This is the 565th edition of the Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue). Here is the July 7 edition. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.
OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES
ClimateDenierRoundup writes—Lamenting the Loss of a Loser: Deniers Mourn Pruitt’s Resignation: “No one likes a sore winner, but we’re not here to be liked. Here’s how the biggest denial outlets responded to Scott Pruitt’s long-awaited departure last week. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial blaming the ‘permanent progressive state” for running Pruitt out, while also paradoxically noting that ‘Mr. Pruitt gave his enemies so much ammunition.’ Apparently, the Journal thinks it was wrong for reporters to “have examined every furl of Mr. Pruitt’s forehead.’ Normally, it would be weird for a free and independent media to criticize reporting on government officials, but that’s only if one were to consider the Journal’s editorial board to have standards and ethics and objectives outside that of supporting the GOP. As we’ve repeatedly shown, that’s a silly assumption. As for supposedly non-opinion coverage, let’s look at the Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch, one the most successful Koch folk pretending to be a journalist.”
Pakalolo writes—National monument Trump gave back to 'the people of the United States' to be mined by Canadian firm: “During a signing ceremony (along with the corrupt Ryan Zinke) at the Department of the interior in April of 2017, Trump said his executive order overturning the National Monument protections would end ‘another egregious abuse of federal power’ and ‘give that power back to the states and to the people where it belongs.’ Trump accused the previous administration of using the act to "’put millions of acres of land and water under strict federal control’ — a practice he derailed as ‘a massive federal land grab.’ Trump, a serial liar on every single issue imaginable, never intended to give the land back to the American people. He instead has handed over the sacred land of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to a Vancouver-based mining company — Glacier Lake Resources Inc. — after the site ‘recently became open for staking and exploration after a 21-year period moratorium,’ the firm said in a June 13 press release.”
CRITTERS AND THE GREAT OUTDOORS
Besame writes—Daily Bucket: Condor released in Arizona says buh-bye and heads to Wyoming: “Condor kids these days want it all — their choice of sun, cliffs, forests, and water. A juvenile California condor took time to scope out her first wild home then headed north for new vistas. Hatched in the Portland Oregon zoo, California condor T-2 was two years old when released at the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument near the Arizona-Utah border in March 2018. Three months after being released, she had travelled 440 air miles and was spotted in Wyoming’s Snowy Mountains on July 8th.”
Besame writes—Daily Bucket: Easy Rider Gull-Style: “Why spend energy flapping your wings when you can ride comfortably in the dining car? One clever western gull figured out how to hitch a ride on a Recology truck hauling compost from a landfill transfer station in San Francisco to the composting facility in Vernalis, California (south of Stockton). A researcher studying breeding western gulls on Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge discovered the innovative foraging route. To learn where the gulls go to feed, he tagged them with GPS trackers. The mapped data show this gull flew from the Farallons to the SF transfer landfill, then into the city, across the Bay Bridge, south along I-980 and I-580 through the East Bay, and inland to the Vernalis site. The map then shows the gull flying overland and across SF Bay to the SF transfer station, and back over the Pacific Ocean to the Farallons. Not just once. The gull flew back home and then two days later took the same trip.”
OceanDiver writes—The Daily Bucket - White-headed gulls back from Baja: “The official name for these gulls is Heermann’s, and there is little reason anyone in the Salish Sea would use their historical name since we rarely see them in their white-headed breeding colors. There’s a very narrow window for us here and it’s — right now. They are already shifting into the mottled grey we see for most of the time these remarkable gulls are up this way. They breed down in the Sea of Cortez over a short period in the spring and depart immediately northward to spend the rest of the year feeding along the west coast. We only see them hereabouts until the end of October; they take a more leisurely path back to Baja on their southward migration. White-headed, or Heermann’s, gulls are unusual in several ways. They: • are the only North American gull that is grey-bodied • have a bright orange bill • breed almost exclusively on one small island in the Sea of Cortez • migrate northward for the summer • live only along the ocean shores and out to sea. Because of their narrow niche, they are vulnerable to sudden environmental changes and local human activities.”
OceanDiver writes—The Daily Bucket - a surprise out at the Rocks this summer: “Our excursions out to the offshore waters in our boat always reveal beautiful moments of nature, and often surprises too. This trip was no exception. Before even getting onto the boat, the lone bufflehead bobbing in the bay was a hint as to the BIG surprise we saw later. […] This being midsummer, I did expect to see Harbor seals hauled out on the Rocks. We’re into pupping season, and I was on the lookout for any big one and a little ones. Didn’t see any but it’s hard to see them on shore; in the water the mom and pup pairs are very obvious. The reason I expected to see seals on the Rock is because the Steller sea lions who occupy it from September to May return to their breeding rookeries on the Oregon and BC coastline in summer, freeing up this valuable real estate. Sea lions are vastly bigger than seals, and will dominate choice haulout sites — and the Whale Rocks site is one of the most attractive in the Salish Sea. For one thing, these rocks are large enough to accommodate the 100 or so sea lions who regularly spend the winter here. Stellers are extremely social, preferring to rest together at one haulout. The other reason this site is attractive to pinnipeds is its location in the pathway of swift turbulent currents, productive waters with lots of prey. So imagine my surprise when we came around the corner and saw sea lions on the Rock!”
OceanDiver writes—The Daily Bucket - otter snacking in seaweedy bay: “We’re having extreme high and low tides again — back to a new moon again — here on the other side of the summer solstice. From here on out the tides will be more moderate until winter solstice. One of the effects we see in our more sheltered bays is the floating of vast quantities of seaweed that’s been accumulating along the shore. Summer sunshine and warmth feeds an explosive growth of algae. On this day, I watched a River Otter feeding. He watched me for a bit to ascertain I was harmless. Then for the next 15 minutes he cruised around amongst the wads of sea lettuce alternately paddling along the surface, diving briefly, and chomping down on snacks from below. There seemed to be as much as he wanted.”
owktree writes—Daily Bucket: Sunday Pot-au-Feu - Roses: “Today’s selection is from a visit to the Butchart Gardens located near Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. We visited there on my last day in BC during my recent vacation. I won’t be much help with identifying the particular variants, I just enjoy the patterns and colors.”
matching mole writes—Dawn Chorus: A Tale of Tails: “This diary is about birds with forked tails such as the barn swallow. It seems to me (and I could be mistaken) that, lacking a tail ourselves, we tend to underestimate the importance of tails in other animals. The tails we do notice, and remark upon, tend to be spectacular and showy, such as the tails of skunks or pheasants. So why have a tail? More specifically, why have a tail if you are a bird? Tails help birds in flight by affecting both lift and maneuverability. Tails are also useful organs for displays. For example, the peafowl is the ‘poster child’ for sexual selection, in large part because of the long and elaborately decorated tail of the male. Closer to home the enlarged and decorated tails of wild turkeys and sage grouse play an important role in courtship displays.”
CLIMATE CHAOS
Pakalolo writes—In just 30 minutes, Greenland's Helheim Glacier lost 10 billion tons of ice to the ocean: “A new video has surfaced that documents an enormous calving event at the rapidly retreating Helheim Glacier in SE Greenland last month. The horrifying event shows massive ice columns, ½ mile thick, breaking off from one of the largest ice streams in Greenland along it’s entire 4.5 mile long ice front. The observable ice of Helheim’s marine extension which towers over the ocean is 100 yards tall or roughly the size of a 10 story building or a football field. That is just a tiny fraction of the enormity of this glacier’s full vertical extent notes Chris Mooney of the Washington Post. He observes that the video captures the ‘already-floating” parts detach and begin to flow away from the front, while the “thicker sections’ of Helheim that rest on the bedrock of the seafloor, ‘detach, lift up and tip backward as they float to the surface.’ This event portends even more dangerous sea-level rise for the world’s coastal cities as whatever resistance the marine ice extension of Helheim provided in holding back the land ice is now gone. The Arctic is warming 2-3 times faster than the rest of the planet.”
Walter Einenkel writes—Nobel Prize-winning economist waives fee to write brief supporting the Child Climate lawsuit: “The Children’s Climate lawsuit has taken years of fighting to find its day in court. Fighting through the Obama administration and more recently winning a victory against the Trump administration, these kids are doing their very best to save us from ourselves. Their lawsuit, handled by Our Children’s Trust, charges the government with not doing enough to address the serious problems of climate change that will wreak havoc on the world these children are inheriting. In choosing the interests of the fossil fuel industry over science, the kids charge that the government has broken the ‘public trust.’ Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel-winning economist who has been very vocal on the dangers of income inequality in our country and the needs for more radical, progressive economic policies to insure the health of not only our country but our planet. He has also written extensively on climate change and environmental economics; and has lent his expertise and his reputation to the children’s cause, writing an economic expert’s court report.”
ClimateDenierRoundup writes—So Close, Yet Still So Far from Reality: Two Deniers Almost Tell the Truth: “Denial is never scientifically accurate, but sometimes it’s close. While we enjoy the relative ease of dunking on the obviously wrong, today we’re going to be a little nicer, and look at a couple of examples of deniers who got oh so very close to being right. Both, oddly enough, are by folks associated with local chapters of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), which has received funding from Heartland. First up: a piece by Viv Forbes, a career coal guy affiliated with the Australian version of ICSC, published this week in the American Thinker. Forbes argues that the ‘climate alarm media’ misses long-term trends of climate by focusing on short-term weather events. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of reality, but in making this counterfactual point, Forbes lays out a fairly factual description of the natural cycles of the climate system. Unfortunately for Forbes, he manages to totally gloss over the fact that these natural cycles take hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, while the warming humans are causing can be felt in just decades. Forbes’s insistence that human carbon pollution can’t offset the next looming ice age is cold comfort for anyone but readers in the year 3100.”
ClimateDenierRoundup writes—Watts and Bastasch: Who’re You Going To Believe, Deniers Or Your Own Sweat? “The relationship between global warming and heat waves is hardly confusing or complicated: CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere, we feel that heat. Nevertheless, Anthony Watts and Koch-political-operative-who-plays-a-reporter Michael Bastaschteamed up yesterday to try and gaslight Los Angeles into thinking its record-breaking heat wasn’t record-breaking. The argument, first presented by Watts at WUWT then repackaged by Bastasch (and tweeted by Drudge) is that each of the half-dozen or so temperature stations which recorded record-high temperatures in Southern California can’t be trusted. Since these stations exist in cities with cars and on rooftops with A/C units and at an airport with planes, Watts argues, they record a warmer temperature than what is actually happening in the atmosphere. Therefore, pieces like this LA Times story about record-high temperatures last weekend are wrong. As Sou at HotWhopper pointed out, station error has long been an obsession of Watts’, yet he still can’t explain why any particular record-breaking station ‘acted up so much more than on any other day, why on this particular day the higher reading couldn't possibly have been higher than the reading taken on another day.’ A station on a roof or by a road is going to be biased by its surroundings every single day (something real climate scientists understand and account for when dealing with the records), so a record-high reading is still indicative of record-high temperatures.”
R. Holloway writes—A Metaphor for Climate Change, and a Taxonomy of Denialists: “Think of it this way. Climate change is a cliff, and the human race is in a car racing toward the edge at high speed. So what to do about it? Climate realists* say we should slow down (reduce fossil fuel use), and change direction (switch to clean energy). Climate denialists deny the very existence of the cliff. They are not sure if it's a mirage or a conspiracy, but they are sure that it isn't real. According to them, we should all just quit worrying, sit back and enjoy the ride. Unfortunately, they ignore the fact that over 97% of published climate scientists (the ones doing the actual research on the lab bench and in the field) agree that human-caused climate change is a real problem. The lukewarmers say that it's not a cliff, just a little speed bump in the road, not that big a deal. If we listen to them, all we have to do is put new shocks on the car, and then it's hey, full speed ahead! The problem here is that the latest scientific research refutes the claim of low climate sensitivity (warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2) upon which their position rests.”
Stonehenge writes—Global warming is real and it could become irreversible: “With so much at stake, why is the Trump administration, and too many in Congress, not addressing climate change head on? It is no mystery to me. These so-called climate change deniers have made a self-interested political decision, rather than a scientific one. By denying climate change, they have an excuse to do little or nothing about it; they don't want to alienate their friends in the fossil fuel industry. It is not coincidental that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 21 other Republicans, whose campaigns have collected more than $10 million in oil, gas and, coal money since 2012, sent a letter to the president urging him to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. It is way past time for this administration to develop and implement an action plan. Planet Earth is our home; we have no place to evacuate to if our home becomes uninhabitable.”
OCEANS, WATER, DROUGHT
Dan Bacher writes—Coalition Protests Delta Tunnels Tax as MWD Revotes on $11 Billion to Finance WaterFix: “Before the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) of Southern California is forced to retake its vote on financing $11 billion of Governor Jerry Brown’s $17 billion Delta Tunnels project on Tuesday, July 10, ratepayers, taxpayer advocates, faith leaders, union representatives and environmentalists will hold a press conference to protest the environmentally destructive project. The press conference will take place at 11:00 a.m. prior to the MWD Board Workshop on the tunnels in the courtyard of the Metropolitan Water District Headquarters, 700 North Alameda Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. The workshop will begin at 12 noon. ‘Advocates will expose legal violations in the original vote that require board members to retake the decision, and outline next steps by the coalition to oppose the tunnel tax,’ said Brenna Norton of Food and Water Watch. ‘The vote comes days after the State Water Board announced a reduction the amount of water that can be pumped south, making local and regional water supplies more cost-effective compared to the tunnels’.”
Dan Bacher writes—Metropolitan Water District Revotes to Finance $10.8 Billion of $17 Billion Delta Tunnels: “Following numerous violations of the Brown Act that guarantees the public’s right to attend and participate in meetings of local legislative bodies, the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) of Southern California Board of Directors was forced today to retake their April vote to finance $10.8 billion of the $17 billion Delta Tunnels project. The vote was 59.5 percent yes and 39.17 percent no. The yes vote was no surprise, since the Board was under intense pressure from Governor Jerry Brown and corporate agribusiness interests on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley to finance the majority of the California WaterFix project’s cost. The Board approved the funding despite the opposition of every individual water ratepayer who spoke during the public comment period today. Delta Tunnels opponents urging the Board to vote no included Los Angeles ratepayers, a representative of the Tonga Tribe, Food & Water Watch, Social-Economic-Justice Network (SEE), Consumer Watchdog, Los Angeles Ministers Forum, SEIU Local 721, Restore the Delta, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), Los Angeles Waterkeeper, Sierra Club California and Los Angeles neighborhood council presidents.”
CANDIDATES, STATE AND DC ECO-RELATED POLITICS
Tracy Mitrano for Congress writes—Pruitt’s Out and We’ve Got a Lot of Work to Do: “Scott Pruitt’s departure from the EPA is a harsh reminder of the work we have ahead of us to protect our environment. In NY-23, we are facing three key environmental threats not unique to our district: Fracking; Algae bloom; Trash incinerators and radioactive waste. [...] From the shores of Lake Erie in the western end of the district to the Finger Lakes in the central and eastern part of the district, NY-23 is known for its natural beauty. Let’s work together to bring a representative who is committed to protecting our environment, instead of a representative with a 7% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters.”
WILDERNESS, NATIONAL FORESTS AND PARKS & OTHER PUBLIC LANDS
Xaxnar writes¸—Yellowstone's Ecosystem is Collapsing: “Charles P. Pierce picks up on a story from National Geographic. It All Started With a Few Trout. Now Yellowstone’s Iconic Birds Face ‘Collapse.' DOUG SMITH DOESN’T remember the moment he realized that a serious ecological crisis was under way in Yellowstone National Park. But as more and more birds began to dwindle, what appeared before him was, he says, ‘an expanding picture of avian collapse.’ One of the first signs Smith spotted presented itself on the normally tranquil Riddle Lake in 2014. There, floating upside down, was a young trumpeter swan killed by a bald eagle. The cygnet was the last of an entire clutch of five siblings eaten by the mighty white-crowned raptors, an act that in one fell swoop wiped out all of the park’s newborn swans for the year. … While an obvious next step would be to look toward the sky for answers, culprits in this whodunit can actually be found up and down the food chain. Swapping out and replacing just one fish species for another has set off a chain of events negatively impacting bears, eagles, ospreys, and more—and, in turn, spelling bad news for many of the park’s birds. (See more in a special issue of National Geographic devoted to Yellowstone.)”
BYPRODUCTS, TRASH, TOXIC & RADIOACTIVE WASTE
Joan McCarter writes—Pence family left a $21+ million environmental disaster in Indiana: “The entire Trump enterprise is a gigantic environmental disaster, but who knew Vice President Mike Pence and his family were a walking superfund site all on their own. The Pence family legacy in Indiana isn't the 200-plus stations that Pence says gave him growing up a "’row of the American dream.’ It's the hazardous waste sites—more than 85 of them scattered through Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois—and tens of millions of dollars it's costing taxpayers to clean them up. Indiana alone has spent at least $21 million on the cleanup thus far, or an average of about $500,000 per site, according an analysis of records by The Associated Press.”
Walter Einenkel writes—Johnson & Johnson slammed with $4.7 billion verdict for asbestos-laced baby powder: “Johnson & Johnson. They have been hit with multiple lawsuits recently surrounding what they did and did not know about the contents of their famed ‘baby powder,’ and its potential relationship with cervical and ovarian cancer. There are over 9,000 similar lawsuits going on right now. Big verdicts have come down saying Johnson & Johnson owes hundreds of millions in damages to the women they’ve in effect poisoned. Now, Johnson & Johnson faces the largest verdict against them yet. An enormous, $4.7 billion decision that was just handed down to 22 women. Thursday's massive verdict was handed down in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis. It was comprised of $550 million in compensatory damages and $4.14 billion in punitive damages. [...] The women and their families said decades-long use of baby powder and other cosmetic talc products caused their diseases. They allege the company knew its talc was contaminated with asbestos since at least the 1970s but failed to warn consumers about the risks.”
ENERGY
Fossil Fuels
ClimateDenierRoundup writes—Big Oil’s Explore Offshore Propaganda is Corporate Ventriloquism: “A couple of weeks ago, Reuters reported on a new effort by the American Petroleum Institute: Explore Offshore. It’s goal is ‘to convince Hispanic and black communities to support the Trump administration’s proposed expansion of offshore drilling.’ Per Reuters, a key part of API’s effort to convince minority communities to support a product that disproportionately hurts them is through a series of op-eds. Media Matters took a look at the pieces that have been published so far, and surprise! they’re misleading. They can’t even get the API talking points, which are going to be biased, right, as one API stat about economic benefits of drilling was exaggerated ’by a factor of 20.’ But we’re all too accustomed to these sort of shenanigans from the industry. What’s perhaps even more galling is that this minority-targeted effort is run predominately by old white men. ”
Mark Sumner writes—Another coal company caught faking safety data, as mining areas suffer an epidemic of black lung: “In 2008, I watched as my father-in-law spent weeks in the hospital, passed into a coma, and eventually died from heart issues directly related to long-term effects of progressive massive fibrosis, also known as coalworker's pneumoconiosis. Also know as black lung disease. He was far from unique. Black lung results in the death of over 25,000 Americans a year. In a country where the number of underground coal miners is well below 50,000, that’s an amazing number. What’s even more disturbing is—that number has been going up. As Inside Climate News reports, eight former supervisors and eight former supervisors and safety officials from Armstrong Coal were indicted this week over charges that they pressured miners to cover up or falsify dust readings. Miners who worked in the dustiest jobs, those near the “working face” of the mine, handed off their monitors to workers who were working in cleaner air. Monitors were placed in clean air for hours before or after a shift to reduce apparent dust readings. Or miners were simply sent into dusty areas without monitors. Miners knew it was happening. They also knew it meant their jobs if they complained. But while the monitors were showing everything as fine, in reality miners were working in areas with inadequate ventilation and dust so thick ‘you couldn't even see your hands in front of you’.”
Pipelines & Other Oil and Gas Transport
Karen Feridun writes—That Feeling When a Hazardous Liquids Pipeline Moves in Next Door to a Daycare Center: “ ‘Daycare center. Sunoco’s pipeline. Economic impact.’ Those three labels on a photo Chester County, PA resident Kent Leininger posted on Facebook tell the story that opponents of the Mariner East have been foretelling for years, one their state government still refuses to hear. Sunoco, now merged with Energy Transfer Partners, started excavating near the daycare center for its hazardous liquids gas pipeline about a year ago, according to Leininger. He remembers wondering what would happen to the daycare, the children who attend it, and their parents when he saw that the pipeline was being constructed within 50 yards of the place. The state has seen a rapid proliferation of pipelines since the shale gas boom began a decade ago. For the most part, the pipelines carry methane, the main ingredient of natural gas used for heating and cooking, among other things. Mariner East is different. It is intended to carry hazardous natural gas liquids (NGLs) like butane, propane, and ethane. Although there is no such thing as a safe gas pipeline, the ones carrying NGLs are particularly dangerous because their contents are highly volatile and are heavier than methane gas, so they tend to stay close to the surface longer, increasing the risk of coming in contact with an ignition source, something as seemingly innocuous as a doorbell being rung.”
REGULATIONS & PROTECTIONS
Mark Sumner writes—Court-nominee Brett Kavanaugh's blind reading of legislation would kill most environmental law: “Part of the right-wing push for judges who take a ‘conservative’ view of the law and only ‘rule on balls and strikes’ means that those judges often demean or discredit regulations. By insisting on an approach that if something isn’t explicitly written out in the original bill, it can’t be supported by regulations, right-wing judges accomplish two goals: They weaken existing legislation, and they make it much more difficult to construct new legislation.That approach has a powerful impact on environmental law, which is entirely dependent on information collected through science. A “just the bill” approach limits environmental law so that it can address new studies showing that a class of pesticides is more dangerous than expected, or that the safe level of lead in drinking water is even lower than we thought, or that carbon in the atmosphere is having an effect on the climate that is damaging to the nation and the world. And, as Inside Climate News points out, that’s exactly the approach being followed by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.”
Mark Sumner writes—Sunset for Scott Pruitt's legacy as the remainder of his top aides leave the building: “Without Scott Pruitt acting as an icebreaker for graft, corruption, and lying to Congress, the EPA is just not a fun place any more. And besides, as new EPA chief Andrew Wheeler gets down the nitty gritty of grinding environmental legislation into dust and salting over the grave of the Clean Air Act, the chances for gold-plated private trips to Rome and we-still-don’t-know-why-they-went shindigs in Morocco are simply no longer there. The trio of assistants who Pruitt counted on to run down his laundry, shop for his house, and find a job for his wife—and who Pruitt slipped massive payments from a fund intended to go to environmental consultants—left in advance of his extremely blessed resignation. Also out a few weeks ago was Albert Kelly, the former banker whose dishonesty had gotten him banned from banking for life before Pruitt put him in charge of the $1.1 billion account to distribute money to sites needing environmental clean up.”
Hunter writes—Trump's court pick would be murder on the environment—and consumers wouldn't fare well either: “It is Kavanaugh's peculiar notions on regulation that threaten to do the most widespread environmental damage, if we are compartmentalizing these things. And Kavanaugh's notion is that government agencies cannot, by themselves, regulate much of anything. Congress can pass laws barring individual dangerous chemicals or stipulating restrictions on their use, to be sure—but cannot delegate a broader authority to federal agencies to do that in the general case, even if Congress passes laws explicitly delegating that authority to those agencies. Kavanaugh has used this rather extremist premise to great effect in not only arguing, in specific, that climate-changing emissions do not count as a federally regulable "pollutant" and thus cannot be curbed or regulated until Congress specifically writes a new law saying so, but as general objection to much of the modern federal framework for regulating environmental dangers, period.”
Billee4FLSenate4 writes—Need a Blue Tsunami To Get Wheeler's Head Out Of Oil Sands: “There are some Republicans in my former neighborhood on a quaint Intracoastal Waterway cove here in North Florida who are ready to tell Andrew Wheeler, the EPA's new environmental chief, to take his head out of the oil sands about climate change and global warming. They finally saw the light after our homes were hit by two devastating floods within 11 months and after witnessing in recent years unprecedented high tides and rains that at times turned Hopson Road into a lake. Pictures here speak a thousand words but, unfortunately, they will fall on deaf ears of the new Trump administration EPA boss who is a long-time apologist for the fossil fuel industry. After exhausting clean-up from Hurricane Matthew, and then Hurricane Irma flooding less than a year later, with much sadness I put the home I built 42 years ago on the market. But as a widow in her 70s, I faced the reality of risking yet another flood and my ability to handle it physically or emotionally a third time. So I moved in late January.”
ursulafaw writes—Scott Pruitt Fires Parting F**k You Shot To Appease Lobbyists, Increase Pollution: “Scott Pruitt received a call from John Kelly on Thursday telling him that Trump had decided to pull the plug and that he had to resign immediately. He was not expecting it, incredible as that may sound. He also was told that he was being let go over issues with his calendar and his mattress. No, this isn’t snark, this was reported in Bloomberg: Pruitt didn’t want to leave his post and was described as being devastated that he had to resign, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a personnel matter. President Donald Trump wanted Pruitt to leave, after revelations that the administrator’s public schedule had been altered to shield some meetings from public view, they said. Doctored schedules -- which could be a criminal violation of the Federal Records Act -- were effectively the final straw after a tenure marred by alleged ethical missteps. The administration knew that more damaging reports would emerge soon, one of the people said. [...] An early June disclosure that a top EPA aide helped Pruitt try to buy a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel was particularly embarrassing to the president, one of the people said. So all the graft and abuse of power didn’t convince the Trump administration that Pruitt was bad news, but the calendar broke the camel’s back.”
TRANSPORTATION & INFRASTRUCTURE
Meteor Blades writes—Study: 84% of road transportation could be green-electrified by 2050. Democrats should talk this up: “This week the National Renewable Energy Lab issued a report on the factors that will affect the country's electricity demand through 2050. Most of the major categories of electricity consumption are projected to have modest but steady growth. Then there is transportation, the ultimate wild card. The report shows that EVs would become 11 percent of the vehicle fleet under a base scenario, and range all the way to 84 percent of the fleet under a high-adoption scenario. Everyone should care about this, because a high-electrification scenario means the country is swiftly moving away from gasoline and its harmful emissions, a vital strategy in slowing climate change (provided, of course, the cars are increasingly being fueled by renewables and other low-carbon sources of power). More jobs, more passengers, lower operation costs, less pollution, less highway traffic, less noise. So what’s not to like? The fact that this long-overdue project covers just 51 of the 140,000 miles of rail lines in the United States. What’s needed if we are really serious about green transportation is a lot more.”
mettle fatigue writes—Automotive Air Pollution in 'particular' May Cause 1 in 7 New Diabetes Cases, 42 Million/Yr Deaths: “Air pollution may have caused 3.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes cases in 2016 globally, 150,000 cases in the U.S. 8.2 million years of healthy life lost in that year. Open access full-text of the Lancet research reportage here. ‘We estimate that about 14 percent of diabetes in the world occurs because of higher levels of air pollution, that's one in seven cases,’ said senior study author Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University and the VA Saint Louis Health Care System in Missouri. ‘Risks exist at levels that are below what's now currently considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States and also by the World Health Organization,’ he told Reuters Health in a phone interview. The tiniest form of particulate matter pollution, known as PM 2.5, is already associated with increased risk of heart disease, lung disease, kidney disease, and other noncommunicable diseases ‘and contributed to about 4.2 million premature deaths in 2015,’ the study team writes in The Lancet Planetary Health, June 29.”