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Nanette Barragán is used to facing off against polluters. Elected in 2013 to the city council of Hermosa Beach, California, she took on E&B Natural Resources, an oil and gas company looking to drill wells on the beach. Barragán, an attorney before going into politics, learned of the potential project and began campaigning for residents to vote against it. The project was eventually squashed. In November, she won a congressional seat in California’s 44th district.
To Barragán, making sure President Trump’s environmental rollbacks don’t affect communities is a matter of life or death. The district she represents, the same in which she grew up, encompasses heavily polluted parts of Los Angeles County — areas crisscrossed with freeways and dotted with oil and gas wells. Barragan says she grew up close to a major highway and suffered from allergies. “I now go back and wonder if it was related to living that close,” she says.
Exide Technologies, a battery manufacturer that has polluted parts of southeast Los Angeles County with arsenic, lead, and other chemicals for years, sits just outside her district’s borders. Barragán’s district is also 69 percent Latino and 15 percent black. She has become acutely aware of the environmental injustices of the pollution plaguing the region. “People who are suffering are in communities of color,” she says.
Now in the nation’s capital, Barragán is chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s newly formed environmental task force and a member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, which considers legislation on topics like energy and public lands and is chaired by climate denier Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican. She knows the next four years will be tough but says she’s up for the challenge. “I think it’s going to be, I hate to say it, a lot of defense.”
Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.
Originally posted here:
The Trump administration is about to officially OK the Keystone XL pipeline.
Mother Jones
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In East Chicago, Indiana, where 90 percent of this population of 29,000 are people of color and one-third live below the poverty line, a lead crisis is unfolding and residents are concerned that the Environmental Protection Agency under Scott Pruitt is unlikely to respond.
For decades, industrial plants polluted the air and soil with lead and arsenic in East Chicago neighborhoods that included a public housing complex and an elementary school. In 2014, the EPA declared the lead plant in the area a Superfund site and began the cleanup, but a Reuters investigation in 2016 found that children living near the Superfund site still had elevated levels of lead in their blood. The EPA subsequently tested the water and found that not only did the homes in the vicinity have elevated levels of lead in their drinking water, but so did the entire city—much as Flint did during its 2014 water crisis. The EPA estimated that up to 90 percent of East Chicago homes received water through lead service lines.
In December 2016, before the EPA’s findings were made public, Mayor Anthony Copeland sent a letter to then-Gov. Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, asking him to declare a state of emergency in the city so communities could acquire financial assistance for residents being forced to relocate because of the lead contamination at the Superfund site. Pence denied the request, but it was subsequently approved by his successor, Eric Holcomb.
This month, a coalition of East Chicago residents sent a petition to the EPA renewing their request for help and asking for water filters, expanded blood level testing for children, and assurance that those affected had access to Medicaid. The petition charges that neither the city nor the state provided an adequate response to the discovery of lead in the drinking water and that the EPA has the authority to act, just as it did in Flint.
But the EPA that the community petitioned has radically changed. The appointment of Administrator Scott Pruitt, who often “disagrees” with scientific fact and was determined to gut the agency, set the stage for cutting programs that deter pollution and rolling back regulations that keep air and drinking water safe. Leaked versions of the EPA budget showed plans to slash funds for lead pollution cleanup efforts and environmental justice programs, both of which could assist the residents of East Chicago. The head of the EPA’s justice office resigned after more than two decades of service, saying the proposed cuts are a signal “that communities with environmental justice concerns may not get the attention they deserve.”
“East Chicago is precisely the kind of community to be affected by cuts,” says Anjali Waikar, an attorney from the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is the heart of what environmental justice is. This is an opportunity for the federal government to exercise muscle and avoid another Flint disaster.”
But will it?
The EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice manages several programs aimed at protecting the human health and environment in communities overburdened by environmental pollution. The Environmental Justice Small Grants Program awards funding to community-based organizations that work with communities facing such issues. With the support of such a grant, a 2013 project funded an education campaign on childhood lead poisoning in Baltimore that helped nearly 16,000 residents.
The EPA’s slow response was widely criticized in the aftermath of the Flint disaster. When he made a campaign stop in Flint, Donald Trump pledged to fix the city’s water problems if he won. “It used to be that cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico,” he said. “And now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint. It’s terrible.” During his confirmation hearings, Pruitt attributed the crisis to EPA’s failure to act quickly. “There should have been a more rapid response,” he said.
Shortly after the EPA received the petition from East Chicago, a spokesperson for the agency told Indiana Public Broadcasting that the agency “will review the petition and will continue to work with the city and state to protect the health of East Chicago residents.”
But East Chicago and Flint are likely not anomalies. A 2016 NRDC report found that 18 million Americans got their water from sources that had lead violations the previous year. The violations ranged from failure to treat water to reduce lead levels to failure to report lead results to the government or public.
“The states have shown that if there’s not a strong federal minimum of water standards, it will fall below that,” says Jennifer Chavez of Earthjustice. She notes that the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to cutting regulations “is just ignoring history and evidence of what happens when regulations aren’t in place.”
Early in his campaign, Trump was clear about his dislike of environmental regulations. “Environmental Protection, what they do is a disgrace,” he told Fox News Sunday‘s Chris Wallace. “Every week they come out with new regulations.” Historically, poor communities and communities of color have been especially vulnerable to pollution and environmental waste. With abundant cheap land, poor neighborhoods are regular dumping grounds for industrial pollutants. And long-term neglect means cities with lead pipes often are ignored.
“The legacy of racial discrimination and marginalization that leaves them with fewer resources also leaves them underinvested,” says Khalil Shahyd, an environmental justice expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Communities with few resources are usually unable to fight back as effectively as wealthier ones. For example, the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline was originally slated to go through Bismarck, North Dakota. Residents there fought back and the route was reworked and is now slated to pass through tribal land belonging to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. In the past, environmental justice activists have sued the EPA and various entities over environmental violations and in some cases have won.
For instance, the city of Tyler, Texas, is predominantly black and poor and was accused of violating the Clean Water Act for pumping raw sewage into the city’s water supply. A few days before Trump’s inauguration, the city settled with the EPA and the Department of Justice and agreed to pay a fine and upgrade the sanitary sewer system.
But for residents of East Chicago, the restructuring of the EPA could hinder their efforts to provide safe drinking water, and time is running out. “The disastrous effects of lead in our soil have already taken a toll on our community,” said East Chicago resident Sherry Hunter in an NRDC press release. “But lead coming through our taps takes this mess to a whole new, unacceptably horrible level.”
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In the piece, which appeared in Science on Monday, the president outlines four reasons that “the trend toward clean energy is irreversible”:
1. Economic growth and cutting carbon emissions go hand in hand. Any economic strategy that doesn’t take climate change into account will result in fewer jobs and less economic growth in the long term.
2. Businesses know that reducing emissions can boost bottom lines and make shareholders happy. And efficiency boosts employment too: About 2.2 million Americans now have jobs related to energy efficiency, compared to about 1.1 million with fossil fuel jobs.
3. The market is already moving toward cleaner electricity. Natural gas is replacing coal, and renewable energy costs are falling dramatically — trends that will continue (even with a coal-loving president).
4. There’s global momentum for climate action. In 2015 in Paris, nearly 200 nations agreed to bring down carbon emissions.
“Despite the policy uncertainty that we face, I remain convinced that no country is better suited to confront the climate challenge and reap the economic benefits of a low-carbon future than the United States and that continued participation in the Paris process will yield great benefit for the American people, as well as the international community,” Obama concludes — optimistically.
Originally posted here:
Can Californians blame climate change for their latest weather woes?
In the piece, which appeared in Science on Monday, the president outlines four reasons that “the trend toward clean energy is irreversible”:
1. Economic growth and cutting carbon emissions go hand in hand. Any economic strategy that doesn’t take climate change into account will result in fewer jobs and less economic growth in the long term.
2. Businesses know that reducing emissions can boost bottom lines and make shareholders happy. And efficiency boosts employment too: About 2.2 million Americans now have jobs related to energy efficiency, compared to about 1.1 million with fossil fuel jobs.
3. The market is already moving toward cleaner electricity. Natural gas is replacing coal, and renewable energy costs are falling dramatically — trends that will continue (even with a coal-loving president).
4. There’s global momentum for climate action. In 2015 in Paris, nearly 200 nations agreed to bring down carbon emissions.
“Despite the policy uncertainty that we face, I remain convinced that no country is better suited to confront the climate challenge and reap the economic benefits of a low-carbon future than the United States and that continued participation in the Paris process will yield great benefit for the American people, as well as the international community,” Obama concludes — optimistically.
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New York State will shut down its dangerously placed Indian Point nuclear plant.
Remember that time Donald Trump told the New York Times he would keep an open mind about climate change? It was just a couple of weeks ago, when he met with the paper’s top reporters and editors. Their tweets sparked a slew of news reports that Trump might be “changing his tune” on climate.
Except that Trump did nothing of the sort. When Grist’s Rebecca Leber pored over the full transcript, it became clear that the president-elect was his usual climate-denying self, and the pliant news media had once again been suckered into making him look mainstream.
“Trump spun his climate denial to the New York Times and lots of people fell for it,” our headline read. “Grist expertly called out” the mainstream media’s failure to hold Trump accountable, The Huffington Post proclaimed.
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We’re going to need a lot more headlines like that in the coming years. And Grist needs your support to keep up our honest reporting and commentary — the kind you won’t hear from this administration or the bamboozled media.
I joined Grist as executive editor nine months ago with a mission: Take a publication beloved for its irreverent and unorthodox approach to environmental journalism and fuse that sensibility with a focus on deeper reporting, sharp analysis, and stories that matter.
As part of Grist’s fall fundraising drive, we’ve just spent the past couple of weeks celebrating some of those results. We sent reporters to cover injustice in Alaska and Standing Rock, told the amazing true story of the slideshow that saved the world, uncovered black-and-white evidence of a huge Trump climate flip-flop, won awards for our fun video explainers, launched a mobile-friendly daily news product, even explored what it takes to be a non-judgmental vegan.
Now we’re asking for your support so we can do more. That’s what it takes to run an independent, nonprofit media shop that doesn’t answer to deep pockets and has the freedom to take on corporate and political power.
I didn’t anticipate the election of Donald Trump, but I’m proud to say that Grist has made significant headway in building a journalistic operation capable of providing tough, fearless coverage of the president-elect and his polluter pals, who are about to have all the power they ever wanted to gut environmental laws, plunder our natural resources, ignore the warnings of climate science, and increase the environmental burdens plaguing vulnerable communities.
It’s become a cliche in the past few weeks to say that strong, honest journalism is needed now more than ever — but cliches gain power because they’re true.
Grist doesn’t have the resources of the New York Times or Washington Post, or even Mother Jones or ProPublica. Those institutions will need your support, too, to cover the range of corruption and assaults on civil liberties that the Trump administration portends.
What Grist does have, though, is a dedicated and skilled staff that’s intensely focused on a set of issues that are about to come under immediate attack from the Trump administration. We understand them — and their impact on people and communities — like no other publication.
And don’t just take my word for it. (I am the editor, after all). Bill Moyers’ website tells readers that if they want “more and better media coverage of these issues” they should “contribute to specialized nonprofit online outlets like Grist. … Robust news coverage will matter more than ever during an administration led by the purveyors of fake news and anti-science propaganda.”
So if you care about safe air and water, sustainable food, livable cities, a clean, inclusive economy, a survivable climate, and environmental justice for all, Grist is the publication you’ll need to cling to in the coming years. We’ll ferret out fake news, seek and spotlight solutions, tell you where progress continues to happen and who is standing in the way, stand up for what’s right and just, reach across ideological lines, give you the tools and advice needed to make a difference, and bring big brains together to spark ideas and innovation.
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Mother Jones
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More than 70 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the United States go to livestock farms, one of the main triggers driving a rising crisis of antibiotic resistance in human medicine.
On Tuesday, researchers from Ohio State University published an alarming finding in a peer-reviewed journal: On a US hog farm, they found bacteria that can withstand a crucial family of antibiotics. Carbapenems, as they are known, are a “last line of defense” against bacterial pathogens that can resist other antibiotics, the paper notes. Worse still, the gene that allowed the bacteria to resist carbapenems turned up in a plasmid—small chunks of DNA found in bacterial cells. Plasmid-carried genes bounce easily from one bacterial strain to another, meaning that carbapenem resistance is highly mobile—making it more likely to find its way into bacterial pathogens that infect people.
If this news sounds depressingly familiar, it’s because something very similar happened with another last-ditch antibiotic, colostin. About a year ago, Chinese researchers alarmed global public health authorities when they found a “plasmid-mediated” strain of colistin-resistant E. coli on a Chinese hog farm. As predicted, it quickly went global, and it turned up in the United States in a patient in May, as well as in a pig intestine identified by US Department of Agriculture researchers. In September, Rutgers and Columbia University researchers found a strain of E. coli with plasmid-carried resistance to colostin and carbapenems. The new Ohio State study marks the first time plasmid-borne carbapenem resistance has been found on a US farm, though it has turned up in livestock operations in Asia and Europe, the researchers write.
To see whether carbapenem resistance is taking hold on US hog farms, the researchers settled on a 1,500-sow confined operation that follows “typical US production practices,” which include giving newborn pigs a dose of an antibiotic called ceftiofur at birth, with the males getting a second dose when they’re castrated at six days. Interestingly, carbapenems are banned from use in US farms. But ceftiofur is a member of the cephalosporin family of antibiotics, which kills bacteria in a similar way to carbapenems, and the authors speculate that those ceftiofur doses “may provide significant selection pressure” for the emergence of carbapenem resistance. They found it in swabs taken from the the surfaces of the farrowing and nursery pens.
Interestingly, the pigs don’t get ceftiofur after those initial doses at birth, except to treat sickness. And at later stages of the pig-raising process, such as the finishing barns where pigs are fattened to slaughter weight, no carbapenem-resistant bacteria turned up. That’s likely because the absence of ceftiofur “likely removed antimicrobial selection pressure” for the resistant gene, causing it to lose its niche. That absence of carbapenem-resistant bacteria in the late-stage pigs is good news—it means the superbug is “unlikely to have entered the food supply through contamination of fresh pork products.”
But given how quickly the gene can jump from one bacterial strain to another, the study identified a ticking time bomb. Cephalosporins, the class of antibiotics that may have triggered the carbapenem-resistant bacteria on this particular farm, aren’t administered nearly as much as other antibiotics on US farms, but alarmingly their use jumped 57 percent between 2009 and 2014, according to the latest Food and Drug Administration numbers. And the Ohio State study settled on one typical US hog operation. Who knows what’s going on with the 21,000-plus others.
Over on the Natural Resources Defense Council blog, antibiotic-resistance expert David Wallinga notes that the bacteria that turned up in the Ohio State study is carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, “one of the nastier superbugs.” He continues:
Infections with these germs are very difficult to treat, and can be deadly—the death rate from patients with CRE bloodstream infections is up to 50 percent. The CDC says these bacteria already cause 9,300 infections, and 600 deaths each year. To date, CRE infections occur mostly among patients in hospitals and nursing homes; people on breathing machines, or with tubing inserted into their veins or bladders are at higher risk, as are people taking long courses of certain antibiotics. But newer, more resistant kinds of CRE seem to be causing more problems outside hospitals, in communities and among healthier people.
Way back in 2012, the Obama administration introduced a new set of guidelines—that will finally go into full effect on January 1—designed to preserve antibiotics as a bulwark against dangerous infections by curbing their use on farms. As I show here, meat farms use about three times as much of these vital drugs as does human medicine. Yet the Obama guidelines are both voluntary and contain a huge loophole, which I tease out here. And now, even as terrifying superbugs continue appearing in the United States, we have a new president whose agriculture advisers have expressed nothing but hostility toward regulating food production.
Source:
A Terrifying Superbug Just Showed Up on a US Farm for the First Time
And it’s just in the nick of time, since President-elect Trump has promised to repeal all of President Obama’s climate regulations.
This rule, which will be gradually phased in, requires drilling operators to halve the natural gas that is flared off from new and existing wells, limit venting from storage tanks, inspect for leaks, and so on. DOI projects that the rule should cut methane emissions up to 35 percent.
Methane is an extremely powerful heat-trapping gas. With the the increase in natural gas and oil drilling that is the fracking boom, methane leakage from wells and pipelines has also skyrocketed. A crackdown on these leaks was part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.
The new rule doesn’t govern private land, where most drilling takes place. The Environmental Protection Agency developed rules limiting methane leakage from new wells on private land. Hillary Clinton proposed to follow up on that with a rule for existing wells on private land.
Trump will not do that. But, now that the public lands rule is finalized, undoing it would require a new rule-making process, subject to legal challenge.
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Dakota Access protesters reminded the nation they won’t be silenced.
And it’s just in the nick of time, since President-elect Trump has promised to repeal all of President Obama’s climate regulations.
This rule, which will be gradually phased in, requires drilling operators to halve the natural gas that is flared off from new and existing wells, limit venting from storage tanks, inspect for leaks, and so on. DOI projects that the rule should cut methane emissions up to 35 percent.
Methane is an extremely powerful heat-trapping gas. With the the increase in natural gas and oil drilling that is the fracking boom, methane leakage from wells and pipelines has also skyrocketed. A crackdown on these leaks was part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.
The new rule doesn’t govern private land, where most drilling takes place. The Environmental Protection Agency developed rules limiting methane leakage from new wells on private land. Hillary Clinton proposed to follow up on that with a rule for existing wells on private land.
Trump will not do that. But, now that the public lands rule is finalized, undoing it would require a new rule-making process, subject to legal challenge.
Visit source:
Climate denier Barrasso to replace climate denier Inhofe as head of Senate environment committee.
Mother Jones
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Physicist Eugene Wigner is the author of a famous paper called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Brad DeLong comments:
We are all, potentially, the Friends of Wigner. It has always seemed to me that anyone with the empathy and imagination to think of him or herself as one of the Friends of Wigner is then driven inescapably to either “quantum mechanics is totally wrong wrong wrong wrong and just predicts well for incomprehensible reasons” or “many-worlds”. There really are no other alternatives, or at least what alternatives there are are even stranger.
Au contraire. I consider quantum mechanics to be evidence that we are all constructs in somebody else’s virtual reality. All of the peculiarities of quantum mechanics are easily explainable if the universe is merely a computer-generated world subject to the whims of a programmer.
The only question left is why the programmer has created such a world. Whimsy? Amusement? As a test of some sociology theorem? Bad design?
Perhaps the last one is most likely. In reality, quantum mechanics is a desperate, ugly patch glued onto a poorly working universe by a stressed freshman at 2 am. Basically, the poor kid waited until the last minute, as freshmen everywhere do, and hadn’t really understood much of the text for the required “Plenum Creation and Maintenance” class. The result was a mess that kept falling apart even for small taus of only a few billion years. One thing led to another, and eventually the whole project became a Rube Goldberg monstrosity of black holes, 11 dimensions, wavicles, arbitrary speed-of-light caps on velocity, and observer-induced wave collapse as a last-ditch way of reducing the computing power needed to run it.
In the end it received a gentlemen’s C- from a sympathetic professor. That’s the universe we live in.
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