a 3 month high, and were nearly 20% higher than last week. Based on new cases, we can probably expect US deaths to peak and then turn lower in about three weeks. But before then, we will probably see Covid-19 as the leading cause of US deaths for a while, passing heart disease and cancer.

I was surprised and alarmed to see the number of cases in Ohio pass that of Michigan this week. Early in the pandemic, our cases were one-third of Michigan’s, and Ohio was being held up as a state that ‘got it right’ in terms of response. But then Gov. Dewine caved in to the legislature and business interests, Amy Acton resigned as Health Director amid the backlash against our lockdown, and our new cases have been accelerating ever since. So now it’s dangerous out there.

Note: News surrounding the Ohio utility bribery scandal are the final articles at the end of this report.

CDC warns of a ‘rapidly growing’ Salmonella outbreak amid more than 200 reported infections – The Center for Disease Control and Prevention warns of a “rapidly growing” outbreak of Salmonella infections. On Friday, the CDC reported that a total of 212 people from 23 states have been infected with Salmonella with a total of 31 hospitalizations. They stated that illnesses first emerged between late June to early July. Between Tuesday and Thursday, 87 additional people reported infections, according to Friday’s report. According to the CDC’s map of reported cases, most of the infections are in Oregon and Utah, with 51 and 40 infections respectively. The two states are followed by Michigan, Arizona, Iowa, California, and Montana, which all have reported ten or more infections, according to the report. The CDC has not “identified a specific food, grocery store, or restaurant as the source of this outbreak,” according to the report. The CDC identifies diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps as symptoms of Salmonella that emerge between six hours to six days after infection. The illness lasts between four to seven days. The CDC asks individuals with symptoms to report their illness to local health department, considering that most people undergo treatment for the infection. The CDC said that they are interviewing infected individuals to understand what may have caused the outbreak.

CDC: Hundreds sick, 1 dead in nationwide Salmonella outbreak linked to chicks, ducklings – Chicks and ducklings kept in backyards are the likely source of a nationwide Salmonella outbreak that has sickened nearly 1,000 people and killed one person, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.The outbreak nearly doubled in size since the CDC’s last report on June 24. Sick people range in age from 1 to 94-years-old, and more than 150 people have been hospitalized. A separate salmonella outbreak tied to red onions has caused nearly 400 cases reported in 34 states this month.Every state except Hawaii and Rhode Island has now reported at least one case in the poultry-related outbreak, the CDC says. Kentucky and Tennessee are currently the hardest hit states.The agency believes backyard poultry – specifically chicks and ducklings – are to blame for the outbreak, citing interviews with 409 ill people.The animals were obtained from several sources and testing has revealed three outbreak strains, the CDC reports.”You can get sick with a Salmonella infection from touching backyard poultry or their environment. Backyard poultry can carry Salmonella bacteria even if they look healthy and clean and show no signs of illness,” the investigation notice warns.Backyard poultry, especially chickens, have become popular pets in the U.S. Many owners continue to use them as a source for eggs and meat, too.People who own backyard poultry should wash their hands after touching the animals.”Don’t kiss backyard poultry or snuggle them and then touch your face or mouth,” the CDC says. “Don’t let backyard poultry inside the house, especially in areas where food or drink is prepared, served, or stored.” Symptoms of a Salmonella infection include diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps. People sickened by the bacteria typically have symptoms in 6 hours to six days after being exposed.

CDC says another salmonella outbreak in 34 states linked to red onions -Across 34 states, nearly 400 people have fallen ill due to a salmonella outbreak. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this outbreak is likely linked to red onions.“Although red onions have been identified as the likely source, other types of onions may be contaminated due to the way onions are grown and harvested,” a statement from the CDC read.The CDC is advising that anyone who has bought onions from Thomson International, Inc – including red, white, yellow and sweet onions – refrain from eating, serving, or selling them. Any food that contains these onions should also not be consumed and can be discarded. Salmonella outbreak update: Do not eat, serve, or sell onions from Thomson International, Inc., or food made with them. This includes red, white, yellow, and sweet onions. 396 illnesses in 34 states. Read more: https://t.co/1uvWO6f6cZpic.twitter.com/PXxCvSC3RN – CDC (@CDCgov) August 1, 2020

Lead Poisoning Affects One in Three Children Worldwide – Childhood lead poisoning is a long-recognized health hazard that has severely negative consequences for the developing brain. A new first-of-its-kind study reveals that lead poisoning is a global problem, affecting far more children than previously thought. The researchers estimate that roughly 800 million children worldwide, or one out of three, suffer from lead poisoning, according to The New York Times. Children with a blood lead level above 5 micrograms per deciliter need immediate treatment to prevent life-long consequences from the powerful neurotoxin. The report, The Toxic Truth: Children’s exposure to lead pollution undermines a generation of potential, says that the bulk of affected children live in South Asia. India is one of the worst affected countries, where more than 275 million children have dangerously high lead levels in their blood, the BBC reported. The study is a collaboration between UNICEF and Pure Earth, a nonprofit that seeks to help poor countries threatened by toxic pollutants. “With few early symptoms, lead silently wreaks havoc on children’s health and development, with possibly fatal consequences,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore in a UN statement. “Knowing how widespread lead pollution is – and understanding the destruction it causes to individual lives and communities – must inspire urgent action to protect children once and for all.” Childhood lead exposure has been linked to behavioral problems. It can also eventually lead to kidney damage and cardiovascular conditions, according to Agence-France Presse (AFP). Lead poisoning is estimated to cost low- and middle-income countries almost $1 trillion over children’s lifetimes, AFP reported. The study showed lead poisoning is a major problem in developing South Asian countries since environmental safeguards have not yet been put in place or are poorly enforced. That means that lead in dust and fumes from smelters, fires, car batteries, old peeling paint and water pipes, electronics junkyards, and even cosmetics and lead-infused spices pose an enormous risk to the mental and physical development of a generation of children, The New York Times reported.”The unequivocal conclusion of this research is that children around the world are being poisoned by lead on a massive and previously unrecognized scale,” the study found.

Reducing Air Pollution Has Helped Children in Northeast U.S., Study Finds – States in the Northeastern U.S. have made a considerable effort to make their air cleaner by reducing toxicmercury, sulfur dioxide and greenhouse gases emitted by the region’s power plants. New research has found that those efforts have had an ancillary benefit of improving the health of children in the area, preventing hundreds of childhood illnesses and saving an additional hundreds of millions of dollars, as WBUR in Boston reported.The emissions program, known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), was established in 2009 and sets a cap on planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions, offering power plants emissions allowances via permit auctions and allowing them to trade those allowances, as The New York Times reported.Past studies of the RGGI have looked at outcomes such as heart attacks, hospitalizations and lost days of work, though they also took infant mortality, children’s acute bronchitis, and some other respiratory symptoms into account. A 2017 study found that the health benefits of RGGI were worth somewhere between $3 and $8.3 billion. That includes health benefits to children estimated to be worth about $8.1 million, according to WBUR.”We felt it was very important to include the outcomes that were associated with the pollutants that had been largely ignored,” said Frederica Perera, who runs Columbia University’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health, to WBUR. “Because the long-term health benefits would be so great if we could prevent these very early damages from occurring.”Perera and her team found that the emissions reduction may have reduced the number of underweight births in the region and lowered the incidence of asthma and autism by hundreds of cases, offering enormous benefits to children and sparing them a lifelong need for excessive health care resources, according to the new research published in Environmental Health Perspectives. “What makes this study particularly important is that it shows how we have so absurdly undervalued the welfare of our children in how we approach our public policies,” said Aaron Bernstein, interim director of theCenter for Climate, Health and Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, to WBUR. Bernstein was not involved with the study. “We really have a lot to gain by fully accounting for what air pollution and other forms of pollution do to children,” he added.

Wheeler dismisses study claiming EPA role in elevated air pollution, COVID-19 cases – The study linked the EPA’s relaxed enforcement during the pandemic with higher air pollution and COVID-19 cases. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler said he had not read a study linking the agency’s relaxed pollution enforcement during the pandemic with air pollution increases and elevated COVID-19 cases and deaths. The study by researchers at American University was widely reported earlier this month. It used EPA daily air quality readings to find a 13% increase in pollution in counties with six or more facilities required to comply with routine reporting requirements. The EPA said it was freezing enforcement efforts for routine compliance requirements on March 26. “I haven’t seen that study yet,” Wheeler said in response to the Energy News Network’s question last week at an event in Lakewood, Ohio, where he announced federal grants for trash cleanup in the Great Lakes. Wheeler characterized the changes as procedural. He also touted a claim that air pollution has gone down 7% since President Donald Trump took office, although he acknowledged that factors besides regulation were at work. “Certainly some of the air reductions are attributed to fuel switching within the electric power sector, but that’s not all of it,” Wheeler said. Fuel switching refers to more reliance on natural gas as the market for coal has continued to decline, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to prop up the coal industry. The lakeside appearance came roughly three weeks after the release of updated research from American University researchers Claudia Persico and Kathryn Johnson, linking increased pollution to more cases and deaths from COVID-19. The analysis found that counties where the EPA rollback may have supported increased air pollution had an average 39% more COVID-19 cases and 19% more deaths from the virus.

After three decades, most polluted U.S. neighborhoods haven’t changed – (Reuters) – If your neighborhood was among the most polluted in 1981, it probably still is. Likewise, the least polluted areas are still faring the best, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science that analyzed concentrations of fine particulate matter over more than three decades in the United States. Overall, pollution from fine particulate matter fell about 70% between 1981 and 2016, the study found. In that time, air quality has improved dramatically across the country thanks to tighter air quality regulations, cleaner vehicles and fewer coal-fired power plants, experts have found. But the communities most exposed to higher levels of pollution remain the same, the study found. That suggests the United States is falling short on its decades-long policy goal of reducing the disproportionate level of exposure to environmental hazards faced mostly by low-income communities of color. “Disadvantaged communities remain persistently exposed to higher levels of air pollution,” said study co-author Jonathan Colmer, an economist at the University of Virginia. “This was true in 1980, it was true in 1990, 2000, 2010, and so on.” The study comes four months after the Trump administration rejected a recommendation from scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency to tighten air quality regulations, arguing the current standards are adequate for protecting human health.

Tool to Curb Pollution in Environmental-Justice Communities Fails to Get Votes | NJ Spotlight – In an unexpected setback, lawmakers yesterday failed to act on a bill touted by Gov. Phil Murphy as key to helping to curb pollution problems in environmental-justice communities.The legislation (S-232) is viewed by advocates as establishing a national model for giving minority and low-income communities more tools to block new projects that could worsen air and other pollution in their neighborhoods.But a last-minute lobbying blitz against the bill by business interests and labor groups led the Assembly to hold off voting planned for Thursday. The bill had been expected to pass and then be approved by the Senate and sent on to Murphy for his consideration. Kim Gaddy, a Newark native and member of Clean Water Action, said she was disappointed Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Middlesex) did not post the bill for a vote, saying advocates were confident they had the 41 votes to send it on to the Senate.“It would have been a great opportunity to demonstrate Black lives and people of color lives matter,’’ The bill, long sought by environmental justice advocates, would require the state Department of Environmental Protection to consider the cumulative impacts of locating new power plants or major manufacturing facilities where residents already suffer from pollution from incinerators, hazardous-waste sites, or large factories.

A Post-Brexit Agrochemical Apocalypse For The UK? – The British government, regulators and global agrochemical corporations are colluding with each other and are thus engaging in criminal behaviour. That’s the message put forward in a new report written by environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason and sent to the UK Environment Agency. It follows her January 2019 open letter to Werner Baumann, CEO of Bayer CropScience, where she made it clear to him that she considers Bayer CropScience and Monsanto criminal corporations. Her letter to Baumann outlined a cocktail of corporate duplicity, cover-ups and criminality which the public and the environment are paying the price for, not least in terms of the effects of glyphosate. Later in 2019, Mason wrote to Bayer Crop Science shareholders, appealing to them to put human health and nature ahead of profit and to stop funding Bayer. Mason outlined with supporting evidence how the gradual onset of the global extinction of many species is largely the result of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. She argued that Monsanto’s (now Bayer) glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and Bayer’s clothianidin are largely responsible for the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and that the use of glyphosate and neonicotinoid insecticides are wiping out wildlife species across the globe. In February 2020, Mason wrote the report ‘Bayer Crop Science rules Britain after Brexit – the public and the press are being poisoned by pesticides’. She noted that PM Boris Johnson plans to do a trade deal with the US that could see the gutting of food and environment standards. In a speech setting out his goals for trade after Brexit, Johnson talked up the prospect of an agreement with Washington and downplayed the need for one with Brussels – if the EU insists the UK must stick to its regulatory regime. In other words, he wants to ditch EU regulations. Mason pondered just who could be pulling Johnson’s strings. A big clue came in February 2019 at a Brexit meeting on the UK chemicals sector where UK regulators and senior officials from government departments listened to the priorities of Bayer Crop Science. During the meeting (Westminster Energy, Environment & Transport Forum Keynote Seminar: Priorities for UK chemicals sector – challenges, opportunities and the future for regulation post-Brexit), Janet Williams, head of regulatory science at Bayer Crop Science Division, made the priorities for agricultural chemical manufacturers known.

Agricultural Warfare? People Are Receiving Mysterious Unsolicited Packages Of Seeds In The Mail From China – Just when you thought tensions between the U.S. and China couldn’t get any stranger in the midst of the ongoing global pandemic, Americans across the country are starting to report receiving unsolicited packages of different types of seeds that they didn’t order – and don’t know anything about – at their door. The return address on the packages is always from China. The Washington State Department of Agriculture wrote about the phenomenon on their Facebook page on July 24, 2020 and said that the seeds are being shipping in packaging that identifies the contents as jewelry. Similar advisories have been issued in Virginia, Utah, Kansas, Arizona and Louisiana. “Unsolicited seeds could be invasive, introduce diseases to local plants, or be harmful to livestock,” the post says. At least 40 residents in Utah were said to have been mailed the unsolicited packages, according to the Daily Mail. The Kansas Department of Agriculture and the Arizona Department of Agriculture also addressed the phenomenon, as did the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, who said: “Right now, we are uncertain what types of seeds are in the package. Out of caution, we are urging anyone who receives a package that was not ordered by the recipient, to please call the LDAF immediately. We need to identify the seeds to ensure they do not pose a risk to Louisiana’s agricultural industry or the environment.”There have been similar reports from Virginia’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. “The seeds have yet to be identified, but officials speculate that the seeds may be of an invasive plant species and are advising residents not to use them,” Fox News reported.”Taking steps to prevent their introduction is the most effective method of reducing both the risk of invasive species infestations and the cost to control and mitigate those infestations,” VDACS wrote in a press release.

Americans warned not to plant mysterious seeds appearing in the mail – Agriculture officials in several US states issued warnings this week about unsolicited shipments of foreign seeds and advised people not to plant them.Residents in more than a dozen states recently reported receiving seed packets they did not order that appeared to have been sent by mail from China.The US Department of Agriculture said it is working with the Customs and Border Protection, other federal agencies, and the state department to investigate the situation. The department is urging US residents to report the suspicious packages and not plant the seeds. But it it “doesn’t have any evidence indicating this is something other than a ‘brushing scam’ where people receive unsolicited items from a seller who then posts false customer reviews to boost sales”. In Kentucky, the state agriculture department was notified that several residents had received the packages, the agriculture commissioner, Ryan Quarles, said.“We don’t know what they are, and we cannot risk any harm whatsoever to agricultural production in the United States,” he said. “We have the safest, most abundant food supply in the world and we need to keep it that way.”“At this point in time, we don’t have enough information to know if this is a hoax, a prank, an internet scam or an act of agricultural bio-terrorism,” Quarles added. “Unsolicited seeds could be invasive and introduce unknown diseases to local plants, harm livestock or threaten our environment.”In North Carolina, the department of agriculture and consumer services said it was contacted by numerous people who received seed shipments they did not order. The agency said the shipments were likely the product of ‘brushing’.“According to the Better Business Bureau, foreign, third-party sellers use your address and Amazon information to generate a fake sale and positive review to boost their product ratings,” said Phil Wilson, director of the state’s plant industry division. And Florida’s agriculture and consumer services commissioner, Nikki Fried,said on Twitter on Tuesday that the state had received more than 600 reports of suspicious seed packages.

Mystery Seeds Spread Around the World – WSJ – The case of the mystery seeds showing up in U.S. mailboxes from shippers in China and other countries has gone global.The U.S. Department of Agriculture said consumers in at least 22 U.S. states and several other countries had received unsolicited packages of seeds. Canada, the U.K. and Australia all are investigating the matter.The USDA, in a recorded radio broadcast released Wednesday night, revealed the world-wide scope of the seed shipments after thousands of people across the U.S. reported receiving seeds in the mail they didn’t order. States from Washington to Virginia have warned residents about the unsolicited packages, and the USDA said earlier this week that it was collecting the packages to test the seeds for anything of concern. Multiple U.S. agencies are now investigating the seeds, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection.Unsolicited seed packages have been on the USDA’s radar since at least early June, according to state agriculture officials. Gary Black, Georgia’s commissioner of agriculture, said his department contacted the USDA after a handful of state residents reported receiving such deliveries around June 2. Osama El-Lissy, a deputy administrator for the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said the agency has so far identified 14 species of seeds, from mustard and morning glory to cabbage, rosemary and roses. As of late Wednesday, there was no indication any of the seeds carry pests or diseases, according to the USDA. The USDA also reiterated it has no evidence the packages are anything other than a “brushing scam.” In such scams, vendors selling through online retailers like Amazon.com pay “brushers” to place orders for their products, and packages with low-value or no contents are shipped to strangers. Brushers then pose as the buyers and post fake customer reviews to boost the vendor’s sales.

Loss of bees causes shortage of key food crops, study finds -A lack of bees in agricultural areas is limiting the supply of some food crops, a new US-based study has found, suggesting that declines in the pollinators may have serious ramifications for global food security. Species of wild bees, such as bumblebees, are suffering from a loss of flowering habitat, the use of toxic pesticides and, increasingly, the climate crisis. Managed honeybees, meanwhile, are tended to by beekeepers, but have still been assailed by disease, leading to concerns that the three-quarters of the world’s food crops dependent upon pollinators could falter due to a lack of bees. The new research appears to confirm some of these fears. Of seven studied crops grown in 13 states across America, five showed evidence that a lack of bees is hampering the amount of food that can be grown, including apples, blueberries and cherries. A total of 131 crop fields were surveyed for bee activity and crop abundance by a coalition of scientists from the US, Canada and Sweden. “The crops that got more bees got significantly more crop production,” said Rachael Winfree, an ecologist and pollination expert at Rutgers University who was a senior author of the paper, published by the Royal Society. “I was surprised, I didn’t expect they would be limited to this extent.” The researchers found that wild native bees contributed a surprisingly large portion of the pollination despite operating in intensively farmed areas largely denuded of the vegetation that supports them. Wild bees are often more effective pollinators than honeybees but research has shown several species are in sharp decline. The rusty patched bumblebee, for example, was the first bee to be placed on the US endangered species list in 2017 after suffering an 87% slump in the previous two decades. Swaths of American agriculture is propped up by honeybees, frantically replicated and shifted around the country in hives in order to meet a growing need for crop pollination. Almonds, one of the two crops not shown to be suffering from a lack of bees in the study, are mostly grown in California, where most of the beehives in the US are trucked to each year for a massive almond pollination event. The US is at the forefront of divergent trends that are being replicated elsewhere in the world – as farming becomes more intensive to churn out greater volumes to feed a growing global population, tactics such as flattening wildflower meadows, spraying large amounts of insecticide and planting monocultural fields of single crops are damaging the bee populations crucial for crop pollination.

Lack of Wild Bees Causes Crop Shortage, Could Lead to Food Security Issues – Without bees, future generations may not be able to identify with adages like, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ Crop yields for key crops like apples, cherries and blueberries are down across the U.S. because of a lack of bees in agricultural areas, a Rutgers University-led study published Wednesday in The Royal Society found. This could have “serious ramifications” for global food security, reported The Guardian.The scientists wanted to understand the degree to which insect pollination, or lack thereof, actually limits current crop production. Surveying 131 locations across major crop-producing areas of the U.S., they found that five out of seven crops showed evidence of “pollinator limitation” and that yields could be boosted with full pollination, the study said.”The crops that got more bees got significantly more crop production,” said Rachael Winfree, an ecologist and pollination expert and the senior author of the paper, reported The Guardian. “I was surprised, I didn’t expect they would be limited to this extent.”The research further noted that pollinator declines could “translate directly” to decreased production of most of the crops studied and that wild bees “contribute substantially” to the pollination of most studied crops.Declines in both managed honeybees and wild bees raise serious concerns about global food security, the study said, because most of the world’s crops rely on pollinators.Bees and other pollinators like bats and birds underpin the global food system, but their populations are dwindling due to human activity including settlement building, pesticide use, monoculture farming and climate change. This is part of what many are calling the “insect apocalypse,” a precipitous decline in insects across the globe.Wild bees, in particular, suffer from loss of flowering habitat, toxic pesticide use, and climate change, The Guardian reported, and managed honeybees have fallen to disease. Overall, three-quarters of the world’s food crops are dependent up pollinators and could falter due to lack of bees, the news report added.According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, crop production has increasingly become dependent upon insects and other pollinators over the past 50 years by 300%, The Guardian reported. At the same time, farming has become more intensive to produce enough volume to feed a growing global population, the news report said, by flattening wildflower meadows, spraying insecticides and using monoculture crops ‒ all tactics which damage bee populations. “Pollination shortfalls” could cause certain fruits and vegetables to become rarer and more expensive, The Guardian reported. This could trigger nutritional deficits in diets as fresh foods are replaced by rice, wheat and corn, which are pollinated by wind rather than insects.

Locust Swarms Are Getting So Big That We Need Radar To Track Them – The desert locust upsurge is yet another of 2020’s horrors. In dry years, the insects, which can grow up to four inches long and are shades of green, black, or yellow depending on their life stage, remain localized to the deserts of Africa, the Middle East, and southwest Asia. Lately, however, the weather has been wetter than usual. Desert locusts have bred prolifically and migrated in huge swarms to countries that don’t always see them in large numbers, including several nations along the horn of Africa. Other places, such as the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, haven’t had a locust invasion in decades. The locust outbreak is currently classed by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) as an “upsurge.” If the insects begin migrating in large bands – which could happen within a couple years, should things worsen – they’ll be officially considered a plague.A swarm covering one square kilometer eats as much food as 35,000 people every day. The damage done so far is already appalling. The UN says thefood supply of 25 million people in East Africa has been threatened by the insects. In Ethiopia alone, they’ve destroyed around 200,000 hectares of crops. Meanwhile, in India, the insects have chewed up 50,000 hectares.The recent outbreak may be just a hint of what is to come, thanks to the extreme weather expected as a result of climate change. Such conditions,including periods of excessive rainfall, would be adored by the locusts, says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at the FAO.The locusts’ wanderlust has sparked efforts to develop tools to closely track the insects. The FAO already uses real-time reports from locust survey teams on the ground and satellite imagery of vegetation and weather events to help forecast how many locusts will breed and where they will go. Countries use data on locust migrations to determine where to send teams in efforts vanquish the insects en masse by dropping pesticide on them from planes. Among the technologies that could improve locust surveillance by pinpointing locations of multiple swarms at a given moment are radar and drones.

Massive Fleet of Chinese Fishing Boats Threaten Galapagos Islands – Ecuador authorities are keeping tabs on a fleet of roughly 260 fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ecuadorian boats are patrolling to try to stop the fishing boats from entering the area, according toReuters.The ships are just outside the perimeter of the 188-mile-wide economic zone. “This fleet’s size and aggressiveness against marine species is a big threat to the balance of species in the Galflpagos,” Yolanda Kakabadse, former environment minister told The Guardian.Chinese vessels travel to the region each year in search of marine species, including endangered hammerhead sharks.”Unchecked Chinese fishing just on the edge of the protected zone is ruining Ecuador’s efforts to protect marine life in the Galflpagos,” Roque Sevilla told The Guardian. Sevilla, former mayor of Ecuador’s capital, Quito, was tasked with designing a “protection strategy” for the islands, which lie 563 miles west of the South American mainland. He said the first step would be diplomatic efforts requesting the withdrawal of the Chinese fishing fleet. Past Chinese fleets have violated international boundaries to capture marine life. In 2017, a Chinese vessel was caught in the marine reserve with 300 metric tons of wildlife, mostly consisting of sharks, according to the BBC. So far, the Chinese fishing boats have stayed in international waters, Reuters reported.In a series of tweets, Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, used #SOSGalapagos to draw attention to the boats surrounding the protected islands. He described the islands as “one of the richest fishing areas and a hotbed of life for the entire planet,” SkyNews reported. BBC reported that Moreno plans to hold consultations with Colombia, Peru, Chile, Panama and Costa Rica in order to confront the threat.

Huge fleet of 260 Chinese fishing ships is discovered off the Galapagos Islands sparking fears they will ‘suck the life’ from the unique marine eco-system – 260 Chinese fishing ships have been discovered near the Galapagos Islands sparking concerns that they will damage the marine eco-system in the area. Ecuador’s president Lenin Moreno had been tweeting over the weekend to boast about the security in place to protect the area surrounding the islands which he said is ‘a hotbed of life for the entire planet’. However, the Ecuadorian Navy has confirmed that around 260 fishing vessels have been spotted 200 miles from the islands’ shores. Now, volunteer pressure group Blue Planet Society have voiced their concern that the ocean is being destroyed in real time, the Scottish Sun reports. Spokesperson John Hourston told Sky News: ‘The threat that the industrial Chinese fishing fleet poses to the unique and spectacular marine life of the Galapagos archipelago cannot be overstated.’ He also said the vessels were ‘sucking the life from this biodiversity jewel’. ‘Marine life doesn’t recognise lines on a map. Unless the high seas are given protection, the ocean is in danger of becoming become a lifeless desert.’ In response to the fishing fleet a Protection Strategy has been put in place by former Mayor of Quito Roque Sevilla and ex-environment minister Yolanda Kakabadse, alongside a team of specialists.

Maine Woman Killed in Possible Shark Attack – Officials in the Pine Tree State are investigating a possible shark attack that took place Monday and left one woman dead. If it’s confirmed, it will go down in the books as Maine’s first official deadly shark attack, ABC News reported.The Maine Department of Marine Resources posted on Facebook that “an eye witness reported that the woman was swimming off the shore near White Sails Lane when she was injured in what appeared to be a shark attack. Kayakers nearby brought her to shore and EMS responders were called to the scene where she was pronounced deceased.” The post went on to say, “Until further notice, swimmers and boaters are urged to use caution near Bailey Island and to avoid swimming near schooling fish or seals.” Bailey Island is in Casco Bay, just east of Yarmouth and Freeport. Maine Department of Marine Resources spokesman Jeff Nichols told the Boston Globe that he could not find records of any fatal attacks before Monday. Nichols also told the Boston Globe that the last known shark attack occurred off the coast of Eastport in 2010, when a diver swam near salmon pens. Local news reports said the diver used his camera to fend off the shark and escaped unharmed, according to the Boston Globe. James Sulikowski, a shark researcher in charge of Arizona State University’s Sulikowski Shark and Fish Conservation Lab, said there are eight shark species found off Maine’s coast, but only white sharks are known to have attacked people, the Boston Globe reported. When that happens, Sulikowski said, it’s most likely because the shark has mistaken a human for a seal.

Hanna pummels Texas coast with strong winds, heavy rain – (Reuters) – Hanna, the first hurricane of the 2020 Atlantic season, left a trail of destruction along the Texas coast on Sunday, downing power lines, flooding streets and toppling 18-wheeler trucks as torrential rains threatened the area.Hanna came ashore on Padre Island on Saturday afternoon as a Category 1 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of intensity and later made a second landfall in Kenedy County, Texas. It swept through a part of the state hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. By Sunday, it had weakened to a tropical depression.Powerful winds from Hanna knocked over at least three 18-wheeler trucks and a recreational vehicle, with tow trucks trying to right the toppled vehicles on Sunday, shutting down a 2-mile (3.2-km) stretch of U.S. Route 77 in Sarita, Texas, near the Mexican border.In Port Mansfield, 150 miles (240 km) south of Padre Island, winds flattened sugarcane fields and leveled trees. Deer roamed the streets, stopping to nibble downed branches in the yards of homes, some that lost their roofs.Heavy downpours of more than a foot (30 cm) of rain flooded roadways and swelled streams and rivers across south Texas, the National Weather Service said.There were no immediate reports of injuries. “You could hear the wind blowing and the rain blowing and you looked outside you could see sheets of water blowing down the street,” said Sharon Pecce, 75, a resident of Port Mansfield, whose roof was ripped off her house on Saturday night. “It’s scary to go through this at my age, a lot could have happened … we could have been killed,” added Pecce, who was at a friend’s home with her 70-year-old husband when the damage occurred. “We are lucky we weren’t there.”

Tropical Storm Isaias may reach hurricane status near Florida – Tropical Storm Isaias is forecast to approach the coast of Florida this weekend, according to the National Hurricane Center, with wind speeds of 70 miles per hour and some models predicting it could strengthen into a hurricane. Tropical Storm Isaias, which became the ninth named storm of a busy 2020 hurricane season late Wednesday night, saw its forecast track make a small move to the east early Thursday, according to the National Hurricane Center, with the center of that track keeping the core of the storm slightly off the shores of South Florida. Although the center of the forecast cone keeps the core of Isaias slightly offshore of South Florida, nearly the entire state remains in the forecast path. The system is projected to remain a tropical storm for its foreseeable duration (maximum sustained surface winds ranging from 39-73 mph). Little change in strength is anticipated until landfall in Dominican Republic later today, with re-strengthening forecast on Friday and Saturday, the hurricane center said Thursday. Top wind speeds of 70 mph were predicted in a forecast discussion Thursday, which is just short of hurricane strength. Some models show it at hurricane strength near the U.S., according to the NHC. In the 8 a.m. advisory, the storm was moving northwest at 20 mph and was about 125 miles west of Ponce in Puerto Rico and about 105 miles east-southeast of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic with maximum sustained winds of about 60 mph.

Isaias Menaces Bahamas and Florida as 2020 Season’s Second Hurricane – Isaias, the earliest Atlantic “I” storm on record, strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane Thursday and now has the Bahamas and potentially Florida in its path. As a tropical storm, Isaias has already battered Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, still recovering from 2017’s Hurricane Maria, the storm knocked out the power of 300,000 to 400,000 people, dumped five to 10 inches of rain and caused mudslides and flash flooding, National Weather Service San Juan meteorologist Gabriel Lojero told CNN. One woman went missing when her car was swept away.”A lot of neighborhoods were submerged under water,” Lojero said. The Dominican Republic also experienced flooding, water and power outages and storm damage, The Associated Press reported. One man died when he was electrocuted by a toppled electrical cable.Isaias is now 340 miles from Nassau in the Bahamas with winds of 80 miles per hour, according to an 8 a.m. EDT update from the National Hurricane Center (NHC). Hurricane conditions are expected in parts of the Bahamas today.The storm is expected to reach the central Bahamas tonight and move near or over the Northwestern Bahamas and near or east of the Florida peninsula Saturday and Sunday.One of the major potential hazards from the storm is rain. It is expected to dump four to eight inches of rain on the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, northern Haiti and the Turks and Caicos islands through Saturday and one to two inches over Cuba.”These rainfall amounts will lead to life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides, as well as river flooding,” the NHC warned. Between Friday and Monday, the storm could dump two to four inches over South and east-Central Florida, potentially causing flooding. Heavy rains could reach the Carolinas early next week.

Coastal Flooding Could Threaten Millions and Cost Trillions by 2100, New Study Finds – The climate crisis may usher in a new level of global economic catastrophe and human suffering as extreme weather worsens and coastal flooding intensifies. A new study found that extreme weather will make coastal areas dangerous places to live as more intense storms crash into coast lines and increasingly high tides encroach inland, as The New York Times reported.”We are attempting to understand the magnitude of the global scale impacts of future coastal flooding,” Ian Young, a professor at the University of Melbourne and an author of the study, told CNBC.”Globally we need to understand that changes of this nature will occur by 2100 and we need to plan how we are going to respond,” he said.The study, published in Scientific Reports, found that the economic damage from those storms and from periodic flooding may cost over $14 trillion and threaten 20 percent of global gross domestic product, according to CNN.”This is on a ‘business as usual’ CO2 emissions scenario,” said Ebru Kirezci from the University of Melbourne, who led the study, as CNN reported. “Business as usual” assumes a rise in average global temperatures at the upper end of predictions, if global emissions are allowed to continue on their current course.The study pinpointed exact hotspots around the world most vulnerable to coastal flooding, as well as the potential economic impact on infrastructure and activity in those areas. As Fortune noted, the study also maps out in great detail the impact of episodic flooding caused by strengthening storm events and tides. Those events are predicted to be more damaging than the threat of slowly rising seas and will cause roughly 69 percent of coastal flooding by 2100. Some of the regions that are particularly at risk, according to the study, are the following:

• The coasts of Northwest Europe, including Southeast England
• The East Coast of the U.S., particularly the coasts of North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland
• India, particularly around the Bay of Bengal

The study was a collaboration between researchers from the University of Melbourne, IHE Delt in the Netherlands, the University of Amsterdam, the University of East Anglia in the UK, and Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, as Fortune reported.

Hundreds of Toxic Superfund Sites Imperiled by Sea-Level Rise, Study Warns – A new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists concludes that more than 800 hazardous Superfund sites near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are at risk of flooding in the next 20 years, even with low rates of sea level rise. More than 1,000 of the sites, overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, will be at risk for flooding by 2100 if carbon emissions continue on their current trajectory, triggering high rates of sea level rise, according to the study, which faults the Trump administration for ignoring climate change. Superfund sites, the toxic legacy of industry’s environmental indifference, are the worst of the worst hazardous waste sites that expose millions of people – many in neighborhoods of color and of lower economic status – to hundreds of deadly chemicals. Flooding can increase the chances that these toxins will contaminate nearby land and water, putting communities at risk of adverse health effects. The study, “A Toxic Relationship: Extreme Coastal Flooding and Superfund Sites,” was written by Jacob Carter, a research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who began the analysis while working at the EPA. He was forced out of the agency in 2017 when the Trump administration signaled it would no longer prioritize climate change-focused research. Carter started his review in response to a 2015 directive by President Barack Obama aimed at understanding how climate change was exacerbating flooding risks. The Trump Administration revoked the directive in 2017. Carter said that’s when he was essentially shown the door. “If I’d been able to carry out this work at the EPA, it would have allowed Superfund site project managers to prepare for the potential flooding to come,” Carter said. “Instead, the new administration’s EPA leadership came in with the clear intention to stop considering climate change, and it became clear to me that my work – which obviously focused on climate change – could easily be terminated. For purely political reasons, the agency sidelined work that was vital to its mission.”

Plastics in Oceans Will Triple By 2040, Absent Immediate Drastic Action – The Pew Charitable Trust and Systemiq Ltd., a sustainability consulting firm, have released a new study reporting that plastics in the world’s oceans could triple by 2040.Nearly 13 million metic tons of plastics find their way into oceans every year, or the equivalent of one garbage trunk of such waste is dumped into the sea every minute. Current commitments would only reduce this projected volume by 7%. Yet the study Breaking the Plastic Wave: A Comprehensive Assessment of Pathways Towards Stopping Ocean Plastic Pollution. also spells out some immediate measures, based on current technologies, that if implemented immediately, could cut this projected volume by 80% (for a short version, see summary).Now, recently both China and India have announced their own versions of single-use plastics bans. Kudos to both. Maybe those moratoria will make some difference.Alas, the COVID-19 crisis may upend these efforts, as throughout the world, we are eschewing plastics-free (or plastics-less markets) in favour of other “sanitary” options – which involve swathing in plastic. And I like so many others have been making more on-line- purchases where the retailer encases products in plastic clamshells before delivering them to me on my doorstep. Whatever happened to good old paper bags?The plastics pushers are only ramping up their plants to produce more plastics – which given that as I’ve written before, the recycling fairy is a fairy – and who believes in those? – all this crap only finds its way into the world’s oceans, or there and elsewhere, decays to microplastics, the health effects of which we remain largely unaware.

A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. – NYT – The country’s latest calamity illustrates a striking inequity of our time: The people least responsible for climate change are among those most hurt by its consequences.Torrential rains have submerged at least a quarter of Bangladesh, washing away the few things that count as assets for some of the world’s poorest people – their goats and chickens, houses of mud and tin, sacks of rice stored for the lean season. It is the latest calamity to strike the delta nation of 165 million people. Only two months ago, a cyclone pummeled the country’s southwest. Along the coast, a rising sea has swallowed entire villages. And while it’s too soon to ascertain what role climate change has played in these latest floods, Bangladesh is already witnessing a pattern of more severe and more frequent river flooding than in the past along the mighty Brahmaputra River, scientists say, and that is projected to worsen in the years ahead as climate change intensifies the rains.“The suffering will go up,” said Sajedul Hasan, the humanitarian director of BRAC, an international development organization based in Bangladesh that is distributing food, cash and liquid soap to displaced people. This is one of the most striking inequities of the modern era. Those who are least responsible for polluting Earth’s atmosphere are among those most hurt by its consequences. The average American is responsible for 33 times more planet-warming carbon dioxide than the average Bangladeshi. An estimated 24 to 37 percent of the country’s landmass is submerged, according to government estimates and satellite data By Tuesday, according to the most recent figures available, nearly a million homes were inundated and 4.7 million people were affected. At least 54 have died, most of them children. The current floods, which are a result of intense rains upstream on the Brahmaputra, could last through the middle of August. Until then, Taijul Islam, a 30-year-old sharecropper whose house has washed away, will have to camp out in a makeshift bamboo shelter on slightly higher ground. At least he was able to salvage the tin sheet that was once the roof of his house. Without it, he said, his extended family of nine would be exposed to the elements.

More than 100 killed, thousands displaced by India floods (video report) More than 100 people have been killed and tens of thousands displaced by floods in northeast India. Flooding is common during the monsoon season.But it is posing an extra challenge this year, as the government tries to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Al Jazeera’s Elizabeth Puranam reports from New Delhi.

Is China’s Massive Three Gorges Dam On The Edge Of Failure? – The massive flooding taking place in China continues, for some reason, this story has been widely ignored by mainstream media. It is important because China’s massive Three Gorges Dam is in peril. If the dam fails there will be a staggering loss of lives and property. The Three Gorges Dam is around one and a half miles long and just over 600 feet tall. About 400 million people live downstream of the dam and apparently, no plans have been made for their evacuation. The failure of this dam, which is the largest in the world, would have catastrophic consequences. It is estimated such an event could result in around half a million people being killed. The Asia Times reported several days ago that Beijing has admitted that its 2.4-kilometer Three Gorges Dam spanning the Yangtze River in Hubei province “deformed slightly” after record flooding. The deformation occurred last Saturday when waters from western provinces including Sichuan and Chongqing along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River peaked. At this, point the biggest concern is that rain continues and more is expected. The company that manages the dam noted that parts of the dam had “deformed slightly,” displacing some external structures. Seepage into the main outlet walls had also been reported throughout the 18 hours on Saturday and Sunday when water was discharged through its outlets. Wang Hao, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an authority on hydraulics who sits on the Yangtze River Administration Commission, has assured that the dam is sound enough to withstand the impact from floods twice the mass flow rate recorded on Saturday. It should be noted that Wang’s remarks stoked a volley of mockery after he said the flooding could be a good thing as the dam would only become more rigid the longer it was steeped up to its top. Below are three new YouTube videos outlining the severity of the situation and a link to a previous article about the Three Gorges Dam posted on AdvancingTime on July 19th.

China’s flooding crisis caused by torrential rain and a weak dam – Heavy rains are putting the Yangtze River at risk of repeating the devastating floods of 1998 which left more than 4,000 people dead and 14 million homeless. The latest natural disaster comes in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and an escalating trade war with the US. The Yangtze River is the longest river in Asia and China’s most important waterway, with some 175 cities located near its banks. As well as being home to a number of multinational companies, the prosperous Yangtze River Basin is a powerhouse of industrial output, generating nearly half of the country’s GDP. The middle and lower reaches of the river are vulnerable to flooding, spilling over their banks every summer. By contrast, the upper river basin flows through mountainous regions and the steep slope of the riverbed makes it far less prone to floods. Floods large enough to overflow the dykes have caused several disasters in the past. Discounting famines and pandemics, the 1931 Central China floods are generally considered the deadliest natural disaster of the 20th century. More than 140,000 people drowned with at least 3.7 million dying over the nine months that followed. Until the Three Gorges Dam project was completed in 2009, provinces along the river mainly relied on reinforced embankments, reservoirs and floodwater storage areas to control flooding. Less than 20 years after the dam’s completion, China is experiencing its worst floods in decades, raising questions about the dam’s efficacy and whether the massive structure itself is at risk after weeks of devastating floods since June. On July 2, the Yangtze River experienced its first flood peak of the year. The Changjiang Water Resources Commission reported the water level had reached 146.97 metres with peak inflows of 53,000 cubic metres per second, the same rate as the 1998 floods. Due to heavy rain in the upper streams of the Yangtze River, the Three Gorge reservoir has seen a recent increase to its inflow. Intense rain and severe flooding has been battering China since early June but, according to the China Meteorological Administration, the country has experienced a 20 per cent increase in heavy rainfall since 1961. Currently, the water level of 433 rivers is above the flood control line, with 33 of them reaching record highs. Heavy rains have lashed 27 of the country’s 31 provinces, affecting more than 37 million people and leaving 141 dead or missing, the Ministry of Emergency Management said on Monday. Economic losses are estimated at 86 billion yuan (US$12.3 billion) so far. Poyang Lake, China’s largest freshwater lake located in the eastern province of Jiangxi, saw its water level rise to 22.6 metres by July 13 – its highest level on record – surpassing its previous record of 22.52 metres in 1998. The Nasa satellite images above show its recent extremes of low and high levels. The lake usually shrinks considerably in winter.

China floods affect 54.8 million people, inflict US$20 billion in losses | Taiwan News – The massive floods which have ravaged China over the past two months have inflicted a heavy toll on the country in terms of damages to property and direct economic losses, with the vaunted Three Gorges Dam seemingly inadequate in reducing these effects and the death toll remaining suspiciously low. After two months of torrential rains and tremendous flooding across the Yangtze River, Yellow River, and Huai River, China’s state-run media mouthpiece Xinhua on Wednesday (July 29) cited the Ministry of Emergency Management as saying that the “rain-triggered floods” have affected 54.8 million people in 27 provincial-level regions as of Tuesday (July 28). Despite the vast scale of the disaster across China over two months, the government is reporting a miraculously low 158 dead or missing. Xinhua says that 3.76 million people have been evacuated from flood-ravaged areas. Amid the onslaught, 41,000 homes have collapsed and 368,000 have been damaged. A total of 5.283 hectares of farmland has been damaged and direct economic losses have climbed to 144.43 billion Chinese yuan (about 20.66 billion U.S. dollars). Compared with the average over the same period in the past five years, the number of people affected by floods this year has increased by 23.4 percent, the number of evacuations has increased by 36.7 percent, and direct economic losses have increased by 13.8%. Suspiciously, the number of dead and missing persons has decreased by 53.9 percent and the number of collapsed houses has dropped by 68.4 percent. Given that this year’s floods have not only surpassed anything seen in the past five years but also since 1998 and beyond, it is odd that the number of deaths and collapsed homes would actually decrease, possibly indicating undercounting by officials. Although it is predicted that the heavy rainfall in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River will ease on Wednesday, the official Weibo page of China’s Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM) stated that the government has decided to maintain the secondary flood control response on the Yangtze and Huaihe Rivers as well as required key areas to the north so as to strengthen the implementation of flood prevention.

Three Gorges Dam weathers the flood challenge – Chinese state media stuck to the script that nothing had happened when this year’s third deluge of the Yangtze River passed the Three Gorges Dam on Wednesday. The dam’s operator said the 185-meter-high barrier had since Monday held back more than a third of the storm water hitting the Yangtze’s upper reaches. At its peak on Monday, run-off from heavy rain in Sichuan and Chongqing poured into the dam at 60,000 cubic meters per second and was discharged at 38,000 cubic meters per second. Xinhua news agency said no severe flooding was reported across major cities including Wuhan east of the dam, and that the dam had mitigated the threat. China’s National Meteorological Center has forecast an end to the summer monsoon drenching southern provinces. The worst of the rainy season since June that had pounded swaths of the nation including the Yangtze basin could soon be over, chief meteorologist Zhang Juan said. The dam has emerged from this year’s massive flooding largely unscathed. Last week, the official Xinhua News Agency said part of the structure buckled slightly due to pressure from the surging water. The Xinhua revelation renewed rumors about a possible breach, fueling speculation in Taiwan, Japan and India about how long the dam could stand the test. Severe rainstorms and flood coming from upstream have put the Three Gorges Dam to the test since June. Photo: Xinhua “It’s rare for Xinhua to admit the Three Gorges Dam had deformed a little bit when holding stormwater to protect downstream cities like Wuhan, as in the past state media would just choose not to report this and deny any talks about the dam being in any sort of danger,”

New China cover-up fears with world’s largest dam ‘on brink of collapse risking tidal wave that could wipe out cities’ – CHINA is facing new cover-up claims amid fears the world’s biggest dam is about to collapse causing a tidal wave which could wipe out entire cities. Sections of the vast Three Gorges Dam in the central Hubei Province are reported to have moved under enormous pressure sparked by torrential rains. And concerns were mourning last night that the giant structure could collapse – sending a devastating 250 foot tidal wave surging hundreds of miles.The 570-foot dam holds back a staggering 39 billion cubic metre reservoir of water so huge that it has a measurable effect on the rotation of the earth.It is five times the size of America’s famous Hoover Dam and generates eleven times as much electricity, vital to millions of Chinese homes and businesses.But rumours of structural faults in the walls of the 14-year-old dam have grown as heavy rains deluged the swollen Yangtze River.China’s secretive leaders – already facing a backlash over the Covid-19 pandemic which started in Wuhan in Hubei Province – have played down the threat.But authorities are said to have quietly ordered the evacuation of 38 million Chinese in the threatened zone – equating to more than half the population of the UK. Heavy rainfall is forecast to continue to pound the Yangtze River basin in the coming days after localised floods claimed at least 141 lives..

Arizona Train Derailment Ignites Massive Fire, Bridge Partially Collapses – A massive fire is burning near Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday morning following a freight train derailment on a bridge. Union Pacific said at least ten cars derailed on a bridge over Tempe Town Lake at 6:15 am, reported CBS 5 Phoenix. Video from social media shows scenes of the train derailment on the bridge. Tempe firefighters, paramedics, and police have arrived at the incident area. Authorities are responding to an apparent train derailment and fire on a bridge in Tempe, Arizona. Police asked people to avoid the area. https://t.co/gIKsa7gM8s pic.twitter.com/2HBpaO3MuO – ABC News (@ABC) July 29, 2020 This is a coordinated attack with several agencies fighting the fire involving multiple train cars,” Tempe police Det. Natalie Barela said in a statement, quoted by NBC News. “The cause of the derailment has not been identified. This is a very fluid and active scene,” said Barela. Tempe Fire Medical Rescue told Fox News multiple train cars carrying lumber were on fire, describing the incident as a second-alarm. An aerial view shows a partial bridge collapse over Tempe Town Lake. It’s not yet clear what caused the train derailment.

Bridge partially collapses near Phoenix in wake of massive fire and train derailment – A bridge near Phoenix partially collapsed Wednesday morning in the wake of a massive fire and freight train derailment on the span, authorities said. Tempe firefighters, paramedics and police rushed to a rail bridge over Tempe Town Lake, following the 6:15 a.m. MT derailment which sent smoke plumes visible for miles.The bridge where the accident happened was inspected on July 9 according to Union Pacific. The south side of the bridge collapsed and rail cars fell into an empty park below,” Union Pacific said in a statement. “Three tank cars were on the ground under the bridge. Two contained cyclohexanone; one contained a rubber material. None are reported leaking, and no tank cars were involved in the fire.” The National Institutes of Health describes cyclohexanone as a flammable liquid, used primarily in the the production of nylon, that is harmful if inhaled.The NTSB is investigating. There were no immediate reports of casualties from the derailment and fire, Tempe Mayor Corey Woods and Police Chief Sylvia Moir both said.

As Climate Change Burns Arizona, State Has More Imprisoned Firefighters Than Employees – Steve Horn – As three historic wildfires burned through over 384,300 acres of Arizona in June, the state deployed nearly 200 firefighters to bring the blazes – which were visible on NASA and NOAA satellites in orbit 23,000 miles above – under control. State prison inmates made up two out of three of those firefighters, under a program that Arizona uses to lower the costs of coping with the ever-worsening wildfire seasons brought on by climate change. The program pays prisoners pennies on the dollars paid to state employees for the same hard and dangerous work.The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry hires the prisoners via the Inmate Wildfire Program. Recent budgetary figures show that these firefighters earn miniscule wages of $1.50 per hour while fighting fires, $1 an hour for other fire suppression work, and $.50 per hour for other non-fire labor. To put that in context, according to Tiffany Davilla, a spokesperson for the Department of Forestry and Fire Management (DFFM), the median pay for non-incarcerated firefighters is $22.31/hour, or an average annual salary of $58,006 for the standard 50-hours-a-week fireman’s schedule. If they worked standard firefighter hours, incarcerated firefighters would earn just under $4,000 for the year. Despite the rising climate change-fueled wildfire risks, the state spends far more on its prisons and law enforcement apparatus than it does on direct costs of firefighting. In March, Gov. Doug Ducey signed a fiscal year 2021 budget allotting just $9.1 million for the Department of Forestry and Fire Management (DFFM) for 88 full-time employees as well as 192 workers in the Inmate Wildfire Program. According to the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry, six crews totaling 113 prisoner firefighters from a half-dozen state prison complexes aided in fighting the June wildfires. “Given the prison system’s direct ties to slavery in the US, and given that all states have an over-population of Black people and people of color behind bars, we can ascertain that prison labor is inherently exploitative and exists to uphold an unjust system,” Feldman – who wrote a 2018 paper about Arizona’s prison wildfire program which she researched in part by spending 15 months in the program herself – said via email. “Pay discrepancies between incarcerated and non-incarcerated wildland firefighters make this clear: incarcerated individuals are doing the same risky work, but are paid a fraction of what their non-incarcerated colleagues make.”

Rapid spread of California wildfires prompts evacuations | TheHill – A wildfire in Southern California that began Friday evening amid blazing temperatures spread across 1,900 acres and prompted evacuations. Officials confirmed in a tweet Saturday morning that the flames were zero percent contained. The Riverside County Fire Department responded with air and ground resources, and at least 375 firefighters were assigned to the blaze, dubbed the Apple Fire. The Riverside County Fire Department also confirmed Saturday that at least one family dwelling and two outbuildings were destroyed in Cherry Valley, Calif. The blazes began as two separate fires at approximately 6 p.m. Friday,according to the Riverside County Fire Department. However, evacuations were quickly ordered by Friday night to the nearby cities of Banning and Beaumont, Calif. The fire later caused evacuations for at least 200 homes in the area, CBS News reported. Riverside County is approximately 75 miles east of Los Angeles. Temperatures are expected to soar to 107 degrees on Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.

Australia’s Fires Harmed 3 Billion Animals, New Report Finds – Unprecedented bushfires that ravaged Australia in 2019 and 2020 killed or displaced almost 3 billion animals, according to an interim report released Tuesday. Compiled by scientists from several Australian universities, the survey said the blazes impacted an estimated 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds and 51 million frogs. The report, commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), did not specify how many animals may have died. But the prospects for those that escaped the fires “were probably not great” because they lost food sources, native habitat and shelter from predators, report co-author Chris Dickman said. The bushfires that swept across Australia between late 2019 and early 2020 scorched 115,000 square kilometers (44,000 square miles) of bush and forest, killing 30 people and destroying thousands of homes. It was one of the worst bushfire seasons on record. Experts say prolonged drought and climate change will likely make such events longer lasting and more frequent. A previous study released in January had estimated that around 1 billion animals perished in the hardest-hit states of Victoria and New South Wales in eastern Australia. But the survey published Tuesday was the first to assess fire zones across the entire country, lead scientist Lily van Eeden of the University of Sydney said. The survey’s results are preliminary, with a full report to be released next month, but scientists said the estimate of 3 billion animals affected was unlikely to change. “The interim findings are shocking,” WWF Australia CEO Dermot O’Gorman said. “It’s hard to think of another event anywhere in the world in living memory that has killed or displaced that many animals.” “This ranks as one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history,” he added.

Brazilian Amazon Has Lost Millions of Wild Animals to Criminal Networks, Report Finds – The Brazilian Amazon is hemorrhaging illegally traded wildlife according to a new report released Monday. Each year, thousands of silver-voiced saffron finches and other songbirds, along with rare macaws and parrots, are captured, trafficked and sold as pets. Some are auctioned as future contestants in songbird contests. Others are exported around the globe.Fish bound for ornamental home aquariums also pour out of the Amazon, including the tiny, iridescent blue and red cardinal tetra. Arapaima fish – also known as pirarucù, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish – are caught illegally, “laundered” amidst captive-bred specimens and shipped to the U.S. in large numbers.Other fish are headed for the dinner table, as are freshwater turtles and their eggs, while tapir, peccary and other mammals are sold in Brazil as bushmeat. Jaguar teeth, heads and skins are shipped to China.Millions of animals are being illegally captured and traded live and in parts in a thriving Brazilian black market, according to the report, produced by TRAFFIC, a UK-based nonprofit that studies the trade. “The pervasive and uncontrolled capture of wild animals and plants for the illegal trade is having grave consequences for Brazilian biodiversity, the national economy, the rule of law and good governance,” it says.Deep-dive research by biodiversity consultant Sandra Charity – who wrote the 140-page study with Juliana Ferreira, executive director of the nonprofit conservation group Freeland Brasil – focused on Amazon rainforest species and closely investigated the domestic bird trade.Importantly, the researchers found that an ever-increasing segment of the illegal trade launders poached animals via a sprawling, legal captive breeding industry – a network that specializes in birds, which have a huge domestic market in Brazil.The authors also discovered that few government agencies have kept records or reported solid data that quantify the true scope of the problem. In many cases, records did not even identify the species or number of animals seized by authorities, while data coming from the Amazon was “notoriously scarce.””Significant seizures are made on a daily basis by Amazon state law enforcement, and we did not have access to their data,” Ferreria said, adding, “from what we saw, [the illegal trade] is even bigger than we imagined.”

Porcupines Face a Poaching Crisis – and It’s All Because of What’s in Their Stomachs – A porcupine’s diet is wide, varied, and a little hard to digest. A lifetime of grasses, herbs, bark and other vegetation can leave little bits of indigestible matter behind in a porcupine’s digestive tract, where they occasionally congeal into a hard ball called a bezoar.That sounds uncomfortable, but a porcupine’s health probably doesn’t suffer due to the presence of this undigested mass in its stomach or intestines – that is, not until humans come along. For centuries people have valued these rare “stones” or “dates,” as they’re sometimes called, for their purported healing abilities. Bezoars have been used to “treat” everything from fevers to diabetes and even cancer.Bezoar use even creeps into popular fiction: the stones are an ingredient for protective spells in the Harry Potter universe.The medicinal claims are equally fiction: there doesn’t appear to be any veracity to bezoar use to treat illnesses. Yet despite the lack of evidence, the trade in bezoars has persisted. Not only that, it appears to be increasing. A study published recently in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation tracked, for the first time, the online trade in old-world porcupines (those from the family Hystricidae in Asia and Africa). The researchers examined e-commerce sites in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore for four months in 2019, where they found active for-sale listings for 443 individual bezoars and a large variety of powdered products. Based on the weight of the powders, and the assumption that they might have contained other ingredients, the researchers estimate this translated to at least 680 and as many as 1,300 bezoars. (The researcher ignored “out of stock” listings and more dubious sites, such as one that claimed to have 2,000 tons of product on hand.) Previous research has suggested that bezoars only grow in an incidentally small portion of the porcupine population, so the total number of animals killed to accumulate that quantity for sale could conceivably have been in the tens of thousands. Currently the various species enjoy some national-level protection but precious little on the international level, because they’re still perceived as relatively common. Only the Philippine porcupine(Hystrix pumila) is listed as “vulnerable to extinction.” None are currently protected by the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species.

Baboons armed with knives, chainsaw spotted in UK safari park There’s some real monkey business at a British safari park, where a roving gang of baboons armed with knives and even a chainsaw has been wreaking havoc and sowing fear, according to a report.The prowling primates are known to have vandalized vehicles, ripping off windscreen wipers and mirrors from them at the Knowsley Safari Park in Merseyside, The Sunday Times reported. But the baboons have recently been seen carrying an assortment of weapons, including blades, screwdrivers and a chainsaw, leading some workers to suspect that visitors have supplied them with the dangerous items for a thrill, according to the news outlet.“We’re not sure if they are being given weapons by some of the guests who want to see them attack cars, or if they’re fishing them out of pickup trucks and vans,” one employee told the paper. “They will literally go into people’s toolboxes and carry them around. One of the baboons was seen lugging around a chainsaw.” Park officials pushed back at the reports, suggesting that armed apes were an urban myth. “We believe many of these stories have grown in exaggeration as they’ve been retold, with embellishment to make the objects that are sometimes found in the enclosure seem more exciting and unbelievable,” the park told the news outlet. The monkey enclosure is well known to mechanics in the northwest area of England where the 550-acre park, which also houses lions, tigers, rhinos, wildebeest and camels, is located. “People know what’s going to happen when they drive inside,” one mechanic told the outlet. “I’ve had two customers this year who became victims of those baboons.

Baghdad sets record with 125-degree day – Baghdad, Iraq, has seen high temperatures before, but not like this.The city recorded its two hottest days ever Tuesday and Wednesday at 125 and 124 degrees, respectively. Per The Washington Post, the situation was exacerbated by the state electricity grid failing, prompting many residents to rely on generators to power their homes. And on Monday, when temperatures reached 123 degrees, two demonstrators protesting against the lack of electricity and basic services were shot and killed by security forces.Several other places in the Middle East have experienced extraordinary temperatures this week, as well. Beirut, Lebanon, set a record at 113.7 degrees, while Damascus, Syria, tied its previous high at 114.8 degrees. Additional locations broke previous records in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, the Post reports. In Baghdad, temperatures are supposed to hover in the same record-setting area Thursday, before dropping slightly over the weekend and into next week. The Postnotes extreme heat can happen randomly and naturally, but climate change has made such instances disproportionately more likely.

Record heatwave in Siberia and the burning danger of climate change – The year 2020 is the hottest in Siberia since measurements began 130 years ago. Russian cities across the polar circle recorded record temperatures. In Nizhnyaya Pesha, a temperature of 30 degrees Celsius (86°F) was measured and in Khatanga, which usually has a daytime temperature of around freezing at this time of year, the temperature reached 25°C (77°F) on May 22. The previous record was 12°C (54°F). In Verkhoyansk, a Russian city in eastern Siberia, the situation is even more extremer. The small city in the state of Sakha was considered the coldest city in the world. But Twitter posts of meteorologist Mika Rantanen have announced that at a hefty 38°C (100°F), Verkhoyansk has set a record high temperature. Records have been kept since 1885. At least 11 other Arctic weather stations recorded temperatures over 30°C. According to announcement of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the May surface temperatures in parts of Siberia were up to 10 degrees Celsius above average. Freja Vamborg, a leading scientist at C3S, said: “It is undoubtedly an alarming sign, but not only May was unusually warm in Siberia. The whole of winter and spring had repeated periods of higher-than-average surface air temperatures.” Scientists explain that the record heatwave in Siberia is an extreme consequence of global climate change. Martin Stendel of the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the uncommon temperatures in May would occur once in 100,000 years without anthropogenic contributions to global warming. According to geomorphologist Anna Irrgang of the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, extreme weather occurrences in this region are not uncommon. What is novel is the frequency of their occurrence. Mika Rantanen likewise warned that the Arctic is warming three-to-four times faster than the global average. Climate scientist Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research stated: “The novel aspect of this ‘phenomenon’ is that the warming of Siberia is not a short-term observation and as such cannot be explained by the wind system of the jetstream, which can last one or two weeks, but not for five months.” The thawing of the permafrost ground layer is especially critical. Permafrost covers about half of the Russian landmass and has been warming for some time. A comparative study of the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost showed in 2019 that across the board, the temperatures at 10 meters depth rose on average 0.3°C from 2007 to 2016.

Where Will Everyone Go? – Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge. The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here – the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño – is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60% in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83%. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but – until recently – little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen. FOR MOST OF HUMAN history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1% of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing 1 of every 3 people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”

First Methane Leak Found on Antarctic Sea Floor Confirms Researchers’ Fears –Scientists have, for the first time, discovered an active leak of methane gas from the sea floor in Antarctica. It is a process that’s likely to accelerate the process of global heating.The finding was published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Royal Society B scientific journal on Tuesday.Methane is powerful greenhouse gas that accelerates climate change, and warms the planet much more than carbon dioxide does.The risk of it leaking from under ice has long concerned scientists, who say that some microorganisms can help to consume it before it is released into the atmosphere.But the new findings appear to dent the hopes of the effectiveness of this process in Antarctica. The report said the methane leak was first discovered in 2011, and that it took five years for the microorganisms that help filter away the gas to develop at the site.The researchers found that methane is still escaping despite their presence.Dr. Andrew Thurber, an oceanographer at Oregon State University, who led the research, told The Guardian: “It is not good news. It took more than five years for the microbes to begin to show up and even then there was still methane rapidly escaping from the sea floor.”Thurber said that the first microbes to grow in the area were of an unexpected strain, and that “it may be five to 10 years before a community becomes fully adapted and starts consuming methane.” Scientists have long warned about the impact on the planet if methane leaks – something that is caused by melting ice as global temperatures rise. The release of methane from ice is also considered one of the tipping points in climate change, where the effects of rising temperatures cannot be stopped or reversed.

Antarctic ice sheet melting could accelerate rapidly, leading to catastrophic rise in sea level – The effects of a human-induced warming climate, driven by the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, are accelerating across the globe. These are especially evident near the poles, where warming is progressing more rapidly than in the lower latitudes, because of so-called polar amplification caused by the greater reflection of solar energy by lighter-colored snow and ice as compared to darker bare ground and water. As snow and ice melt, the ratio of lighter to darker surface shifts toward the latter, creating a positive-feedback loop, increasing the rate of melting even further. In the north, the heat wave in the Siberian Arctic is having devastating consequences for inhabitants of the area. There is also evidence suggesting that the melting of the region’s permafrost is releasing large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas even more potent than carbon dioxide, which will accelerate global warming significantly. In the south, recent research is revealing that the massive Antarctic ice sheets are melting at an ever-increasing rate, and this is likely to accelerate even more in the future. The consequent influx of water, previously sequestered as ice, into the world’s oceans will dramatically raise sea levels, with potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity. Already, between 2003 and 2019, a NASA study revealed that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets combined had lost 118 gigatons (a gigaton is one billion metric tons) and 200 gigatons, respectively, of ice per year. The total is enough to fill Lake Michigan and has caused about half an inch rise in sea level. Greenland alone holds enough ice to raise global sea levels as much as 7 meters (23 feet). If all the Antarctic ice were to melt, that would raise sea levels by approximately an additional 60 meters (nearly 200 feet). If all the world’s glaciers and ice sheets were to melt, extensive areas of land would be inundated, causing massive displacement of human populations and incalculable economic disruption. It is currently estimated that if present trends of melting continue, sea levels could rise between approximately 1 and 2.4 meters (3 to 8 feet) by the end of the century. The danger posed is not only in the quantity of land that would be submerged, but also the rate at which this would occur. Recent research by scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, using geological data collected by remotely operated submersibles, has revealed that at the end of the last Ice Age (Pleistocene), roughly 12,000 years ago, Antarctic ice sheets retreated (i.e., melted back) at the rate of up to 50 meters (164 feet) per day, or 10 kilometers (6.2) miles per year. That is approximately 10 times faster than the maximum rate currently being observed and greatly exceeds the projections of potential melting that have previously been made.

New DNC Platform Could Make The Bleak Climate Forecast Even Worse –Steve Horn – The Democratic National Committee’s Platform Committee has released its proposed policy platform, which will guide party members for the next four years, and climate got 5 pages out of 79. The plan doesn’t call for any type of oil fossil fuel industry phaseout. The words “fracking” and “natural gas” are missing from the text altogether. The terms “coal” and “fossil fuel” only show up once, and not in the context of an industry phaseout:“We will hold fossil fuel companies accountable for cleaning up abandoned mine lands, oil and gas wells, and industrial sites, so these facilities no longer pollutelocal environments and can be safely repurposed to support new economic activity, including in the heart of coal country.”The 2016 platform called for a phaseout of fossil fuel extraction on public lands backed by the “Keep It in the Ground” movement, an end to industry exemptions like the Halliburton Loophole (Biden voted against the 2005 energy bill containing this provision). It said that fracking “should not take place where states and local communities oppose it.” It called for phasing out coal production and ensuring a just transition for industry workers, winding down fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks, and legal accountability for the fossil fuel industry.None of that stuff made it into the 2020 draft platform.Instead, the 2020 version continues Biden’s call for a “double down” on the expansion of carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) technology, and for “breakthrough opportunities” for “direct air capture and net-negative emissions technologies.” As explained in last week’s edition, CCUS means capturing carbon at the point of emissions at the industrial smokestack, storing it in underground pipelines and then utilizing the CO2 for future industrial process like cement and plastics production (which are climate change-causing petrochemicals). In the U.S., most of the time the stored carbon is used to extract more oil in a process called enhanced oil recovery.In reality, this all will mean more fracking for oil and gas and more growth of the sector overall. Some of the people running climate policy for the Biden campaign may explain why this policy platform has arisen. Campaign advisor Heather Zichal, formerly a top climate aide for President Barack Obama, was until recently on the board of directors of gas exporting company Cheniere. Zichal’s fellow campaign advisor, Ernest Moniz, is partial owner of a proposed liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal called G2 Net Zero LNG. He is also currently on the board of directors of the predominantly gas-powered electricity sector giant Southern Company, a major proponent of CCUS and direct air capture. Both direct air capture and CCUS are technologies heavily advocated for by Moniz via his think tank Energy Futures Initiative and through the Labor Energy Partnership. The latter is a partnership that was formed between his think tank and several labor unions.

212 Environmental Activists Were Killed Last Year, a Record Number – While 2019 saw a massive uptick in environmental activism around the world, with climate strikes and the Extinction Rebellion campaign surging in popularity, the work of defending the environment on the front lines became more deadly than ever. In 2019, a record number of environmental activists were killed for trying to protect land and water resources from mining, agribusiness and fossil fuel interests, according to a report released Wednesday by Global Witness, as CNN reported.The number of activist deaths that Global Witness recorded was 212, a nearly 30 percent increase from 2018, when the organization recorded 164 deaths linked to environmental activism. The NGO also warned that the true number is likely higher since many deaths go unreported, according to The Guardian. Global Witness says the problem has continued during 2020, as the COVID-19 lockdowns have left environmental activists as “sitting ducks” inside their own homes, as The Guardian reported.”Agribusiness and oil, gas and mining have been consistently the biggest drivers of attacks against land and environmental defenders – and they are also the industries pushing us further into runaway climate change through deforestation and increasing carbon emissions,” said Rachel Cox, a campaigner at Global Witness, as The Guardian reported. “Many of the world’s worst environmental and human rights abuses are driven by the exploitation of natural resources and corruption in the global political and economic system. Land and environmental defenders are the people who take a stand against this,” she added.

EPA cancels subscription to news outlet dedicated to covering it – The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is immediately canceling its paid subscription to one of the largest environmental trade publications, E&E News. The move takes effect Aug. 1 and will end EPA employees’ free access to the Washington-based publication, which provides in-depth coverage of the agency and related government agencies alongside a wide variety of environmental issues. “EPA has decided to cancel its desktop subscription to E&E News,” Associate Deputy Administrator Doug Benevento wrote in an email to employees on Thursday. “Over the next two years, EPA would have spent $382,425 to receive” various E&E newsletters, Benevento said, noting that the money will instead be used to purchase subscriptions and access to other publications. He did not name the other publications. The American Federation of Government Employees, the EPA employee union, described the cancelation as a retaliatory move that would hurt agency employees. “By cutting @EPA staff off from @EENewsUpdates, #EPA is stopping EPA scientists from getting E&E’s impeccable & in-depth press coverage of EPA’s union busting moves & #AFGE’s efforts to counter them, thereby retaliating against both E&E News & the union,” the union tweeted. EPA has been one of the Trump administration’s most vocal agencies in pushing back against critical press coverage. The agency often issues press releases denouncing coverage from outlets like E&E, The New York Times and The Hill.

EPA Watchdog to Investigate Trump’s Tailpipe Emissions Rollback – The inspector general for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will look into one of the Trumpadministration’s hallmark environmental rollbacks: the weakening of Obama-era emissions standards. The law from the Obama administration was designed to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by increasing fuel-efficiency standards. Now, the EPA’s inspector general will try to determine whether or not the rollback violated the government’s own laws, according to CNN.The inspector general said yesterday that its review would determine whether the agency’s rule followed requirements for “transparency, record-keeping, and docketing, and followed the EPA’s process for developing final regulatory actions,” according to EPA documents, as CNN reported.In other words, the inspector general would like to see the paper trail that led to the decision and to see if there was undue influence or ethics violations from industry insiders for the slackening of tailpipe emissions standards, which was finalized in late March as the Trump administration’s single largest rollback of federalclimate change rules, according to The New York Times.The new rule, named the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient Vehicles rule, or SAFE, holds automakers to weaker fuel economy standards through 2025. The SAFE rule lowered the annual emission improvement requirements that the makers of passenger vehicles must meet. Rather than growing approximately 5 percent annually as required under an Obama-era mandate, the standards now increase about 1.5 percent annually. The Trump administration originally proposed freezing the standards entirely, as CNN reported.The Obama era rule would have forced new cars to have a fuel efficiency standard of 54 miles per gallon of gasoline by 2025. The rollback of the law in the SAFE rule will essentially add 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, increase gasoline consumption by around 80 billion gallons, and increase oil consumption by 2 billion barrels, according to The Verge. The potential “irregularities” in crafting the rule were flagged in May by Sen. Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, who asked for an investigation in a letter to the EPA inspector general at the time, as The Verge reported.

Solar Farms on NJ Farmlands? State Looks to Boost Large-Scale Projects – The state wants to sharply ramp up efforts to build utility-scale solar projects in New Jersey, a strategy that could result in opening up existing agricultural land to huge new solar farms.Under a bill (S-2605) now under consideration by lawmakers, a policy initiated during the Christie administration of steering new solar projects away from farmland would be scrapped. That would open up land to accommodate large solar projects that supply power directly to the grid.Without more utility-scale solar projects that provide at least 10 megawatts (MW) of solar power and the land to locate them, the state will not achieve its goal of transitioning to 100% clean energy by 2050, according to proponents of the bill. “It ain’t going to happen unless we change our policies,’’ said Sen. Bob Smith, the sponsor of the legislation and chairman of the Senate Environment and Energy Committee, which kicked off debate on the issue during a hearing in Trenton. No action was taken on the bill Wednesday. Utility-scale solar projects are widely viewed as the most cost-effective way of delivering solar power, largely because of the economies of scale associated with building bigger projects rather than putting solar panels on a residence or on warehouse rooftops.

U.S. solar power plant backed by over $700 million in government loans goes bust: filing – (Reuters) – The owner of a big Nevada solar-thermal power plant that received $737 million in loans from the U.S. Department of Energy filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, according to a court filing, potentially leaving U.S. taxpayers with a whopping bill. The project’s failure is a blow to the DOE renewable energy loan program, which had already been criticized by Republicans as a waste of money after it backed failed solar panel maker Solyndra during the Obama administration. Tonopah Solar Energy LLC still owes $425 million on its DOE loan, but reached a settlement under which the department will recover at least $200 million, it said in court documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. The deal is subject to court approval. In a statement, DOE spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said the settlement decision “was made after years of exhausting options within our authority to get the project back on track.” A senior Trump administration official said the settlement “secures taxpayer money that was squandered by the previous administrations’ failed energy pet projects.” Tonopah’s 110-megawatt plant in the Nevada desert was billed as the first to be able to store solar energy. But its technology, which uses more than 10,000 mirrors to focus the sun’s heat on a tower to create steam, was both unreliable and expensive. Soon after it began operating in 2015, the facility suffered a string of leaks in its hot salt tank, a key component of its energy storage system. It has not operated since April of 2019.

CMP corridor opponents still in the dark about police surveillance – Opponents of Central Maine Power’s proposed transmission line project say they are frustrated at delays in obtaining information collected about them by a secretive Maine State Police intelligence unit that’s come under scrutiny for its methods and tactics in recent months. Separately, Sandra Howard, the leader of Say NO to NECEC, said last week that since 2018, the FBI has been in regular contact with her to gauge whether members of the opposition group have become radicalized, she said – which she suspects was one result of the local surveillance efforts by state police. NECEC stands for New England Clean Energy Connect. Howard’s group was first alerted to the possible surveillance by state police when the group was named in a lawsuit by a state trooper, George Loder, who filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit in May against the Maine Information and Analysis Center and his former state police supervisors. He alleged that he suffered professional retaliation when he called out what he believed were unethical and illegal collection of data about Mainers who were not suspected of committing any crimes. Loder alleged that state police collected information on the Say NO to NECEC group based on a flimsy pretext – such as littering – to justify collecting and retaining information about opponents to CMP’s propose high-voltage transmission line.

Mass. in middle of Maine power fight – A group of 25 current and former Maine state lawmakers sent a letter to Hydro-Quebec on Wednesday urging the provincial utility to stop meddling in a state election battle spawned by Massachusetts’ thirst for hydro-electricity from Canada.Massachusetts utilities, with the backing of the Baker administration, signed a nearly $1 billion contract topurchase electricity from Hydro-Quebec and have it delivered over a 145-mile transmission line running from the Quebec border through western Maine to Lewiston, where it would feed into the regional power grid.The power line made its way through most regulatory channels in Maine, but is now facing a ballot question seeking to prevent it from being built. Hydro-Quebec and Central Maine Power, the company building the power line, are both financing multi-million-dollar campaigns against the ballot questionThe current and former lawmakers say they object to a company owned by the province of Quebec trying to sway voters in Maine. They note that Canada in 2018 amended its own election laws to prohibit foreign entities from spending money to influence elections there. “As a result, it is illegal for foreign entities to attempt to influence elections in Quebec even as Quebec is attempting to influence an election in Maine,” the letter said.

Inside Clean Energy: How Soon Will An EV Cost the Same as a Gasoline Vehicle? Sooner Than You Think. | InsideClimate News At some point, probably sooner than you expect, the price of an all-electric vehicle will fall far enough to equal the cost of an equivalent gasoline vehicle.We know that day is coming and a whole lot of people – many of whom work in the auto industry – would like to know when.So here’s an answer: Maybe by 2023, probably by 2024 and almost definitely by 2025. That’s according to Venkat Viswanathan and his team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. They developed a model to calculate the costs of EV batteries that breaks down the costs of each component and then predicts changes over time.”There will definitely be cars, passenger vehicles, in multiple segments where the EV option is the cheaper option,” Viswanathan said about the 2025 timeframe.When we talk about the cost of EVs, we’re mainly talking about the cost of batteries, which are the most expensive components in the vehicle, and also the ones for which the costs are changing most quickly. Analysts and researchers have said for years that a battery price of $100 per kilowatt-hour is the point at which EVs become cost-competitive with gasoline vehicles. Last year, the global average price was down to $156per kilowatt-hour, according to BloombergNEF.

Ohio lawmakers want ‘puzzling’ offshore wind ruling revisited – The state’s siting board had approved the project, but with a provision that made it nearly impossible to build.A bipartisan coalition of 32 state lawmakers from Northeast Ohio has interceded on behalf of the Lake Erie Energy Development Company’s 20.7-megawatt demonstration offshore wind project, now before state regulators.In a strongly worded letter to Sam Randazzo, chair of the Ohio Power Siting Board, the lawmakers objected to the board’s ruling in May granting a permit – if LEEDCo agreed to shut down the wind farm’s six turbines from dusk to dawn eight months out of the year, Mar. 1 through Nov. 1, so there would no impact on migrating birds.The provision, which the ruling noted might be lifted at some future point, was a “poison pill” that made the development financially unfeasible because it would drive away investors, LEEDCo president David Karpinski said at the time.LEEDCo in June asked the board to reconsider. An administrative law judge granted the request, along with requests from other parties as well. The board does not meet until Aug. 21.Calling the siting board’s May ruling “puzzling” and in part “unlawful,” the legislative coalition’s letter asks the siting board to “immediately grant LEEDCo’s request for reconsideration.” Randazzo, a longtime opponent of renewable energy, also chairs the state’s Public Utilities Commission. The nightly shutdown requirement had been an issue earlier in the four-year case, prompting LEEDCo to negotiate with the board’s technical staff, which had sought 11-month nightly shutdowns. The company then committed to installing state-of-the-art radar to detect birds and bats weighing a little as 11 grams, and collision detection systems on the turbines as part of a program to keep bird fatalities to a minimum, settling the issue. Or so LEEDCo thought, only to see the overnight shutdown provision buried deeply in the board’s May decision.That history was not lost on the lawmakers.“We have reviewed the facts in the case, and we remain puzzled the Board would re-insert the evening shutdown order that its own technical staff had determined was not necessary to meet the statutory standard,” they wrote.The letter further argues that the May order is “unlawful” because

• It contradicts the evidence in the four-year case record as well as the formal finding of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
• It does not offer “compelling evidence” to override the recommendations of the board’s staff or the recommendations of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources
• It requires two separate approvals, one for construction, one to operate at night – a violation of rules governing the board’s actions.

Can an evangelical group change Ohio lawmakers’ minds on clean energy? – An evangelical group has a stark message for Ohio lawmakers: If you care about unborn children, clean up the air their mothers breathe.“As a pro-life Christian, I believe pollution harms the unborn, causing damage that lasts a lifetime,” reads a petition signed by more than 53,000 Ohioans in support of moving the state to 100% clean electricity by 2030.The petition, circulated by the nonprofit Evangelical Environmental Network, was delivered to lawmakers on July 16. Its potential political impact was unclear then and is even more so now after federal authorities arrested the speaker of the Ohio House and others as part of an alleged $60 million bribery scheme. It’s not the first time a faith group has called for clean energy. Several congregations have framed environmental issues as matters of stewardship andrespect for creation. The Ohio petition stands out for bluntly linking two of the state’s most controversial political issues.“Truly a pro-life future is a clean energy future. And more than 53,000 pro-life Christians in Ohio agree,” said Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, Midwest director for the Evangelical Environmental Network and national organizer and spokesperson for its ministry, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. The Pew Research Center reports that 29% of Ohio adults identify as Evangelical Christians, making them the largest religious group in the state.

New York’s $3 Billion Environmental Bond Delayed by Coronavirus -New York state will postpone plans to place a $3 billion environmental bond on the ballot in November, citing a dire financial situation stemming from the coronavirus pandemic.“It was my proposal. I believe deeply in it, but we need to have financial stability before we do that,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said Thursday on a conference call with members of the media.Cuomo (D) proposed the bond act in January as part of the state’s budget process. The state’s $177 billion budget, passed in Aprilallowed the bond act question to be placed on the Nov. 3 ballot.The bond, if approved by voters, would have allocated funding for a number of projects, including habitat restoration, flood reduction, environmental justice communities, preservation efforts, renewable energy expansion, and water quality improvements.New York state is now facing a nearly $14 billion budget deficit for the current fiscal year, which began April 1, as a result of the public health crisis.“The financial situation now is unstable, as everyone knows,” Cuomo said. “We’re waiting to see what the federal government provides in aid. We’re waiting to see what happens with the economy. We’re waiting to see when the revenues come back to the state and that economic engine really starts turning.” Cuomo said he hopes the measure can be added to the ballot next year.

Millions Could Lose Power As Moratoriums On Utility Shut-Offs End : NPR Wykeisha Howe is trying to be thrifty. Instead of cranking up the air conditioner, she uses a fan. Lunch and dinner are cooked at the same time, so the electric stove doesn’t have to be turned on twice. Still, Howe, who has five kids living at home, is about a month and a half behind on her electric bill. For the last four months, the bill didn’t need to be a priority. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, her electricity provider, Georgia Power, voluntarily suspended disconnections for nonpayment. Dozens of states and utilities around the U.S. took similar actions, ensuring that even as businesses closed and millions of Americans lost their jobs, people would still be able to keep their lights on regardless of their ability to pay. Now, many of those power shut-off moratoriums are expiring, including Georgia Power’s, which ended on July 15. And this comes as Americans who are still struggling face the end of another lifeline: supplemental unemployment benefits that are set to lapse. The combination has utility analysts and advocates for low-income communities worried about a potential “tidal wave” of power shut-offs at a time when temperatures and COVID-19 cases are soaring across much of the country and as health officials are urging people to stay home in response to both emergencies.Utility groups, energy watchdogs and advocates for those in need are calling for a national moratorium on power shut-offs and are pressing Congress for relief. But the White House and both parties are at odds over what another round of relief money would look like and how much it would be.

The Energy 202: U.S. coal production hit its lowest point in last four decades – Last year was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad one for the U.S. coal-mining industry. Freshly publicized federal data showing that U.S. coal production is down to its lowest level in four decades throws into stark relief the decline of American coal mining as it faces stiffer competition from cleaner and cheaper sources of power. That low point comes even as President Trump has tried to marshal the power of the federal government to reverse the trend and rescue the industry. That decline, driven by market forces and activist pressure, has deep implications for combating climate change. Former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is vowing to wean the country’s power plants of fuels that contribute to heat-trapping pollution to the atmosphere. Now in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, 2020 is already projected to be worst than 2019 for the coal sector. The United States mined 706 million tons of coal in 2019 – the lowest total since 1978. That’s a 7 percent drop from the previous year, continuing a decade-long decline in overall output since the coal-mining sector’s peak production in 2008. Wyoming, the top coal-producing state, saw a 9 percent drop in 2019. Arizona stopped mining coal altogether after the Navajo Generating Station, the largest coal-fired facility in the western United States, and the adjacent mine both closed. And it marks the lowest level of coal mining since a national coal miners’ strike in the late 1970s ground most of the country’s production to a halt. With the coronavirus pandemic leading to a decline in demand for electricity, the U.S. coal sector is on pace for even bigger drop in 2020, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration projecting in a blog post Monday mining levels “comparable with those in the 1960s.”

Pandemic is reducing electricity demand and coal-burning power plants are the first to shut down -A report this week from the U.S. government found coal consumption in 2019 was the lowest it’s been since 1978. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, electricity demand is down even more this year, and some utilities are shutting down their more expensive-to-operate coal-burning power plants. Michigan’s two largest power companies, Consumers Energy and DTE Energy already have shuttered some coal-fired plants. Laura Sherman is the President of Michigan Innovation Business Council, a group representing renewable energy companies. She says while the pandemic might be triggering some utility companies to close coal-burning plants, it is not the main cause. “What’s causing this shift away from coal is that it’s not the cheapest resource anymore. Over the last decade approximately, the cost of energy for wind has dropped by 70 percent, and utility scale solar has dropped by 89 percent,” she explained. Sherman says Michigan’s two large utilities have recognized that coal is no longer the future of energy generation. Climate change is the political part of their decisions to end fossil fuel generated electricity, but cost is the main driver. “And they’re both making more investment, and especially Consumers, making significant investments in things like utility-scale solar as basically the cheapest thing they can build to satisfy the load that they have,” she said. Neither Consumers nor DTE has indicated closing coal-burning plants early because of reduced consumption is in the works, but together the two utilities plan to shut down five coal-burning units by 2023.

Phasing out: Utilities, cities prepare for the end of coal-fired energy in Minnesota | MinnPost – In May, when Great River Energy announced plans to close a North Dakota coal-burning plant that powers parts of Minnesota, it served as a reminder that the days of coal-powered energy will eventually end.It’s hard to say when that last piece of coal will get burned in Minnesota, exactly, though the state’s largest utilities are planning to phase out most of their coal-fired plants by the end of the decade.Xcel Energy has four coal-burning units that are still operating. Two units at its Sherco Power Plant near Becker are slated to close in 2023 and 2026 while the last one there could close in 2030, pending regulatory approval. The company is also proposing to close its coal-fired Oak Park Heights plant in 2028.Meanwhile, Otter Tail Power plans to shutter its Fergus Falls plant in 2021 whileMinnesota Power is preparing a proposal for state regulators that would close its two remaining units in Cohasset, on the Iron Range. A half-dozen other operations also burn some coal, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, such as a steam plant in Duluth and utilities in a few rural cities. But the lion’s share of coal-produced power in Minnesota comes from the major utilities that are planning for a future without it. Audrey Partridge, the regulatory policy manager at the Center for Energy and Environment, a nonprofit organization that promotes green energy policies, has been studying the economic impact of coal-plant closures. One probable change: higher taxes in communities where coal-fired electricity plants have been producing significant revenue for cities and school districts. Indeed, in Cohasset, Minnesota Power’s Boswell Energy Center provides nearly 70 percent of the city’s tax revenue and about 20 percent of the school district’s take, according to the utility. Mayor Greg Hagy is holding out faint hope that the coal units, which power this city of 2,800 people as well as the region’s mining and paper industries, might remain open indefinitely, arguing that they burn coal more efficiently than other plants. “You’re talking about a devastating economic hit, and that’s not even considering the spinoff jobs” that have been created, he said.

To keep franchise, ComEd must reform, Lightfoot warns – ComEd, which confessed to paying $1.3 million in bribes to associates of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, must enact ethics reform and other policy changes before the city will extend the utility’s franchise agreement, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Monday.Lightfoot delivered a shape-up-or-else ultimatum in a letter she emailed to ComEd CEO Joseph Dominguez. The agreement that allows ComEd to provide electricity within Chicago expires at the end of 2020, but how much leverage the city has in the situation is debatable.ComEd’s owner, Exelon, will pay $200 million to settle federal corruption charges and agreed to continue cooperating in the Madigan-focused probe. A copy of Lightfoot’s letter was given to the Sun-Times.Saying she is “deeply disturbed” by the company’s admission, the mayor told Dominguez she finds “the company’s response thus far to this clearly unethical behavior to be inadequate. Good governance and transparency have been guiding principles for my administration, and I expect the same principled approach from any company that does business with the City of Chicago.”She added: “The City will not make rash decisions about such an important and essential service as electricity.” Lightfoot said to renew the franchise, “the City expects the company to implement (1) a comprehensive ethics reform plan that rebuilds trust with the City, its residents and its businesses, and (2) my administration’s policy priorities around energy and sustainability, equitable economic development, utility affordability and transparency. “Top executives at Chicago-based Exelon, in apologizing for the misconduct, said they have removed individuals involved in the bribery, which they said was designed to curry favor from Madigan on important legislation. ComEd admitted to federal charges that it derived at least $150 million in benefits from the scheme over an eight-year period ending in 2019. Madigan has not been charged.

Who’s going to pay for beefed-up policing of ComEd? You will. – Ratepayers of Exelon’s utilities, including its disgraced subsidiary ComEd, will shoulder the cost of a new exec and his staff who are meant to reassure the public that payoffs to the politically connected will end. Commonwealth Edison and Exelon executives, for the first time saying something extensive about the scandal engulfing them in a hearing today before the Illinois Commerce Commission, put forth a vocal defense of the company even as they offered words of contrition. While they guaranteed that ComEd customers wouldn’t pay more to cover any of the utility’s $200 million fine under its deferred-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors, they did admit that ComEd customers will indeed pay for the steps the utility is taking to police itself. ComEd did not admit to a crime, CEO Joseph Dominguez emphasized to commissioners. He referred to it repeatedly as “misconduct.” “I am very sorry for that conduct,” he said. Under the arrangement with the feds, ComEd is charged with bribery. The charge will be dismissed after three years if ComEd continues to cooperate with their investigation of House Speaker Michael Madigan and reforms its lobbying practices. Dominguez introduced to the commission David Glockner, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago hired by Exelon in a newly created position to audit and police the requests and hiring recommendations Exelon’s utilities get from public officials, among other ethics concerns. Quickly, commissioners asked whether ratepayers were covering Glockner’s compensation as an executive vice president and others the company might be hiring to boost compliance. Indeed, they are through the Exelon shared-services unit that all its business units including ComEd help pay for, ComEd executives responded. ComEd includes those expenses in the rates it charges. Commission Chair Carrie Zalewski told Dominguez and Glockner that she wasn’t comfortable “with one penny” of ratepayer money going to an improved compliance system made necessary by actions over nearly a decade at ComEd that resulted in a criminal charge of bribery. “I find it very hard to believe Exelon was going to enhance their policies regardless,” she said.

With city takeover off the table, ComEd hearing reduced to political theater – The City Council’s chance to publicly flog Commonwealth Edison for a $1.3 million bribery scandal was quickly reduced to political theater Thursday after a top mayoral aide took Chicago’s trump card off the table right off the bat.Mayor Lori Lightfoot had asked a consultant to study the feasibility of a municipal takeover of Chicago’s electric service. The final report is expected to be released in August.But Assets and Information Services Commissioner David Reynolds delivered the bottom line progressive aldermen didn’t want to hear during a virtual hearing before the City Council’s Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection.“It appears municipalizing ComEd is not financially feasible for this city, given the cost of both purchasing ComEd’s distribution infrastructure and severing the portion of the system that serves Chicago from the portion that would serve ComEd’s revised service territory if the city were to municipalize the portion that serves Chicago,” he said. Instead of preparing for a municipal takeover, the city and ComEd have been “meeting at least weekly for more than a year to negotiate the terms of the new franchise agreement,” Reynolds said.

Judge Rules Justice-Controlled Coal Company Liable For Pollution Violations At W.Va. Mine – A federal judge has ruled a coal company owned by the family of West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is liable for more than 3,000 violations of federal clean water standards stemming from pollution discharged from a coal mine in southern West Virginia. In a motion issued Monday, U.S. District Judge David Faber ruled Bluestone Coal Corporation discharged selenium at the Red Fox Surface Mine in McDowell County many times at levels above its permitted allowances from July 2018 to March 2020. Selenium is a chemical element found in coal that accumulates in the body and has been linked to growth deformities and reproductive failure in fish. Data submitted by the company to regulators showed 60 violations of its monthly average limit for selenium and 78 violations of its daily maximum limit for selenium. Under the Clean Water Act, each violation of a monthly average limit is treated as a violation for every day in the month in which the violation occurred, rather than as a single violation for that month. In total, Faber found Bluestone was liable for 3,033 days of violations of the Clean Water Act. Faber also ruled that the company violated its permit under the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act 183 times. The lawsuit was brought by four environmental groups – the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, Appalachian Voices and the Sierra Club – under the citizen suit provision of the Clean Water Act. Last month, Faber rejected Bluestone’s request to have the lawsuit dismissed. The company argued a 2016 settlement deal reached with the Environmental Protection Agency precluded environmental groups from suing over the selenium pollution. In his opinion, Faber noted enforcement under the Clean Water Act is set up to be simple, and Bluestone’s own data showed repeated violations.

Lawsuit Says Plant Scherer Is ‘Poisoning’ Locals When Georgia Power opened Plant Scherer in 1982, Marvin Bowdoin, who owned a store in the small town of Juliette that sold groceries and gas to the company’s employees, sold his neighbors on the utility’s promises of more jobs and greater tax revenues for the community. But over 35 years later, his grandson Tony Bowdoin, who worked at the family’s store for decades, discovered his home’s drinking water was full of contaminants. Last fall, he was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, and is still battling it today. Tony Bowdoin is one of 45 Central Georgia residents living near America’s largest coal-fired plant who claim in a lawsuit that the utility has unlawfully released, discharged and deposited coal ash into their community’s drinking water source. The residents get their water from private drinking wells, which draw water from the aquifer below the ground. They’re seeking to force the state’s largest power company to stop polluting the area’s water, provide ongoing medical monitoring, and pay damages. The mass tort lawsuit, filed Wednesday morning in the Superior Court of Fulton County, where Georgia Power is based, claims that coal ash stored in an unlined basin has contaminated the groundwater surrounding the plant site. Heavy metals found in that industrial waste are “poisoning” residents, who have suffered health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular disorder, and thyroid damage, the lawsuit said.

Wildlife at Lake Michigan park threatened by toxic ash buried underground – — Coal ash buried beneath a former coal-fired power plant may be seeping into the groundwater and harming wildlife at the Indiana Dunes National Park. According to the Associated Press, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is asking for public feedback on a proposal to cleanup the site which is located along Lake Michigan, approximately 50 miles southeast of Chicago.Although the Bailly Generating Station closed in 2018, the EPA says the Northern Indiana Public Service Co. buried coal ash – a byproduct of coal burned to produce electricity – on the site in the 1960s and 1970s. The ash was buried about 25 feet underground.Coal ash is known to contain toxic metals, which includes boron, the primary contaminant the EPA has concerns about at this site. So far the EPA has determined the metal is harming plants in the area, but levels are “too low to harm people.” Still, the EPA believes the ash is seeping into underground water, which is “carrying the underground contamination into the park.”The EPA suggests 100,000 cubic yards of dry coal ash/soil need to be dug up and hauled off-site as part of its plan. On top of that, the EPA says another 85,000 cubic yards of “wet” ash below the water table would be solidified to prevent contaminants from making their way into the groundwater or surface water, according to the AP. The public has until Aug 19 to submit public comment on the plan.

EPA rule extends life of toxic coal ash ponds | TheHill – The Trump administration is extending the life of giant pits of toxic coal sludge, a move critics say further risks contamination of nearby water sources. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) late Wednesday announced it had finalized a new regulation for the more than 400 coal ash pits across the nation, where coal residue is mixed with liquid and stored in open air, often unlined ponds. “Today’s action makes changes to the closure regulations for coal ash storage that enhance protections for public health while giving electric utilities enough time to retrofit or replace unlined impoundment ponds,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a release. “The public will also be better informed as EPA makes facility groundwater monitoring data more accessible and understandable,” he added. But critics say the new rule is full of loopholes that will actually extend the life of coal ash ponds for years, giving facilities extra time to dump the arsenic-laden waste if they can’t find anywhere else to put it or have plans to retire one of their coal-burner boilers. With those extensions, coal ash ponds that are supposed to stop receiving waste by 2021 can keep receiving sludge for two to seven more years. Including the additional time for closing ponds, that allows some pits to stay open as late as 2038. “EPA is disingenuous. EPA is clearly fulfilling the demands of industry. This is coal lobbyist rule, this is Andrew Wheeler’s rule, and we wouldn’t expect anything different,” Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans told The Hill, referencing Wheeler’s career as a lobbyist. “This rule allows tens of millions of tons of additional toxic waste to be placed in impoundments we know are leaking,” she said. The EPA has been under longstanding pressure to better regulate coal ash ponds because of the extreme risks associated with them. An Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice review of monitoring data from coal ash ponds found 91 percent were leaking toxins in excess of what EPA allows, contaminating groundwater and drinking wells in nearby communities. And when they aren’t leaching into groundwater, the contaminants risk spilling over the sides of the pond any time there is a heavy rain. Dan Costa, former director of EPA’s Air, Climate, and Energy Research Program at the Office of Research and Development, said a flurry of early season tropical storms is a sign of what lies ahead. “There’s already another tropical storm approaching the Carolinas,” he said. “The problem with these holding facilities is that they’re large, they’re full, and they can be breached with heavy rains.” “They are usually in rural areas, if not in environmentally sensitive areas, sometimes near rivers, and they are usually in communities that have lower income people. And in North Carolina, they are in areas that are predominantly African American and poor because they don’t have any power to fight these things,” he said.

Plant Vogtle installs new sirens and will start testing them this week– Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle has installed 48 new sirens in the area around it as part of its emergency response plan in case of a dangerous incident at the nuclear power facility. During a six-month commissioning phase beginning this week, the new sirens will be tested in small groups. Officials say this will allow time to ensure all sirens function properly before testing all of them together. Residents in a 10-mile radius will continue to hear the sirens but may notice a slight change in the duration and sound of the tone. Once the upgrade is complete, the sirens currently in use will be decommissioned, and the new sirens will continue to be tested audibly on a quarterly basis, in addition to the weekly inaudible tests that already occur.

Georgia Power forecasts increased costs for Vogtle nuclear expansion – The costs and challenges of expanding Plant Vogtle continue to grow, in part because the number of workers diagnosed with COVID-19 is on the rise, Southern Company acknowledged Thursday. The Atlanta-based company, which is the parent of Georgia Power, forecasts it will cost $149 million more for its share of the project. It said Georgia Power could eventually ask state regulators to charge customers for the increase. Southern also reported on Thursday quarterly declines in its latest revenue and profits, compared to a year ago, as overall electricity use fell with the pandemic and the battered economy. Commercial and industrial customers used far less electricity. But residential electricity use rose 5% as people spent more time at home. Southern said the pandemic continues to affect work at Vogtle, which was already billions of dollars over its original budget and years behind schedule. In April, the company cut 2,000 jobs on the project after absenteeism rose and coronavirus cases grew at the massive construction site south of Augusta. Southern said the number of cases among workers declined significantly, but began to increase again in mid-June and “continue to impact productivity levels and pace of activity completion.” Still, the company said it expects to have the two new nuclear units operating by November 2021 and November 2022. Georgia Public Service Commission staffers and independent monitors have testified that, even before factoring in the pandemic’s impact, it is “highly unlikely” that Vogtle will be completed by then. And they predicted the project will be $1 billion over its current budget.

JEA Settles Litigation Over Nuclear Plant Vogtle –JEA has ended its attempt to get out of a deal it made to buy electricity from a Georgia nuclear power plant that has seenbillions of dollars in cost overruns.Thursday afternoon Jacksonville’s public utility announced it has settled litigation and all related claims with the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG Power) in its dispute over the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, which is commonly referred to as Plant Vogtle.In settling the case, JEA acknowledged the contract is “valid and enforceable.”“We likewise are pleased to have reached this settlement with MEAG Power and look forward to Vogtle Units 3 and 4 coming online in the near future,” said Paul McElroy, JEA interim managing director and chief executive officer in an email to WJCT News. “The reliable, emissions-free power from Plant Vogtle will help JEA continue to serve our Jacksonville-area customers with ever-cleaner power into the future.”Earlier this week JEA’s board unanimously agreed to have JEA’s legal team attempt to reach a settlement.That followed a U.S. District judge’s June ruling against JEA in the lawsuit, saying the contract Jacksonville’s utility set up for the nuclear power plant is still valid. JEA entered into its power purchase agreement with MEAG Power in 2008. At the time, JEA’s portion of the project was expected to cost $1.4 billion, but the cost overruns that JEA must absorb totaled $2.9 billion by 2019, and JEA expected that uncapped liability to continue rising.

Work crews fudged maintenance records at nuke plant – Several maintenance workers at a South Florida nuclear power plant have been fired for not completing the safety inspection of a critical piece of equipment – and then falsifying records about it, a public safety concern, according to newly released documents by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. After an internal investigation by Florida Power & Light confirmed regulators’ findings, the utility company fired at least three employees involved in the January 2019 incident at the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station. Turkey Point, situated more than 60 miles south of Fort Lauderdale, provides power for roughly 1 million homes across South Florida. Its two nuclear reactors came online in the early 1970s. Because of the age of the reactors, some critical systems have to be regularly taken apart and checked for age-related issues. It was during one of these checks that investigators from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say maintenance crews falsified work records. Workers inspecting a valve for wear and tear in the aging reactor’s backup cooling system failed to use specialized equipment to measure a valve for signs of weakness, according to investigative documents. The valve must be taken apart and measured with specialized equipment every three years. Investigators found that the maintenance crew tasked with taking the valve apart hadn’t checked out the necessary tools for the job, even though they reported completing the task on maintenance paperwork. Workers had written the measurements from 2015 onto a form in 2019.

UAE starts operations at Arab world’s first nuclear power plant – In a first for the Arab world, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has begun start-up operations in the initial unit of its first nuclear power plant, the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) has said. The Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant on the Gulf coast west of Abu Dhabi, a major oil producer, is being built by Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO). The plant was originally due to open in 2017 but the start-up of its first reactor was repeatedly delayed. ENEC on Saturday said its subsidiary Nawah Energy Company “has successfully started up Unit 1 of the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant, located in the Al Dhafrah Region of Abu Dhabi”. The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, wrote on Twitter that nuclear fuel had been loaded into the first of four units of what he called “the first peaceful nuclear energy reactor in the Arab world”. “We are now another step closer to achieving our goal of supplying up to a quarter of our nation’s electricity needs and powering its future growth with safe, reliable, and emissions-free electricity,” ENEC’s Chief Executive Mohamed Ibrahim al-Hammadi said. The UAE started loading fuel rods into the reactor at Barakah in February, after regulators gave the greenlight for the first of the plant’s four reactors, opening the way for commercial operations. The Nawah Energy Company said at the time that Unit 1 will begin commercial operations after a “series of tests” leading to the start-up process. During the process, the unit will be synchronised with the power grid and the first electricity produced. When completed, Barakah will have four reactors with 5,600 megawatts (MW) capacity. The UAE has not disclosed the total planned investment in the project The UAE has substantial oil and gas reserves, but with a power-hungry population of 10 million, it has made huge investments in developing clean alternatives, including solar energy. The nuclear plant is a regional first. Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, has said it plans to build up to 16 nuclear reactors, but the project has yet to materialise.

After $60M Bribery Charges, Questions Renewed over Ratepayer Subsidies for Nuclear Power – FirstEnergy Corp. CEO Chuck Jones was more than halfway through his second-quarter earnings call Friday, when he could no longer hold in his frustrations. “It’d be really nice,’’ he said softly, ‘’we have 15 minutes left if we could actually talk about the great quarter that we had at some point here.’’ Unfortunately for him, analysts were not interested. Instead, they sought to gauge the Ohio energy giant’s risks and exposure following the announcement three days earlier of its role in the $60 million bribery scandal related to the bailout of two nuclear plants formerly owned by the company. The federal investigation led to the arrest of Ohio’s speaker of the House, his chief political aide and three lobbyists. The alleged scheme involved using funds from FirstEnergy, its former subsidiary and operator of the plants, and another subsidiary, to help pass a bill last year to keep the plants open with a $1.3 billion subsidy paid for by utility customers. Once enacted into law, funds funneled to a dark-money nonprofit set up by the Ohio Speaker Larry Householder were used to block a referendum seeking to overturn the law. The scandal has revived questions about whether these aging nuclear plants deserve the subsidies and how they were awarded. New Jersey was one of four states to allow ratepayer subsidies to avoid closing nuclear power plants. At this juncture, there are more questions than answers relating to FirstEnergy’s , involvement. FirstEnergy, which owns Jersey Central Power & Light and its subsidiaries, is cooperating with the investigation, Jones said. “I believe First Energy acted properly in this matter,’’ Jones told analysts. None of the money from the bailout went to FirstEnergy, he said. Still, the affidavit renewed criticism from some in the energy sector over states subsidizing bailout of nuclear power plants, a process that has also occurred in New York, New Jersey and Illinois. In New Jersey, Public Service Enterprise Group and Exelon Corp. won subsidies amounting to $300 million a year to prevent their three plants in South Jersey from closing after a bitter two-year legislative battle. “This should raise questions in New Jersey whether the ZEC (zero-emission certificate) legislation is necessary,’’ said Glen Thomas, president of the P3 Group, a coalition of energy suppliers that opposes nuclear subsidies. “We now know in Ohio the only reason these bills passed (was) legislators were being bribed.’’

‘Dark money’ can easily fuel bribery schemes – The Columbus Dispatch – The key tool that used to carry out what federal authorities described as a criminal enterprise in support of a nuclear power-plant bailout bill was “dark money,” which is derived from donations that don’t have to be disclosed.Commercials supporting the FirstEnergy nuclear power-plant bailout bill in 2019 showed children playing, wind turbines spinning and solar panels shining in the sun – but never showed a nuclear power plant.“Clean air and clean energy begin with clean government,” one video said, over a scene of a toddler walking hand in hand with his parents.But according to an 82-page criminal complaint released by federal prosecutors Tuesday, the ubiquitous ads were really part of the largest criminal conspiracy in Ohio government political history – a “racket,” similar to those used by the mafia. The goal was to gain control of the Ohio House, appoint a new speaker and then pass a law charging electricity customers to bail out the company that owns two aging Ohio nuclear power plants and some coal-fired power plants in the Midwest.And the key tool that Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder used to carry out what federal authorities described as a criminal enterprise was “dark money” – $61 million of it largely from the plants’ owner, which information contained in the criminal complaint identifies as bankrupt FirstEnergy Solutions, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy now operating under the name Energy Harbor.If you’re intent on bribing a politician, “dark money makes it a lot easier,” said Richard Briffault, a professor with the Columbia Law School specializing in campaign-finance issues.“What makes money dark is that the donations don’t have to be disclosed. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. It’s harder to do things like this out in the open,” Briffault said.

‘Unholy alliance’ of power, money fueled corruption scheme (AP) – An accused co-conspirator called it an “unholy alliance” – dealings between a longtime Ohio politician seeking to restore his power and an energy company in desperate need of a billion-dollar bailout to rescue two nuclear plants in the state. Both the politician, current Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, and FirstEnergy Corp., identified in an FBI complaint as “Company A,” got what they wanted last year from what federal officials say was a $60 million bribery scheme funded by an unidentified company the complaint makes clear is FirstEnergy and its affiliates. What Householder and his alleged co-conspirators might not have realized until their arrests on Tuesday and the affidavit was made public was that the FBI had insider help from people who cooperated with agents, recorded phone calls and dinner conversations, and shared text messages from members of the alleged conspiracy. Householder, one of the state’s most powerful politicians, and FirstEnergy, which through its affiliates provided nearly all of the cash used to fund the alleged scheme, now face a reckoning that could upend Ohio’s political landscape. Both FirstEnergy and Householder were successful. Householder surged to power with his election as House speaker in January 2019, and FirstEnergy got its bailout. Tens of millions of dollars were then spent to fund a campaign that prevented Ohio voters from deciding in a ballot issue whether they were in favor of paying more on their electric bills to help keep the struggling plants afloat. Youtube video thumbnail Householder’s attorney declined to comment on Friday. FBI Agent Blane Wetzel’s detailed 81-page affidavit in support of the criminal complaint against Householder and four others showed how the Perry County politician was connected to FirstEnergy. It painstakingly details how the alleged conspiracy to spend $60 million of the corporation’s money unfolded. The affidavit lays out the speaker’s ties to the corporation, starting with Householder and his son flying to President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 on a FirstEnergy plane. According to the affidavit, there were 84 telephone contacts between Householder and FirstEnergy President and CEO Chuck Jones between February 2017 and July 2019; 14 contacts with the corporation’s vice president for external affairs; and 188 contacts with its Ohio director of state affairs. “Let me be clear, at no time did our support for Ohio’s nuclear plants interfere with or supersede our ethical obligations to conduct our business properly,” Jones told investors Friday during a quarterly earnings call. “The facts will become clear as the investigation progresses.”

Environmental groups push Murray Energy to disclose possible HB 6 ties – Columbus Dispatch – Environmental groups are asking a federal bankruptcy court for Murray Energy Holdings Co. to disclose any potential involvement with House Bill 6, the nuclear bailout law now tied to a $60 million bribery and racketeering scheme involving Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and four associates. Environmental groups are asking a federal bankruptcy court for Murray Energy Holdings Co. to disclose any potential involvement with Ohio House Bill 6, the nuclear bailout law now tied to a $60 million bribery and racketeering scheme involving indicted former state House Speaker Larry Householder and four associates. St. Clairsville-based Murray Energy is in the process of providing additional information about how its finances are being reorganized in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings before Judge John E. Hoffman Jr. in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Ohio in Columbus. The disclosures were due Wednesday. “It would be helpful if, when Murray provides its supplemental disclosure, it also disclosed whether or not it had provided money to any of the organizations that are named in the indictment related to HB 6, because there’s Company B and Company C. The chatter on the street” is that one of them is Murray, said Margrethe Kearney, a senior staff attorney with the Midwest-based Environmental Law and Policy Center. She is also representing the environmental organizations Ohio Citizen Action and Ohio Environmental Council.

AEP contributed to dark money group that gave money to Generation Now – American Electric Power (AEP) has acknowledged that it funded a dark-money group that itself contributed funding to Generation Now, the group charged in the federal criminal complaint that centered around a $61 million bribery scheme involving FirstEnergy. The group, called Empowering Ohio’s Economy, Inc., is a 501(c)(4) organization that paid $100,000 to Generation Now in 2017, and another $50,000 in 2018. The Energy News Network first reported the funding earlier this year. Neither Empowering Ohio’s Economy nor AEP are mentioned by name in federal prosecutors’ criminal complaint.The complaint does, however, describe a “Coalition” as one of the entities controlled by the criminal enterprise. It says the Coalition was funded in part through “$200,000 from an interest group that was funded exclusively by $13 million from another energy company that supported HB 6 and separately paid $150,000 to Generation Now during the relevant period.“The Energy News Network reported that Empowering Ohio’s Economy “gave $200,000 for public advocacy to the Coalition for Growth & Opportunity in 2017″ in addition to the $150,000 it gave to Generation Now in 2017 and 2018. Those details would appear to match Empowering Ohio’s Economy with the description of the “interest group” named in the complaint, and would appear to match AEP with the description of “another energy company that supported HB 6″ and exclusively funded Empowering Ohio’s Economy with “$13 million.”The Columbus Dispatch has confirmed that AEP is the energy company cited in the affidavit as funding that interest group, citing a source close to the investigation. AEP spokesperson Melissa McHenry confirmed to the Energy and Policy Institute that AEP has funded Empowering Ohio’s Economy, though would not comment on the level of funding.

Illinois and Ohio Bribery Scandals Show the Perils of Mixing Utilities and Politics – – Among other things, the king-size bribery scandals in Illinois and Ohio dominating the headlines lately are a vivid illustration of how utilities routinely exert financial and political power to shield themselves from the risks of doing business, often at the expense of consumers.The dynamic is so pervasive that some analysts and advocates say they thought they had lost the ability to be shocked by it – until the revelations of the last 10 days.”I was gobsmacked,” said Ned Hill, an Ohio State University economist who had testified against the legislation now at the center of the bribery probe. The behavior described in legal documents, he said, looks “like the outtakes from The Godfather.”Hill and other close observers of the legislative process say utilities have too much political power and operate in a campaign finance system that makes it too easy for them to get what they want, and that often leads to unfair competition. On July 17, federal prosecutors in Illinois announced that the utility Commonwealth Edison had allegedly provided jobs and favors to people associated with the Illinois House speaker, in exchange for legislation that included a bailout of nuclear power plants. Four days later, federal prosecutors in Ohio made a more startling announcement in an unrelated but similar case, charging the Ohio House speaker, Republican Larry Householder, and four other people, with taking more than $60 million from the utility FirstEnergy in exchange for passing a nuclear bailout. The utilities’ unrestrained influence also has implications for climate change and the environment, although those factors differ widely in the Illinois and Ohio cases because of differences in the bills passed in each state. But environmental advocates say both the Illinois and Ohio examples are alarming because they show a system in which all concerns take a back seat to profits of utilities.”When companies like ComEd and FirstEnergy have billions of dollars at stake, spending tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions, bribes and other activities is sort of a down payment, and that’s sad,” said Howard Learner, president and executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago.

Ohio political scandal nicks AEP stock price, FirstEnergy CEO clarifies defense as shares languish – American Electric Power’s share price tumbled about 10% at the beginning of the week and had still not completely recovered by the end of the day Tuesday, following published reports that the company had contributed to the dark money committee, Generation Now, in its $61 million, multi-year campaign to bail out nuclear plants formerly owned by FirstEnergy Corp. Nicholas Akins, AEP’s CEO, issued a statement stating that neither the corporation nor its subsidiaries contributed to Generation Now. He said the company contributed to Empowering Ohio’s Economy, AEP’s wholly-owned, tax-exempt committee promoting business development in Ohio. But Empowering Ohio’s Economy then contributed $150,000 to Generation Now and $200,000 to another non-profit group also under federal investigation. AEP’s chief lobbyist, who testified in favor of the bailout legislation, is a director of Empowering Ohio. AEP’s efforts to stay as far away from the federal bribery investigation that has all but named FirstEnergy and its former power plant subsidiary, now called Energy Harbor, came this week as FirstEnergy CEO Charles Jones issued a new public statement clarifying remarks he made to analysts during the company’s second quarter earnings call on Friday. Jones’ statement underscored previous comments to analysts, that the company’s subsidiary FirstEnergy Solutions began acting independently in November 2016 when it created its own board of directors, and that while FirstEnergy continued to offer FES support services – including advice on external affairs – “that support decreased over time, particularly, as the FES [March 2018] bankruptcy approached. FES made its own decisions after its new board was in place with respect to its external affairs strategy.” Both AEP and FE issued their statements this week just a day before Republican lawmakers, in a private a caucus Tuesday, agreed to remove Rep. Larry Householder, R, as speaker of the House in Ohio. Election of a new speaker, yet to be identified, would occur in a public meeting of the House. FBI agents last week arrested Householder and four others following an investigation that lasted more than a year. Federal prosecutors simultaneously released an 81-page complaint alleging that Householder created Generation Now as a tax-exempt, non-profit organization that used bribery as early as 2016 with the goal of ultimately winning passage of the bailout legislation, House Bill 6, approved last year. Generation Now financed the election campaigns of Ohio House and Senate members through several election cycles, creating “Team Householder,” that is, House and Senate members beholden to the speaker.

FirstEnergy customer files potential class-action lawsuit seeking refund of rate hike due to ‘ill-gotten gains’ of House Bill 6 – cleveland.com — A FirstEnergy customer on Monday filed what could become a class-action lawsuit in an effort to make the electricity company refund customers for rate hikes that resulted from a billion-dollar nuclear bailout now at the center of a corruption scandal.The lawsuit filed by Jacob Smith, a North Royalton homeowner, accuses the Akron-based utility of committing civil racketeering by bribing law Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder to introduce House Bill 6 and then illegally bankrolling a dark-money campaign to pressure legislators into supporting the bill and fending off a ballot initiative to repeal it.The goal of the scheme was to deprive ratepayers of money through the law that required them to pay a monthly surcharge on power the company delivered, the lawsuit says.The 34-page complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus also asks a federal judge to grant class-action status, a move that would allow hundreds of thousands of customers from across the state to join as plaintiffs and seek refunds.House Bill 6 required every Ohio customer to pay a new monthly surcharge that ranged from 85 cents for residential customers to $2,400 for operators of large industrial plants. It also stripped requirements that traditional utility companies generate a certain percentage of the power they provide from renewable energy, which supporters said would result in a net savings for consumers.Sandusky-based attorney Dennis Murray Jr., a former Democratic state representative who represented what was then District 80 from 2009 to 2013, filed the suit on Smith’s behalf. He said that lawmakers’ plans to repeal the bailout law and pass new legislation in its place are not enough.“[FirstEnergy] hijacked Ohio’s democracy,” Murray Jr. told cleveland.com Monday. “Repeal and replace is likely, but they’re not entitled to keep the change in the meantime. They have to give it back.”

Ohio House votes to remove Larry Householder as Ohio Speaker following corruption arrest – — The Ohio House of Representatives has voted unanimously to remove Larry Householder as Ohio House speaker a little more than one week following his arrest on federal corruption allegations. Members approved the measure swiftly without debate in a Thursday morning session. The vote was 90-0, with 9 members, including Householder, absent. Additional “yes” votes could trickle in as Thursday continues – some of the “absent” members were nearby but missed the vote since it happened so quickly. The move doesn’t remove Householder from office entirely – it just removes him from his job as Speaker, a powerful position that schedules House votes and decides what will be voted on. Householder remains in office, and is up for re-election in November. Householder, a political aide and three lobbyists, including former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges, were arrested last Tuesday in what federal authorities described as a $60 million bribery scheme. They were formally indicted on Thursday, minutes before the vote. The FBI says FirstEnergy funneled the money to Householder and his allies, including a network of shadowy political groups, to help elect Householder as speaker, in exchange for a nuclear bailout bill worth more than $1 billion that Householder pushed through the legislature. With Householder removed as speaker, House Republicans are working behind the scenes to pick a new one, with state reps. Jim Butler, of suburban Dayton, and Bob Cupp, of Lima, emerging as the lead candidates. Cupp is a former Ohio Supreme Court justice, while Butler served under Householder as the number-two ranking House Republican. House Republicans said the plan is to hold a private vote for Butler or Cupp behind closed doors, and then vote unanimously for the winning candidate in a later, public vote to make it official. They were scheduled to meet privately immediately following the session, but the caucus was delayed until 1:30 p.m. so additional representatives could make it to Columbus. State Rep. Jon Cross, a Kenton Republican who was a close Householder ally, said following the vote he thinks Republicans will be able to unite behind either candidate. “I’m hoping we can make a very unified decision, get together and vote and get this done,” he said. State Rep. Jack Cera, a Belmont County Democrat and longtime state legislator, said he’s saddened by Thursday’s vote. He said the Householder episode illustrates the need for campaign-finance reform. “The public going back years and years has thought that all politicians are crooks. And stuff like this paints us all with the same brush. And we’ve got to do something about the money in the political system if we want to change that,” he said.

.