California Free Press

Societal Cost of 'Forever Chemicals' Estimated at Over $17,000,000,000,000

"Why are we allowing this?" asked one group. "$17.5 TRILLION in societal cost so that industry can make billions."

In healthcare and other societal costs, the use of per- and polyfluorinated substances costs more than $17 trillion per year. (Photo: iStock via Getty Images)

Societal Cost of 'Forever Chemicals' Estimated at Over $17,000,000,000,000

May 12, 2023

 

from Common Dreams

 

An upcoming report by Sweden-based organization ChemSec will detail the costs of the continued use of so-called "forever chemicals" which go overlooked by their manufacturers—the "societal" price that individuals and governments pay as the chemicals remain in the environment long after they are used in a range of products.

Factoring in soil and water remediation, monitoring of pollution, and healthcare costs associated with a number of health problems linked to per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS), the cost to society of using the chemicals totals about $17.5 trillion every year.

ChemSec has worked with investment firms to pressure companies to eliminate the use of PFAS, which have earned the nickname "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally degrade and have been detected in breastmilk, wildlife, and drinking water samples.

Major manufacturers of PFAS include Chemours, Solvay, Daiki, Honeywell, Bayer, and 3M—the last of which announced this year it will discontinue the use of the synthetic compounds.

While manufacturers typically prioritize their profit margins and shareholder rewards over public health and safety, ChemSec found that these companies bring in relatively little money each year from using PFAS, compared to their cost to society.

The use of forever chemicals yields only about $4 billion each year, according toThe Guardian, which reported on ChemSec's findings ahead of the release of the analysis.

"If you compare the profits that they make and the cost to society—it's ridiculous," Peter Pierrou, communications director for ChemSec, told The Guardian.

When accounting for the societal cost of using PFAS to make a range of products heat-, water-, and stain-resistant, the price of the chemicals is more than $20,400 per kilogram rather than the recognized average market price of about $20.75.

"Why are we allowing this? $17.5 TRILLION [in] societal cost so that industry can make billions," said the Environmental Media Association in response to the findings, which will be released with more detail in "a couple of weeks," according to ChemSec.

Health-related social costs of PFAS include treatment for cancers, thyroid disease, kidney dysfunction, birth defects, and autoimmune diseases, all of which have been linked to low levels of exposure.

The drinking water of at least 200 million Americans is believed to be contaminated with forever chemicals, and the compounds have become ubiquitous throughout Europe as well.

ChemSec's analysis will also examine the use of PFAS in "essential" versus "non-essential cases." The European Union in February proposed a ban on the chemicals in products for which manufacturers have identified alternative, non-toxic substitutes that can also repel water, heat, and stains.

The organization has made some progress in appealing to manufacturers to end their use of PFAS by pointing to the chemicals' cost to society. Late last year it organized a letter signed by investment firms which hold $11 trillion in assets in the E.U. warning that companies risk threatening "public health, the environment, and shareholder value" if they continue to use forever chemicals.

"There is particular concern about PFAS, often found in cosmetics, furniture, carpeting, non-stick pans, and waterproof jackets, which accumulate in the environment and cause health impacts for generations," the investment firms warned. "Growing awareness of these risks has triggered a surge in lawsuits, which could cost chemicals companies as much as $30 billion."

 

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Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Industry Knew—and Hid—Dangers of Gas Stoves Over 50 Years Ago

Amid growing research showing the climate and health risks of gas stoves, some advocates and experts want a ban on new fossil fuel-powered appliances.

(Photo: Andrea Todaro/EyeEm)

by Bret Wilkins, March 7, 2023

from Common Dreams

Industry Knew—and Hid—Dangers of Gas Stoves Over 50 Years Ago

"What? They knew? Next you're going to tell me that ExxonMobil knew about climate change and that the tobacco companies knew cigarettes caused cancer," one Democratic senator sarcastically said.

Newly uncovered documents published last week by DeSmog reveal that the leading gas industry trade group knew over 50 years ago that cooking with gas stoves could harm human health and tried to cover up the evidence.

The DeSmogrevelations regarding the American Gas Associationn (AGA) came as the gas industry is pushing back against climate and public health advocates' efforts to ban new gas stoves amid mounting scientific evidence that the appliances threaten the warming planet and people's health.

Rrcent studies—which, among other things, showed that nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and ultrafine particles produced by gas stoves cause a range of health problems, including 1 in 8 U.S. cases of childhood asthma—sparked fast and furious backlash from the gas industry and its congressional boosters.

"It's less widely known that the gas industry has long sponsored its own research into the problem of indoor air pollution from gas stoves," wrote DeSmog's Rebecca John. "Now, newly discovered documents reveal that the American Gas Association was studying the health and indoor pollution risks from gas stoves as far back as the early 1970s—that they knew much more, at a far earlier date, than has been previously documented."

According to John:

More than 50 years ago, in 1972, AGA authored a draft report highlighting indoor air pollution concerns similar to those being raised by health experts and regulators today. In particular, this draft report examined what to do about problems related to the emission of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides (collectively referred to as NOx) from domestic gas appliances. This draft, recently discovered in the U.S. National Archives, would eventually become an official report published by the National Industrial Pollution Control Council (NIPCC), a long-forgotten government advisory council composed of the nation's most powerful industrialists.

However, an entire section detailing those concerns, entitled "Indoor Air Quality Control," vanished from the final report. With it went all the important evidence that the gas industry was not only conducting research into what the NIPCC called the "NOx problem" but also that it was actively testing technological solutions "for the purposes of limiting the levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides in household air."

"Instead," John wrote, "the final report argued gas' sole drawback was its limited availability, 'not its environmental impact.' It also lobbied for a massive expansion of U.S. domestic gas reserves and the rapid rollout of gas-based infrastructure, under the banner of replacing coal with gas to stem air pollution."

Reacting to the DeSmog report, U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) sardonically tweeted: "What? They knew? Next you're going to tell me that ExxonMobil knew about climate change and that the tobacco companies knew cigarettes caused cancer."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

 

Brett Wilkins

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Off the Top of My Head

What Mass Shootings and Global Warming Have in Common

by John Lawrence

Even if sales of AK-15s were banned today, there would still be enough AK-15s on the streets for mass shootings to continue for decades. Even if no more carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere starting today, there is enough already there to provide weather disasters for decades. Meanwhile, gun sales and carbon dioxide generation are continuing apace. There will be no diminution of gun violence nor will there be any diminution of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. If there were zero gun sales tomorrow and zero carbon dioxide generation tomorrow, there might be a chance for recovery from both travesties, but, no, those travesties will continue along predictable lines. There will be even more mass shootings and assorted other gun violence while gas powered vehicles and power generating plants will continue to pump out carbon dioxide using the atmosphere as a waste dump. Plastic will continue to pollute the oceans. Chemical fertilizer and pest control chemicals will continue to pollute waterways. People pursuing the American Dream will continue consuming products to the point of commercial gluttony and beyond.

The production of steel and cement produces large amounts of carbon dioxide that goes directly into the atmosphere. It's a matter of sheer chemistry. Steelmaking is one of the most carbon emission intensive industries in the world. As of 2020, steelmaking is estimated to be responsible for 7 to 9 per cent of all direct fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions. In order to mitigate global warming, the industry will need to find reductions in emissions. In 2020, McKinsey identified a number of technologies for decarbonization including hydrogen usage, carbon capture and reuse, and maximizing use of electric arc furnaces powered by clean energy. A Swedish company has developed a way of making carbon dioxide emission free steel. The Guardian reported:

The world’s first customer delivery of “green steel” produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer.

The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel.

Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU’s plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

So the chemistry is being changed so that water H₂O is produced as a by product instead of carbon dioxide, CO².

CNBC reported:

Cars and electricity get a lot of attention in conversations about decarbonization, and they should. But building materials like cement and steel also need to be scrutinized.

The production of cement is responsible for about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions and 5.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.

On [April 28, 2022], Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates’ climate finance firm, and DCVC, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, announced they led a $55 million funding round in Brimstone Energy, a start-up aiming to commercialize carbon-negative cement.

“We need to recognize that cement is a massive problem for climate and that nobody has figured out how to address it at scale without dramatically increasing costs or moving away from the regulated materials that the construction industry knows and loves,” Breakthrough partner Carmichael Roberts told CNBC.

So it is not enough to get gas guzzlers off the roads. Gas prices going up is a good thing. It will guarantee that more new car purchases will be hybrid or all electric vehicles. But the world is not changing over to non-polluting forms of energy quick enough. Major climate related disasters are already occurring and will continue to occur. Since we are still adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, these disasters will only get worse as time goes by. Meanwhile, all kinds of other ecological disasters are taking place including the insane and greedy pursuit of insatiable profits in the gun production industry and the buildup of military hardware. In 2019, a report released by Durham and Lancaster University found the US military to be “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries”. In addition to climate pollution the military is responsible for the development of assault rifles like the AR-15 which was first developed for combat operations. Very conveniently, it is now a profit center for US gun corporations, and in addition to killing combatants on the field of battle, it has brought war time slaughter into children's schools, people's super markets and night clubs. We've come full circle. And in addition the production of steel weapons results in increased carbon emissions.

Off the Top of My Head

Without Majority Rule Is The US Still a Democracy?

by John Lawrence

The US Senate is not ruled by a majority. Arguably that makes the US not a democracy or a democracy in name only. The filibuster is an artificial rule that precludes majority rule in the Senate, and, therefore, in the US since the Senate is a representative body of the people. A majority of the people want gun control, but, because the Senate is not a democratic institution, there is no gun control. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2019 found that 60% of Americans say gun laws should be tougher. Conclusion: the US is no longer a democracy. Strong majorities of voters across party lines view access to clean water, a quality public education, adequate food, and housing as basic human rights that should be secured by the federal government. A survey by Harvard University found the following: "The right to clean air and water, for example, was considered important by 93 percent of those surveyed; protection of personal data, by 93 percent; the right to a quality education, by 92 percent; racial equality, by 92 percent; affordable health care, by 89 percent; and the right to a job, by 85 percent."

The filibuster precludes democracy. It is not in the Constitution. Neither is the right to own a gun. The Second Amendment states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." At the time of the American Revolutionary War, militias were groups of able-bodied men who protected their towns, colonies, and eventually states. They were state based armed groups that later became the National Guard. It was these groups that were allowed by the Constitution to bear arms, not every idiot who came down the pike. Other more mature societies regulate gun ownership the way the US regulates drivers.

NPR reports:

"It's illegal for Russian citizens to own automatic and semi-automatic guns. It's possible to apply for a handgun or shotgun license, though citizens are required to provide reasons such as hunting or target shooting. Applicants face strict background checks, including criminal history, a full psychological evaluation and a medical exam. They must pass a test on firearm laws and safety. Each weapon is then registered by the police during a home visit. Police take bullet patterns, test bullets and cartridges so bullets can be matched if the gun is used in a crime. A license lasts five years, after which applicants must go through the whole process again."

The US is falling apart because groups with lots of money are lobbying Congress to perpetuate their income stream from gun sales regardless of what the majority of US citizens want. Yet the US lectures other countries about human rights. Is it a human right to own a gun? I don't see it listed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. What is listed is the following:

1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

The controlling interests of US society are not the majority of the people. US society is controlled by wealthy interests which lobby Congress providing them with financial incentives to do their bidding. One of the main reason companies lobby Congress is to preserve their rights not to have to pay for externalities. Externalities are byproducts of the production process that pollute the environment. It would lower their profits if they had to pay for them. William D Nordhaus writes in The Spirit of Green:

"One prominent example is the activities associated with the Koch brothers and their companies. Koch Industries is a privately owned company holding companies with major environmental impacts and with revenues of around $115 billion in 2017. As reported by the Center for Public Integrity, one of Koch's holdings, Georgia-Pacific, is significantly impacted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision on dioxin. They write that Koch has intervened 'in various regulatory proceedings to dilute or halt tighter federal regulation of several toxic by products that could affect its bottom line, including dioxin, asbestos and formaldehyde, all of which have been linked to cancer.' According to Greenpeace, 'Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science and policy solutions, from 1997 - 2018.'"

So it's understandable why Republicans especially don't want Joe Biden's climate change agenda to pass even though a majority (actually two thirds!) of Americans want the government to do something about climate change according to a Pew poll. "A majority of Americans continue to say they see the effects of climate change in their own communities and believe that the federal government falls short in its efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change." But since the Koch brothers and others like them have the Republican party in their pockets, the filibuster assures them that nothing will get done. And this is happening in a democracy where democracy rule supposedly prevails? The US, sadly to say, is no longer a democracy if it ever was.

Off the Top of My Head

Beyond Meat and Cow Farts

by John Lawrence, February 24, 2021

About 19% of the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) emitted into the atmosphere each year comes from agriculture. There are roughly a billion cattle in the world raised for both meat and dairy. The 2 billion tons of GHGs they burp and fart account for 4 percent of global emissions each year. Also pig poop accounts for half of all poop related emissions with cows making up the other half. Industrial cow and pig farms create ponds full of poop which then sometimes break through to streams and rivers. In an article, "A million tons of feces and an unbearable stench: life near industrial pig farms", we find the following:

"Fifty yards from Miller’s family graveyard is a massive open-air cesspool storing the pigs’ waste – a stagnant pool containing their feces, urine, blood and other bodily fluids – often referred to as a “lagoon”, one of about 3,300 lagoons across the state. When the cesspool reaches its capacity, its contents are liquefied and sprayed into a field across the street from Miller’s house via a large, sprinkler-like apparatus. The sprayer releases a mist of waste on to the field, which, according to court documents, is about 200ft from Miller’s home at its closest rotation."

In addition to the environmental, health and stench problems, pig shit lagoons are contributing major amounts of GHGs into the atmosphere. “Air pollutants from the routine operation of confinement houses, cesspools, and waste sprayers affect nearby neighborhoods where they cause disruption of activities of daily living, stress, anxiety, mucous membrane irritation, respiratory conditions, reduced lung function, and acute blood pressure elevation,” Wing and fellow UNC researcher Jill Johnston wrote in a 2014 study. They also found that the state’s industrial hog operations disproportionately affect African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. That pattern, they concluded, “is generally recognized as environmental racism”.

The Guardian article continued: "North Carolina’s pork production industry has shifted dramatically since the mid-80s. Today’s industrial farms, often called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, raise pigs and other livestock in confinement until they are ready for slaughter. The hogs generally live in cramped quarters; Michelle B Nowlin, supervising attorney of Duke’s Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, estimates they typically get seven or eight square feet of space each." Chickens and cattle suffer the same fate of having to spend their meager existence in CAFOs.

As more people world wide become middle class, they want to eat more meat. This is not only a problem for the animals who suffer the most, but it is a problem for the GHGs that animal agriculture causes that contribute to global warming. But the nutritional aspects of eating animals are equally inefficient. A pig eats 3 times as many calories as we get when we eat it. Cows require six calories of feed for every calorie of beef that we eat. In China and other developing countries meat eating is becoming much more popular because of a growing and more affluent middle class.

There are several alternatives already on the market: plant based hamburgers called Beyond Meat and Impossible Burgers. These burgers are a pretty good approximation of the real thing, but there are even more products being developed that don't only mimic the taste of meat. They actually are meat except they are created without having to pass calories through a cow and then slaughtering the cow. They use the same metabolic processes that a cow does to deposit meat on its bones. This meat though is created in a lab and is already on the market in Singapore according to The Guardian:

"Cultured meat, produced in bioreactors without the slaughter of an animal, has been approved for sale by a regulatory authority for the first time. The development has been hailed as a landmark moment across the meat industry.

"The “chicken bites”, produced by the US company Eat Just, have passed a safety review by the Singapore Food Agency and the approval could open the door to a future when all meat is produced without the killing of livestock, the company said.

"Dozens of firms are developing cultivated chicken, beef and pork, with a view to slashing the impact of industrial livestock production on the climate and nature crises, as well as providing cleaner, drug-free and cruelty-free meat. Currently, about 130 million chickens are slaughtered every day for meat, and 4 million pigs. By weight, 60% of the mammals on earth are livestock, 36% are humans and only 4% are wild."

If the world's consumption of meat can be converted to lab grown meat that looks, taste, and feels like the real thing, then we can eliminate the whole process of passing calories through a cow or pig or chicken first and still get the same end result. That alone will save about 10 billion tons of GHGs per year.

Transforming to an Ecological Civilization: The Alternative Is Unthinkable

Published on Friday, February 19, 2021

by YES! Magazine

A society based on natural ecology might seem like a far-off utopia—yet communities everywhere are already creating it. We need to forge a new era for humanity—one that is defined, at its deepest level, by a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior.

by

Jeremy Lent

 

22 Comments

When we consider the immensity of the transformation needed, the odds of achieving an ecological civilization might seem daunting—but it’s far from impossible. (Photo by Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images)

As a new, saner administration sets up shop in Washington, D.C., there are plenty of policy initiatives this country desperately needs. Beyond a national plan for the COVID-19 pandemic, progressives will strive to focus the administration’s attention on challenges like fixing the broken health care system, grappling with systemic racial inequities, and a just transition from fossil fuels to renewables.

These are all critically important issues. But here’s the rub: Even if the Democratic administration were resoundingly successful on all fronts, its initiatives would still be utterly insufficient to resolve the existential threat of climate breakdown and the devastation of our planet’s life-support systems. That’s because the multiple problems confronting us right now are symptoms of an even more profound problem: The underlying structure of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice.

Take a moment to peer beyond the day-to-day crises capturing our attention, and you quickly realize that the magnitude of the looming catastrophe makes our current political struggles, by comparison, look like arguing how to stack deck chairs on the Titanic.

The climate emergency we’re facing is far worse than most people realize. While it was clearly an essential step for the United States to rejoin the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, the collective pledges on greenhouse gas emissions from that agreement are woefully insufficient. They would lead to a dangerous temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius this century—and many nations are failing to make even these targets. We are rapidly approaching—if we haven’t already passed—climate tipping points with reinforcing feedback loops that would lead to an unrecognizable and terrifying world.

Even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, our current growth-oriented economic juggernaut will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats in future decades. As long as government policies emphasize growth in gross domestic product and transnational corporations relentlessly pursue shareholder returns, we will continue accelerating toward global catastrophe.

We’re rapidly decimating the Earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, fresh water—even the topsoil we need to grow our crops. We’ve already transgressed four of the nine planetary boundaries that define humanity’s safe operating space, and yet global GDP is expected to triple by 2060, with potentially calamitous consequences. In 2017, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries issued an ominous warning to humanity that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late,” they wrote, “to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

We need to forge a new era for humanity—one that is defined, at its deepest level, by a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior. In short, we need to change the basis of our global civilization. We must move from a civilization based on wealth accumulation to one that is life-affirming: an ecological civilization.

A Life-Affirming Civilization

Without human disruption, ecosystems can thrive in rich abundance for millions of years, remaining resilient in the face of adversity. Clearly, there is much to learn from nature’s wisdom about how to organize ourselves. Can we do so before it’s too late?

Changing our civilization’s operating system to one that naturally leads to life-affirming policies and practices rather than rampant extraction and devastation.

 

This is the fundamental idea underlying an ecological civilization: using nature’s own design principles to reimagine the basis of our civilization. Changing our civilization’s operating system to one that naturally leads to life-affirming policies and practices rather than rampant extraction and devastation.

An ecological civilization is both a new and ancient idea. While the notion of structuring human society on an ecological basis might seem radical, Indigenous peoples around the world have organized themselves from time immemorial on life-affirming principles. When Lakota communities, on the land that is now the U.S., invoke Mitakuye Oyasin (“We are all related”) in ceremony, they are referring not just to themselves but to all sentient beings. Buddhist, Taoist, and other philosophical and religious traditions have based much of their spiritual wisdom on the recognition of the deep interconnectedness of all things. And in modern times, a common thread linking progressive movements around the world is the commitment to a society that works for the flourishing of life, rather than against it.

'Invisible killer': Fossil Fuels Caused 8.7m Deaths Globally in 2018, Research Finds

by Oliver Milman, Tue 9 Feb 2021 03.00 ES

from the Guardian

Pollution from power plants, vehicles and other sources accounted for one in five of all deaths that year, more detailed analysis reveals

Two men walk along Rajpath amid smoggy conditions in New Delhi last month. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, a staggering one in five of all people who died that year, new research has found.

Countries with the most prodigious consumption of fossil fuels to power factories, homes and vehicles are suffering the highest death tolls, with the study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused by the resulting pollution, along with nearly a third of deaths in eastern Asia, which includes China. Death rates in South America and Africa were significantly lower.

The enormous death toll is higher than previous estimates and surprised even the study’s researchers. “We were initially very hesitant when we obtained the results because they are astounding, but we are discovering more and more about the impact of this pollution,” said Eloise Marais, a geographer at University College London and a study co-author. “It’s pervasive. The more we look for impacts, the more we find.”

The 8.7m deaths in 2018 represent a “key contributor to the global burden of mortality and disease”, states the study, which is the result of collaboration between scientists at Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and University College London. The death toll exceeds the combined total of people who die globally each year from smoking tobacco plus those who die of malaria.

Scientists have established links between pervasive air pollution from burning fossil fuels and cases of heart disease, respiratory ailments and even the loss of eyesight. Without fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy of the world’s population would increase by more than a year, while global economic and health costs would fall by about $2.9tn.

The new estimate of deaths, published in the journal Environmental Research, is higher than other previous attempts to quantify the mortal cost of fossil fuels. A major report by the Lancet in 2019, for example, found 4.2m annual deaths from air pollution coming from dust and wildfire smoke, as well as fossil fuel combustion.

This new research deploys a more detailed analysis of the impact of sooty airborne particles thrown out by power plants, cars, trucks and other sources. This particulate matter is known as PM2.5 as the particles are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter – or about 30 times smaller than the diameter of the average human hair. These tiny specks of pollution, once inhaled, lodge in the lungs and can cause a variety of health problems.

“We don’t appreciate that air pollution is an invisible killer,” said Neelu Tummala, an ear, nose and throat physician at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “The air we breathe impacts everyone’s health but particularly children, older individuals, those on low incomes and people of color. Usually people in urban areas have the worst impacts.”

Instead of solely relying upon averaged estimates from satellite and surface observations that account for PM2.5 from a range of sources, the researchers used a global 3D model of atmospheric chemistry overseen by Nasa that has a more detailed resolution and can distinguish between pollution sources. “Rather than rely on averages spread across large regions, we wanted to map where the pollution is and where people live, so we could know more exactly what people are breathing,” said Karn Vohra, a graduate student at University of Birmingham and study co-author.

The researchers then developed a new risk assessment based on a tranche of new research that has found a much higher mortality rate from fossil fuel emissions than previously thought, even in relatively low concentrations. Data was taken from 2012 and then also 2018 to account for rapid improvements in air quality in China. Deaths were counted for people aged 15 and older.

The results show a varied global picture. “China’s air quality is improving but its fine particle concentrations are still staggeringly high, the US is improving, although there are hotspots in the north-east, Europe is a mixed bag and India is definitely a hotspot,” said Marais.

A coal power plant in Niederaussem, western Germany. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images

The death toll outlined in the study may even be an underestimate of the true picture, according to George Thurston, an expert in air pollution and health at the NYU school of medicine who was not involved in the research. “Overall, however, this new work makes clearer than ever that, when we talk about the human cost of air pollution or climate change, the major causes are one and the same – fossil fuel combustion,” he said.

Philip J Landrigan, director of the program for global public health and the common good, said: “Recent research has been exploring the use of newer exposure-response functions, and several recent papers that use these newer functions have produced higher estimates of pollution-related mortality than the Global Burden of Disease analyses.” He added: “I consider it important that different risk assessment models are now being developed, because their development will force re-examination of the assumptions that underlie current models and will improve them.”

Ed Avol, chief of the environmental health division at the University of Southern California (USC), said: “The authors have applied improved methodologies to better quantify exposures and better document health outcomes in order to reach the unsettling (but not surprising) conclusion that fossil-fuels-combustion-related air pollution is more damaging to global human health than previously estimated. The remote satellite imagery exposure specialists and health epidemiologists on the research team are highly competent investigators and among the most talented scholars in this dynamic field.”

“Fossil fuels have a really large impact upon health, the climate and the environment and we need a more immediate response,” said Marais. “Some governments have carbon-neutral goals but maybe we need to move them forward given the huge damage to public health. We need much more urgency.”

 

Off the Top of My Head

It's Almost Thanksgiving: Let's Talk Turkey

by John Lawrence, November 14, 2020

So what are Republicans saying about a Biden administration? That the progressive wing of the Democratic party will push him too far to the left. Well, what exact policies would be "too far to the left"? Defund the police? That's just a radical slogan that means about as much as "Lock her up." In other words it means nothing in terms of either Biden's agenda or progressives in the Democratic party. Reform the police - that would be more like where the Democratic party actually stands. As far as Medicare for All, Biden favors Medicare for All Who Want It. I guess there are those Republicans who so love their employer based health insurance that they are terrified by the possibility that it might be taken away from them and replaced with something better. So Biden's position is go ahead and keep it. He just wants to make it possible that those who do want it will be able to have it or a public option which amounts to the same thing.

So Republican concerns amount to whipping up a bunch of meaningless hysteria just like Trump has always done. It's his stock in trade. So what about the Green New Deal? Who could object to creating jobs to build infrastructure and combat global warming? Oh maybe it's that they fear their taxes will go up? There's actually no reason why anyone's taxes should go up based on the realities as they exist in the 21st century. The government has shown that any amount of money can be found and spent to bail out banks or to add to the debt to give people tax breaks. Trump's tax cuts added a trillion dollars to the debt. Quantitative easing and the money to bail out the big banks amounted to several trillion dollars and yet it has had no adverse effect on inflation or anything else. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that Deficits Don't Matter whether those deficits originate from bailing out the banks or a Green New Deal or Biden's Green Deal which is more or less the same. Expect Republicans to cry bloody murder any time government threatens to formulate a program to combat global warming or to create jobs for poor people or to raise wages for essential workers to $15. an hour.

Money spent constructively on infrastructure or other things will never cause inflation. What will cause inflation is money that is pissed away frivolously or unconstructively. Reorienting out priorities can and should be done even if deficit spending is required to do it. When the economy is rebalanced, it eventually will mean that the rich will have to pay their fair share of taxes in order to reduce inequality. That's the main thing that Republicans are afraid of - that eventually the rich will have to pay their fair share of taxes. In the meantime economic history since 2000 has demonstrated the fact that, if trillions of dollars were found to bail out the banks and give tax cuts to the rich, trillions of dollars can be found to repair and rebuild infrastructure and prevent the world from the disaster of global warming. Private enterprise has done nothing but accelerate global warming because private enterprise consists of the fossil fuel industry. Private enterprise profits from pollution that it doesn't have to compensate for. Therefore, it's up to government to balance out what private enterprise seems incapable of doing. That's not to say that private enterprise is unimportant. It does some things very well, some things that government does not do well. It's a matter of finding the correct balance between private enterprise and government enterprise.

Does any fossil fuel worker object to working in the renewable energy industry providing they are guaranteed a job in that industry? I don't think so. There's no one that loves fossil fuels per se or just because they are fossil fuels. They are not like Scrooge who just loves the look and feel of money. Are there people who so much like the look and feel of oil that they can't bear the thought of working in an industry that doesn't pollute the planet? There are new industries coming - a straw with the look and feel of a plastic straw that biodegrades and doesn't stay in the ocean for hundreds of years like the plastic straw does. These straws are being manufactured today. If government can assist in the ramping up of this private enterprise - Newlight Technologies - we will be all better off except for the plastic straw manufacturers which are using mainly robots to produce their straws so there are not that many jobs involved there.

Huntington Beach, California-based Newlight produces an ocean-degradable biopolymer called PHB using air and greenhouse gas. Newlight's methods are supported by more than a decade of research and development as well as an extensive patent portfolio. Newlight's Series F finance round coincides with the commissioning of a new commercial-scale production facility in California called Eagle 3 and the launch of branded products including a line of cutlery and drinking straws for the food-service industry. Newlight's foodware products deliver a unique level of material safety and certified sustainability, resulting in high-performance, ocean-degradable foodware that works for people and the planet. 

Government can provide an assist to private enterprise as long as that enterprise is headed in a new direction which doesn't pollute and which doesn't produce greenhouse gasses. Which is more important - hanging onto the familiar past or striking out in a new direction that saves the planet and makes it better for our grandchildren? Are we pioneers and adventurers like our ancestors or what?

Off the Top of My Head

When The Pandemic Is Over, The World Must Come Together

by John Lawrence, April 28, 2020

These are the fateful words of Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Prize Laureate and the first and only President of the Soviet Union. Recently, he recalled how the threat of nuclear war was reduced by the treaties in the 1980s made possible by his friendly relationship with Ronald Reagan. Writing in Time magazine, he said, "The leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union declared that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought." Despite the fact that the Cold War was declared to be over, the neocons running foreign policy today have been doing their best to create another one. The pandemic has made it clear that there are more important challenges than U.S.-Russian rivalry, and that the world has more to gain by cooperating even with supposed enemies or rivals than it does by perpetuating idiotic animosities. We have common enemies that affect us all with the coronavirus pandemic being just one of them.

Gorbachev mentioned "poverty and inequality, the degradation of the environment, the depletion of the earth and the oceans." Global warming is an existential threat that must be addressed now or there won't be a habitable earth left to fight over. "We have so far failed to develop and implement strategies and goals common to all mankind." Not only that the U.S. under Trump has retreated from any kind of cooperation with the other nations of the earth even our supposed allies. Instead U.S. foreign policy has been based on ordering other nations around as if we were the supreme bully. Trump's latest blunder is to defund the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of a pandemic.

"Progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, adopted by the U.N. in 2000, has been extremely uneven." The U.S. under Trump does not really support the U.N. in any way because it wants to be the ruler of nations not part of an organization that attempts to have a forum for the cooperation of nations. The United Nations Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000 commits world leaders to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women. The Eight Millennium Development Goals are:

• to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;
• to achieve universal primary education;
• to promote gender equality and empower women;
• to reduce child mortality;
• to improve maternal health;
• to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases;
• to ensure environmental sustainability; and
• to develop a global partnership for development.

I had never even heard of the Eight Millennium Development Goals although I think I'm pretty well informed. All of the media time spent on Trump's self-serving bragging could have been better spent informing us about this WHO program. But instead the media spends its time either chastising Trump's stupidity or praising his glory depending on which channel you watch. He has changed from campaign rallies to hour long daily commercials for himself.

"What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security. Even after the end of the Cold War, it has been envisioned mostly in military terms." Yes, military hubris crowds out any prospect of peace let alone a prospect of eliminating extreme poverty. Bill Gates is singlehandedly doing his best to eliminate poverty and disease in the world. He basically is a one man United Nations surrogate. He presciently tried to warn us of the pandemic in a Ted talk. Now he is spending millions of his own money on developing a coronavirus vaccine. There are some good people in the world - even billionaires. That I am sure of. It's just that not a lot of them occupy positions of power in the U.S. government.

Gorbachev continued: "The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people's health. To achieve it, we have to develop strategies, make preparations, plan and create reserves. But all efforts will fail if nations continue to waste money by fueling the arms race. I'll never tire of repeating: we need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics and political thinking."

Gorbachev is calling on national leaders to cut military budgets by 10% to 15%. It is not enough. The mindset, even among Democrats, is that we need a huge military to defend ourselves from perceived threats and perceived enemies. They don't have the mindset that they could make the world a better place by defusing tensions among nations that they perceive as threats. It might start by apologizing to Iran for overthrowing their democratically elected leader Mossaddegh and installing the brutal Shah. That would go a long way to establishing a peaceful relationship with Iran. It could start there. Instead the U.S. only fuels tensions by applying sanctions and carrying on like the rest of the world should bow down to the almighty dollar.

Off the Top of My Head

How the World Could Change When the Current Crisis is Over

by John Lawrence, April 26, 2020

Perhaps we will rethink what is essential and what is inessential. Here's my list of what is essential: 1) Health care; 2) Food; 3) Water; 4) Sanitation (Waste water and trash collection); 5) Education; 6) Transportation; 7) Electricity; 8) The Internet; 9) Grocery stores. 10) Elder care.11) Police, Fire and Paramedic services. Here are some things that are considered inessential now: 1) Spectator sports; 2) Spectator music events; 3) Parades; 4) Conventions; 5) Bars; 6) Restaurants; 7) Barber and beauty parlors; 8) Tattoo parlors; 9) Political campaign events; 10) Large parties like wedding receptions.

Everyone can come up with their own list of what they consider to be essential and what they consider to be inessential. In my opinion the least essential of inessential services are tattoo artists. There are a lot of products and services in our mass consumer culture which are also frivolous and have nothing to do with what is essential or beneficial to human well being.. It seems that the most essential workers are the least paid while the least essential are well paid indeed. Is advertising really essential? You can look up everything you might want or need online using google or amazon. Why do you have to have some irrelevant product or service pounded into you by TV advertising? It's a historical relic. I record most programs so that I can fast forward through the commercials. If I watch a live program, I put it on pause while I do something else for awhile, and then I fast forward through the commercials. In my opinion everything advertised on TV, especially pharmaceuticals, is inessential. They should be prescribed by a doctor. It's the doctor's business to know which pharmaceuticals you need, not yours.

Are hedge funds essential? Is jewelry essential? Are the products of the wedding-industrial complex essential? Many people are having weddings during the pandemic without paying the tens of thousands of dollars that current weddings fashioned by the wedding-industrial complex demand. There are many frivolous consumer items which advertising insists that people need that they don't really need, that are completely inessential. Some are nice to have, but inessential, and some are downright destructive to peoples' health and welfare.

The most essential activity at this time in history is saving the planet from global warming. Production of renewable energy alternatives is absolutely essential. The provision of green infrastructure is absolutely essential. Fossil fuels need to be left in the ground. Getting rid of plastics which pollute the oceans and other waste products that aren't biodegradable is absolutely essential. Rethinking payscales for essential workers like agricultural workers and grocery store workers is essential. If these are the most essential workers, they should be paid more. The same goes for doctors, nurses, certified nursing assistants, the CNAs who do most of the caregiving at nursing homes. CNAs make little more than minimum wage and yet they are exposed to the coronavirus. What this means is that so much that is really essential now is either being ignored or very little money is being allocated to it while huge amounts of money are being allocated to fruitless and frivolous activities.

The most fruitless activity is war and the provoking of war. The trillion dollar annual budget of the military-industrial complex has been shown to be fruitless and meaningless when the real war is against a virus. Unhealthy conditions in poverty stricken areas of the world including refugee camps can breed disease which affects the whole world including "privileged" people in the more advanced nations. Poverty and disease need to be eradicated in all parts of the world. The military cannot do that. Oh, they can be repurposed a little bit to help out with a pandemic, but they can not really do the job that needs to be done. In particular they are vulnerable to the pandemic themselves and all of the weapons of war cannot protect them. The real war needs to be against poverty and disease which are the breeders of war and pandemics. The real war needs to be against global warming. The real essential workers are construction workers who need to be constructing advanced green infrastructure.

What is clear is that real essential workers need to be paid more which argues for a lessening of economic inequality. So much of the wealth is held by people who are absolutely inessential to the health, welfare and betterment of people all around the world. A Green New Deal needs to be prioritized. Wealth needs to be taxed to pay for it. New York state needs to tax Wall Street to make up for its budget deficit. Priorities, priorities. The helping professionals and care workers need to be given more respect and money. Taxing inessential workers like hedge fund managers is what needs to pay for it.

Off the Top of My Head

Is the Coronavirus Interrupting Humanity’s Ability to Kill Itself?

by John Lawrence, April 16, 2020

Instead of spending a trillion dollars annually for the instruments of and preparations for war, perhaps we should have spent it on ventilators and PPE. If we're all in this together, does this mean all of humanity or only all of us Americans? Will getting back to normal mean getting back to war? Trump and Pompeo are a continuation of the neocon mentality of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle. These folks are never satisfied unless they have an enemy or a perceived enemy to deal with. If there's not one conveniently around, they'll go out of their way to create one. Then of course we'll need more military aircraft, more aircraft carriers, more smart missiles and more of the other implements of war. What, are we taking a break from war now that the coronavirus is occupying our attention?

Well, the coronavirus has had some good effects. There is less global warming. There hasn't been a recent school shooting. Air pollution is dropping rapidly in cities around the globe. Less fossil fuels are being taken out of the ground and consumed. People have been getting along quite nicely without crowding into sports and concert venues. Money isn't being wasted as flagrantly as it was before. Of course, that's bad for the economy in which money wasting contributes to the 70% consumer economy.

There is a renewed respect for the true heroes, not the armed forces, but the health care workers on the front lines. There is a realization that what is important is not American hegemony but the health and welfare of all the people in the world. As long as some are susceptible to the conditions creating ill health, a virus spawned anywhere, even in the poorest ghetto in Africa, can affect the whole world. The economic systems of the whole world can grind to a halt whether they be capitalistic, communistic or some variation or combination thereof.

Is there a renewed respect for cooperation instead of competition? The coronavirus is humbling. It doesn't respect power. Anyone from the richest and most powerful person in the world to the poorest and least powerful can be taken down by this virus. It has outsmarted and outwitted the ablest and the proudest among us. It has made us aware that we are all human and all susceptible no matter in which nation we live, no matter where we live anywhere in the world. It has made us aware of what is essential and what we can do without.

The pandemic is a dress rehearsal for what needs to be done to combat global warming, another pandemic that affects every human being in the whole world for generations to come. Unlike the coronavirus, global warming will not kill us in as rapid and dramatic a way, but it will kill us just as surely over a longer period of time. Instead of getting back to normal in terms of fossil fuel consumption and creating enemies as a justification for armaments buildups, let's get back to a new normal where priorities are realigned with the health and betterment of all people starting with the least among us. We need to make amends with out mother as well, Mother Earth that is.

Instead of creating and exacerbating relationships with our enemies, let us heal them instead. We were getting along just fine with Iran as long as the nuclear deal was in effect. Everyone was behaving. First, Trump opts out of that, and then goes out of his way to exacerbate tensions. Even with a pandemic affecting Iran to a great degree, the Trump administration has no pity on the average Iranian citizen. His and Pompeo's only concern is to totally wreck their economy with sanctions. Perhaps during a pandemic sanctions there should be a moratorium on sanctions. They are only making relations between the US and other countries, even friendly countries, worse.

The origin of the nasty relationship between the US and Iran was in the 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA which overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed the Shah in his place. It was the first covert action by the United States to overthrow a democratically-elected government during peacetime. Maybe as a first step to restoring peaceful relations with Iran the US should formally apologize for betraying its own democratic values by ousting a democratically elected leader and installing a cruel dictator. By the way it was all about the fact that Mosaddegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil. On Aug. 19, 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup against Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. It still has not apologized though.

TRUMP’S DIRTY DEED: LATEST EPA DEREGULATION WILL KILL AMERICANS

from WhoWhatWhy blog

by Celia Wexler and DonkeyHotey, April 5, 2020

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0) See complete attribution below.

It is silent, deadly, and all around us. No, it’s not the coronavirus. It’s the dirty air millions of Americans are forced to breathe. And while the Trump administration has done too little to protect Americans from the current pandemic, its record on pollution is much, much worse — and its recent policies seem particularly cruel and wrongheaded right now.

Without even factoring in the ravages of COVID-19, we know that air pollution is very hazardous to health. Epidemiologists at Washington University in St. Louis examined the medical records of 45 million US veterans over ten years, and found an estimated 200,000 deaths were linked to particulates in the air that actually met current US air quality standards.

Even more concerning, African American vets were more vulnerable to the ravages of poor air quality than white vets exposed to the same level of pollutants in the air.

“I went into it thinking pollution is color blind … it’s not true,” Dr. Ziyah Al-Aly told the Guardian. “Actually, pollution itself does discriminate. For the same level of pollution, black people tend to be affected more. And on top of that, black people get exposed to more pollution than white people.

“It’s kind of like a double-whammy,” he added. “It’s really unfair.”

Just this week, capping three years of unraveling nearly 100 regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that would drastically reduce automobile fuel efficiency standards. The new rule revises an Obama administration standard put in place to address climate change. Under the Obama rule, cars would have had to average 54 miles per gallon by 2025. The Trump rule changes that requirement to 40 miles per gallon.

The EPA not only is primed to allow automakers to unleash almost one billion tons of additional carbon into the air, increasing global warming. The rule also will make US air more dangerous to breathe.

That’s in part because anything that increases the amount of carbon in the air increases global warming. Climate change helps trigger events like forest fires that make the air we breathe dirtier.

This new policy would be cruel at any time, but seems particularly callous when the country is in the grip of a pernicious virus that preys in particular on Americans who already have respiratory problems, like asthma and lung disease.

In a statement, the American Lung Association (ALA) charged that the new rule “will result in dirtier cars that pollute the air and harm public health.”

The fumes from car tailpipes add to pollution, the ALA stated, particularly for minority and low-income people who often live near major highways.

Even worse, this federal policy will apply to all states. Over the past half century, under authority given the states by the federal Clean Air Act, California has imposed stricter mileage standards on automakers. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia follow the Golden State’s mandates.

Indeed, in 2019, California — fearful that the Obama standards would be gutted by the EPA — reached an agreement on a compromise standard with a few carmakers.

President Donald Trump reportedly was furious that some auto companies already had agreed to accept California’s requirement that they achieve 51 miles per gallon by 2026.

Perhaps his ire explains why the White House revoked the permission the federal government had routinely given California to impose stricter rules. The Trump Department of Justice also opened an inquiry into the four auto companies — Ford, Honda, BMW, and Volkswagen — that agreed to accept California’s standards for alleged antitrust violations. The DOJ dropped its investigation in February. 

But that’s far from the only thing the White House has done recently.

Just last week the EPA capitulated to every special interest. The agency announced that any company it regulates is excused from any penalty for the duration of the pandemic — if it can demonstrate that its violation of rules was related to the crisis.

So with this logic, if someone robs a grocery store and says it’s because of the pandemic, the cops should not arrest them, at least for the duration of the crisis. Ditto for murder, particularly if one spouse, cooped up in the house with his or her partner, can offer the COVID-19 excuse.

“Allowing a company to postpone the repair of equipment that leaks toxic gases into the atmosphere, as API [the American Petroleum Institute] has suggested, leaves the public exposed to those pollutants for longer periods of time, increases the risk of fire and explosion, and is not just a paperwork concern.”

This new policy is particularly good news for oil and gas companies, in trouble for not complying with air and water pollution regulations, consent decrees at their refineries, unsafe disposal of fracking waste, and emission reporting requirements.

It might seem reasonable to give companies a break on some reporting requirements, given the disruptions the pandemic has caused, but this blanket relaxation of enforcement of environmental regulations has much more serious consequences. Without oversight or the threat of penalties, companies could easily expose thousands of people near polluting operations to much higher levels of toxic chemicals. In a letter to the EPA, dozens of environmental groups charged that the “suspension of monitoring and reporting requirements would have a very specific impact on public health and safety.

“Allowing a company to postpone the repair of equipment that leaks toxic gases into the atmosphere, as API [the American Petroleum Institute] has suggested, leaves the public exposed to those pollutants for longer periods of time, increases the risk of fire and explosion, and is not just a paperwork concern,” the groups said.

The environmentalists pointed out that just one example — allowing oil refineries to ignore the rule to monitor the amount of benzene they emit — can expose nearby communities to this “deadly pollutant.”

But of course, the Trump White House is not content to roll back rules, the administration also is seeing to it that future rules will be dumber, because they’ll be informed by less scientific data.

Remember that study of millions of veterans and deaths related to pollution? It found not only an estimated 200,000 pollution-related deaths, it also tracked pollution’s impacts on kidney disease, hypertension, and dementia.

If the Trump White House has its way, this study will not be able to guide the EPA in the future. The EPA’s proposed “secret science” rule directs the agency to rely almost exclusively on studies whose underlying data is not fully disclosable to the public. Public health studies, like the one that estimates the health impacts of air pollution, cannot be disclosed because of federal rules protecting the privacy of individual patients.

I don’t know about you, but as a member of the public, I have not been clamoring to see the “raw data” that underlies massive epidemiological studies, sometimes involving millions of health records. The EPA’s claim that this is all about transparency is disingenuous, especially for an agency that so churlishly responds to requests for other more useful public records. Just last year, the agency tried to do an end run around its rulemaking process to make it easier for political appointees to control access to documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

Maybe the Trump White House and all its political operatives might want to practice more “social distancing” and keep their mitts off federal agencies, at least until we’ve escaped the coronavirus, a risk to health almost as damaging as their bad policies. 

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The cartoon above was created by DonkeyHotey for WhoWhatWhy from these images: Donald Trump caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), body (The White House / Flickr), White House lawn (Obama White House / Flickr), boxes (Pexels), EPA Logo (EPA / Wikimedia), and lighter fluid (Bonnie Pierce / Flickr).

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Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy The White House / Flickr.

Off the Top of My Head

During WW II, Cars and Gas Were Rationed. Would the American People Accept Such Sacrifices in the War on Global Warming?

by John Lawrence, March 10, 2020

Evidently not. Despite warnings that we have less than 10 years to do something before there is runaway global warming, nothing much has been done. Yet the coronavirus has set the world's consciousness on fire in just a few short weeks. Why hasn't global warming gotten the world so up in arms? During WW II everybody had a job; everybody worked, yet there were government mandated limits on consumption. All kinds of things were rationed especially cars and gas. Yet economic activity expanded due to ramping up the war effort. Today the economy is going into a tailspin because large crowds have been proscribed. All the money that has been added to GDP by music events and professional athletics has gone bye-bye. This is not necessarily a bad thing because people might be better off staying home and reading a good book rather than being out at a sporting event. I know. I know this is a very unpopular opinion.

The point is that, during WW II people had the basic necessities, and everyone was employed. They just couldn't have the icing on the cake until after the war when rationing was lifted. Then the economy boomed. Perhaps there is a lesson here for how to mobilize a society to get a handle on global warming.  In the few short weeks that government spokesmen have decried cruise ship and airplane travel, green house gas emissions (GHGs) have actually decreased. If the government proscribed these and other activities such as automobile travel (think gas rationing), GHGs would decrease even more rapidly. Then, if the government went on an investment spree in terms of renewable energy the way it did on planes and battleships during WWII, there would be full employment. People would just be limited temporarily until this war is won in how they could actually spend their money just like in WWII.

Then after a totally green economy is achieved fueled by green renewable energy, the barriers on spending money would be lifted. Could this even work? Some authors don't think so. William Greider writes in "Secrets of the Temple":

World War II was a model of the possible. In theory, if a national consensus of purpose developed, if people would accept temporary limits on their economic choices as well as regulatory controls on wages and prices, the nation could literally rebuild itself, almost overnight. With the right choices, America could practically double the productive capacity of its economy and advance innovation and dramatically multiply new wealth and incomes. These economic choices, however, were really political questions: who would take the sacrifices and who would take the rewards? Whose consumption would be restrained and whose production would be encouraged. All this consigned extraordinary powers to government, perhaps tolerable only in war. No one, including the most ardent Keynesian planners, has ever figured out how to recreate a comparable combination of creative sacrifices in peacetime or how to sell it to a free society.

And that, dear reader is the crux of the matter. How do you sell the necessary war time effort to combat global warming to a free society? Sure the coronavirus has had the salutary effect of decreasing cruise ship and airplane travel with the concomitant decrease in GHG emissions. At the same time the stock market has gone into a tailspin. If the same kind of effort were made in behalf of global warming, we could expect the stock market to go into the mother of all tailspins. Is it worth it or should we consign future generations to the fate of runaway global warming and an uninhabitable planet?

Abraham Maslow wrote a book, "Towards a Psychology of Being" in which he identified a pyramid of needs starting with D-needs. D-needs are the basic needs of food, air, water, housing and clothing. You might throw in medical care.Then, as you ascend the pyramid, higher order needs are revealed once the lower order needs are met. At the top he identified B-needs or self-actualization which might mean developing all your latent higher order capacities such as becoming a great musician. What seems to me to have happened though is that society has intervened in this process to impose superfluous needs on people. Let's call them S-needs. These needs have to do with all the materialistic consumption that a commercial society imposes or tries to impose on people through advertising so that Maslow's higher order needs are really short-circuited. That's why I say that staying home and reading a good book might be more beneficial in and of itself than attending  a professional sporting event in addition to protecting one from the coronavirus.

What an enlightened society would do to combat global warming is exactly what America did during WW II. D-needs were well satisfied due to a full employment society in which certain kinds of consumption were discouraged while making sure that everyone was fed, clothed, housed and had adequate medical treatment. Could in Greider's words a " national consensus of purpose develop" in which people felt it was more important to delay certain kinds of consumption in order to develop the green infrastructure needed to get global warming under control? The world needs America's leadership on this because America is largely responsible for the GHGs already in the atmosphere, and, if America will not have a sense of urgency, why should any other nation which is just starting to develop a consumer culture?

Off the Top of My Head

The Changes Needed in the Composition of GDP

by John Lawrence

The four components of GDP are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Right now personal consumption is 70% of GDP in the US. Business investment is 18%. Most businesses are buying back their stock rather than investing in manufacturing or R&D. Government spending is 17%. More than 60% is military spending. Net exports were -5% since imports (18%) were greater than exports (13%). This represents an oil based economy heavy on fossil fuel pollution. What needs to happen to fend off global warming is a reduction in personal consumption especially in those aspects that are high in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions such as automobile, airplane and cruise ship travel. Government needs to increase its spending in areas of infrastructure rebuilding and spending on renewable energy systems while reducing military spending which is highly GHG contributing as well.

Businesses need to be encouraged to manufacture here in the US instead of importing everything from China and elsewhere because cargo ships are highly polluting. Businesses which help solve the climate change dilemma need to be encouraged while high polluters need to be reined in. We need to become more like Europe where personal consumption is only 54% of GDP. In Europe government spending is 46.5% of GDP. Of this spending on defense amounted to 1.2 % of GDP in 2018. Contrast this with the 60% that the US spends on defense, and you see the difference between a highly militarized nation that has no money to spend on infrastructure much less a Green New Deal and a group of countries that spends more of its money on the welfare of its citizens. Trump has been agitating to get European countries to spend 2% on defense. This would still mean that the US would be spending 30 times as much.

If Bernie Sanders wins the election for President of the US, we can expect radical changes in the current composition of GDP. Certain items of personal consumption need to be reduced, namely combustion engine car travel. The infrastructure for electric automobiles needs to be built out. Government subsidies need to be given to electric car purchasers. Mass transit needs to be built out and encouraged. Military expenditures need to be reduced both to promote peace in the world and so that the money can be freed up for more constructive purposes. Coal fired electric power generating plants need to be replaced with renewable energy electric power generating plants. Frivolous personal consumption needs to be discouraged while consumption based on human needs for all people should be encouraged especially affordable housing, nutritious non-industrialized food production which is affordable for all and universal health care like Europe has.

In short we need to become more like Europe with a reduced military empire and an increased build out of green infrastructure based on renewable energy. Bernie Sanders represents this kind of change for America - a government which invests in its people and takes radical steps to mitigate global warming.

Off the Top of My Head

Back to the Future

by John Lawrence, February 3, 2020

In order to save the planet from global warming, we may have to go back to how life was in preindustrial times circa 1860. Before the era of the automobile, the airplane, industrialized food and electricity. The first oil well was discovered in 1859. After that it's been downhill all the way insofar as planet earth is concerned. Smokestack industries have been spewing greenhouse gasses into the fragile atmosphere. Cars, airplanes, coal burning steam locomotives, coal fired electricity generating plants - all the appurtenances of modern life  including labor saving appliances have been contributing to the destruction of earth's atmosphere with the consequence of global warming. Plastic produced from petrochemicals is polluting the ocean. Viewed form the perspective of the long term viability of earth as a place of habitability for human beings and other species, oil and coal have been more of a curse than a blessing. Modern life, industrialized life has been a tragedy for Mother Earth, and will have contributed to its destruction as a place for humans to live in less than 200 years  from the discovery of oil unless drastic action is taken.

To the extent that renewable energy can be brought online, we may not have to give up all the appurtenances. However, most Americans will not voluntarily give up their way of life. It's ingrained in the American way that we should have more energy consuming goddies and gadgets than our parents had. That's the meaning of progress. We can't regress, can we? Besides, Americans are taught to maximize their own personal success, profit and benefit. For example, Wall Street is only interested in short term profits, not the long term livability of the human habitat we call earth. We have been ingrained that we should be free to pursue our own advantage. To think that now Americans will be asked to sacrifice to save the planet for future generations is almost unthinkable.

Instead of a future utopia on planet earth, the stage has been set for dystopia. Instead of saving the planet for all people and for future generations, the American playbook, unless there are drastic changes, will be to save the planet for rich Americans and to hell with the rest of the world. If people have to die, the US will see to it that rich Americans are safe, well fed and well protected from the ravages of climate change. People elsewhere on the planet will not be so protected or kept safe. In fact if history is any example, they will continue to be exploited for the benefit of rich Americans so that they can maintain the lifestyle they feel they are entitled to.

As sea levels rise, American corporations will just continue operation in the midwest, well away from the sea coasts. As New York City becomes a waterlogged ghost town, Wall Street will just relocate to Chicago or Des Moines, no problem. Headquarter locations are fungible. While the rest of the nation is fed industrialized food, the rich will eat organic food grown on small farms the way it was in the preindustrial age. As some vacation spots in the world become uninhabitable, others will open up perhaps farther north. Siberia may become the next playground for the rich. Desalination plants will provide pure water for a limited number of people as the rivers which have historically provided drinking water dry up for lack of snow pack or glaciers.

In short instead of the hardships being shared mutually among all people on the planet, they will be visited on the lower classes the way they have always been. The ruling powers, whether it be the American Empire or some other empire, will see to that. The ideals of freedom and liberty will be in name only and mainly exercised by the upper classes while the rest of the people will be propagandized to think that they are free. As the Romans pacified their population with bread and circuses, modern dystopian society will make poor people work overtime for bread while providing circuses galore by means of mass media. The salinity of drinking water in some parts of the world as well as the acidification of the ocean which killed all the crustaceans will be of no concern to rich Americans who will have their seafood tailor made for them on elaborate farms.

In short, if we continue on our present path, most Americans will value the continuation of their present lifestyles more than the habitability of the planet for future generations. Not maximizing current levels of consumption will be seen as socialistic. Capitalism demands that the emphasis be on short term profits for ourselves not long term viability of the planet for others. If necessary, war can guarantee that only the strongest in military terms will survive.

Off the Top of My Head

China Bans Use of Single Use Plastics

by John Lawrence, February 2, 2020

Not reported on nightly news, but single-use and non-degradable plastic bags will be banned in major Chinese cities by the end of 2020 and across the country by 2022. Just like that! While the US "grapples" and "prevaricates", China just does it in one swell foop! In fact US oil corporations are planning to build more petrochemical plants in order to produce more plastic. Why? Because they anticipate that oil consumption will go down due to more electric cars being on the road. Well, they can't let all that oil and all those profits go to waste, can they? Therefore, more plastic. If they can't harm the earth one way, they'll choose another. The NY Times reported: "Royal Dutch Shell’s plant will produce more than a million tons of plastic, in the form of tiny pellets. Many in the Pittsburgh area see it as an economic engine, but others worry about long-term harm."

While Shell is planning to continually pollute the environment in one way or other, their CEO is on a campaign to show how environmentally conscious Shell really is. An article in Time magazine ballyhooed their efforts:

Shell CEO Ben van Beurden has a bird’s-eye view of the situation from his corner office at the company’s global headquarters in the Hague. “We have to figure out what are the right bets to take in a world that is completely changing because of society’s concerns around climate change,” he says.

Projections from energy companies show demand for oil could peak and fall in the coming decades; some outside analyses suggest demand for oil could plateau as soon as 2025. Markets are already jittery about the industry: energy was the worst-performing sector on the S&P 500 index in 2019. In 1980, the energy industry represented 28% of the index’s value, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). Last year, it represented less than 5%. The shift away from oil looms so large that Moody’s warned in 2018 that the energy transition represents “significant business and credit risk” for oil companies. The heads of the Banks of England and France said in an op-ed that any company that does not change strategically to the new energy reality “will fail to exist.” On Jan. 14, Larry Fink, founder and CEO of investment giant BlackRock, wrote in an open letter that “climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects.” ...

Under van Beurden’s leadership, Shell is charting a path that will allow it to continue to profit from oil and gas while simultaneously expanding its plastics business and diversifying into electrical power. By the 2030s, the 112-year-old fossil-fuel giant wants to become the world’s largest power company. As part of this strategy, Shell has worked to present itself as environmentally friendly. Last year, it committed to reduce its emissions by as much as 3% by 2021, and by around 50% by 2050, tying its executives’ compensation to the cuts.

Mind you, Shell is more concerned about its investors than it is in the long term habitability of planet earth. Even executives' compensations are going to be tied to reducing emissions. Whoo Hoo! It's only now though that Shell is prepared to do something about climate change. Shell knew it was contributing to the problem of climate change a long time ago. “Yeah, we knew. Everybody knew,”  [Shell CEO van Beurden] said. “And somehow we all ignored it.” Just like the tobacco industry! They knew too that cigarette smoking caused cancer. They just didn't tell us about it in order not to forego their profits.

The NY Times reported:

The 386-acre property looks like a giant Lego set rising from the banks of the Ohio River. It is one of the largest active construction projects in the United States, employing more than 5,000 people.

When completed, the facility will be fed by pipelines stretching hundreds of miles across Appalachia. It will have its own rail system with 3,300 freight cars. And it will produce more than a million tons each year of something that many people argue the world needs less of: plastic.

Yes, more plastic, thanks to Shell's concern about global warming. It's a modern miracle. In the movie, "The Graduate," “plastics” is understood to mean a cheap, sterile, ugly, and meaningless way of life, boring almost by definition—the embodiment of everything about the values of the older generation that seems repugnant to young Benjamin. Today, the word "plastic" has taken on a far more sinister meaning. But to Shell it's a less offensive way to pollute. If you can't pollute one way, then try a less offensive way. I guess that's Shell's mantra.

China's policy will ban the production and sale of disposable plastic tableware and cotton swabs by the end of 2020. Production of household products containing microbeads will be banned by the end of 2020 and sales of such products will be banned two years after that. Single-use and non-degradable plastic bags will be banned in major Chinese cities by the end of 2020 and across the country by 2022. In addition, single-use straws will be banned by the end of 2020. By 2025 the proposal, which was introduced by both the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, would ban all single-use plastics across the country.

Meanwhile, only three states in the US have banned single use plastic bags: California, Hawaii and New York. I'd say the US has a long way to go to be as progressive as China. Like the song says, the US will do the right thing after it has exhausted all the profits from doing the wrong thing. "Everybody's crying peace on earth, just as soon as we win this war." Thank you, Mose Allison.

Dirty Air and Water Is Killing Us

Published on Tuesday, December 31, 2019

by The Progressive

New study affirms that pollution is the world’s leading cause of death, ahead of tobacco use, drug and alcohol use, and even war.

by Michelle Chen

 

12 Comments

One of the top countries for pollution-related death is among the richest: the United States ranks number seven, with some 197,000 deaths due to pollution.  (Photo: ribarnica/Flickr/cc)

The way we live is killing us. 

Pollution—whether it comes from a car’s tailpipe, a coal-fired power plant, or a toxic waste dump—claimed more than eight million lives around the world in 2017, fully 15 percent of all deaths. That’s according to a new report published by the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, a coalition of environmental and health institutions and agencies.

In fact, pollution is the world’s leading cause of death, ahead of tobacco use, drug and alcohol use, and even war. And the United States is one of the leading sources of pollution-induced death. The Global Alliance on Health and Pollution study, drawing on data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, frames pollution as one of the world’s largest, yet most neglected public health threats.

On top of mass mortality, pollution in 2017 resulted in the equivalent of 275 million years of Disability-Adjusted Life Years, a measure of the years that individuals lose to illness, disability, or premature death. Roughly five million deaths are attributed to polluted air, mostly from outdoor sources in urban and industrialized areas.

Climate change is exacerbating the problem of dirty air.

Altogether, the estimated health burden of pollution from air, water, lead contamination, and workplaces reflects a cross section of human suffering worldwide, the vast majority concentrated in low and middle-income countries. But one of the top countries for pollution-related death is among the richest: the United States ranks number seven, with some 197,000 deaths due to pollution. 

That ranking—just behind Bangladesh, and just ahead of Russia and Ethiopia—is in large part a function of the large U.S. population. When ranked by pollution-related deaths per 100,000 people, the United States drops to 132nd in the ranking. Nonetheless, since about half of those deaths are in China and India, two relatively poor countries, the United States stands out for its extreme wealth and extreme inequality.

And, according to two Natural Resources Defense Council experts, senior advocate Juanita Constible and senior scientist Kim Knowlton, the U.S. pollution-related death will likely “climb in the coming years if the Trump Administration has its way.” Massive deregulation by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, they warned, could “reverse decades of progress toward a cleaner environment and healthier people.”

While pollution plagues many regions of the country, the Trump Administration has been steadily dismantling two bedrock laws, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The EPA, now headed by a former coal-industry lobbyist, has dramatically weakened pollution controls for factories and chemical plants, undermined fuel efficiency standards, and is working to repeal long-standing restrictions on hydrofluorocarbons from cooling and refrigeration. 

“Many people may assume that because the United States is a wealthy, developed country, that we've somehow moved past the point of thousands of deaths caused by pollution,” Bill Magavern, policy director of the California Clean Air Coalition, tells The Progressive in an interview. But that hasn’t happened because corporations have systematically weakened or co-opted agencies through “regulatory capture.” 

Trump has acted as “the lapdog of the fossil fuel industry,” Magavern says. “Unfortunately, we have a President who has really made himself the polluter-in-chief and is making our air and water dirtier rather than cleaner.”

But the pollution epidemic may be even worse than it sounds. The study’s primary data set omits several common toxins: plastics, pesticides, chemicals that act as endocrine disruptors, mercury, and pharmaceutical wastes. Occupational hazards, which are specifically related to the work environment, cause about 800,000 deaths through “occupational carcinogens, second-hand smoke, particulates, gases, and fumes.” 

But that figure is a vast undercount, because the occupational pollution data excludes workers in the informal economy, like casual farm laborers, domestic workers, and trash pickers. Informal sectors like small-scale artisanal gold-mining employ millions of people, mostly in Africa, and expose them constantly to illness caused by mercury vapors.

Climate change is exacerbating the problem of dirty air. A 2009 study on the effects of global warming estimated that “as many as 20,000 air-pollution related deaths may occur worldwide each year with each one degree Celsius increase.” Respiratory diseases like childhood asthma, which already costs an estimated $23,573 per case, will worsen. 

In addition to increased frequency and severity of climate-related disasters like flooding, droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires, projected long-term ripple effects include rising rates of infectious diseases such as malaria, and aggravate antibiotic resistance, raising the risk of public health crises. Rising temperatures and ocean acidification could alter the chemical composition of some pollutants.

Although the United States ranks shamefully high in pollution-induced death, it also has the technology and financial capacity (if not the political will) to stop the worst impacts of pollution inside and outside its borders.

Fortunately, if there is the political will to address the problem, we already know what works. 

Exposure to atmospheric particulate matter has on average declined significantly between 2003 and 2015, and historically, the Clean Air Act has been credited with dramatic reductions in ozone, lead, and the toxins that cause acid rain. And despite Trump’s anti-regulatory crusade, there have been several regional and state-level initiatives aimed at curbing pollution. 

A dozen northeastern states and the District of Columbia recently launched the Transportation and Climate Initiative to develop a cleaner, more efficient transit network. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative has linked Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont in a unified cap-and-trade market that is expected to reduce annual emissions from the power sector to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. 

But the map of pollution death is also a reflection of social inequality. Black and Latinx populations suffer disproportionately from pollution impacts, especially air pollution, though they individually contribute to very little of it. Communities of color, immigrant workers, and other vulnerable populations often have little recourse when corporations want to heap toxins on their neighborhoods or force them to work in hazardous environments.

The map of pollution death is also a reflection of social inequality.

“Low-income communities of color are suffering from a historic and ongoing discrimination which subjects them to disproportionate burdens from pollution, while at the same time they have the fewest resources with which to address the impacts of that pollution,” Magavern says.

Though previous administrations have moved to incorporate an environmental justice framework into policymaking by targeting interventions toward disadvantaged groups, Trump has drastically reduced enforcement activity under the EPA and is now poised to obliterate basic oversight rules for corporations that threaten to inflict environmental damage on marginalized communities. (These are the rules used by members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to resist plans to build the Dakota Access Pipeline project near their reservation in 2017.) 

As those legal protections erode, the nation’s pollution burden will continue to hurt the most vulnerable communities. Around the world, pollution is largely the byproduct of uneven development and lack of resources; in the United States, it’s the byproduct of deliberate policy choices that put profit over public health.

Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at In These Times. She is a regular contributor to the labor rights blog Working In These Times, Colorlines.com, and Pacifica's WBAI. Her work has also appeared in Common Dreams, Alternet, Ms. Magazine, Newsday, and her old zine, cain.

Experts Warn This Industry-Backed Attack on Science at EPA Would Be Among 'Most Damaging' of All Trump-Era Policies

Published on Tuesday, November 12, 2019

by Common Dreams

"Let's call this what it is: an excuse to abandon clean air, clean water, and chemical safety rules."

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer

 

11 Comments

A stop sign stands outside the Environmental Protection Agency building on May 24, 2013 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Advocates of strong public health protections responded with alarm to a Monday night New York Times report on the Environmental Protection Agency's new draft proposal for the Trump administration's drawn-out effort to dramatically scale back the scientific research that can be used in government policymaking.

"Let's call this what it is: an excuse to abandon clean air, clean water, and chemical safety rules," said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "This is a blatant removal of well-established science from the policymaking process, to the benefit of polluters and at a huge cost to the marginalized communities who face the biggest threat from pollution."

Trump Administration is making it easier to pollute our air and water for the profit of corporations. This literally does not make us great again. It makes us sick.

E.P.A. to Tighten Limits on Science Used to Write Public Health Rules https://t.co/d9oYS0vCh1

— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) November 11, 2019

The draft proposal (pdf), titled "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science," would force the agency to only consider research that discloses all raw data, including private medical files. It follows a similar proposal unveiled by former EPA chief Scott Pruitt in April 2018 that provoked nearly 600,000 comments from the public, the majority of which were critical.

Pruitt's successor as EPA administrator, ex-lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, delayed the prior proposal, purportedly to consider concerns from environmental and public health groups. However, the new version "headed for White House review and obtained by The New York Times shows that the administration intends to widen its scope, not narrow it."

According to the Times:

The measure would make it more difficult to enact new clean air and water rules because many studies detailing the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information gathered under confidentiality agreements. And, unlike a version of the proposal that surfaced in early 2018, this one could apply retroactively to public health regulations already in place.

"This means the EPA can justify rolling back rules or failing to update rules based on the best information to protect public health and the environment, which means more dirty air and more premature deaths," said Paul Billings, senior vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association.

Public health experts warned that studies that have been used for decades—to show, for example, that mercury from power plants impairs brain development, or that lead in paint dust is tied to behavioral disorders in children—might be inadmissible when existing regulations come up for renewal.

One key example of scientific research that wouldn't be permissible for government use under the EPA proposal is a 1993 Harvard University project known as the Six Cities study, which connected air pollution to premature deaths and subsequently informed nationwide air quality policies.

"A separate internal EPA memo viewed by The New York Times shows that the agency had considered, but ultimately rejected, an option that might have allowed foundational studies like Harvard's Six Cities study to continue to be used," the newspaper reported Monday.

As journalist Emily Atkin put it in her HEATED newsletter Tuesday: "In other words, air pollution denial is becoming U.S. policy for the first time." She noted that this proposal "is a key priority of Steve Milloy, a former tobacco and fossil fuel industry lobbyist who served on Trump's EPA transition team."

Atkin recalled speaking with Stan Glantz, a professor of tobacco control at the University of California San Francisco, when reporting on Pruitt's version of the proposal last year. The tobacco industry, Glantz told her, "realized that, rather than fighting every single study that came out linking them to cancer, if they could get the rules of evidence changed, they wouldn't have to worry about it."

The Times report on Wheeler's revived and expanded version elicited impassioned warnings and critiques on Twitter:

If somebody had a long-term plan to return us to the Dark Ages, this would be one of the steps. https://t.co/BQRA0Ftixo

— Kurt Andersen (@KBAndersen) November 12, 2019

A dangerous move that will impact the health of our communities today & for decades to come. Also attacking rigorous scientific research; data on vulnerable populations must be protected to assure the best science and true public health protections https://t.co/cncrXXQBBA

— Carmen Marsit (@CMarsit) November 12, 2019

The safety of the air we breath and water we drink shouldn’t be partisan. But sadly is, as R lawmakers in the pocket of industry work to unwind significant protections. Care about the health and safety of your kids? Vote them out. #TX21 https://t.co/cgHjVOksoK via @NYTimes

— Wendy Davis (@wendydavis) November 12, 2019

An EPA spokesperson told the Times in an emailed statement that "the agency does not discuss draft, deliberative documents, or actions still under internal and interagency review." Wheeler, for his part, said in September that "we're moving forward [with the proposal] to ensure that the science supporting agency decisions is transparent and available for evaluation by the public and stakeholders."

UCS's Rosenberg said Tuesday that "Wheeler's claims about the need for these restrictions don't pass the laugh test. Everything about this rule makes a mockery of the EPA's claim that this change is necessary for transparency. This rule was driven by political operatives. It's being rushed through with minimal opportunity for public comment. And it introduces pointless hurdles and delays into the policymaking process that will compromise the federal government's ability to protect the public."

"The Trump administration has a clear pattern of sidelining science and undermining public health protections," he added. "If this rule is finalized, it would be one of the most damaging and far-reaching policy changes enacted by the administration. It would put the entire enterprise of developing science-based public health safeguards at risk."

The Times report came ahead of a Wednesday morning hearing planned by the Democrat-controlled U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee about the Trump administration's effort to restrict the use of scientific research in federal policymaking, which will feature testimony from various scientists and public health experts.

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Off the Top of My Head

Green New Deal and American Dream on Collision Path

by John Lawrence, June 3, 2019

The Green New Deal recognizes the fact that climate change is already impacting America and the world. Torrential rains, flooding, tornados, wildfires are destroying lives and real estate in staggering numbers. But it will only get worse based on the fact that we are emitting more greenhouse gasses than ever into the atmosphere. A Green New Deal can only hope that runaway climate change can be prevented, that some vestige of humanity and civilization can be preserved. The American Dream, on the other hand is that each generation should have more than the preceding one: more stuff, a higher standard of living (measured totally in materialistic terms), a bigger car, a better education (measured solely in terms of diplomas), a bigger house, more stuff.

The more stuff American Dream is contradictory to what needs to be done to ameliorate and mitigate climate change. Since we're all inhabitants of planet earth, it would seem that, with regards to climate change, we're all in this together. But no, say True Americans, the kind that drive around in pickup trucks with an American flag stuck in the truck bed, that's socialism. It's socialism if we are all in this together. Whatever happened to good old American self interest, short term profits and may the best man win? Whatever happened to hard work, accumulation of money and stuff and looking down on those who had less? All I need to do is to look out for Number One, Numero Uno, and all the rest will follow. Who was it who said seek ye first less materialism and all the rest would follow, or something like that.

Wall Street is only concerned with quarterly profits and not at all with the quarterly increase in greenhouse gasses flooding into the atmosphere. It seems that the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania might be the worst thing that ever happened to human civilization. Without oil, we would still be using horses and buggies which are far less polluting. American Progress has literally almost doomed the planet. Plastics, which are filling fish bellies and creating huge gyres of waste in the oceans, are probably the next worse human invention. Again progress through better living has run amuck. It seems like the good old Amish had it right. Plowing with horses is far less polluting than plowing with tractors. The industrialization of agriculture has only let to the almost universal use of Roundup, a proven carcinogen, to rid crops of weeds and improve yields, thus enhancing corporate agriculture's profits. Organics, which were universal before World War II because there was no glyphosate, are now a premium commodity as some farmers are fighting back against Monsanto's and Bayer's corporate domination of agriculture.

But some states and cities are embracing the Green New Deal. The Washington Post reported (The Energy 202: Green New Deal is alive and well in liberal cities and states https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/05/28/the-energy-202-green-new-deal-is-alive-and-well-in-liberal-cities-and-states/5cecc28b1ad2e52231e8e812/):

LOS ANGELES -- The Green New Deal may be floundering in Washington. But it is alive and well in left-leaning states and cities across the country.

From Maine to California, Democratic politicians have begun adopt the Green New Deal brand -- a progressive movement to dramatically tackle climate change over the next decade -- to describe their own contributions to address global warming.

Lawmakers in New York City are doing so when compelling landlords to cut climate-warming emissions from their skyscrapers. And Los Angeles leaders in this car-clogged, smog-choked town are doing it when pushing residents to drive electric vehicles.

All told, lawmakers in seven states have proposed various pieces of local legislation explicitly under the Green New Deal banner, according to the environmental group the Sierra Club, which is tracking the proposals.

So, too, have the Democratic mayors of the nation’s two biggest cities, Bill de Blasio of New York and Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, taken up the Green New Deal mantle to push their own climate proposals.

The popularity of the Green New Deal among young Democratic voters — even after its defeat in the GOP-controlled Senate in March — gives local lawmakers a clear way to cast state and municipal energy and transportation projects as part of a nationwide effort to halt the crisis of a changing climate.

In many cases, politicians are using the label to describe what they have already been doing to address global warming.

So even though we have an ignoramus for President of the United States, that doesn't mean that everyone in a position of power is one. But crucially, how many Americans are willing to give up the American Dream even though this will be the last generation, one way or the other, to have one. Will we reconstitute the planet and our lifestyles in recognition of the fact that "we are all in this together" or will we continue on the path of individual self-interest and feel a sense of fulfillment and completion when we die with more stuff than our neighbors?

Off the Top of My Head

Trump Wants to Deny California the Right to Set its Own Tailpipe Emission Standards

by John Lawrence, August 4, 2018

Trump wants more pollution for gas guzzling cars. The Federal government is lowering tailpipe emission standards for the whole nation. At the same time they are in the process of denying California the right to have higher standards than the rest of the nation. Governor Jerry Brown has vowed to fight. What right does the Federal government have to tell California that it must have more pollution. California has set the standard for lowering pollution and fighting global warming as well it should. The state is burning up from causes related to global warming.

It's all about states' rights. California has the right to join the rest of the civilized world and try and do something about global warming which is caused to a great extent by the pollutants emanating from your car's tailpipe. The carbon dioxide coming out of there is a greenhouse gas. The earth is becoming a greenhouse trapping huge amounts of heat in its atmosphere. The heat is causing massive wildfires in California and elsewhere.  But Trump wants to deny the science and say "full steam ahead with pollution."

Fortune magazine reported:

The tit-for-tat continues between President Trump and the state of California.

On Thursday, the administration proposed freezing vehicle fuel economy requirements at the 2020 level and revoking California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set more stringent tailpipe emissions rules in the state.

But California, a state that has long prioritized lowering its emissions—even going so far as beating its 2020 emissions target four years early, will not take these changes lying down. California governor Jerry Brown vowed Thursday to “fight this stupidity in every conceivable way possible.”

“For Trump to now destroy a law first enacted at the request of Ronald Reagan five decades ago is a betrayal and an assault on the health of Americans everywhere,” Brown said. “Under his reckless scheme, motorists will pay more at the pump, get worse gas mileage, and breathe dirtier air.”

Since such a huge number of cars are sold in California, car manufacturers have to gear their production to California standards. They could make cheaper, dirtier cars for the rest of the nation, but it is not worth it. That's why Trump wants to insist on California lowering its standards so car manufacturers can lower them for everybody. They then can sell a cheaper, dirtier car.

The article continues:

California has previously sued the Trump administration over its auto policies, and the state announced plans for a new lawsuit following Thursday’s announcement. California attorney general Xavier Becerra announced that he would lead 19 attorneys general in a new lawsuit, saying that “California is about progress and 21st century innovation and technology. We’re not about backsliding.”

“The earth is not flat and climate change is real. Can someone please inform the folks at the White House?” he added.

A number of California lawmakers demonstrated their own intention to combat the administration’s proposal, with Senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein introducing a resolution in the Senate that would allow California to remain autonomous in its clean air policies. A similar measure was also introduced in the House.

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, also condemned the administration’s policy, noting that it was Reagan who had first requested California’s waiver. On Thursday, he tweeted that “this is a stupid policy and no one asked for this,” adding that “if the president thinks he can win this fight, he’s out of his mind.”

So we have a head-in-the-sand stupenagel for a President, and he has brought in other stupenagels to be members of his administration. He's put them at the head of every department. He's hell bent on making America not Great Again, but on the contrary the Laughing Stock of the world. But to some extent we get what we deserve. This is supposedly a democracy after all. If the Democrats ever get control of the government again, let this be a lesson to them. They will have to undo everything Trump has done just like he is endeavoring to undo everything Obama did.

Trump Wants to Eliminate Obama's Tailpipe Emission Standards

More Smog = Saving Lives? The Trump administration wants to get rid of aggressive fuel economy targets for cars and trucks, an action that it acknowledges would result in more pollution harmful to people’s health. The upside? An improvement in vehicle and highway safety, according to administration officials. Environmental advocates and many outside scientists dispute that reasoning and say that the proposed regulations, which even automakers are wary of, would contribute to global warming. In addition, the administration is looking to take away California’s power to set its own, tougher greenhouse gas emissions standards and electric vehicle mandate. Gov. Jerry Brown vows to fight the new plan “in every conceivable way possible.”

 

New map, support tools empower communities to act on oil & gas related air pollution

Washington, DC -- Today, Earthworks’ Community Empowerment Project (CEP) launched a new interactive online tool to help people see, understand and reduce pollution in their communities. The CEP homepage includes a new interactive map of optical gas imaging videos of normally invisible air pollution, personal stories and official complaints; information about the health and climate impacts of air pollution caused by the oil and gas industry; and ways to engage with Earthworks and regulators to reduce that pollution. “Since the program’s inception in 2014, Earthworks’ Community Empowerment Project has served dozens of communities, exposed the impacts of oil and gas on health and the climate, and triggered accountability by polluters,” said Nadia Steinzor, Earthworks’ Community Empowerment Project manager. “These new tools will engage even more affected residents, increase pressure on state and federal regulators to act, and systematically document bad actors in the fracking industry.” The new interactive map will allow anyone to search for their home, school or place of work and find documented instances of pollution and any results from complaints Earthworks filed. To date, Earthworks has investigated 1,127 oil and gas facilities in 16 U.S. states and three other countries. “Our message to industry is we’re watching,” said Bruce Baizel, Energy Program Director. “Companies keep claiming they can reduce emissions and clean up their act. We look forward to seeing this happen and to regulators doing a better job.” By helping communities file complaints, Earthworks will increase pressure on regulators to enforce rules to reduce pollution and prevent harm. Individuals or groups can request support from Earthworks’ team of experts through three tailored forms: request that Earthworks’ Community Empowerment Project investigate pollution in your community get help filing an official complaint with your regulatory agency using your own testimony register a complaint you filed with regulators Earthworks uses the same FLIR GF320 optical gas imaging camera that regulators and oil and gas operators nationwide use to find and document pollution at wells and other facilities. Earthworks’ thermographers have also taken industry-standard training to interpret the images produced by the camera. The camera detects 20 climate and health-harming pollutants associated with oil and gas including methane, a climate pollutant 86 times worse than carbon dioxide, and volatile organic compounds like benzene, a known carcinogen. FOR MORE INFORMATION Earthworks Community Empowerment Project

 

Off the Top of My Head

Trump's EPA Head Rolls Back Tailpipe Emissions Standards

by John Lawrence, May 2, 2018

Just what the climate needs now - more carbon dioxide coming out of the tailpipes of cars. More pollution, more global warming. Scot Pruitt, Trump's head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is protecting the environment by mandating that more tailpipe emissions go into it. That means that cars will be sold with lower mileage standards, and you will buy more gas to keep them running. But who cares as long as the oil and gas companies are in a position to sell more gas and make more money. The US is the biggest climate polluter in history. It set the stage for polluting even more when Trump walked away from the Paris accords on climate change. Now they are reducing tailpipe emissions standards so car makers can relax and not have to engineer cars that get better gas mileage.

California is fighting back. Long a leader in reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide pollution, California is suing the Trump administration which insists that California lower its emissions standards according to Pruitt's dictates. The New York Times put it this way:

California and a coalition of 16 other states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its plan to roll back greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars, trucks and S.U.V.s.

The move comes days after reports that the Environmental Protection Agency and Transportation Department plan to dramatically weaken federal auto emissions rules. California, which holds a waiver under the Clean Air Act that allows it to set its own standards for vehicle exhaust pollution, has pledged to stick with stricter Obama-era targets.

So the Trump administration which formally doesn't believe in global warming is insisting that all the states follow its dictates and pollute more. Of course states rights, which are always insisted upon by Red states, don't figure here. They are only taken seriously when the Red states want to do something which is counter to a Democratic administration. California has always wanted to have stricter rules regarding auto emissions standards. The Obama administration brought Federal guidelines into compliance with California's higher standards only to have Trump and Pruitt mandate that all the states including California pollute more. “My message to the E.P.A. and administrator Pruitt is simple: Do your job. Regulate carbon pollution from vehicles, defend the clean car standards, don’t tear them up,” Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, said in a press conference.

California wants to get 5 million zero-emissions vehicles on the road by 2030. It is doing all it can to prevent a global warming crisis. The Trump administration wants to hasten that crisis. It doesn't care about global warming. In fact it could care less. If California outlaws the sale of gas guzzlers in the state, will Californians have to go out of state to buy their SUVs. Stay tuned.

Taking 9 Million Lives Per Year, Pollution Bigger Killer Than War, Tobacco, and Various Diseases Combined

Published on Friday, October 20, 2017 by Common Dreams

New Lancet Commission spotlights "profound and pervasive threat that affects many aspects of human health and wellbeing."

by Andrea Germanos, staff writer

 

7 Comments

Garbage is seen in the Santiago River in Jalisco, Mexico. (Photo:  WATERLAT GOBACIT/flickr/cc)

Pollution, "one of the great existential challenges of the Anthropocene epoch," kills 9 million people per year. That's more than the number of deaths caused by tobacco, three times as many deaths caused by AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined, and 15 times as many deaths caused by war and other violence.

The data comes from a new global study on pollution and health published in The Lancet, which calls for a mobilization of both resources and political will to tackle the worldwide and costly menace.

"Pollution is much more than an environmental challenge—it is a profound and pervasive threat that affects many aspects of human health and wellbeing. It deserves the full attention of international leaders, civil society, health professionals, and people around the world," says Professor Philip Landrigan of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and co-leader of the two-year, international Lancet Commission.

Air pollution, including indoor and outdoor, plays the biggest role in pollution-related deaths (6.5 million deaths in 2015 ), and is linked to heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and COPD. Polluted water, workplace pollution (such as asbestos exposure), and lead pollution also add to the death toll—which researchers say is likely an underestimate.

Looking at those impacted most reveals global inequality at play.

The bulk of pollution-related deaths (92 percent) strike in low- and middle-income countries. India and China tallied the highest numbers of such deaths, with 2.5 million and 1.8 million respectively. In addition, the researchers note, across the board, the deaths are most prevalent among minorities and the marginalized.

"Now is the moment to accelerate our collective response."
—Pamela Das and Richard Horton, The LancetPollution is an extremely costly problem, even without environmental damage costs taken into account. Looking at welfare costs alone, the total in 2015 topped US$4.6 trillion, or 6.2 percent of world GDP.

The World Health Organization (WHO) applauded the new analysis. "Pollution is a symptom and unintended consequence of unhealthy and unsustainable development," write Maria Neira, Michaela Pfeiffer, Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, and Annette Prüss-Ustün of WHO's Department of Public Health, Environmental, and Social Determinants of Health.

"If we want to substantially reduce the global environmental burden of disease, we need to act further upstream and address the drivers and sources of pollution to ensure that development policies and investments are healthy and sustainable by design and that the choices we make—at the government, private sector, and individual levels—cultivate a healthier and safer environment. In other words, we need to move beyond a 'do-no-harm' approach and ensure that development actively and explicitly improves the environmental and social conditions that give rise to, and expose populations to, disease," they add.

According to Pamela Das, senior executive editor, and Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, the new report should be "a timely call to action."

"Now is the moment to accelerate our collective response. Current and future generations deserve a pollution-free world," they write in a comment linked to the report.

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Analysis: Harvey Triggered Release of Nearly a Million Pounds of Toxic Air Pollutants

Published on Friday, September 01, 2017 by Common Dreams

"Oil-industry facilities spewed thousands of tons of toxic chemicals into defenseless communities, despite ample warning about hurricane risk to this area."

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer

 

4 Comments

Texas refineries and petrochemical plants affected by Hurricane Harvey have released nearly 1 million pounds of seven dangerous air pollutants, and upwards of 2 million pollutants overall, according to industry data. (Photo: IIP Photo Archive/flickr/cc)

Texas refineries and petrochemical plants affected by Hurricane Harvey have released nearly a million pounds of seven especially dangerous air pollutants, according to a new analysis released Friday.

"The petroleum industry seems utterly unwilling to take responsibility for operating safely, even as climate change makes storms like Harvey more destructive."
—Shaye Wolf, Center for Biological Diversity

"Staggering amounts of benzene, 1,3-butadiene, hexane, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, toluene, and xylene—estimated at 951,000 pounds so far—were emitted" at "several dozen petroleum industry facilities," the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) said in a statement.

According to the group, "these seven chemicals are all toxic air pollutants documented to cause serious harms to human health, and several cause cancer."

The analysis is based on initial industry reports submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality through August 31, and the group said it expects these numbers to continue to rise in the coming days.

Expressing concern for communities in the immediate vicinities of the facilities, Shaye Wolf, the scientist who compiled the analysis, said: "Oil-industry facilities spewed thousands of tons of toxic chemicals into defenseless communities, despite ample warning about hurricane risk to this area."

Monsanto Polluted San Diego with PCBs and GMOs

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

PCBs Pervade San Diego Bay

A San Diego group of attorneys is suing Monsanto to get millions of dollars for remediation projects to clean up San Diego Bay. Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) have been linked to cancer, neurological damage, thyroid problems and reproductive complications. Monsanto is all about the profits even when it has knowledge that what it's selling is poison. Cases have been filed in Federal Court in San Jose, Oakland and Spokane in addition to San Diego. Dozens more cities across America may soon follow suit.

Municipalities have been forced to shell out millions to clean up rivers, creeks and bays. It has been established that fishing in such places and consuming those fish is dangerous to human health. PCBs have shown up in breast milk and sea lions among other places. They are ubiquitous in our environment.

Monsanto marketed the PCBs under the trade name Aroclor. The chemicals accumulate in fish that are devoured by humans with the result that almost everybody who eats fish has a certain amount of PCBs in their system. PCBs were used in electrical equipment, highway paint, caulk and many other products. Monsanto's position is that, if their product was improperly disposed of, it was not their fault. Under California's public nuisance laws, however, a company may be held responsible if it knowingly marketed a product even though it knew it was hazardous.

Monsanto officials knew as early as 1969 that Aroclor was dangerous, but decided to keep manufacturing and marketing it anyway in order to increase profits. Their official discussions went so far as to say that Aroclor was likely a "global contaminant." Monsanto employees had thrown fish into a heavily contaminated creek and discovered that they started bleeding and losing their skin in about 10 seconds.

The Oakland city attorney said that the chemical giant "chose profits over people, and American cities and citizens are still suffering the consequences."

Robert Reich Nails Monsanto's Modus Operandi

In an excellent book, Saving Capitalism (For the Many, Not the Few), Robert Reich has a great section on Monsanto. I, therefore, give over the rest of this article to a quotation from this book:

Monsanto, the giant biotech corporation, owns the key genetic traits in more than 90 percent of the soybeans planted by farmers in the United States and 8o percent of the corn. Its monopoly grew out of a carefully crafted strategy. It patented its own genetically modified seeds, along with an herbicide that would kill weeds but not soy and corn grown from its seeds.

The herbicide and herbicide-resistant seeds initially saved farmers time and money. But the purchase came with a catch that would haunt them in the future: The soy and corn that grow from those seeds don't produce seeds of their own. So every planting season, farmers have to buy new seeds. In addition, if the farmers have any seeds left over, they must agree not to save and replant them in the future. In other words, once hooked, farmers have little choice but to become permanent purchasers of Monsanto seed. To ensure its dominance, Monsanto has prohibited seed dealers from stocking its competitors' seeds and has bought up most of the small remaining seed companies.

Not surprisingly, in less than fifteen years, most of America's commodity crop farmers have become dependent on Monsanto. The result has been higher prices far beyond the cost-of-living rise. Since 2001, Monsanto has more than doubled the price of corn and soybean seeds. The average cost of planting one acre of soybeans increased 325 percent between 1994 and 2011, and the price of corn seed rose 259 percent. Another result has been a radical decline in the genetic diversity of the seeds we depend on. This increases the risk that disease or climate change might wipe out entire crops for years, if not forever. A third consequence has been the ubiquity of genetically modified traits in our food chain. At every stage, Monsanto's growing economic power has enhanced its political power to shift the rules to its advantage, thereby adding to its economic power.

The Fight to Label GMOs

Beginning with the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970, and extending through a series of court cases, Monsanto has gained increased protection of its intellectual property in genetically engineered seeds. It has successfully fought off numerous attempts in Congress and in several states to require labeling of genetically engineered foods or to protect biodiversity. It has used its political muscle in Washington to fight moves in other nations to ban genetically engineered seed. To enforce and ensure dominance, the company has employed a phalanx of lawyers. They've sued other companies for patent infringement and sued farmers who want to save seed for replanting. Monsanto's lawyers have also prevented independent scientists from studying its seeds, arguing that such inquiries infringe the company's patents.

You might think Monsanto's overwhelming market power would make it a target of antitrust enforcement. Think again. In 2012, it succeeded in putting an end to a two-year investigation by the antitrust division of the Justice Department into Monsanto's dominance of the seed industry. Monsanto has the distinction of spending more on lobbying—nearly $7 million in 2013 alone—than any other big agribusiness. And Monsanto's former (and future) employees frequently inhabit top posts at the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department, they staff congressional committees that deal with agriculture policy, and they become advisors to congressional leaders and at the White House. Two Monsanto lobbyists are former congressman Vic Fazio and former senator Blanche Lincoln. Even Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was at one time an attorney for Monsanto. Monsanto, like any new monopoly, has strategically used its economic power to gain political power and used its political power to entrench its market power.

It's useful to view the strategy of the new monopolists as integrating economic and political dominance. They acquire key patents and then spend vast sums protecting them and charging others with patent infringement. In addition, they use mandatory licensing agreements to require potential competitors to use whole lines of their products and prevent customers from using competing products, thereby creating de facto industry standards. Favorable court rulings, advantageous laws, and administrative decisions to forgo antitrust lawsuits or bring them against competitors extend these de facto standards to entire sectors of the economy. [end quote]

And so, dear reader, we live in a world in which large corporations feel free to pollute and despoil the environment including the food we eat because they have not only market dominance but because they have political dominance as well. The revolving door between government and corporations swings ever so easily, the hinges are well lubricated. Congresspersons and their staff have easy access to lucrative jobs once they have established their contacts on the inside. They just have to lobby their old friends on behalf of Monsanto and other large corporations giving them a free license to pollute and purvey dangerous products. The hallmark of these products is not that they will kill you immediately like the poor fish that Monsanto employees threw into a PCB polluted river, but that the symptoms will show up as cancer and other related diseases years later when Monsanto can no longer be linked to those outcomes.

More Bad News for Monsanto

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA), IFOAM International Organics, Navdanya, Regeneration International (RI), and Millions Against Monsanto, joined by dozens of global food, farming and environmental justice groups announced December 4th, 2015 that they will put Monsanto on trial for crimes against nature and humanity, and ecocide, in The Hague, Netherlands, next year on World Food Day, October 16, 2016.

Vandana Shiva, physicist, author, activist and founder of Navdanya, and member of the RI Steering Committee said: “Monsanto has pushed GMOs in order to collect royalties from poor farmers, trapping them in unpayable debt, and pushing them to suicide. Monsanto promotes an agro-industrial model that contributes at least 50 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Monsanto is also largely responsible for the depletion of soil and water resources, species extinction and declining biodiversity, and the displacement of millions of small farmers worldwide.”

Andre Leu, president of IFOAM and a member of the RI Steering Committee, said: “Monsanto is able to ignore the human and environmental damage caused by its products, and maintain its devastating activities through a strategy of systemic concealment: by lobbying regulatory agencies and governments, by resorting to lying and corruption, by financing fraudulent scientific studies, by pressuring independent scientists, and by manipulating the press and media. Monsanto’s history reads like a text-book case of impunity, benefiting transnational corporations and their executives, whose activities contribute to climate and biosphere crises and threaten the safety of the planet.”

Get set for an epic battle between a corporation that is destroying the planet and those who are pushing back against this monstrous corporate behemoth.

Did the Supreme Court Just Kill Dirty Coal Plants and Save the World?

    

by Juan Cole

 

Truthdig/ Op-Ed

 

Published: Sunday 4 May 2014

 

The Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed that the Environmental Protection Agency has the prerogative to regulate air pollution that spills across state lines. 

 

The Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed that the Environmental Protection Agency has the prerogative to regulate air pollution that spills across state lines.  The EPA wants to force 28 states to reduce emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from their power plants.  Sulphur dioxide causes acid rain and breathing problems.  Nitrogen oxide causes ground-level ozone, which is a big problem in cities such as Los Angeles.

The biggest source in the US of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide is coal-burning power plants.  A typical coal plant emits 14,000 tons of sulphur dioxide a year, and those plants with environmental controls still put out 7,000 tons a year of the toxic material.  Coal plants without special controls put out 14,000 tons of nitrogen oxide a year.  Even if they have environmental controls, they still produce 3,000 tons of the stuff a year.

Even without those two toxic substances, coal plants are a major source of carbon dioxide emissions, which are causing climate disruption and global warming.

The coal industry already lost   a Federal court case it brought against the Environmental Protection Agency, which is giving coal plant owners a year to clean up their act and stop mercury emissions.  (Mercury is a nerve poison and can produce brain damage).  The court held that the EPA is authorized by law to regulate such matters.

The Obama administration appears to want to close down the coal plants.  Coal-burning produces over 30% of the 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide the US emits every year (1.7 billion metric tons). 

Coal power generation can now be replaced by a combination of wind and solar in many states.  Natural gas in the US is now often produced by hydraulic fracturing, which is a big emitter of methane gas, an extreme hothouse gas, which should be forbidden lest we cook the planet.

President Barack Obama's administration scored a major victory Tuesday when the US Supreme Court revived regulation limiting harmful emissions that blow across state lines.

A coalition of six progressive and conservative justices clinched the 6-2 vote overturning a lower court decision that a 2011 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule overstepped the agency's authority.

At issue are control measures on emissions of sulfur dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are sometimes blown by the country's prevailing winds across state boundaries, leaving upwind states in violation of clean air standards.

The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, opposed by industry groups and upwind states such as Michigan, Ohio and Texas, requires 28 states to reduce power-plant emissions that harm downwind states' air quality.

It emerges from the Clean Air Act, a centerpiece of the Obama administration's environmental agenda.

Backed by nine states and six cities, the Obama administration argued that the emissions were responsible for one out of 20 deaths in the United States and thousands of cases of asthma.

The Environmental Defense Fund said the "life-saving" rule will save up to 34,000 lives, prevent 400,000 asthma attacks, avoid 1.8 million employee sick days and provide benefits of $120-280 billion each year.

In its ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington had said the EPA's approach in setting pollution limits forced certain states to reduce more emissions than they contribute.

The EPA rule determined the cost allocations not just on how much pollution a state produces but also on how affordably the state can cut the emissions.

Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the EPA had followed the "plain text" of the Clean Air Act in enacting the measure also known as the Transport Rule.

"EPA's cost-effective allocation of emission reductions among upwind states, we hold, is a permissible, workable and equitable interpretation" of the law, Ginsburg wrote in the 32-page opinion.

Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting alongside Justice Clarence Thomas, blasted the majority's "undemocratic revision of the Clean Air Act," criticizing its acceptance of the EPA's cost-based allocation.

Justice Samuel Alito was recused in the case.

"Today's decision feeds the uncontrolled growth of the administrative state at the expense of government by the people," Scalia said in a separate statement read from the bench.

Senate Environment Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer hailed the "major victory in the fight for clean, healthy air."

"By making our air healthier to breathe, EPA's rule will save lives and prevent up to 34,000 premature deaths a year," she added.