What Really Happens When You Recycle Wrong?
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We just got our disaster bill and it was $306 billion
Highways turned into rivers with white-capped waves in Texas. Wildfire smoke reddened the sky in California. And the country’s signature “amber waves of grain” were parched by drought, leaving farmers with fields of gray, cracked soil in Montana.
In all, the United States was hit by 16 weather events last year that cost more than $1 billion each, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calculated. Piece them together, and you get the story of a climate transformed by human activity — and a country racked by wild weather that cost us a record-shattering $306 billion.
That price tag is four times more than average over the past decade, adjusted for inflation. It was nearly off the charts.
2008, 2011, 2012, and 2017 experienced one or more tropical cyclones.Grist / Amelia Bates / NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
Last year blew past the previous record for disasters, $215 billion, set in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck. The priciest natural disasters tend to be hurricanes, which explains why 2017 was so different. Harvey, Irma, and Maria were three of the five most expensive hurricanes in U.S. history, and they all hit in one year. The three accounted for 87 percent of the bill.
Western wildfires racked up $18 billion in damages, tripling the price tag of the previous worst wildfire year, 1991.
Severe storms, flooding and drought afflicted people across the country. But the Northeast was the only region spared from a disaster that caused $1 billion or more in damages.
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
Given how much time we’ve devoted to talking about climate change’s fingerprints on everything, you’d suspect its criminal record would be well-documented. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how climate change affects a particular storm or heatwave, scientists are getting better at untangling the connection. For example, researchers calculated that the chances of a Harvey-esque storm hitting Texas was made six times more likely because of climate change.
Oh, and did we mention that last year was the third-hottest on record? Thank goodness it’s over. But don’t get excited — extreme weather is already creeping in to the new year. In just the first nine days of 2018, the weather has already dealt us deadly mudslides and a bomb cyclone.
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Teenagers Are Having Fewer Kids—Here’s Why
Mother Jones
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The number of teenage women having children has hit an all-time low, thanks in large part to increased contraceptive access and use among Hispanic and African American teenagers, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For decades, the United States has had higher rates of teen pregnancy than most other developed countries. But recent increases in access to contraception, particularly to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) such as IUDs and implants, have helped women of all ages reduce the chances of unintended pregnancy. Since 2002, LARC use has increased five-fold, with most of that change being due to greater use of IUDs.
Though the CDC stopped short of completely attributing the drop in teen births to contraceptives like LARCs, according to the report “preliminary data” suggests that the use of evidence-based reproductive health services, including contraceptives, is what has led to the huge drop in childbirth among young women over the last ten years.
The drop was particularly notable among Hispanic and African American teenagers. Birth rates for young Hispanic women fell 51 percent since 2006, and for black teenagers 44 percent. That’s a big deal, because Hispanic and African American teenagers have historically had much higher rates of teen pregnancies than their white counterparts. Ten years ago, the birth rate for Hispanic teens was nearly 80 births per 1,000 women, but the rate for white teens was around 25. Now, the rate for Hispanic women is closer to 40.
Still, even though the number of white teens having children has also decreased, black and Hispanic teens still have twice as many pregnancies as their white peers. According to the report, that’s because social inequalities, like income and education, and employment opportunities, remain low in communities of color and influence rates of teen pregnancy.
“The United States has made remarkable progress in reducing both teen pregnancy and racial and ethnic differences,” CDC Director Tom Frieden told the Washington Post. “But the reality is, too many American teens are still having babies.”
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Tagged according, african-american, centers, control, disease-control, prevention, radius, reproductive rights, states, washington, white
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We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever
Mother Jones
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The meat industry’s massive appetite for antibiotics just keeps growing. That’s the takeaway from the Food and Drug Administration’s latest annual assessment of the issue, which found that agricultural use of “medically important” antibiotics—the ones that are prescribed to people when they fall ill—grew a startling 23 percent between 2009 and 2014. Over the same period, the total number of cows and pigs raised on US farms actually fell a bit, and the number of chickens held steady. What that’s telling us is that US meat production got dramatically more antibiotic-dependent over that period.
Even more disheartening, medically important antibiotic use crept up 3 percent in 2014 compared to the previous year—despite the FDA’s effort to convince the industry to voluntarily ramp down reliance on such crucial medicines. True, the FDA’s policy, which was first released in 2012, contained a “three-year time frame for voluntary phase-in.” One might have hoped, however, that by 2014, the needle would point downward, not implacably upward.
Note, too, that the last time the FDA saw fit to release numbers on human antibiotic use, in 2011, the total stood at about 3.3 million kilograms. The chart below tells us that farms now using nearly 9.5 million kilograms—nearly three times as much. The news comes in the wake of warnings from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control that the meat industry’s drug habit contributes to a growing crisis in antibiotic-resistant pathogens that kill 23,000 people each year in the United States and 700,000 globally. Then there was the recent news that in China—which has patterned its meat industry on the antibiotic-ravenous US model—a strain of E. coli had evolved on hog farms that can resist a potent antibiotic called colistin, considered a last resort for pathogens that can resist all other drugs.
Here are the numbers:
FDA
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We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever
What Particular Kind of Death Is Your State Known For?
Mother Jones
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You might have seen a map floating around in the last couple days showing what the most distinctive cause of death is in each state (see methodology and full write-up here). It was a pretty neat (if clinical and somewhat creepy) way of showing some interesting trends going on around the country.
To make the map (published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this week), Francis P. Boscoe and Eva Pradhan, both at the New York State Department of Health, took data from 2001 to 2010 and calculated state rates of death for each of the 113 causes tracked by the CDC. They then divided those answers by the national rates of death for those specific causes. As Tech Times pointed out, the most distinctive cause doesn’t necessarily mean high numbers. Rather, the map shows a cause of death for each state that occurs at higher rates than in the rest of the country.
Here’s a look at what the CDC found, with the causes of death translated from medical speak into plain English:
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Mark Zuckerberg Just Donated $25 Million to Fight Ebola
Mother Jones
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have donated $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help combat the Ebola crisis, which has killed more than 4,400 people in West Africa. Zuckerberg announced the nice chunk of cash via his Facebook on Tuesday:
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Post by Mark Zuckerberg.
Scaremongers in Congress and the media have Americans in a tizzy about Ebola: Nearly two-third of Americans now fear the virus will soon infect them or or someone they know. Although Zuckerberg’s donation won’t do much to quell the the panic, it’s certainly a nice response to recent criticism that Silicon Valley types have done little-to-nothing to combat the ongoing public health crisis.
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