Tag Archives: climate

‘Climate denial’ just made it into the dictionary. Wait, what?

by ChristinOlney9 Posted on May 2, 2019

The world is on fire, and so is our vocabulary. Merriam-Webster added 640 new words to its online dictionary last week. The additions include swole (“extremely muscular”), new meanings for snowflake (someone who is “treated as unique or special” or “overly sensitive”) and, you guessed it, a whole batch of neologisms tied to the environment.

“The work of revising a dictionary is constant, and it mirrors the culture’s need to make sense of the world with words,” the dictionary’s announcement reads.

Many of the new arrivals reflect the creative ways big corporations have found to trash the place. Our plastic pollution problem has brought us microplastic, “a piece of plastic that is five millimeters or smaller in size.” The natural gas industry (the folks who gave us “fracking”) introduced flowblack, “liquid used in fracking that returns to the surface after being injected into shale.” Then there’s omnicide, “the destruction of all life or all human life (as by nuclear war).”

Great, you say, any other downers? Of course! Bioaccumulation for the gradual buildup of contaminants, like pesticides and heavy metals, in an organism over time. And chronic wasting disease is an illness that afflicts deer, leading to weight loss, drooling, and listlessness.

For a more cheerful phrase, take bluebird day, “a day marked by cloudless blue skies.” Sounds lovely until you learn about the potential cloudpocalypse (not an official dictionary entry, I just made that up) in which a lack of climate-regulating cloud cover brings about a scary global-warming feedback loop.

Another nice one: petrichor, the name for that pleasant, earthy smell that fills the air after a rain. Contributing to that odor is geosmin — an organic compound created by soil- and water-dwelling bacteria.

The ever-expanding agricultural lexicon brought us a few new selections, such as the verb hydroseed, for the spraying of a liquid seed-mulch-fertilizer mix, along with the easy-to-pronounce insecticide called imidacloprid.

The big surprise for me was that Merriam-Webster’s new additions included two compound nouns, climate change denial and climate change denier. Wait, haven’t those phrases been in frequent use for a long time? The reason for their inclusion gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of the dictionary and the painstaking process of deciding what makes the cut.

“Traditionally, we limited the entries for compounds because we were always trying to conserve space in the printed dictionary,” Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, wrote in an email. The online dictionary lifts this limitation, enabling more space for compounds like screen time and go-cup.

But not all compounds make it into the dictionary. Sokolowski pointed to a “longstanding rule not to enter terms that we consider to be self-evident or self-explanatory.”

Consider the phrase cattle ranch. You can look up the definitions for cattle and ranch and deduce the compound’s meaning. That’s why the phrase isn’t in the dictionary. But dude ranch? A large farm for raising … men? Hence, dude ranch gets an entry.

Whereas the meaning of climate change denial is self-evident, the shortened form climate denial could be confusing for those who don’t spend their days thinking about our planetary crisis. Climate, after all, is just a word for the prevailing weather conditions of an area over time. Why would anyone deny the rain dropping on their head?

“Therefore, because the variant needed entry, the expanded form gets an entry even though its meaning is transparent,” Sokolowski said.

Speaking of transparent, one thing couldn’t be clearer: The climate is changing and humans are the cause, as sure as petrichor after a rain.

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‘Climate denial’ just made it into the dictionary. Wait, what?

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Los Angeles launched its own Green New Deal

by Hiram53B0521 Posted on May 1, 2019

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Los Angeles just launched its very own Green New Deal, setting up the second-largest city in the country to have a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

“Politicians in Washington don’t have to look across the aisle in Congress to know what a Green New Deal is ― they can look across the country, to Los Angeles,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement Monday.

The city’s Green New Deal is an aggressive expansion of the Sustainable City pLAn the mayor created in 2015 to reflect more recent environmental studies that have shown the need for rapid and more radical solutions to combat climate change.

Garcetti was among the handful of mayors and governors to stick with the Paris climate agreement after President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the accord. The mayor said his Green New Deal unveiled Monday is partially driven by his commitment to uphold the Paris Agreement.

The city’s Green New Deal would require all new city-owned buildings and major renovations to be “all-electric,” effective immediately. The plan also hopes to phase out styrofoam and to plant 90,000 trees by 2021, and to end plastic straws and single-use containers by 2028.

The initiative also includes Los Angeles recycling 100 percent of its wastewater by 2035 and building a zero-carbon electricity grid with the goal of reaching an 80 percent renewable energy supply by 2036.

By 2050, the city hopes to create 400,000 green jobs, have every building become emissions-free and halt sending trash to landfills. By then, the city’s plan is expected to save more than 1,600 lives, 660 trips to the hospital and $16 billion in avoided health care expenses every year.

“With flames on our hillsides and floods in our streets, cities cannot wait another moment to confront the climate crisis with everything we’ve got,” Garcetti said. “L.A. is leading the charge, with a clear vision for protecting the environment and making our economy work for everyone.”

Los Angeles joins New York City, the country’s largest and most economically influential city, in working to create more localized climate initiatives as progressive Democratic lawmakers in Washington push for a national Green New Deal, led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) who introduced the resolution with Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in February. New York City passed a historic bill on April 18 capping climate-changing pollution from big buildings and requiring massive cuts to greenhouse gases.

The L.A. City Council passed a motion earlier requiring the city to draft a Green New Deal plan to match Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s resolution, which proposes increasing clean energy development, boosting electric vehicle manufacturing, and guaranteeing high-wage jobs fixing roads and rebuilding bridges.

The resolution in Congress is meant to be more of a guidance to eventually draft federal climate policy, but critics say that it’s a wish list of radical reforms. But the resolution does outline important steps for local leaders to take to combat climate change.

From 2017 to 2018, the number of cities pledging to use 100 percent renewable energy had doubled. More than a dozen states have passed or are considering setting 100 percent clean-electricity targets, according to a March report by consultant group EQ Research.

Some environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, applauded Garcetti for L.A.’s new initiative. But the city’s Sunrise Movement chapter said Monday that the plan will not do enough to combat climate change in time.

“Our generation’s future, as well as the future of Los Angeles and of the world, depends on us reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This is not a goal — it is a deadline,” the group said in a Medium post. “With Mayor Garcetti’s current plan for net-zero emissions by 2050, Los Angeles is on track to be 20 years too late. That is not a Green New Deal.”

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Los Angeles launched its own Green New Deal

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China’s plan to reduce smog in cities basically just moved it to other areas

by CharlaBodin5717 Posted on May 1, 2019

The Beijing air was so polluted, you couldn’t see to the other side of the street. Thousands of parents and children overflowed the hospitals, and rows of babies were hooked up to machines, suffering from respiratory issues. If you zoomed out on a map, the smog cloud covered one-sixth of the entire country.

It was 2013, and the particulate matter in China’s air, often bad, had gone off the charts into a full-on “airpocalypse,” due to increases in iron and steel production, diesel trucking, and coal-fired energy production.  

“A ‘normal bad’ pollution day is like a rating of 160. I think [one] day the rating was above 600,” said Anthony Singleterry, a Seattle resident who was living in Beijing at the time.

In response to the pollution, the Chinese government quickly drafted and launched a plan to mitigate smog in its big cities. It set aggressive clean air goals for the capital region, and met them, too: By 2017, particulate air pollution in the area was reduced by 25 percent.

But, as a team of Chinese and international scientists found, that quick pursuit of cleaner air for cities meant outsourcing much of the country’s coal-based energy production, and with it the air pollution, to poorer neighboring regions.

A new study in Science Advances looks at the unintended harm the plan did to bordering regions.

Under the policy, 53 percent of Beijing’s energy production was moved elsewhere. More rural regions often have less efficient technologies and lower environmental standards.

The study found that the plan actually increased particulate pollution and carbon emissions nationwide. It also resulted in increased water scarcity in the more rural provinces, which are now providing water to the coal plants. Overall, the study said, these measures may just be passing off pollution problems to less-developed regions of the country.

“Our intention is certainly not to blame or discourage environmental policies designed to reduce air pollution,” but rather to examine the unintended side effects of isolated environmental policies, said University of Maryland’s Kuishuang Feng, a co-author of the study. 

Some smog from these new power plants in neighboring areas will also travel back to the cities, canceling out some of the gains made in reaching the 25 percent pollution reduction goal.

“Especially with an issue like air pollution, it’s not the smartest scientific approach to these problems,” Chris Nielsen, executive director of the Harvard-China Project, told Grist and added that policies should be more holistic and long-term. “Chinese environmental air pollution policies can be overly narrow, both in their spatial focus and environmental focus by being single-pollutant driven.”

Nielsen said there is a benefit, though, to the Chinese government in setting such narrow targets: They are easily measured, and easily communicated to the public. Multi-faceted environmental policy takes “messy, complicated science,” he said. “So it’s hard to explain what you’re chasing.”

Lara Cushing, a public health researcher at San Francisco State University, said she’s seen this kind of spillover effect before: here in the states. She’s published work on similar issues with California’s cap-and-trade emissions program.

“The challenge is that without a broader coordinated strategy, there’s these really big problems of leakage — of pollution just moving around,” Cushing said.

After a 2018 study found California had significantly lowered emissions statewide, but at the expense of poorer communities, the state developed its own environmental justice tool to map pollution by county, and show the areas where people are particularly vulnerable to its effects.

The China study is important, Cushing said, because it not only sheds light on the spillover effect; it shows how unintended consequences can impact water and climate, too.

Since meeting its initial goals set after the “airpocalypse” for 2017, China has rolled out a new climate plan that is a bit more comprehensive. Its name translates to: “Action Plan for Winning the Blue Sky War.” No city in China yet meets the World Health Organization’s recommended particulate levels, so the new policy expands air pollution goals to all cities, rather than just those in the capital region.

Since 2013, the Chinese government also restructured its environmental policy staff. Climate policy used to be under the economic and development commission, and now it has its own branch. This was done, according to Nielsen, to allow scientists to coordinate more closely with government officials on policy.

“It’s evidence that the government recognizes, at least to some degree, what is described in this paper,” Nielsen said.

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China’s plan to reduce smog in cities basically just moved it to other areas

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GOP Rep. Mike Simpson: It’s my party, and I’ll fight climate change if I want to

by PhilAthayjkslt Posted on May 1, 2019

In deep red Idaho, out of sight of the national news media and out of reach of the Twitterati, a real-live Republican member of Congress acknowledged the existence of climate change and even proposed taking action.

“Climate change is a reality,” said Mike Simpson, a Republican Congressman from Idaho, at a conference in Boise last week. “It’s not hard to figure out. Go look at your thermometer.”

Simpson knew he might hear a record scratch when he broke out of the well-worn Republican grooves. After stepping to the lectern, he joked that anyone carrying matches or lighters should pass them to the authorities as a security measure to prevent heads from bursting into flames.

Simpson was there to say he wanted to see Idaho’s mountain lakes full of salmon again, even if it meant tearing down the dams that the state’s politicians have defended for decades. Dams, climate change, and predators all threaten the fish, and Simpson said he was ready to consider all options. It was clear to anyone watching his speech he feels a spiritual obligation to save salmon.

Recounting a trip to a spawning creek in the Sawtooth Mountains in central Idaho, Simpson paused to swallow hard a couple of times. Only one salmon made it to those shallows, he said, to “create its bed, lay its eggs and die. It was the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one. These are the most,” he paused for a deep breath, “most incredible creatures I think that God’s created. It’s a cycle God has created. We shouldn’t mess with it.”

This break with standard Republican talking points has people asking if he had “gone over to the dark side,” Simpson said. “I’ve had people say to my chief of staff, we don’t even like someone of Simpson’s seniority asking these questions.” And in the run up to this speech, he said his office was fielding calls from nervous people asking, “What’s Simpson going to say at this?”

Of course, Simpson isn’t the first Republican advocating for action on climate change, but most of those politicians differ from Simpson in one important way: They come from swing districts. In fact, the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the House of Representatives (Simpson isn’t a member) has a hard time keeping Republicans because voters keep kicking them out in favor of Democrats. Former representatives Carlos Curbelo, Mia Love, and Peter Roskam are exhibits A, B, and C.

Simpson was just elected to his 11th term in the House, so he isn’t pivoting left to get in front of his voters. Elections in Idaho are usually decided in the Republican primaries (personal aside: I started my reporting career covering politics — and everything else — in Idaho). In this part of the country, tacking to the right is smart politics; tacking to the left is often political suicide.

Simpson’s suggestion to consider tearing down dams is, if anything, even more taboo than an embrace of action to curb climate change. “In the past, the people talking about removing dams have been the environmentalists outside screaming and throwing pebbles against the walls of the halls of power,” said Sean O’Leary, communications director for the NW Energy Coalition a regional conservation group. “Now Simpson is saying the same things.”

In black and white text, Simpson’s words may read like political hyperbole — but it didn’t come across that way in the room.

“I looked over to my right and Simpson’s wife was sitting there with tears in her eyes,” O’Leary said. “No, this was genuine.”

In his speech, Simpson said he wanted to study every possible salmon fix, including removing four dams on the Lower Snake River, just across the border in Washington state. But this is about a lot more than fish. The public power agency that sells electricity from the 31 federal dams in the Northwest, the Bonneville Power Administration, is in deep trouble. It’s paying billions to try and rescue salmon, which drives electric rates up, Simpson explained. As a result, utilities and rural electric co-ops are thinking about buying electricity elsewhere, especially now that the combination of natural gas and renewables is providing cheaper rates.

Simpson sees the BPA’s problem as an opportunity: Maybe there’s a way to fix the salmon runs and the BPA in one fell swoop.

Everyone knows the status quo isn’t working, Simpson said. After electricity-bill payers and taxpayers spent some $16 billion on salmon, the fish population is still dwindling. Farmers from Idaho are sending precious water downstream to keep water cool for salmon smolt without seeing any increase in the number of fish that come back upstream. The situation isn’t great for anyone, Simpson argued, but all parties are so focused on protecting what they have that they’re unwilling to consider big changes. “We’ve got to stop thinking that way,” he said.

Simpson’s appeal might just work because he’s dealing with a regional issue, where the tangible facts can replace the hallucinations that accompany partisan rage. While national politics might seem like it’s all about rooting your side on, Idaho is full of farmers, outfitters, fishers, and electricity buyers who are more interested in finding solutions, said Justin Hayes, program director of the Idaho Conservation League. And all these people can see that the status quo is failing.

“It’s clear to everyone that the strategy of ‘our interests are more important than your interests, let’s fight’ doesn’t work,” Hayes said.

How does climate change enter into this? Well, removing dams would take a good chunk of clean electricity off the grid. So Simpson wants to replace the dams with new forms of power built in the region. He pointed to the Idaho National Lab’s work on new types of nuclear reactors. In eastern Washington, he said the Pacific Northwest National Lab is “the leader in battery storage in this country.”

So Simpson believes there’s a way to turn this whole mess into a surge of business for Idaho. In that way, he’s not straying from his red-state brand at all. But Simpson is unusual in that he’s willing to shake things up and make himself vulnerable, all to create the possibility of change.

The speech ended with Simpson looking to the end of his own life and his political legacy. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to stay alive long enough to see salmon return in healthy populations in Idaho … We need to do it for future generations.”

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GOP Rep. Mike Simpson: It’s my party, and I’ll fight climate change if I want to

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Green New Deal activists make first 2020 endorsement in wildfire-burned California

by DarrylWindham92 Posted on April 30, 2019

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Green New Dealers are making their first endorsement of the 2020 election.

At a rally on Saturday, Sunrise Movement, the youth-led grassroots group whose protests pushed the Green New Deal into the political mainstream, endorsed Audrey Denney, an agricultural educator running to replace Rebulican Representative Doug LaMalfa in California’s wildfire-scorched 1st congressional district.

“She’s spent her life working to help farmers and rural communities in the district put food on the table for their families and be part of environmental solutions,” Varshini Prakash, Sunrise Movement’s co-founder, said in a statement. “Representative LaMalfa’s constituents are dying because of climate change, yet he’s spent his career in Washington cozying up with the same oil and gas lobbyists who profited at the expense of his constituents’ lives.”

The rally, the latest stop on Sunrise Movement’s tour to promote the Green New Deal, took place in Chico, a northern California city with nearly 94,000 residents, which was hit repeatedly last year by deadly wildfires.

LaMalfa, who rejects what he calls the “bad science” behind climate change, beat Denney last November to win a fourth term.

But the Democrat faced extraordinary personal challenges in her debut bid for elected office. She advanced to the general election despite entering the primary race late. But midway through the campaign, she underwent surgery after her doctor diagnosed a football-sized tumor on her ovary. Eighteen hours after her procedure, she shot a video from her hospital bed reflecting on the limited healthcare access in her district.

She lost the race but managed to shrink LaMalfa’s usual 20 percent margin of victory to 9 percent. At the time, Sunrise Movement — then a much smaller operation working on just a handful of progressive campaigns, including that of New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  — did not endorse her. But this time the group is betting that its newfound clout and the sobering climate realities that voters in California’s 1st now face will propel Denney to victory in 2020.

Already last summer, the Carr Fire ripped through the district, killing eight. But, days after the election, a utility equipment failure ignited the Camp Fire. By the time its final flames went out, the blaze killed 85, reduced the entire town of Paradise to ash and displaced thousands in the deadliest wildfire in California history. Though mostly spared, the Chico City Council declared a climate change emergency earlier this month.

“In 2018, 93 lives were lost in my district in the Carr and Camp Fires,” Denney said in a statement. “I’m running for Congress because we need a representative who is only beholden to their constituents, not to corporate interests and political gamesmanship.”

Denney pledged to reject money from fossil fuel companies and executives, and she vowed if elected to support Green New Deal legislation in Congress. That stands in stark contrast to LaMalfa, who’s received over $162,330 from energy and natural resource corporate political action committees and over $100,000 from the oil and gas lobby, according to data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. A LaMalfa spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Sunrise Movement is expected to play an expanded role in 2020. Last November, the group’s protests mainstreamed the Green New Deal, a movement for a sweeping national plan to zero out emissions and provide clean-energy and climate infrastructure jobs to millions. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey released a joint resolution outlining the core values of a Green New Deal in February. With notable exceptions, including former Vice President Joe Biden, nearly every major contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination backed the plan.

The group is in the midst of a nationwide tour with roughly 250 events at churches, classrooms and town halls meant to drum up support for the Green New Deal.

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Green New Deal activists make first 2020 endorsement in wildfire-burned California

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Headed for a reckoning: A look inside NYT Magazine’s climate issue

by Elva Diller Posted on April 12, 2019

This Sunday, subscribers to New York Times Magazine will receive a noteworthy issue in their mailboxes. Its theme is climate change, marking the second time in eight months that the magazine has dedicated an entire issue to the pressing problem.

The first was Nathaniel Rich’s “Losing Earth,” which took up an entire issue last August and was reportedly the longest article ever published in the magazine. The 30,000-word piece covered the decade between 1979 and 1989 when humanity had a decent chance at putting a serious dent in the climate problem. (That article was recently turned into a book.)

This time, the so-called Climate Issue features several shorter articles instead of a single massive one, and those pieces look at the present and the future, rather than back at the past. It amounts to the Times’ most comprehensive look to date at the economics of climate change. Some highlights from the forthcoming issue:

“The Next Reckoning: Capitalism and Climate Change”

When the “Losing Earth” issue came out, it received some criticism for letting oil companies off the hook for their role in fomenting the political indecision that continues to plague Congress. Lo and behold, the new issue features a second article by Rich that offers a scathing rebuke of corporations for their ruthless pursuit of easy profits.

“It has become commonplace to observe that corporations behave like psychopaths,” he writes, calling out ExxonMobil by name. “They are self-interested to the point of violence, possess a vibrant disregard for laws and social mores, have an indifference to the rights of others and fail to feel remorse.” He wonders whether capitalism is fundamentally at odds with climate action and ends his piece with the assertion that coercion — economic, political, or moral — “must be the remedy” to whipping corporations into shape.

“The Problem With Putting a Price on the End of the World”

Another article from Sunday’s issue evaluates the obstacles to putting a price on climate change. Opinion columnist David Leonhardt, with help from a couple of prominent economists, weighs the pros and cons of carbon pricing and tries to uncover why that particular policy for reducing emissions is losing favor in the public square. The central question, he writes, “is whether any policy is both big enough to matter and popular enough to happen.”

“Climate Chaos Is Coming — and the Pinkertons Are Ready”

Journalist Noah Gallagher Shannon’s piece about a private security contractor prepping for climate fallout paints a bleak and fascinating picture of a future in which huge corporate clients turn to third parties to protect themselves against upheaval.

Turns out, that world is already here. Pinkerton, an agency originally formed in the mid-1800s “in response to the lawlessness of the frontier,” is rebranding itself as disaster-security-for-hire prepared to mitigate the risks of climate change for its clients: hurricanes, mass migration, violence, food shortages, and more.

Shannon observed a talk by Pinkerton’s senior vice president in charge of the Americas: “‘You’re going to turn to desperate measures,’ he said. Everybody will. The other Pinkertons nodded.”

What services, exactly, do the Pinkertons offer? “Armed warehouse defense, executive extraction, 24-hour surveillance, chartered helicopters and planes, escorted cargo shipments.” As Shannon writes, “Pinkerton sells safety.” Climate change is the new threat.

Whereas the New York Times Magazine’s previous climate-themed issue focused on a single narrative, its second foray into the world of climate writing puts a lineup of articles in conversation with one another about the economic, political, and moral feasibility of reigning in climate change.

In sum, the Climate Issue gives you a good idea of where humanity is headed if a policy that is both “big enough to matter and popular enough to happen” doesn’t come around soon: nowhere good.

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Headed for a reckoning: A look inside NYT Magazine’s climate issue

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Traffic pollution leads to 4 million child asthma cases every year

by PeterWeinstein8 Posted on April 11, 2019

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Four million children develop asthma every year as a result of air pollution from cars and trucks, equivalent to 11,000 new cases a day, a landmark study has found.

Most of the new cases occur in places where pollution levels are already below the World Health Organization limit, suggesting toxic air is even more harmful than thought.

Guardian Graphic / Source: Achakulwisut et al, Lancet Planetary Health

The damage to children’s health is not limited to China and India, where pollution levels are particularly high. In U.K. and U.S. cities, the researchers blame traffic pollution for a quarter of all new childhood asthma cases.

Canada has the third highest rate of new traffic-related asthma cases among the 194 nations analyzed, while Los Angeles and New York City are in the top 10 worst cities out of the 125 assessed. Children are especially vulnerable to toxic air and exposure is also known to leave them with stunted lungs.

The research, published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health, is the first global assessment of the impact of traffic fumes on childhood asthma based on high-resolution pollution data.

“Our findings suggest that millions of new cases of pediatric asthma could be prevented by reducing air pollution,” said Susan Anenberg, a professor at George Washington University. Asthma can cause deadly seizures.

The key pollutant, nitrogen dioxide, is produced largely by diesel vehicles, many of which emit far more than allowed on the road even after the Dieselgate scandal. “Improving access to cleaner forms of transport, like electrified public transport, cycling and walking, would reduce asthma, enhance physical fitness, and cut greenhouse gas emissions,” said Anenberg.

“This landmark study shows the massive global burden of asthma in children caused by traffic pollution,” said Chris Griffiths, professor at Queen Mary University of London and the co-director of the Asthma U.K. Center for Applied Research, who was not part of the research team. “Asthma is only one of the multiple adverse effects of pollution on children’s health. Governments must act now to protect children.”

Guardian Graphic / Source: Achakulwisut et al, Lancet Planetary Health

The new study combined detailed NO2 pollution data with asthma incidence rates and population numbers. Many large studies have already shown a strong link between traffic pollution and childhood asthma and that pollution causes damaging inflammation. This data on risks was used to calculate the number of new cases around the world.

“From the weight of evidence, there is likely a strong causal relationship between traffic pollution and childhood asthma incidence,” said Ploy Achakulwisut, also at George Washington University and the lead author of the new study. “So we can be confident that traffic pollution has a significant effect on childhood asthma incidence.”

The epidemiological evidence for NO2 being the key pollutant is the strongest. However, researchers cannot rule out that other pollutants also pumped out by vehicles, such as tiny particles, are also a factor as it is not possible to experiment directly on people.

“Childhood asthma has reached global epidemic proportions,” said Rajen Naidoo, professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and not involved in the study. It indicates that 1 in 8 of all new cases is due to traffic pollution. “An important outcome from this study is the evidence that the existing WHO standards are not protective against childhood asthma.”

The country with the highest national rate of childhood asthma attributed to traffic pollution is South Korea, with almost a third of all new cases blamed on vehicles. Japan and Belgium are in the top 10, along with six Middle Eastern nations, including Saudi Arabia.

Due to their high populations and pollution levels, the top three countries for the total number of new children getting asthma each year are China (760,000), India (350,000), and the U.S. (240,000). The scientists said their research may underestimate the true levels in many poorer nations where asthma often goes undiagnosed.

“While it is important for parents to try to reduce individual exposure, maybe by avoiding highly congested roads as much as possible, not everyone can do this,” said Achakulwisut. “So it is important to call for policy initiatives to tackle pollution at city, state and national levels.”

“The good news is that a transition to zero-emission vehicles is already underway,” she said. Some countries and cities are pledging to phase out internal combustion engines and policies such as London’s new ultra-low emission zone are being rolled out. “But this transition needs to become global, and it needs to happen faster. Each year of delay jeopardizes the health of millions of children worldwide.”

Penny Woods, chief executive of the British Lung Foundation, said: “We used to think the only real danger roads posed to children was the threat of a car accident. However, now we can see there’s an equally deadly risk: breathing in air pollution. Rightly, there’s been a huge effort to reduce road accidents and we need to see an equal commitment to reducing toxic air.”

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Traffic pollution leads to 4 million child asthma cases every year

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The Weather Channel’s new climate change video is … really intense

by SonGodson3899 Posted on April 10, 2019

“The Arctic — the fastest warming area on Earth,” Weather Channel meteorologist Jen Carfagno narrates in a new video as the camera speeds you under an iceberg arch, through the spray from a breaching whale, and past ice-capped peaks so realistic you can almost feel the Arctic chill. “Changes here are drastic, undeniable, and all too real.”

It’s the latest in a Weather Channel video series that uses immersive mixed reality technology to help you visualize extreme weather up close. The first video went viral last September, when meteorologist Erika Navarro was virtually transported from the studio to a flooded neighborhood street in North Carolina to demonstrate storm-surge projections for Hurricane Florence in person.

“For 30 years, weather presentation has been very consistent,” Michael Potts, the vice president of design at the Weather Channel, told New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. “Usually it’s a person in front of a map. We wanted to engage the audience more and find a way to go deeper into the science of weather.”

And, in this latest video, they do. Instead of regurgitating statistics or presenting another doomsday scenario, the video portrays global warming in a gripping yet realistic way, transporting you from a rooftop above flooded city streets to a rocky coast in front of a collapsing iceberg. Carfagno takes you from 1851 to 2100, visiting Charleston, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; and Greenland’s famous Jakobshavn Glacier — all in the span of under two minutes. How’s that for high-speed time travel?

Using an immersive graphics technique popular in video games to produce the clip, the Weather Channel hopes to turn climate change into a vivid experience for viewers.

“By engaging our senses of sight and sounds — and our tendency to focus on things that move — they earn our full attention, and are experienced more like real lived experience than like book learning,” Edward Maibach, director of George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication, told the Verge.

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The Weather Channel’s new climate change video is … really intense

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Is Bolsonaro the Trump of the Tropics or is Trump the Bolsonaro of the States?

by AndraAntoine Posted on April 10, 2019

A document released earlier this week revealed that the Brazilian government is considering axing its current Environment Council and replacing it with political appointees from far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, also known as the “Trump of the Tropics.” The current Environment Council, known as CONAMA, is the policymaking body tasked with protecting 60 percent of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.

CONAMA has nearly 100 members from all levels of government and society. Supporters of the plan say CONAMA is a “confusing” body that “acts emotionally, without due technique, being subjected to ideological interference.

“This is a profoundly ironic statement coming from members of the Bolsonaro regime,” Christian Poirier, a program director with the nonprofit Amazon Watch, told Grist. “The very same contention can be made about their form of government, which is deeply confusing, emotional, and ideological.”

It’s been just over a hundred days since Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, known as the “Trump of the Tropics,” took office. As a candidate, Bolsonaro often questioned the reality of climate change and claimed environmental protections restrained Brazil’s economic growth by holding back mining and agriculture. Since he’s been in power, he’s spent the bulk of his time weakening environmental restrictions, prioritizing industry interests, and cracking down on environmental activists. In other words, he’s not exactly the kind of guy environmentalists are keen to make more political appointments related to Amazonian protections.

“Bolsonaro’s environmental policy can be Orwellian to the extreme,” Poirer said.

Bolsonaro is well on his way to following through with his promises to rip up protected areas in the Amazon and gut other areas protected for Indigenous communities. The deforestation numbers from his first two months in office are already concerning. According to Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian advocacy group, there has been a 54 percent rise in deforestation in the Amazon-Xingu basin since Bolsonaro took power — the equivalent of 170,000 trees found a day. (Given that January and February are high rainfall months, it’s difficult to determine the full extent of the damage at this time.)

One of Bolsonaro’s first acts as president was to strip the country’s National Indian Foundation of much of its authority to demarcate and declare protected territory for Indigenous reserves. That authority has instead shifted to the Ministry of Agriculture, run by Bolsonaro appointee Ricardo Salles, who has called climate change “secondary” and says that agribusiness is “under threat.”

Bolsonaro has promised that he will not “give the Indians another inch of land.” And his rhetoric hasn’t stopped there — he took a particular interest in MST aka The Landless Worker’s Movement, a group that advocates for small landholders and subsistence farmers, referring to them as terrorists. “These red outlaws will be banished from our homeland,” Bolsonaro said in an address last November. “It will be a clean up the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history.”

Brazil is known as the deadliest place in the world for environmental defenders, many of whom are a part of indigenous communities.

Indigenous groups are, naturally, concerned. Dinamã Tuxá, Coordinator of Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples, told Amazon Watch, “[Bolsonaro’s] discourse gives those who live around indigenous lands the right to practice violence without any sort of accountability. Those who invade indigenous lands and kill our people will be esteemed. He represents an institutionalization of genocide in Brazil.”

During the Fourth Session of the United Nations Environmental Assembly in Nairobi, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles said Brazil could neither support nor sign environmental agreements that went against the country’s agribusiness sector. Salles claimed Brazil’s carbon emissions have fallen by about 72 percent since 2004, but failed to mention that that decline stopped in 2012.

It’s no surprise Bolsonaro’s appointees are pushing for industry interests. Bolsonaro is backed by some of the most powerful political players in Brazil: the ruralista bloc. The ruralistas are a political group linked to agribusiness and contend that environmental regulations in the country are too stringent, instead proposing agribusiness should be allowed to expand unrestricted.

Bolsonaro’s time in office has gotten a fair bit of U.S. coverage, with many stories focusing on the danger he and his administration poses to the Amazon rainforest, one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks. But lest Americans get too greener-than-thou, it’s important to note just how much Bolsonaro’s actions have drawn inspiration from our own Commander-in-Chief.

President Trump has signed several executive orders to reduce the size of national monuments and protected areas (some of which are considered sacred lands by indigenous groups) in order to allow for industry to open them up to oil and gas drilling and rake in the profits. Before taking office, Trump described the Environmental Protection Agency as a “disgrace” that should largely be dismantled. Moreover, former EPA head Scott Pruitt was an oil and gas industry man who has drawn parallels to Brazil’s Ricardo Salles, a convicted environmental criminal running the Brazilian Environmental Ministry. One of Pruitt’s appointees, Tony Cox, recently recommended the EPA dismiss the vast majority of evidence air pollution is bad for human health as it reassesses its national air quality standards.

There’s little doubt the two anti-environmental world leaders are fans of each other. When Bolsonaro threatened to jettison the Paris Climate Agreement, he was following Trump’s lead (though some speculate Bolsonaro has since backtracked from this promise). And yes, Bolsonaro has been a guest at Trump’s White House.

So, is Bolsonaro the Trump of the Tropics or is Trump the Bolsonaro of the States?

Continued – 

Is Bolsonaro the Trump of the Tropics or is Trump the Bolsonaro of the States?

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Amazon accused of abandoning 100 percent renewable energy goal

by IndiraRxm3 Posted on April 9, 2019

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Amazon has been accused of abandoning a much-publicized goal of running its data centers on 100 percent renewable energy — instead focusing its attention on winning business from the oil and gas industry.

According to a Greenpeace report released earlier this year, some of Amazon’s most important data centers in Virginia, where the company has committed to building its second HQ, are powered by only 12 percent renewable energy. Across the company as a whole, Amazon reached 50 percent renewable usage in 2018, and has not issued any updates since.

This week, a report from the tech news site Gizmodo suggested one reason for the slowdown was Amazon’s increasing focus on bringing on board large oil and gas companies as Amazon Web Service customers.

The figures represent slow progress towards the goal, first announced in 2014, to power the entire company using renewables, and have led some to accuse Amazon of abandoning the goal entirely.

Alongside the organization’s report, Greenpeace’s Elizabeth Jardim said: “Despite Amazon’s public commitment to renewable energy, the world’s largest cloud computing company is hoping no one will notice that it’s still powering its corner of the internet with dirty energy.

“Unless Amazon and other cloud giants in Virginia change course, our growing use of the internet could lead to more pipelines, more pollution and more problems for our climate.”

Gizmodo’s report cited Andrew Jassy, the AWS chief executive, who told an oil and gas conference in Houston last month: “A lot of the things that we have built and released recently have been very much informed by conversations with our oil and gas customers and partners.”

Gizmodo contrasted his statement with another, reported in December, from the AWS executive Peter DeSantis, who “told colleagues inside the company that renewable energy projects are too costly and don’t help it win business.”

Amazon’s renewables record is in stark contrast to some of its competitors, most notably Google, which reported success in reaching 100 percent renewables use in 2017. “Our engineers have spent years perfecting Google’s data centers, making them 50 percent more energy-efficient than the industry average,” the company’s head of technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, said at the time.

“But we still need a lot of energy to process trillions of Google searches every year, play more than 400 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute and power the products and services that our users depend on. That’s why we began purchasing renewable energy – to reduce our carbon footprint and address climate change. But it also makes business sense.”

A year later, Apple declared its “retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries” were powered by 100 percent clean energy. Facebook has committed to do the same by 2020.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Amazon accused of abandoning 100 percent renewable energy goal

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