WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Minnesota recently became the first state in the union to ban TCE, short for trichloroethylene, a volatile organic compound that’s used to manufacture refrigerant chemicals and is also used as a solvent for degreasing and as a spot cleaner in dry cleaning. It’s also in several common household products.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is an important federal consumer watchdog agency. President Trump has nominated Nancy Beck, chief of the EPA’s chemical office, to chair it. Beck has stymied the EPA’s efforts to regulate a ubiquitous chemical, trichloroethylene, or TCE.
A renewable energy company has asked local government officials in Indiana to address zoning regulations for utility-scale solar farms as it moves forward on a $242 million, 200-megawatt project.
Iowa legislators have passed a new so-called ag-gag bill, making people exposing animal exploitation on factory farms criminals.
President Trump has issued an executive order claiming to “promote American seafood competitiveness and economic growth.” In reality, it permits offshore aquaculture, or so-called fish farms in federal waters with reduced environmental protections. The order will slowly destroy regulations on the operation of fish farms and open huge ocean areas to exploitation by the industry.
Australian researchers captured a stunning scene when they took a new approach to counting green turtles near their nesting area. They used drones to count them. The drones the scientists used recorded approximately sixty-four thousand green turtles migrating near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef for nesting season.
WFHB has reported on accelerated logging of rainforests during the COVID outbreak. The reason for this was decreased oversight. Now satellite data collated for the World Resources Institute has shown primal rainforest was lost across fourteen thousand square miles globally last year, ruining habitats and releasing carbon once locked in wood into the atmosphere.
A new United Nations report is telling governments that the solution to the economic depression that COVID-19 has triggered is to greatly increase funding for renewable energy and hasten the transition away from fossil fuels. The findings show that doing so is a better investment now than ever before.
