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Why I Love a Good Clothes Swap

by AmeliaPulkkinen81 Posted on June 8, 2019

Back in middle school, when shopping was a favorite pastime but?spending money was hard to come by (that allowance didn’t stretch very far), my little clutch of girlfriends and I invented what we thought was an ingenious way to expand our wardrobes for free. We called this grand exchange a “clothes swap.”

Each season, one of us would host?a party?to which we’d bring a haul of items that we’d grown out of or grown tired of. After arranging ourselves on the floor in a circle, wares displayed, we’d take turns holding up an item for “bid.” From there, it was up to expert female negotiation, complete with try-ons, to decide who got what. (Talk about diplomacy!)

By the time we were finished, each of us would walk away with?a whole new bag of clothes, filled to the top with cute pieces of clothing from the others’ closets. At the end of the season, we’d return what was?borrowed, deciding whether what we’d given away was worth missing, then gradually evolving our wardrobes?from there. It was magic!

Later on, I realized that we weren’t the only ones onto the idea that sharing is caring. In fact, clothes swaps have become a very popular party format. I mean, who doesn’t love the idea of getting something new to wear without having to spend a dime?

So many of us?find ourselves blankly staring at our closets each morning wondering how we could possibly have nothing to wear. Despite wardrobes overflowing with shoes, tees, dresses and jackets, we still grow tired of seeing the same pieces day after day. And when the urge to shop strikes, our wallets (and knowledge of our destructive consumeristic tendencies) halt us in our tracks.

A clothes swap solves all of these problems at once. It’s free, has no environmental impact and helps inject a little novelty into our wardrobes just when we need it most. Really, it’s a fantastic idea!

Sound like something you could get into? All you need is willing participants, a few guidelines for the group and keen minds ready to barter! Here are some ideas to get you started.

How to Host a Clothes Swap

1. Invite?a mix of guests?within a similar size range or make the party accessories only (shoes, bags, scarves, jewelry).

2. Set rules that will help create a calm, polite space for negotiating. Settle on a specific number of items to bring (say, 10 or so), set up a lottery system for picking order, and lay out some criteria for the quality items.

3. Encourage browsing and bartering, clear space for a makeshift fitting room and set a fixed amount of time for the swap. You could even display all the items like you might in a boutique!

4. Set out snacks and drinks to establish a leisurely pace to the evening. The last thing you want is a selfish frenzy! It’s all just for fun, after all. This isn’t a sample sale.

5. Donate any pieces that are leftover. There’s no pressure for every last straggling item to be taken home.

If your first clothes swap goes well, it might just become a regular event, like it did for my friends and I back when we were kids. Hold a swap once per season, or make it an annual bash that brings together friends from a variety of different social circles. Your closet will?be glad you did!

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Why I Love a Good Clothes Swap

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The Koch brothers are funding Facebook’s newest fact-checking partner

by MattieNsk58774 Posted on April 29, 2019

Is Facebook trying to solve its fake news problem by partnering with … climate deniers?

Last week, social media giant Facebook announced that it would be partnering with CheckYourFact.com, the fact-checking offshoot of the Koch-funded, right-leaning news outlet The Daily Caller. The fact-checking site will help provide third-party oversight of Facebook’s news content, including stories about global warming.

The Check Your Fact site says it is “non-partisan” and “loyal to neither people nor parties,” describing itself as an “editorially independent” subsidiary from The Daily Caller, though it receives funding from both The Daily Caller and the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Daily Caller was founded by Fox News political analyst Tucker Carlson, who is known for hosting climate deniers on his show.

Critics say the deal say the partnership is a case of a fox guarding the hen house (Or, at least, Fox News guarding the greenhouse). “It is truly disturbing to hear that Facebook, already known to be a dubious organization with an ethically challenged CEO, is partnering with ‘Daily Caller,’ which is essentially a climate change-denying Koch Brothers front group masquerading as a media outlet,” leading climatologist Michael Mann told E&E News. “If they fail to cease and desist in outsourcing their ‘fact-checking’ to this bad faith, agenda-driven outlet, they will face serious repercussions.”

Facebook did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

But is Check Your Fact really as bad as all that? In February 2018 the site was found to be “compliant or partially compliant” with the Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network Board’s standards, though the site was placed under review in November for not clearly listing its funders. Recently, Check Your Fact looked at President Trump’s claims that wind turbines cause cancer, and found them to be false. However, their statement also included quotes from National Wind Watch, an anti-wind advocacy group.

Facebook has contracted with several organizations to identify factually disputed stories, but its relationship with fact checkers has long been rocky. In 2017, several journalists expressed concerns about the company’s lack of transparency, saying the Facebook’s fact-checking effort had not been effective. More recently, both the Associated Press and Snopes.com, cut ties with the company, with Snopes’ managing editor saying she felt Facebook essentially used them for “crisis PR.”

This isn’t the first time Facebook has entrusted its fact-checking with a website associated with climate denial: In the fall of 2017, Facebook named the right-wing, partisan Weekly Standard as a fact-checking partner. According to IFCN officials, the organization does not take partisanship of the news outlet into account when verifying an organization, only partisanship of the fact-checking itself.

“[U]ltimately, it’s important that people trust the fact-checkers making these calls,” wrote Facebook product manager Tessa Lyons as part of the company’s Hard questions series. “While we work with the International Fact-Checking Network to approve all our partners and make sure they have high standards of accuracy, fairness and transparency, we continue to face accusations of bias. Which has left people asking, in today’s world, is it possible to have a set of fact-checkers that are widely recognized as objective?”

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Einstein’s Shadow – Seth Fletcher

by Myrna Posted on April 27, 2019

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Einstein’s Shadow

A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable

Seth Fletcher

Genre: Astronomy

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: October 9, 2018

Publisher: Ecco

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE Einstein’s Shadow follows a team of elite scientists on their historic mission to take the first picture of a black hole, putting Einstein’s theory of relativity to its ultimate test and helping to answer our deepest questions about space, time, the origins of the universe, and the nature of reality Photographing a black hole sounds impossible, a contradiction in terms. But Shep Doeleman and a global coalition of scientists are on the cusp of doing just that.  With exclusive access to the team, journalist Seth Fletcher spent five years following Shep and an extraordinary cast of characters as they assembled the Event Horizon Telescope, a virtual radio observatory the size of the Earth. He witnessed their struggles, setbacks, and breakthroughs, and along the way, he explored the latest thinking on the most profound questions about black holes. Do they represent a limit to our ability to understand reality? Or will they reveal the clues that lead to the long-sought Theory of Everything? Fletcher transforms astrophysics into something exciting, accessible, and immediate, taking us on an incredible adventure to better understand the complexity of our galaxy, the boundaries of human perception and knowledge, and how the messy human endeavor of science really works. Weaving a compelling narrative account of human ingenuity with excursions into cutting-edge science, Einstein’s Shadow is a tale of great minds on a mission to change the way we understand our universe—and our place in it.  

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Einstein’s Shadow – Seth Fletcher

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A new study says meal kits may be greener than a trip to the store

by haroldclemente3 Posted on April 22, 2019

I’ll be the first to admit that I was skeptical of meal kits — you know, those cooking-for-dummies-style food bundles sent to your doorstep. Visually framing the cooking process with single-serving mise-en-place ingredients while touting sustainability seemed, to me, the epitome of greenwashing. But according to a new study, meal kits can let you successfully cook up a deliciously climate-conscious meal.

The first-of-its-kind study released Monday by University of Michigan researchers revealed that after accounting for every step in the process — from the farm to the landfill — home-delivered meal kits are more environmentally friendly than picking up the same ingredients at your local grocery store. Of course, there are some important caveats: Meal kits tend to have a bad environmental rap due to their monumental amount of packaging. But from a carbon emissions perspective, it turns out food waste is an even bigger sin.

“Even though it may seem like that pile of cardboard generated from a Blue Apron or Hello Fresh subscription is incredibly bad for the environment, that extra chicken breast bought from the grocery store that gets freezer-burned and finally gets thrown out is much worse,” said Shellie Miller, senior author of the study, in a press release.

Meal kits have been booming ever since the major players — Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and Plated — entered the market in 2012. Dozens of other meal kit companies have cropped up around the country catering to every kind of dietary preference, from vegan to paleo, single serve to family style. Meal kit sales reached $3.1 billion nationwide in 2018 after an annual growth rate of nearly 22 percent, but until now, very little was known about their overall environmental footprint.

According to the study, the average carbon footprint for a meal Blue Apron came to the equivalent of 6.1 kg CO2, about 33 percent lower than the 8.1 kg CO2 footprint for the store-bought version. (Though this shouldn’t be a shocker: Meal kits that either contained red meat or were otherwise associated with large amounts of wasted food were found to have the largest environmental impact.)

“I hadn’t quite realized the amount of environmental impact contributed through the supermarket retail process,” Brent Heard, Ph.D. student and lead study author, told Earther. “That includes foods that become food loss from overstocking or stores culling blemished produce, but also operation of supermarkets.”

Now before you throw out that giant pot of vegetarian chili you made from scratch and look up a meal kit code, keep in mind the study only compared meal kit footprints with grocery store equivalents. Figuring the greenest way to get your grub on is beyond the scope of this particular research paper. But despite their egregious wrapping, it seems that meal kits are doing a better job environment-wise than haters like me initially thought.

So yes — I stand corrected, meal kit companies. Now let’s tackle that wasteful packaging issue, shall we?

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A new study says meal kits may be greener than a trip to the store

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Ryanair’s budget flights could blow the E.U.’s carbon budget

by AraceliDominiqu Posted on April 2, 2019

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“Europe’s Greenest Airline” just made the list of the top E.U. climate polluters, ranked 10th after nine coal plants. One of these things is not like the others?

The E.U.-commissioned study looked at major, measurable carbon sources like power plants, manufacturing companies, and airlines. This year’s study marks the first time that a non-coal plant has made it into the fabled top 10.

While the study showed total measured emissions fell 3.8 percent, Ryanair’s emissions rose 6.9 percent in 2018, and a whopping 49 percent over the past five years.

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The Irish airline has its frequent flier customers to thank for its climb to carbon-emitting fame. Since its founding in 1984, Ryanair has worked hard to keep its costs as low as possible. This means $12 tickets from Dublin to Amsterdam, but it also includes hiring contract pilots, flying to secondary rather than main airports, and hidden fees, like charging for a second carry-on. Despite all this, Ryanair has quickly become the largest European airline, with over 2,400 flights daily.

To put things in perspective, the next airline company, EasyJet, doesn’t appear on the list until No. 31.

Still, the company claims to be “Europe’s greenest and cleanest airline,” despite its sizable carbon emissions and climate change-denying CEO.

What does this all mean for the E.U. going forward? The E.U. uses a cap-and-trade system to monitor and decrease carbon emissions, but aviation companies are privy to a large amount of untaxed emissions. So Ryanair and other airlines have been able to increase their carbon emissions dramatically over the past couple of  years with few economic consequences. Without any policy changes, E.U. airline carbon emissions are expected to grow 300 percent by 2050.

Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester, told The Guardian, “If we genuinely care for our children’s futures, we need to drive down the demand for aviation. This will require stringent regulations focusing on frequent fliers rather than those taking the occasional trip.”

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Ryanair’s budget flights could blow the E.U.’s carbon budget

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Climate change could push tropical diseases to Alaska, according to a new study

by PNTImogengbpfbf Posted on March 28, 2019

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Nearly a billion people could be newly at risk of tropical diseases like dengue fever and Zika as climate change shifts the range of mosquitoes, according to a new study.

Since the life cycle of mosquitoes is temperature sensitive, scientists have long been concerned about how their prevalence might spread as the world continues to warm. The study is one of the first to examine in detail how that might happen by using an overlap of two disease-carrying mosquitoes’ range and projected monthly temperature changes under a variety of future warming scenarios.

In the most extreme scenario of more than 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) warming by 2080, certain tropical disease-carrying species of mosquitoes currently found only seasonally in the U.S. South and southern Europe could greatly expand their range, as far north as Alaska and northern Finland — north of the Arctic Circle. That would force a redefinition of the term “tropical” diseases.

The sheer enormity of people who could be exposed gave the lead author pause. “It’s rather shocking,” said Sadie Ryan, a disease ecologist at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, in an interview with Grist.

In Europe alone, the number of people exposed to the dengue-carrying Aedes egypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes could roughly double within the next 30 years. In currently warm climates like the Caribbean, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, tropical disease incedence could actually decrease as those climates become so warm that they “exceed the upper thermal limits for transmission.” In other words: It will be too hot for the mosquitoes to effectively carry dengue.

On the whole, “climate change will dramatically increase the potential for expansion and intensification of Aedes-borne virus transmission,” according to the study.

“Climate change is one of the biggest threats to global health,” Ryan said. “There are many more vector-borne diseases out there that are temperature sensitive.” Ryan also cautioned that mosquitoes, ticks, bark beetles, and invasive fungus threaten animals and plants as well as human health, and climate change is making many of them worse.

Malaria, which was not considered in this study, already affects nearly half of the world’s population, according to the World Health Organization, killing more than 400,000 people each year — one of the leading causes of death for children in Africa. Previous studies have shown that hundreds of millions of people could be newly exposed to malaria by the end of the century, which is carried by a different species of mosquito. Dengue is one of the most common tropical diseases, but it is far less deadly than malaria — out of 100 million infections, it causes about 22,000 deaths each year.

According to the work from Ryan and her colleagues, Europe could be hardest hit because it sits on the leading edge of where mosquitoes can now survive. The worst-case scenario that Ryan and her colleagues explore is actually worse than business-as-usual — it’s a world where civilization doubles down on fossil fuels and planetary systems cause the world to heat beyond the 3.4 degrees C (6.1 degrees F) currently projected.

Ryan said her results should send a clear message to public health departments to boost their budgets in preparation.

There are countless reasons to be scared of climate change, and invading mosquitos might be one of the most tangible. Still, Ryan points out that it’d probably be among the least of our worries — sea-level rise, food shortages, mass migration, and financial collapse would probably pose a much greater risk to civilization.

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Climate change could push tropical diseases to Alaska, according to a new study

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So what did California do with that $1.4 billion in cap-and-trade money?

by Alena9871307 Posted on March 27, 2019

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Think of California as a kind of green Robin Hood. For six years now, it has been taking money from polluters and spending it to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, the state spent $1.4 billion on such efforts. So where’s did all that money go?

It went to electric car buyers, people who installed solar panels on their roofs, and local governments that added transit lines, according to the state’s annual report on its cap-and-trade program. The report, out this week, paints a mostly rosy picture of lots of ostensibly worthy programs. One takeaway: the state is ramping up its spending. That $1.4 billion last year is is a big chunk of the total $3.4 billion California has doled out since it started in 2012.

California Air Resources Board

And what does California get for the money? If you include the full benefit of all allocations so far — for instance, the gas a newly purchased electric bus saves over the course of its life — it adds up to a reduction of more than 36.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s like taking eight million cars off the road for one year.

It’s enough to make a real dent in the state’s emissions, but comes nowhere close to a solution. Just for reference, California has about 36 million vehicles on its many roads. By 2030, according to the figure from the report below, Californians will be living in a green wonderland of bikes, trains, and swoopy architecture. On the downside, everyone will have turned into stick figures.

California Air Resources Board

The programs that this cap-and-trade money paid for didn’t just reduce carbon emissions. These programs also scrubbed the air of of pollution that makes people sick — reducing particulate emissions by 474 tons in 2018. They’re reducing the amount of water that Californians use and planting millions of trees. Turns out, you can pay for a lot of stuff when you start taxing polluters.

California Air Resources Board

There’s some room for skepticism about the numbers. For instance, California has spent $626 million of its carbon trading money laying rails for a high speed train, more than any other single program. The report estimates that California’s high speed rail project will slash greenhouse gas emissions by more that 65 million metric tons over the first 50 years of its operating life. But it’s unclear if that rail line will ever span its planned route between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

California’s Governor, Gavin Newsom, has said he might shrink the project. “Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A.,” Newsom said last month. The report doesn’t consider the possibility that the rail line might just wind up connecting mid-sized cities in California’s Central Valley.

To reap the benefits described in this report, these projects need more than funding — they also need to work.

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So what did California do with that $1.4 billion in cap-and-trade money?

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How Trader Joe’s Will Save a Million Pounds of Plastic

by BlaineITPrtn Posted on March 19, 2019

Last year, Trader Joe’s officially announced that it would be making some major company-wide shifts?namely, to up its sustainability standards and reduce its plastic waste. While it all started as a response to a massive Greenpeace petition, Trader Joe’s is continuing to hold itself to a higher standard by scrutinizing all the wasteful, unsustainable facets of its grocery empire?and it seems to be working. When all is said and done, the company will have eliminated over one million pounds of wasteful single-use plastic from its stores.

Where’s all that plastic waste coming from?

Odds are, you’ve probably strolled through any supermarket and been frustrated by the amount of fresh food wrapped in plastic. From individually-wrapped cucumbers to plastic-wrapped styrofoam trays of apples, it’s like walking into an environmental nightmare scenario. There is so much unnecessary, un-recyclable plastic waste in our grocery system. And Trader Joe’s has placed itself on the front line.

Now that they’re keyed in on the problem, Trader Joe’s continues to strive to clean up their act.

In December, they informed customers that they would no longer be offering single-use plastic bags?one of the first nationwide grocery chains to do so. They’re also replacing their produce bags with compostable alternatives and limiting the amount of produce sold in plastic altogether. They are even going the extra?mile to remove the tiny bit of non-recyclable plastic and foil from their tea packaging.

It seems that no waste is too small to address, which is a sustainability outlook we can all get behind.

Curious to check out Trader Joe’s new sustainability principles? Here they are, straight from their press release:

1. Reducing and removing packaging

2. Sourcing renewable and recycled packaging materials

3. Choosing packaging that can be realistically recycled

4. Avoiding the use of harmful substances in packaging

5. Providing information to customers that increases understanding of how best to recycle or dispose of packaging

That right, your Trader Joe’s obsession?just got affirmed. The best chocolate-dipped, peanut butter-filled pretzels AND a conscious push towards greater sustainability?! It’s almost green grocery heaven.

Trader Joe’s closed their press release by stating, “We view this as ongoing work?in fact, never-ending work. As we continue in this endeavor, we are committed to openly sharing information about our progress.”

Hopefully more companies will adopt that outlook and become better stewards of our planet. In the meantime, Trader Joe’s: keep it up!

Related on Care2:

Forget Lifespan, Let’s Talk About Health Span
Is Your Favorite Tea Contaminated with Toxic Chemicals?
?Study Shows It’s Never too Late to Go Organic

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How Trader Joe’s Will Save a Million Pounds of Plastic

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‘We won’t stop striking’: The New York 13-year-old taking a stand over climate change

by TobyTheodore Posted on March 13, 2019

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

Alexandria Villasenor looks a slightly incongruous figure to stage a lengthy protest over the perils of catastrophic global warming. The 13-year-old, wrapped in a coat and a woolen hat, has spent every Friday since December seated on a frigid bench outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City with signs warning of climate change’s dire consequences.

Most passersby, probably hardened to confronting New York street scenes, scurry past, eyes diverted downwards. But some mutter words of support, while the odd passing driver rolls down their window to offer a thumbs up.

There is media interest, too. On a recent Friday protest stint, a microphone was being pinned to a shivering Villasenor by an NBC crew. “I stayed out there for four hours and I lost circulation in my toes for the first time,” she said afterwards.

Cold weather in winter is routinely used by President Donald Trump to disparage climate science — in January, the president tweeted: “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” — but Villasenor has experienced enough in her nascent years to grasp the scale of the threat.

Her concern has driven her to help organize the first nationwide strikes by U.S. school students over climate change, on March 15. More than 100,000 young people are expected to skip school on the day and attend rallies demanding radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Villasenor was born and raised in Davis, California, in the teeth of the state’s fiercest drought in at least 1,200 years. She recalls seeing the dead and dying fish on the shores of nearby Folsom Lake as it dried up. In November, Davis was shrouded in a pall of smoke from record wildfires that obliterated the town of Paradise, 100 miles to the north.

“I have asthma so it was a very scary experience for me, I couldn’t leave my house at all,” Villasenor said. “Just walking to the car would make my eyes sting. We rolled up towels and put them under the windows. A lot of my friends were going out in the smog and I was texting them to see if they were OK, as I’m the mom of the group.”

Villasenor’s family subsequently moved to New York, the switch hastened by concerns over her health due to the smoke. The young student then swiftly became an activist after reading how warming temperatures are making the western U.S. far more prone to the sort of huge wildfires that menaced her hometown.

After bouncing around a few youth-led climate groups, Villasenor struck up a rapport with fellow students Isra Hirsi, in Minnesota, and Haven Coleman, from Colorado. The trio set about creating Youth Climate Strike U.S., the first major American response to the recent mass school walkouts by European students frustrated by adults’ sluggish response to climate change.

“My generation knows that climate change will be the biggest problem we’ll have to face,” Villasenor said. “It’s upsetting that my generation has to push these leaders to take action. We aren’t going to stop striking until some more laws are passed.”

The American students preparing to join a global wave of school strikes on March 15 have been spurred by the actions of Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old Swede who started taking every Friday off school to call for more rapid action by her country’s leaders.

In a gently excoriating speech, Thunberg told governments at U.N. climate talks in December that “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

Those under 20 years old have never known a world where the climate isn’t rapidly heating, ensuring that their lifetimes will be spent in average temperatures never before experienced by humans.

For someone getting their first taste of politics it can be hard to digest that precious little has been done to avert a future of disastrous droughts, floods, and storms since James Hansen, then of NASA, delivered his landmark warning on climate change to Congress 30 years ago.

“It was confusing at first because I expected politicians to be on to this, given what the scientists were saying,” said Chelsea Li, a 17-year-old at Nathan Hale high school in Seattle and local strike organizer. “But I didn’t see any action. We are going to have to do the things the adults are too afraid to do because it’s our futures we are fighting for.”

The American strikers’ challenge appears particularly steep. It’s one thing protesting in the U.K., where carbon dioxide emissions have plummeted to levels not seen since Queen Victoria’s reign, or Germany, where the government has pledged to phase out all coal use within 20 years.

It’s quite another to appeal to Trump, who has called climate science an elaborate Chinese hoax and has overseen the dismantling of Obama-era efforts to reduce emissions from coal plants and vehicles.

Youth-led groups like the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour have seized the initiative from traditional green groups but have been met with the same unyielding political establishment. In a videoed exchange since parodied on Saturday Night Live, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the veteran Democrat, clasped her hands behind her back and patiently told a group of middle and high schoolers that they weren’t yet able to vote for her and their demands on climate were unrealistic.

There was no way to pay for the Green New Deal, a plan to decarbonize the economy championed by progressives, according to Feinstein. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said, an assurance alluding as much to political inertia as political experience.

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“I think she was trying to dismiss me,” said Isha Clarke, a 16-year-old from Oakland who had confronted Feinstein. “I think she was making excuses for why she didn’t have to listen to us. For older people there’s no urgency, they are used to the system and compromising.”

Clarke said the interaction with Feinstein was disappointing but the backlash was “amazing,” with the California senator releasing and then dropping her own climate plan after it was savaged for being too weak. Feinstein also offered Clarke an internship, which she has yet to accept.

“It’s sort of tricky because you have to play the game to change it but I don’t want it to cover up everything that happened,” Clarke said. “Most young people are very aware of climate change, a lot of them are super passionate about it but they don’t have the resources to make their voices heard. They don’t realize they have the power to create change.”

That voice will be heard on March 15 when students forgo their classes in order to make a plea that they hope won’t be dismissed as indulgent truancy. Parents and teachers may have to brace themselves for future walkouts.

“My parents are very supportive, they understand my beliefs,” said Villasenor, as she repositioned her placards for the cameras. “If we’re not going to have a future, then school won’t matter anymore.”

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‘We won’t stop striking’: The New York 13-year-old taking a stand over climate change

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Coal ash contamination is widespread, new report finds

by brendangarling Posted on March 6, 2019

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Coal ash pollution has repeatedly coated North Carolina’s rivers bottoms with a plethora of toxic chemicals. The culprit from the state’s biggest spill? Duke Energy, a Charlotte-based energy giant.

But the issue of coal ash is not unique to North Carolina — it’s happening everywhere.

A new report, published jointly by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice, found that 242 — the vast majority (91 percent) of the coal-fired power plants examined — had elevated levels of toxic heavy metals and other pollutants in nearby groundwater. Over half of those sites were contaminated with cancer-causing arsenic, and 60 percent were polluted with lithium, which has been linked to neurological damage. That’s…not good.

In 2014, North Carolina experienced the third-worst coal ash spill in recorded history, dumping 39,000 tons of waste product along 70 miles (110 kilometers) of the North Carolina-Virginia border. Residue from the spill coated the floor of the Dan River. This contamination poses many health risks to people living nearby, such as cancer and asthma.

The cleanup, which is still ongoing after five years, could cost Duke Energy to the tune of $5 billion, and according to the Associated Press, the company plans to pass the rather expensive bill along to its consumers.

The issue of coal ash in North Carolina flared up again last year when Hurricane Florence caused flooding at coal ash sites alongside Duke Energy’s L.V. Sutton Power Station, which carries coal ash components into a cooling lake and then into the nearby Cape Fear River. Cape Fear River is a water source for Wilmington, a city of 60,000 downstream from the coal ash site.

“Our communities are being harmed both by Duke Energy’s coal ash negligence and by repeated flooding from our changing climate,” said Bobby Jones of the Down East Coal Ash Coalition, speaking at a press conference at the First Baptist Church in downtown Raleigh. “Duke’s influence is a moral decay that erodes our democracy.”

Duke may not be the only company to blame (also, they’ve vehemently opposed the report’s findings.) The new report analyzed data from 265 plants–about three-quarters of all coal power plants in the U.S. And the report’s authors say they could be “understating” the extent of contamination since data is available only on coal ash sites actively in use; ponds and landfills that hold coal ash but are not receiving any were not included.

As with many environmental woes, low-income communities and communities of color are the ones likely to suffer the most from this threat as these sites tend to be located near their homes. According to Abel Russ, lead author of the report and an attorney for the Environmental Integrity Project, as long as EPA Administrator (and former coal lobbyist) Andrew Wheeler is at the helm of the environmental agency, that threat will not waver.

“At a time when the EPA […] is trying to roll back federal regulations on coal ash, these new data provide convincing evidence that we should be moving in the opposite direction,” Russ said in a statement.

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Coal ash contamination is widespread, new report finds

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