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Your environmental headlines:
Every year over one hundred climate scientists fly far into the wilderness and bore deep into Greenland’s largest glacier. Their work is complicated and important. The project is trying to understand how ice streams underneath the glacier are pushing vast amounts of ice into the ocean and how this contributes to rising sea levels. But this year the drills will be silent. The ice streams will go unmeasured.
The reason is the coronavirus. The fallout from measures to contain the outbreak have made the research impossible. Greenland is closed to foreigners. Its government is worried that any outbreak could be particularly dangerous to its indigenous population and rapidly overwhelm its health services. Even if the country were open, it just isn’t practical to bring an international team of scientists together, a thousand miles away from the nearest airport, in case one of them is sick. The transport planes that normally fly in the teams and resupply them have also been grounded. */
People with COVID-19 who live in U.S. regions with high levels of air pollution are more likely to die from the disease than people who live in less polluted areas, according to a new nationwide study from Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health.
The study is the first to look at the link between long-term exposure to fine particulate air pollution generated largely from fuel combustion from cars, refineries, and power plants—and the risk of death from COVID-19 in the U.S.
The study looked at over three thousand counties across the country, comparing levels of fine particulate air pollution with coronavirus death counts for each area. Adjusting for population size, hospital beds, number of people tested for COVID-19, weather, and socioeconomic and behavioral variables such as obesity and smoking, the researchers found that a small increase in long-term exposure to pollution leads to a large increase in the COVID-19 death rate.
The study found, for example, that someone who lives for decades in a county with high levels of fine particulate pollution is fifteen percent more likely to die from COVID-19 than someone who lives in a region that has just one unit (one microgram per cubic meter) less of such pollution.
The study suggests that counties with higher pollution levels will be the ones that have higher numbers of hospitalizations, higher numbers of deaths and where many of the resources should be concentrated.
Another study shows the same trend. Researchers said air pollution could be the reason two of Italy’s hardest-hit regions have drastically different COVID-19 mortality rates.
Environmental scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Siena in Italy looked at why the COVID-19 mortality rate in most of Italy was approximately four and a half percent, while the northern part of the country suffered a twelve percent rate.
They concluded that there is a probable correlation between air pollution and mortality in Lombardy and Emilia Romagna [ro-man-ya], two of the worst affected regions in northern Italy.
The two regions are among the most air polluted regions in Europe, possibly leading to health complications for residents that contracted the disease.
April twenty-second is the thirtieth anniversary of Earth Day. Among those celebrating on that first Earth Day were corporate sponsors whose ads proclaimed that every day is Earth Day. Many of those ads were merely greenwashing, what Environmental Health News calls, “the newly-coined word to denote when dubious environmental intentions cloak serious environmental crimes.”
Some progress has taken place since the first Earth Day. Our air and water are cleaner than in nineteen ninety, though the Trump administration is bent on undoing the regulations that brought us cleaner air and water. Also, some species survived and are no longer on the Endangered Species list, though others remain on the brink of extinction, and still others have become extinct.
Some problems have worsened. Government officials are still not taking global climate disruption seriously. The oceans’ temperatures and acidification have resulted from the burning of fossil fuels, and scientists now predict that soon the number of plastic pieces in the oceans will outpace the number of fish.
The giant manta ray is under imminent threat of extinction. The ray has a wingspan of up to twenty-nine feet and a length of twenty-three feet, weighs up to fifty three hundred pounds and has a lifespan of about forty years. The ray has been designated as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. For a long time people have hunted rays for their gills, which some parts of the world consider a culinary delicacy. However, their main threat is getting caught in commercial fishing nets and baitlines intended for other fish.
Manta rays give birth to a single pup only once every two or three years, so they have an especially hard time recovering from harm to the species.
Under the Endangered Species Act, the National Marine Fisheries Service has the power to go after the fishing industry because of its negligence in regard to manta rays. The Fisheries Service has already protected dolphins in this way. It has a court deadline of May fifteenth to take action and is awaiting instructions from the Trump administration.
Bastiaan Bloem, M.D., an esteemed neurologist and professor at Radboud University Nijimegen Medical Center in the Netherlands, says that over the next twenty years, the number of people with Parkinson’s disease globally will probably double, from the current six point five million to over thirteen million. The major cause? Widespread exposure to pesticides, solvents and other neurotoxic chemicals used in agriculture and industry.
Bloem commented, “A pandemic, as everybody is now painfully aware, is a disease happening worldwide, to which no one is immune. [Parkinson’s] fulfills all those criteria.” Bloem added that today Parkinson’s is the world’s fastest-growing neurological disease.
Bloem is co-author of a new book, Ending Parkinson’s Disease: A Prescription for Action, which he wrote with two other neurologists and a neuroscientist.
Bloem points to the close link between exposure to herbicides such as paraquat and the risk of developing Parkinson’s. Paraquat destroys the dopamine-producing cells in the brain. The herbicide is legal for use in the U-S but banned in China. Trichloroethylene, a solvent used in manufacturing, has the same effect on the human brain.
There is a way out, Bloem says: prohibit the use of toxic pesticides, which have been found in milk; transition to organic food; and move away from the use of other neurotoxic chemicals.
A new study by Columbia University researchers has found that American robins have adjusted their migration patterns to keep pace with the earlier spring arrivals caused by climate change.
By fitting individual robins with small backpacks to track the patterns of migration, the researchers found that robins are migrating five days earlier every decade. Currently, robins are migrating twelve days earlier than they did in nineteen ninety-four.
Environmental cues helped the robins make the decision to begin their migration. The tracked robins began heading north earlier during warm and dry winters. Such winters mean the birds must be responding to when food is available – when snow melts and there are insects to get at.
The study is part of a NASA-funded project, which seeks to understand the vulnerability and resilience of ecosystems in the wake of climate change.
While the rest of the world is preoccupied with COVID-19, President Trump is busying himself with plans to mine the moon. He has signed an executive order commanding U-S corporations to mine the moon for minerals.
The nineteen seventy-nine moon treaty states that the nonscientific use of resources in space must be governed by international regulations. However, the U-S didn’t sign the treaty. In two thousand fifteen Congress passed a law permitting U-S corporations and citizens to extract resources from the moon and asteroids. Trump’s new executive order states, “Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view space as a global commons.”
Mining the moon commercially by U-S companies is a prelude to exploring the moon and other celestial bodies by humans. The administration plans to construct a sustainable settlement on the moon. For starters, in two thousand twenty-four the Artemis Three mission will land on the moon’s south pole with one male and one female astronaut.
The Trump administration is expected to announce its final rule to roll back Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standards, relaxing efforts to limit climate-warming tailpipe pollution and virtually undoing the government’s biggest effort to combat climate change.
The new rule, written by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation, would allow cars on American roads to emit nearly a billion tons more carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the vehicles than they would have under the Obama standards.
Trump administration officials raced to complete the auto rule by this spring, even as the White House was consumed with responding to the coronavirus crisis. President Trump is expected to extol the rule, which will stand as one of the most consequential regulatory rollbacks of his administration, as a needed salve for an economy crippled by the pandemic.
Trump’s critics said the rule showed the president’s disregard for science and could actually harm the economy over time. The administration’s own draft economic analysis of the rule showed that it could hurt consumers by forcing them to buy more gasoline. A report by a panel of government-appointed scientists, many of them selected by the Trump administration, concluded that there are significant weaknesses in the scientific analysis.
“This is not just an inopportune moment to finalize a major rule-making,” said Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment Committee. “In this case, it’s a completely irresponsible one.”
Even many large automakers, which had asked Mr. Trump to slightly loosen the Obama-era rule, had urged him not to roll it back so aggressively since the measure is certain to get bogged down in court for years, leaving their industry in regulatory limbo. The auto industry has consistently called for year-over-year increases in fuel efficiency, according to an auto spokesperson.
The new rule, which is expected to be implemented by late spring, will roll back an Obama rule that required automakers’ fleets to average about fifty-four miles per gallon by two thousand twenty-five. Instead, the fleets would have to average about forty miles per gallon.
The new standard would lead to nearly a billion more tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide released and the consumption of about eighty billion more gallons of gasoline over the lifetime of the vehicles built during the terms of the new rule, according to a recent draft of the plan.
Some features of the Trump proposal include:
Vehicle prices could be reduced by one thousand dollars, but consumers would pay more than fourteen hundred dollars more in fuel. Accounting for miles traveled, the rule results in more premature deaths from air pollution (up to sixteen hundred ). The rule cuts automotive revenue by fifty billion dollars, resulting in job losses in the auto sector of over ten thousand by twenty thirty.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, or maybe because of it, the oil industry is scrambling for new ways to profit from its dirty fuel. It already demanded that Congress lower royalties for drilling on public lands, to no avail, and now it’s asking that governing body to buy three billion dollars’ worth of crude oil for its Strategic Petroleum Reserves.
A bipartisan group in Congress has introduced a bill that would require the government to buy up oil during the current glut on the market, when the demand is very low.
Research from two thousand seventeen has shown that the fossil fuel industry receives many government handouts: half their profits were tied to tax benefits and royalties.
During the pandemic, it’s questionable whether government funds should subsidize polluters.
World methane emissions have reached an all-time high, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Methane is about eighty times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It threatens the climate severely but remains in the atmosphere for only about a decade, though, unlike CO2, which lasts hundreds of years.
Methane emissions come from natural sources, such as wetlands and emissions from livestock, as well as human-made sources, like oil and gas drilling. Limiting methane emissions from oil and gas extraction sites should be the first course of action. The industry could install equipment that would enable it to collect the natural gas, which is mainly methane, and sell it. However, companies are unwilling to pay for the collection equipment because there are no profits in doing so, and federal regulations forcing them to recover the methane are lacking. It’s been estimated that the fossil fuel industry could decrease methane emissions by forty-five percent at no net cost.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, representing the state government, is rushing the permitting process for the Line Three pipeline, a tar sands oil pipeline owned by the company Enbridge, that would threaten the state’s water, conflict with indigenous rights and emit as much carbon dioxide as fifty new coal plants. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency canceled public hearings on the project but extended the public comment period by only one week.
At a time when there is a huge oversupply of oil in the world, Line Three would move over seven hundred sixty thousand barrels of tar sands oil, the dirtiest oil on the planet, from Alberta, Canada, through northern Minnesota to Wisconsin. Line Three would endanger more than two hundred waterways, including wild rice beds sacred to the Anishinaabe people. The oil the pipeline would transport would have a larger climate impact each year than the entire state of Minnesota’s economy has.
As the novel coronavirus spreads across Central Indiana, Hoosiers are holed up in their homes to wait out the pandemic. And, much like other cities across the world, this has created a particular environmental benefit: Air quality has improved.
Simply put, fewer cars on the road means fewer pollutants fouling the air.
And Indiana’s stay-at-home order means there are a lot fewer cars on the road. The state’s main air monitor for Indianapolis showed a thirty-eight percent drop in emissions of nitrogen dioxide, a substance commonly used as a measure of traffic pollution, as compared to the same period last year.
The stay-at-home order has resulted in better air quality immediately, according to Gabriel Filippelli, director of the Center for Urban Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
The improvement could be particularly beneficial in Central Indiana, which has historically had high levels of air pollution, concerning public health experts.
Professor Filippelli, who monitors the air quality sensors around Indianapolis as part of his work, said he believes the drop in nitrogen dioxide is predominantly caused by the reduction in vehicle traffic.
Nitrogen dioxide, emitted from the burning of fuel, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says, is known to aggravate the respiratory system. What this situation provides for us is an example of air quality if electric vehicles comprised a substantial part of our transportation.
People confined to their homes due to the COVID-19 outbreak are finding creative ways to work, socialize and entertain themselves – all from a safe distance. For those feeling as though their wings have been clipped by stay-at-home orders, the simple act of watching those that are flying freely just outside their windows can offer some solace.
“Birding” is a fun and educational experience that offers a special kind of stress relief, whether luring the feathered friends to a backyard feeder or taking a stroll with a pair of binoculars..
Many birders in Bloomington have been very active in posting daily observations.
Your feature report:
And now for our feature we will hear Enrique Saenz from the Indiana Environmental Reporter talk about Regulation Suspension.
