Tag Archives: blue marble

North Carolina Protected Duke Energy from Pollution Complaints Before the Company’s Coal Ash Disaster

by Aale Thomas Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last year, North Carolina’s top environmental regulators thwarted three separate Clean Water Act lawsuits aimed at forcing Duke Energy, the largest electricity company in the country, to clean up its toxic coal ash pits in the state. That June, the state went even further, saying it would handle environmental enforcement at every one of Duke’s 31 coal ash storage ponds in the state—an act that protected the company from further federal lawsuits. Last week, one of those coal ash storage ponds ruptured, belching more than 80,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River.

Now environmental groups and former regulators are charging that North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, who worked for Duke for 30 years, has created an atmosphere where the penalties for polluting the environment are low.

The Associated Press reports that McCrory’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources blocked three federal Clean Water Act suits in 2013 by stepping in with its own enforcement authority “at the last minute.” This protected Duke from the kinds of stiff fines and penalties that can result from federal lawsuits. Instead, state regulators arranged settlements that carried miniscule financial penalties and did not require Duke to change how it stores the toxic byproducts of its coal-fired power plants. After blocking the first three suits, which were brought by the Southern Environmental Law Center, the state filed notices saying that it would handle environmental enforcement at every one of Duke’s remaining North Carolina coal ash storage sites—protecting the company from Clean Water Act lawsuits linked to its coal waste once and for all.

The Dan River disaster became public on February 3—one day after Duke officials had been alerted that a pipe beneath a coal ash storage pit of nearly 30 acres had ruptured. “The company reports that up to 82,000 tons of coal ash mixed with 27 million gallons of contaminated water drained out, turning the river gray and cloudy for miles,” the AP reports. “The accident ranks as the third largest such coal ash spill in the nation’s history.”

The AP story suggests that McCrory’s settlements with Duke are part of a pattern of regulatory slackness. A former North Carolina regulator who recently left to work for an environmental advocacy group after nine years working for the state told the AP that under McCrory, who took office in early 2013, she was often instructed not to fine or cite polluters, but instead to help them reach compliance standards. The article continues:

Since his unsuccessful first campaign for governor in 2008, campaign finance reports show Duke Energy, its political action committee, executives and their immediate families have donated at least $1.1 million to McCrory’s campaign and affiliated groups that spent on TV ads, mailings and events to support him.

After winning in 2012, McCrory has appointed former Duke employees like himself to key posts, including state Commerce Secretary Sharon Decker.

His appointee to oversee the state environmental department, Raleigh businessman John Skvarla, describes his agency’s role as being a “partner” to those it regulates, whom he refers to as “customers.”

“That is why we have been able to turn DENR from North Carolina’s No. 1 obstacle of resistance into a customer-friendly juggernaut in such a short time,” Skvarla wrote in a letter to the editor of the News & Observer of Raleigh, published in December. “People in the private sector pour their hearts and souls into their work; instead of crushing their dreams, they now have a state government that treats them as partners.”

McCrory hit back, telling the AP that his administration is “the first in North Carolina history to take legal action against the utility regarding coal ash ponds.” Duke Energy has also made large donations to Democrats, giving $10 million for the Democratic National Convention in 2012.

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North Carolina Protected Duke Energy from Pollution Complaints Before the Company’s Coal Ash Disaster

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Ken Ham: "There’s Been Climate Change" Since Noah’s Flood

by KelleyCooley Posted on February 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Bill Nye the Science Guy took the stage Tuesday night at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., his task was to refute the idea that Biblical creationism is a scientifically valid idea—one that should be taught in schools.

But as we’ve seen again and again, science denial is rarely limited in scope. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Nye’s opponent, museum head Ken Ham, doesn’t just reject evolution; he’s also spreading some rather unscientific ideas about global warming. Appearing on CNN after the debate, Ham informed viewers that “there’s been climate change ever since the flood of Noah’s day.” Ham added that while the climate had warmed “a bit in the past,” it’s now “cooling again.” (Not true.) You can watch Ham and Nye debate climate science in the clip above.

This has been something of a theme for Ham, who says in a series of online videos that this supposed “cooling trend” is “no surprise to creation scientists.” According to Ham: “Western governments have invested so much in the carbon dioxide theory that they probably won’t change their minds any time soon. But scripture tells us what really happened: We live on a young Earth that has undergone radical climate changes from the global flood.”

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Ken Ham: "There’s Been Climate Change" Since Noah’s Flood

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Federal coffers are missing out on what could be billions of dollars in lost revenue due to shoddy accounting work by the office that handles leases for coal mines on public land, according to a report made public today by the investigative arm of Congress.

The Government Accountability Office was asked by Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a stalwart climate hawk, to look into whether the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management routinely sells leases to coal mining companies for far less than their market value. Investigators found that BLM agents in Wyoming (by far the country’s largest coal producer) set prices based on coal’s historic value, but, in contradiction of the department’s own rules, fail to take into account how much it will likely be worth in the future. Similar problems were found in other coal-producing states. As a result, the GAO report claims, many leases were sold far beneath their true market value, depriving taxpayers of additional royalties (which, as it stands, come to about $1 billion per year) that are normally skimmed from the mines’ profits.

“As a net result, the public is getting screwed,” said Tom Kenworthy, an energy analyst at the Center for American Progress who has kept tabs on Interior’s longstanding problems with coal lease valuation.

That the leases are selling for less than they’re worth seems clear; what’s less obvious is exactly how much money is at stake, since the values were never properly set in the first place (the GAO report doesn’t specify a number). A 2012 analysis of federal lease records by former New York State Deputy Comptroller Tom Sanzillo for the independent Institute for Energy Economics found that undervalued coal leases cost the Treasury $28.9 billion in lost revenue since 1983, or almost $1 billion every year. Meanwhile, analysis by Senator Markey’s office put the figure at $200 million, although a spokesperson would not specify the time period to which that applied, as the underlying data are considered proprietary to the Interior Department, he said.

Since 1990, the federal government has leased 107 parcels of public land for coal mining; these parcels typically account for 25-40 percent of the roughly one billion tons of coal produced annually nationwide. That adds up to a massive carbon footprint: Fossil fuels produced on public land create roughly a billion metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution every year, about as much as 285 coal plants.

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

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How 2 Inches of Snow Created a Traffic Nightmare in Atlanta

by ManieFerrell Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared on Conor Sen’s personal site and was published by the Atlantic. It is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

I know what you’re thinking (I grew up outside of D.C. and Boston): “How can 2 inches of snow shut down Atlanta?”

Before I got here, I thought that too. I wonder it every time there’s a run on the grocery stores before a storm, or when some other city cancels schools before a flake has even hit the ground.

And surely, the drivers play a part. I was out getting coffee around noon yesterday, just when things were starting to get bad (at the time there was, at most, a half inch of snow on the ground), and set out to drive my 2 miles home, a straight shot on a fairly major surface street. It took me around 30 minutes. Part of the reason was one of the drivers in front of me (with Tennessee plates) was going 5 miles-per-hour in a 35 miles-per-hour zone with no cars in front of them. But even with my car—2013 model, 10,000 miles on it—I was skidding at times on the gentle incline of a street that hadn’t been treated with sand/salt/gravel at all.

My wife left work in Woodstock, a city 30-35 miles northwest of here, a little after noon yesterday, and took 3.5 hours to get home. She was one of the lucky ones.

Yes, Atlanta has many drivers who are inexperienced in the snow, but for a region that gets a storm (I know, I know “2 inches = storm”) like this at most once every few years, how is anyone supposed to be experienced in the snow? How do you think San Francisco would handle a couple inches of snow? Going north/south on Franklin or Gough, or east/west on Fell or Oak? How do you think the N-Judah out in Cole Valley or the Sunset would handle it? This is a metro area of 6 million people, and it’s time to think beyond “those silly southern drivers.”

Metro areas of 6 million people need to be prepared for anything.

Which leads into the blame game. Republicans want to blame government (a Democrat thing) or Atlanta (definitely a Democrat thing). Democrats want to blame the region’s dependence on cars (a Republican thing), the state government (Republicans), and many of the transplants from more liberal, urban places feel the same way you might about white, rural, southern drivers. All of this is true to some extent but none of it is helpful.

How much money do you set aside for snowstorms when they’re as infrequent as they are? Who will run the show—the city, the county, or the state? How will preparedness work? You could train everyone today, and then if the next storm hits in 2020, everyone you’ve trained might have moved on to different jobs, with Atlanta having a new mayor and Georgia having a new governor.

Regionalism here is hard. The population of this state has doubled in the past 40-45 years, and many of the older voters who control it still think of it as the way it was when they were growing up. The urban core of Atlanta is a minority participant in a state government controlled by rural and northern Atlanta exurban interests. The state government gives MARTA (Atlanta’s heavy rail transportation system) no money. There’s tough regional and racial history here which is both shameful and a part of the inheritance we all have by being a part of this region. Demographics are evolving quickly, but government moves more slowly. The city in which I live, Brookhaven, was incorporated in 2012. This is its first-ever snowstorm (again, 2 inches). It’s a fairly affluent, mostly white, urban small city. We were unprepared too.

The issue is that you have three layers of government—city, county, state—and none of them really trust the other. And why should they? Cobb County just “stole the Braves” from the city of Atlanta. Why would Atlanta cede transportation authority to a regional body when its history in dealing with the region/state has been to carve up Atlanta with highways and never embrace its transit system? Why would the region/state want to give more authority to Atlanta when many of the people in the region want nothing to do with the city of Atlanta unless it involves getting to work or a Braves game?

The region tried, in a very tough economy and political year (2012), to pass a comprehensive transportation bill, a T-SPLOST, funded by a sales tax. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an attempt to do something. The Sierra Club opposed it because it didn’t feature enough transit. The NAACP opposed it because it didn’t have enough contracts for minority businesses. The tea party opposed it because it was a tax. That’s politics in the 2010s. You may snicker, but how good a job has any major city done with big transportation projects over the past 30 years?

As anyone paying attention knows, Atlanta’s finally moving in the right direction. The Beltline build-out is underway and reshaping neighborhoods. Downtown is finally getting some investment, and we’ll see how useful it is, but it’s building a streetcar that will be up and running this year, with plans in the works for extensions. More and more counties in the region are tipping from red to purple/blue (Henry, Gwinnett, soon Cobb), which should help ease some of the racial and partisan tensions associated with regionalism. Most of the development dollars in a region driven by real estate are now flowing to urban, walkable projects. There are increasingly serious conversations about extending MARTA to the north and east. We’ve become one of the top 3 markets in the country for electric vehicle sales.

But clearly, there’s work to be done.

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How 2 Inches of Snow Created a Traffic Nightmare in Atlanta

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No, Climate Change Is Not Waking Bears From Hibernation

by Hedrick Lepsch Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, a rogue black bear made a cameo appearance for skiers at the Heavenly Mountain Resort near Lake Tahoe. The month before, a 260-pound male bear had to be put down by wildlife officials after breaking into several cars and a home in the same area. The spate of run-ins comes as California’s brutal drought lingers on, with snowpack in the Sierra Nevada at a fifth of its normal level, leading several news outlets to suggest that balmy conditions have led bears here to awaken prematurely from their annual winter slumber.

That’s a nice hypothesis, but according to the California Department Fish and Wildlife, there’s nothing to it. Five to 15 percent of the Tahoe area’s 300 black bears stay awake every winter, said CDFW biologist Jason Holley, and “we don’t have any evidence to support that there’s any more this winter.” In fact, Holley said, the last few months of 2013 saw fewer bear complaints than average.

The front page of a recent San Francisco Chronicle. There’s no evidence that more bears are awake this year than in an average year, officials said. Clara Jeffery/Mother Jones

So why all the hullabaloo? Holley’s guess is that the drought cut down supplies of the bears’ natural food sources—mainly grass, berries, and insects, although they’ll eat just about anything—forcing those that are normally awake anyway to wander further afield, i.e., onto your ski slope or into your backyard. Not that the bears mind much.

“They are very adaptive and very mobile, so they will usually be able to take care of their daily needs in a drought situation,” Holley said. “But then they’re coming down to the lake to drink a lot, coming down for food. If the drought persists, it greatly increases the odds of a negative interaction with people.”

What motivates some bears to stay awake while others hibernate is still somewhat of a mystery to scientists, according to Roger Baldwin, a wildlife specialist at the University of California-Davis who has conducted extensive research on bear behavior. When small mammals (a squirrel, say) hibernate, their heart rate and body temperature drop radically, toeing death’s doorstep without actually stepping over, and stay that way for several months. Black bears, on the other hand, are much less extreme: They crank down their metabolism, heart rate, and body temperature just enough to get seriously lazy, but are still with it enough to be “perfectly capable of taking a swipe at you if you crawl into the den with them,” Baldwin said, so rousting them is neither uncommon nor difficult.

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No, Climate Change Is Not Waking Bears From Hibernation

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6 Scary Facts About California’s Drought

by LibbyThalberg Posted on January 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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“Fire season just didn’t end this year.”

The comment came from Scott Miller, the Los Angeles County fire inspector, in the wake of the Colby Fire in the foothills near Los Angeles. The fire is now 30-percent contained, but it serves as the latest reminder that California is facing an increasingly alarming drought—one that yesterday prompted Gov. Edmund Brown, Jr., to declare a state of emergency.

Last year was California’s driest on record for much of the state, and this year, conditions are only worsening. Sixty-three percent of the state is in extreme drought, and Sierra Nevada snowpack is now running at just 10 to 30 percent of normal. “We’re heading into what is near the lowest three year period in the instrumental record” for snowpack, says hydrologist Roger Bales of the University of California-Merced.

Water shortages, devastating wildfires, and growing economic impacts: All could be on the way unless more precipitation arrives, and fast. Here are some scary realities about the drought:

1. It’s Bordering on Unprecedented in Some Areas. According to Christopher Burt, weather historian at Weather Underground, the City of San Francisco has received only 2.12 inches of water so far in this water year. The driest water year on record was from 1850-1851, at 7.42 inches. So as of now, San Francisco is below half of the all-time record low.

2. Time in the Rainy Season is Running Out. California doesn’t get steady rain all year round. Rather, it has a rainy season each year, and we’re currently in it. Typically, the rainy season runs through March; if major precipitation doesn’t arrive by then, it probably won’t be coming. Granted, this is also the chief source of hope right now: California can sometimes get plenty of water in February and March.

3. The Drought Could Lead to Dirtier Energy Use. Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, points out one less-noticed consequence of the drought: The lack of water means less available hydropower. And that has consequences: “Because renewable hydropower is among the cheapest and most versatile of electricity sources,” writes Gleick, “California ratepayers will have to pay for more costly fossil fuels to make up for the difference.” The result, he notes, is likely to be “billions of dollars in added energy costs and generating more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”

4. It’s Setting the Stage for a Devastating Fire Season. Hotter, drier conditions favor wildfires. Indeed, California has already seen several significant fires since the October 31 end of the traditional fire season, including December’s Big Sur fire and the ongoing Colby Fire in the Los Angeles area. That’s a bad sign. So is the fact that in just the first 11 days of January, the state saw 154 fires that burned 598 acres. That’s way above the five-year average for this time of year.

For California, seven of the 10 largest fires in state history have occurred since the year 2000. And if these dry conditions persist throughout 2014, another new fire may be added to that list.

5. It Could Pummel Agriculture. California is an agricultural powerhouse. For crops, the state accounts for 15 percent of national sales and for livestock, 7.1 percent, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. But now farmers are likely to have considerably less water. This won’t lead to agricultural collapse, but it will definitely take a toll. “There will be, in agriculture, fewer plantings, fewer harvests, and revenue of seasonal crops,” says UC-Merced’s Roger Bales. “There could be more expensive pumping of groundwater. And there could be just lower yields if they have less water to apply.”

6. It’s a Sign of What’s to Come. NOAA’s seasonal drought outlook projects persistent or worsening conditions in California through April:

US seasonal drought outlook. National Weather Service

Over the longer term, climate projections suggest that this risk will continue or increase. According to the draft National Climate Assessment, the US Southwest—which includes California and five other states—can expect less precipitation, hotter temperatures, and drier soils in the future, meaning that by 2060, there could be as much as a 35-percent increase in water demand. Along with that comes a 25- to 50-percent increased risk of water shortages.

So even if California gets some much needed rain in the coming months, that’ll only be a short-term reprieve. Right now, the state needs to engage in some major climate adaptation planning, to get ready for a much drier future.

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6 Scary Facts About California’s Drought

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PHOTOS: Koalas, Tennis Players Grapple with Australian Heat Wave

by GenevieveKunkel Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Parts of Australia are in the midst of a massive heat wave, straining resources and sparking fires. Matches had to be suspended at the Australian Open in Melbourne, where temperatures hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Here are photos showing the toll this extreme heat has taken on the country’s forests, animals, and visiting tennis stars.

A fire-fighting helicopter extinguishes a fire burning throughout Victoria’s Grampians region. Country Fire Authority/ZUMA

Fans cool off in a fountain outside the Rod Laver Arena on day five of the Australian Open. Jason O’Brien/ZUMA

Despite the heat, Serena Williams set a tournament record by winning her 61st Australian Open match. Ken Hawkins/ZUMA

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PHOTOS: Koalas, Tennis Players Grapple with Australian Heat Wave

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Global Warming Denial Hits a 6-Year High

by Pauline80x Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The latest data are out on the prevalence of global warming denial among the US public. And they aren’t pretty.

The new study, from the Yale and George Mason research teams on climate change communication, shows a 7-percentage-point increase in the proportion of Americans who say they do not believe that global warming is happening. And that’s just since the spring of 2013. The number is now 23 percent; back at the start of last year, it was 16 percent:

The increase in climate science disbelief. Yale and George Mason University teams on Climate Change Communication.

The percentage of Americans who believe global warming is human-caused has also declined, and now stands at 47 percent, a decrease of 7 percent since 2012.

At the same time, the survey also shows an apparent hardening of attitudes. Back in September 2012, only 43 percent of those who believed that global warming isn’t happening said they were either “very sure” or “extremely sure” about their views. By November of last year, that number had increased to 56 percent.

Overall, more Americans now say they have all the information they need to make up their minds about the climate issue, and fewer say they could easily change their minds:

Increasing righteousness about global warming, on both sides of the issue. Yale and George Mason teams on Climate Change Communication.

The obvious question is, what happened over the last year to produce more climate denial?

According to both Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale and Ed Maibach of George Mason, the leaders of the two research teams, the answer may well lie in the so-called global warming “pause”—the misleading idea that global warming has slowed down or stopped over the the past 15 years or so. This claim was used by climate skeptics, to great effect, in their quest to undermine the release of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report in September 2013—precisely during the time period that is in question in the latest study.

As we have reported before, the notion of a global warming “pause” is, at best, the result of statistical cherry-picking. It relies on starting with a very hot year (1998) and then examining a relatively short time period (say, 15 years), in order to suggest that global warming has slowed down or stopped during this particular stretch of time. But put these numbers back into a broader context and the overall warming trend remains clear. Moreover, following the IPCC report, new research emerged suggesting that the semblance of a “pause” may be the result of incomplete temperature data due to the lack of adequate weather stations in the Arctic, where the most dramatic global warming is occurring.

Nonetheless, widely publicized “pause” claims may well have shaped public opinion. “Beginning in September, and lasting several months, coincident with the release of the IPCC report, there was considerable media attention to the concept of the ‘global warming pause,'” observes Maibach. “It is possible that this simple—albeit erroneous—idea helped to convince many people who were previously undecided to conclude that the climate really isn’t changing.”

“Even more likely, however,” Maibach adds, “is that media coverage of the ‘pause’ reinforced the beliefs of people who had previously concluded that global warming is not happening, making them more certain of their beliefs.”

As Maibach’s colleague Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale adds, it isn’t as though those who were already convinced about global warming became less sure of themselves over the last year. Rather, the change of views “really seems to be happening among the ‘don’t knows,'” says Leiserowitz. “Those are the people who aren’t paying attention, and don’t know much about the issue. So they’re the most open-minded, and the most swayable based on recent events.”

Journalists take heed: Your coverage has consequences. All those media outlets who trumpeted the global warming “pause” may now be partly responsible for a documented decrease in Americans’ scientific understanding.

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Global Warming Denial Hits a 6-Year High

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Planet-Hunter: We’ll Find An “Earth 2.0” Within “10 or 15 Years”

by MeiAllardyce Posted on January 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Last week, a team of astronomers at the Gemini Planet Imager in Chile released the mysterious blue image above. That small bright dot in the lower right of the image is a planet—not a planet in our solar system like Mars or Neptune, but one 63 light-years away. It’s the planet Beta Pictoris b, which orbits the star Beta Pictoris in the southern constellation Pictor. But what’s most exciting about the picture is the technology used to make it, which represents a dramatic improvement in the speed and quality with which scientists will be able to look for other planets—including “Earth 2.0,” a theorized planet much like our own.

The first confirmation that planets exist beyond our solar system came in 1992, when a team of astronomers monitored changes in radio waves to prove that multiple planets were orbiting a small star about 1000 light-years away. Then, in 2005, astronomers created the first actual image of a planet beyond our solar system (the date is arguable because the observation was made in 2004, but not confirmed until a year later). Since then, hundreds more planets have been discovered, and a few others have even been photographed.

So when Gizmodo reported last week that the blue image above was the “first ever image of a planet, orbiting a star,” they didn’t have it quite right. In fact, the image wasn’t even the first time that planet had been photographed. But the GPI images are still extremely exciting: They could mark the beginning of a new era of planet-hunting, thanks to technology developed by a team of astronomers led by Bruce Macintosh of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Frank Marchis, who works for the SETI Institute, a non-profit organization that seeks to explore, understand, and explain the prevalence of life in the universe, is a key member of Macintosh’s planet-hunting team. I met with him in San Francisco last week to discuss the project and the search for Earth 2.0:

MJ: What exactly are we seeing in this image?

FM: Behind this image is a lot of work. This image is simply a planet orbiting around another star. So we call that an exoplanet – an extrasolar planet – because it doesn’t belong to our solar system. It belongs to another planetary system. So this is the grail of modern astronomy. We’re trying desperately now to image those planets because we know they exist. When you observe a planet with the now defunct telescope Kepler, what you’ve been doing is basically detecting the transit – the attenuation of the star’s light – due to the planet passing between us and the star. Now with GPI, the Gemini Planet Imager, which is mounted at the 8 meter class telescope in Chile we’re going to be able to see the planet itself.

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Planet-Hunter: We’ll Find An “Earth 2.0” Within “10 or 15 Years”

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What Do We Know About the Chemical That Just Spilled in West Virginia?

by h7paisjnha Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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The chemical that leaked yesterday into a West Virginia river “hasn’t been studied very well,” says Deborah Blum, a New York Times science columnist who specializes in reporting on chemistry.

A state of emergency was declared for nine West Virginia counties yesterday after a chemical called 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol spilled into the Elk River. The chemical is “used to wash coal of impurities,” according to the Times.

The chemical leaked from a holding tank owned by a company called Freedom Industries, according to West Virginia American Water, a water company operating in the region. At present, the nine counties are under a “do not use” advisory from West Virginia American Water, and residents there do not know when they will be able to turn on their taps.

A rush on bottled water subsequently ensued, as documented in this tweet from a local news anchor:

Undoubtedly much more information will emerge on 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol and how dangerous it is (or isn’t) in water. But to start things off we turned to Blum, who was just a guest on our Inquiring Minds podcast.

“We know methanol is toxic, we know that methylcyclohexane is moderately toxic, but I haven’t seen a full analysis of the entire formula,” says Blum. “Still, I think we can assume there’s nothing here that we’d want to drink or like to see in our rivers.” However, given that it is in the Elk River it will be “very diluted,” she added, and likely will ultimately be broken down and digested by microbes. In the meantime, Blum praised authorities’ cautionary approach.

The fact that relatively little is known about the compound, says Blum, represents “another reminder that we have way too may poorly researched compounds in the toxic registry and we desperately need to update our creaking regulations regarding industrial materials.”

For our recent podcast with Deborah Blum, you can listen here:

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What Do We Know About the Chemical That Just Spilled in West Virginia?

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