Category Archives: ONA

Don’t call it a climate bill: Senators unveil bipartisan energy package

by CelsaDann937308 Posted on February 28, 2020

On Thursday, Senators Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska and the chair of the Senate’s energy committee, and Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, unveiled the American Energy Innovation Act of 2020. If passed, the bill would be the first comprehensive update to U.S. energy policy in 12 years.

In a statement, Murkowski called the package, which combines bits and pieces of 50 energy-related measures cleared by the energy committee in 2019, America’s “best chance to modernize our nation’s energy policies.” She said she hopes Senate Democrats and Republicans will work together to pass the act, which “will help keep energy affordable even as it becomes cleaner and cleaner.”

That’s the foundational principle of this package, which is expected to be introduced in the Senate early next week. It basically ensures that states like Alaska and West Virginia can keep drilling and fracking while the nation also develops renewables like wind and solar and invests in advanced nuclear energy. In short, it’s an all-of-the-above energy strategy. It’s the kind of approach President Obama took in his years in office — one that has been disavowed in recent months by some presidential candidates.

Senate energy committee aides expect the bill to garner wide support in the Senate, and if the same happens in the House, it means Congress could actually pass bipartisan energy legislation in the year of our Lord 2020. But it certainly isn’t a substitute for a climate bill. Committee staff told reporters that while the committee considers the bill important for the climate, it isn’t claiming it’s “in any way sufficient.” Instead, it’s a “down payment” on tackling the crisis.

There are certainly some climate-friendly elements in the bill. It would require Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, a Trump appointee, to establish a pilot program aimed at awarding grants to nonprofits for using energy-efficient materials in buildings like museums and historical centers. It extends current energy-efficiency targets for federal buildings through 2028 and adds in water-efficiency targets through 2030. It would help “weatherize” renewable energy technologies to help them withstand storms. It authorizes the secretary of energy to create a wind and solar technology program to address “near-term, mid-term, and long-term challenges” in development through the fiscal budget year 2025. The list goes on.

Leah Stokes, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says there’s a lot that’s laudable about the bill. “It’s really good that, even though the Republicans are the majority in the Senate, that there’s some willingness on the part of Senator Murkowski to do something” about climate, she said. The emphasis on energy efficiency is good, she said, if ultimately too narrow. Stokes said she’d like to see homes and commercial buildings included in the bill’s efficiency directives, not just schools, nonprofits, and federal buildings.

The biggest head-scratcher, she said, are the portions of the bill that focus on expanding oil and gas production. For instance, the bill would speed up the approval process for small-scale natural gas exports, even though recent research says the production of natural gas, once seen as a fuel that could bridge the gap between oil and coal and wind and solar, emits massive amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The bill requires Brouillette to study the possibility of building out new oil and gas facilities in Appalachia. It also includes provisions for research and innovation in carbon capture and storage technology for emissions from power plants and other industrial sources of carbon. Those provisions would, according to the bill, “improve the efficiency, effectiveness, costs, and environmental performance of coal and natural gas use.”

So, instead of banning fracking and other fossil-fuel related activities, the bill encourages those things while simultaneously boosting carbon capture, an unscalable (for the time being) technology the GOP has started to champion as a key part of its belated response to rising temperatures.

“I thought that was very odd,” Stokes said. “I don’t know why we need coal and natural gas technology programs at this point in time.” She said that a better bill would focus those carbon-removal technologies on capturing historical emissions directly from the atmosphere rather than capturing emissions from new fossil fuel developments. “I think that there’s a bit of a mismatch there,” she said.

Her general impression of the bill? “Not at the scale of what’s necessary by any means, but it’s better than nothing.” Stay tuned next week, when the bill moves to the Senate floor.

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Don’t call it a climate bill: Senators unveil bipartisan energy package

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The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants – Department of the Army

by Myrna Posted on February 28, 2020

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The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants

Department of the Army

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: June 23, 2009

Publisher: Skyhorse

Seller: SIMON AND SCHUSTER DIGITAL SALES INC


Anyone who has spent serious time outdoors knows that in survival situations, wild plants are often the only sustenance available. The proper identification of these plants can mean the difference between survival and death. This book describes habitat and distribution, physical characteristics, and edible parts of wild plants—the key elements of identification. Hugely important to the book are its color photos. There are over one hundred of them, further simplifying the identification of poisonous and edible plants. No serious outdoors person should ever hit the trail without this book and the knowledge contained within it.

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The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants – Department of the Army

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Major news networks devoted less than 4 hours to climate change in 2019. Total.

by fishing1461955 Posted on February 27, 2020

When it comes to climate change, television news is covering little more than the tip of the iceberg.

That’s according to a just-released report from Media Matters for America, which found that global warming garnered a tiny sliver — well under 1 percent — of overall broadcast news coverage. The progressive research nonprofit also found that, while these news outlets did cover climate change more often in 2019 than in the year prior, the quality of coverage was “generally shallow.” And when it came to giving voice to those hit first and worst by extreme weather and other climate-related disasters, the networks fell short: People of color were “massively underrepresented” in coverage.

“In spite of the increase in coverage from 2018 to 2019, climate coverage as a whole still made up only 0.6% of overall corporate broadcast TV nightly news in 2019, showing that these programs’ climate coverage does not adequately reflect the urgency and severity of the climate crisis,” the report found.

The study analyzed four nightly news programs and four Sunday morning political shows, focusing both on segments devoted to climate change as well as substantial mentions of the topic in other segments. Yet even with significant year-to-year increases in coverage — for example, a 180 percent increase in climate coverage on nightly news in 2019 compared to 2018 — corporate broadcasters failed to substantially improve the overall quantity and quality of their climate coverage, according to Media Matters.

The analysis focused on four nightly news programs — ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC’s Nightly News, and public broadcaster PBS’s NewsHour — as well as four Sunday morning political shows: ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, and Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday. Media Matters has produced variations of this analysis annually since at least 2012, including reports in 2018 and 2017.

Among the report’s key findings for 2019:

Although the volume of climate change coverage on the corporate broadcast nightly and Sunday morning news shows increased 68 percent from 2018 to 2019 (142 minutes to 238 minutes), the report noted that this was not difficult to achieve because the amount of coverage in 2018 was “so pitiful” that news shows had a low bar to meet the following year. This climate coverage represented just .07 percent of the overall broadcast nightly and Sunday morning news shows in 2019.

When it came to racial and gender diversity in their climate coverage, Media Matters found that broadcast television also failed: People of color were “massively underrepresented” as news guests, even though communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Just 10 percent of guests interviewed or featured in these news segments were people of color, and 2019 was the third year in a row that representation came in at this percentage or lower.

Scientists and women were also underrepresented by broadcasters, comprising 22 and 27 percent of guests, respectively. Women of color were featured even less prominently — a troubling reminder that women “typically play second fiddle to white men” in discussions of climate change, according to Media Matters. “A lack of women’s voices in media coverage of climate change is part of a pattern of racism and sexism that these broadcast networks need to address,” the report stated.

Not all of the findings in Wednesday’s report were grim. In 2019, more than a third of climate segments on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox mentioned solutions or actions to address climate change — a significant increase over the previous two years. The broadcasters focused most often on climate adaptation and renewable energy technologies when discussing solutions, but advocacy and direct action, such as youth climate activism, were also featured. The report cited studies showing that media coverage of climate change solutions can help spur collective action from viewers. “Much of this shift in public debate to talking about solutions is being driven by TV weathercasters, who are often trusted and knowledgeable members of local news,” the study added.

Media Matters praised PBS NewsHour for its climate coverage, noting that it has outpaced its broadcast counterparts in climate reporting for the past six years. PBS Newshour aired 121 climate segments in 2019, an average of 10 segments per month. “This is more coverage than we found from the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news shows combined,” the report found.

The analysis also found that climate change coverage last year was driven in large part by reporting on the Green New Deal congressional resolution, extreme weather, climate activism, and the 2020 presidential election. Coverage of climate activism, which comprised about 16 percent of the overall climate coverage from these broadcasters, focused in large part on activist Greta Thunberg and climate strikes, which took place across the globe last year. The report also found that broadcasters did a “pretty poor job overall” covering the connection between climate change and specific extreme weather events.

Media Matters is hardly alone in its withering analysis of major media coverage of climate change — and news outlets’ failure to link global warming to wildfires and other extreme weather events that are becoming the new normal.

Some of those critics are starting to offer solutions. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor Leah C. Stokes and Ph.D. candidate Emily Williams have compiled a concise fact sheet intended to help journalists and citizens understand the scientific evidence linking climate change to wildfires. They are also working on a project with Climate Signals, a science information project from the nonprofit Climate Nexus, to help journalists more easily access academic journal articles on climate change, which are typically behind paywalls, according to a radio interview Stokes gave in September.

As Grist recently reported in a story about how local journalists are tackling climate coverage, a comprehensive approach to covering climate change should include going beyond analyzing the evidence supporting global warming. John Morales, a meteorologist at NBC6 in Miami, Florida, has been covering climate change for decades. He said that local news needs to cover “how fast things are changing, the links between the observed symptoms and causes of rising temperatures, and move on to ‘what do we do about this?’”

As Media Matters made clear on Wednesday, Morales is way ahead of television’s largest news providers.

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Major news networks devoted less than 4 hours to climate change in 2019. Total.

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Trump’s environmental rollbacks are deeply unpopular with swing voters

by PhoebeKmk753134 Posted on February 26, 2020

It may be hard to tell, but in between jabs at climate science, federal science agencies, and stalwart environmental regulations, President Trump has been trying to position himself as an environmentalist. The president’s efforts to green his image go back as far as 2017, when he told business leaders, and I quote, “I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment.” Do voters agree? New research shows they most certainly do not.

Swing voters in four key states — Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan — are squarely opposed to Trump’s environmental rollbacks. That’s the takeaway from a set of focus groups of dozens of swing voters — defined as those who switched their presidential vote from Democratic to Republican, or vice versa, between 2012 and 2016 — run by a non-partisan research groups Engagious and Focus Pointe Global.

Unlike polls, the focus groups don’t reflect the opinions of a representative sample of likely voters. Instead, they give us a glimpse into the minds of voters whose preferences could determine who will sit in the Oval Office come January. The participants were asked to rate their support for Trump’s environmental rollbacks on a scale of 1 to 10 twice: before seeing a list of 17 policies he’s gutted and after. (Those 17 policies were pulled from a comprehensive list of rollbacks compiled by the New York Times.) The groups’ ratings averaged 4.5 before seeing the rollbacks and 3.2 after.

In Florida, a state that’s particularly aware of the consequences of rising temperatures and seas, the average dropped to 2.6 after seeing the rollbacks enumerated. “Before seeing that list of rollbacks, my hand would have been up 100 percent for Trump,” one Florida focus group participant and 2016 Trump supporter said. “After seeing it, my hand was not up. I’m not 100 percent sold on him.” Another participant asked why she supported Trump less after seeing the list of rollbacks, said she didn’t know about half of those rollbacks before seeing them. “To me, it made a difference to actually see them and process it,” she said. Another participant said she didn’t expect or want Trump to roll back those regulations, despite voting for him in 2016. “He’s supposed to be protecting our country and our world,” she said. “He’s supposed to be a world leader.”

Trump’s environmental rollbacks might not be enough to prompt these swing-state voters to choose a Democrat in the voting booth — that first Florida participant who said he’s not 100 percent sold on Trump said he’s still “80 percent sold on Trump just because of a lot of the other things he stands for.” But the focus group results do show that Trump’s rollbacks are supremely unpopular with the people whose presidential votes count the most.

Other research supports the idea that climate change is an important consideration for bipartisan voters. In South Carolina, a state that votes for the Democratic nominee this Saturday, addressing climate change is a top issue. A January poll conducted by Conservation Voters of South Carolina and Audubon Action Fund found that 64 percent of all South Carolinians think climate change is a serious problem. Only 13 percent of folks surveyed for that poll self-identified as liberal, and only 31 percent said they were Democrats. It’s clear that rising temperatures aren’t just an issue for diehard Democrats anymore — other slices of the political spectrum are starting to get in on the climate action.

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Trump’s environmental rollbacks are deeply unpopular with swing voters

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Somebody in Trump’s cabinet came out in favor of carbon pricing?

by mohammedreber18 Posted on February 25, 2020

Trump’s agriculture secretary managed to alarm lots of rural conservatives and White House staffers when he broke with the administration last week to say that farmers would make money if the government did what economists, think tanks, and some old-school Republicans have been clamoring for — putting a price on carbon.

“If it is a social goal and social priority there, then let’s put a price over carbon emissions,” Sonny Perdue told reporters. “And I think you can really see farmers show out in their carbon sequestration efforts.”

The biggest farm-lobbying group, the Farm Bureau, has long opposed any carbon-pricing plans. But it has warmed a bit to the idea that farmers might benefit: In January the conservative lobbying group voted to support research on carbon-storing soils, and “unbiased science-based research on climate change.”

Perdue’s apparent break with White House orthodoxy had the executive-branch’s flaks scrambling to spin the story. Perdue couldn’t possibly have proposed that the government put a price on carbon emissions, they said, because President Donald Trump opposes that. Instead, he was simply pointing out that farmers could win: “If the free market puts a value on carbon,” an Agriculture Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.

Oh, okaaaaay. It’s unclear how the free market would impose a price on carbon pollution, but sure. Putting aside the spin, was Perdue right? Would farmers benefit if we put a price on carbon? It’s a worthwhile question with agriculture responsible for about 9 percent of the greenhouse gasses emitted in the United States.

Back in 2009, when Congress came close to passing a climate bill, scholars were asking these same questions. One of the people to do the math was economist Bruce Babcock, then at Iowa State, and now a professor at the University of California at Riverside. Babcock calculated that a carbon price would drive up the cost of propane farmers use to dry their corn the diesel that fuels their tractors, and the nitrogen fertilizer spread on their fields. But all those costs could be wiped out if farmers were paid for storing carbon in soil.

A price of $20 per ton of carbon dioxide would increase an Iowa farmer’s costs by about $4.50 an acre, while no-till farming could earn that farmer $8.00 per acre, Babcock calculated. So farmers wind up netting $3.50 thanks to a carbon tax.

The basic math still applies today, but a couple dollars an acre probably wouldn’t convince farmers to make major changes, Babcock said. “A more productive way would be to convince them they have a private benefit from better soil health. Improving soil is the best investment they can do, and carbon is an indicator of healthy soil.”

It always depends on the individual farm, but most would be able to adapt to a price on carbon emissions. But adapting to climate change is a different story. “Given how much irrigated agriculture in the West relies on consistent mountain snowfall and Corn Belt agriculture relies on warm summers with abundant rainfall, any disruptive change in climate will have a far greater impact on livelihoods than will the price of carbon,” Babcock wrote.

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Somebody in Trump’s cabinet came out in favor of carbon pricing?

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Guess who’s hiding again? Oregon Republicans hoping to squash a climate bill.

by Jurgen5242 Posted on February 25, 2020

When it came time to vote on a bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the Oregon Senate on Monday, the Republican state senators’ chairs were empty. All of them except state Senator Tim Knopp of Bend had run away from Salem in an attempt to kill Oregon’s cap-and-trade bill. Again.

That left Democrats one senator short of the 20 they need to hold a vote, effectively putting the state government on pause. If signed into law, the legislation would make Oregon the second state in the country after California to adopt a cap-and-trade program. But that would require bringing Republicans back to Salem.

It’s the third walkout by Oregon Republicans in 10 months: the first for a business tax to raise money for Oregon schools, and the second for the vote on the cap-and-trade bill last June, which ended up lacking enough Democratic support to pass.

“Frankly, the entire world is watching,” Governor Kate Brown said in a news conference on Monday. “We need to get this done now. The votes are there to pass it straight up.”

Brown said she had “bent over backwards” to make compromises with the Senate Republicans. “They’re adults,” she said. “They need to come back to the building. They need to do the jobs they were elected to do. And instead, they’re taking a taxpayer-funded vacation.”

There are still two weeks left of the 35-day legislative session — and if one of the senators comes back, it’ll be enough to hold a vote.

The Senate Republicans have been threatening to walk out for weeks, arguing that Democrats were refusing to compromise with them on the cap-and-trade bill, which is opposed by some odd bedfellows. The logging industry argues that it would raise fuel costs, threatening a compromise the industry had made with the state’s environmental groups. Climate activists with Portland’s Sunrise Movement oppose the cap-and-trade policy, arguing that it isn’t strict enough.

Despite Oregon’s reputation as a green state, a fact sheet from the Northwest-based Climate Solutions shows that it’s falling behind on taking steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Though other states have passed policies to put a price on carbon, raised fuel standards, and committed to a timeline for running on totally clean electricity, Oregon is not among them. If the state government doesn’t do something soon, according to Climate Solutions, Oregon won’t be able to meet its own emissions goals for 2020.

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Guess who’s hiding again? Oregon Republicans hoping to squash a climate bill.

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Cosmos: Possible Worlds – Ann Druyan

by Myrna Posted on February 25, 2020

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Cosmos: Possible Worlds

Ann Druyan

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: February 25, 2020

Publisher: National Geographic Society

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


This sequel to Carl Sagan's blockbuster continues the electrifying journey through space and time, connecting with worlds billions of miles away and envisioning a future of science tempered with wisdom. Based on National Geographic's internationally-renowned television series, this groundbreaking and visually stunning book explores how science and civilization grew up together. From the emergence of life at deep-sea vents to solar-powered starships sailing through the galaxy, from the Big Bang to the intricacies of intelligence in many life forms, acclaimed author Ann Druyan documents where humanity has been and where it is going, using her unique gift of bringing complex scientific concepts to life. With evocative photographs and vivid illustrations, she recounts momentous discoveries, from the Voyager missions in which she and her husband, Carl Sagan, participated to Cassini-Huygens's recent insights into Saturn's moons. This breathtaking sequel to Sagan's masterpiece explains how we humans can glean a new understanding of consciousness here on Earth and out in the cosmos–again reminding us that our planet is a pale blue dot in an immense universe of possibility.

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Cosmos: Possible Worlds – Ann Druyan

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Birds by the Shore – Jennifer Ackerman

by Myrna Posted on February 25, 2020

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Birds by the Shore

Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast

Jennifer Ackerman

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: May 7, 2019

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


From the bestselling author of The Genius of Birds , the revised and reissued edition of her beloved book of essays describing her forays along the Delaware shore For three years, Jennifer Ackerman lived in the small coastal town of Lewes, Delaware, in the sort of blue-water, white-sand landscape that draws summer crowds up and down the eastern seaboard. Birds by the Shore is a book about discovering the natural life at the ocean's edge: the habits of shorebirds and seabirds, the movement of sand and water, the wealth of creatures that survive amid storm and surf. Against this landscape's rhythms, Ackerman revisits her own history–her mother's death, her father's illness and her hopes to have children of her own. This portrait of life at the ocean's edge will be relished by anyone who has walked a beach at sunset, or watched a hawk hover over a winter marsh, and felt part of the natural world. With a quiet passion and friendly, generous intelligence, it explores the way that landscape shapes our thoughts and perceptions and shows that home ground is often where we feel the deepest response to the planet.

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Birds by the Shore – Jennifer Ackerman

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The Future We Choose – Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

by Myrna Posted on February 25, 2020

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The Future We Choose

Surviving the Climate Crisis

Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: February 25, 2020

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Climate change: it is arguably the most urgent and consequential issue humankind has ever faced. How we address it in the next thirty years will determine the kind of world we will live in and will bequeath to our children and to theirs. In The Future We Choose , Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac–who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015–have written a cautionary but optimistic book about the world's changing climate and the fate of humanity. The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can and must do to fend off disaster.

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The Future We Choose – Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

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Researchers blast ‘forever chemicals’ into oblivion with plasma

by JustinaMcNally Posted on February 24, 2020

Christopher Sales is an environmental microbiologist, and until recently, his world was about harnessing the power of microorganisms to break down contaminants in the environment. But a resilient intruder that does not succumb to the same old tricks has shaken up the remediation community and led Sales to look outside of his field for a solution. It’s a chemical that’s been found in water, soil, and food all over the planet: PFAS.

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a group of chemical compounds used in carpet, waterproof clothing, nonstick pans, and many other common products, that have gone unregulated and been dumped into the environment for decades. Exposure studies have linked some forms of PFAS to thyroid disease and some cancers, but there’s very little health research on most of them. They’ve been dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down over time, and now scientists like Sales are racing to figure out how to clean PFAS up.

“PFAS is becoming a big issue,” Sales told Grist. “It’s being found in a lot of different places, and unfortunately we haven’t found a microorganism that can degrade it.”

Sales is a professor at Drexel University, and he has experimented a little bit with biological treatments for PFAS with little success. But while chatting with one of his colleagues at Drexel’s Nyheim Plasma Institute, he learned that plasma was being used to kill bacteria and other contaminants in water, and wondered if it might be effective on PFAS. Plasma is the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids, and gases, and it is created by applying heat or electricity to gas. In September 2017, when the Department of Defense announced new funding for technologies to degrade PFAS, Sales asked the Nyheim researchers if they would be interested in collaborating. They secured a grant and got to work.

In January, Sales published a study detailing the results of that collaboration. After testing a new plasma-based treatment system on water samples contaminated with 12 different types of PFAS, they found that it degraded significant amounts of all of the compounds, and for some types of PFAS, the system degraded more than 90 percent of the contamination.

Degrading PFAS doesn’t necessarily remove their threat, because it can result in new, smaller molecules of PFAS. The real target, and the more challenging one, is to defluorinate them, or break apart their carbon-fluorine bond. In some of the tests at Drexel, the plasma treatment system successfully defluorinated about a quarter of the compounds.

“In terms of treatment efficiency, plasma technology ranks really high,” said Jinxia Liu, an environmental engineering professor at McGill University who was not involved in the study. Liu said that plasma treatments for PFAS are promising because they do not require any added chemicals and do not seem to produce harmful byproducts.

There are two ways to remove PFAS from water. Right now, the most widely used approach is to filter them out. But because PFAS don’t break down, filters just transfer the contamination from one medium to another. If the filter ends up in a landfill, PFAS can still seep out into groundwater. The other approach is to try to destroy the compounds altogether. Currently, the only scalable method to destroy PFAS is incineration, but that requires large amounts of heat and is very energy intensive.

Sales’ plasma treatment still requires energy, but much less. In plasma, what were once gas molecules have been broken apart, creating what scientists call a highly reactive environment. The freely floating electrons, ions, and unstable neutral atoms in this environment can be deployed as a sort of arsenal of weapons against other molecules. Depending on what the original gas was, some of these weapons will attack pollutants like PFAS. In their study, the Drexel researchers used regular air, which is cheap and abundant, as the gas.

The study results are encouraging, but they do not necessarily translate to a breakthrough in real-world decontamination efforts. The concentrations of PFAS in the water in Sales’ experiments were much higher than levels that are found in the environment. Sales said that at lower levels, the compounds become more difficult for the plasma to target. But this system was just a proof of concept on one liter of water. If Sales can secure another grant, he plans to scale the experiment up.

Another lab at Clarkson University has developed a plasma treatment system with comparable results using real groundwater samples. Last fall, the Clarkson researchers were also able to test it in the real world with a field demonstration on the groundwater at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Groundwater near military bases is notoriously contaminated with PFAS, since the chemicals have long been a key ingredient in the firefighting foam used to put out blazes during training exercises.

The EPA recently announced long-awaited plans to develop a drinking water limit for two specific PFAS compounds, PFOA and PFOS. Currently, the agency has only set a recommended “health advisory level” for drinking water of 70 parts per trillion. Although they haven’t published the results yet, Clarkson researcher Thomas Holsen told Grist that his team’s system lowered PFAS concentrations below that level at Wright-Patterson in most of the experiments. Their system can treat one gallon per minute, which doesn’t exactly compare to the filtration systems at wastewater treatment plants that process hundreds of gallons per minute. Then again, those systems don’t actually destroy PFAS.

Liu said the best application of plasma might be at the end of a treatment train, after other technologies have concentrated the contamination. “There are a lot of different treatment needs. There’s drinking water treatment, groundwater, processing water” — the kind used in industrial plants. “There’s no one solution that fits all. People need all these different technologies, and it depends on the situation,” she said.

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Researchers blast ‘forever chemicals’ into oblivion with plasma

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