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The unexpected ways climate change harms your health

by AlyciaX57289953 Posted on April 4, 2016

A man rests during a heat wave in Manhattan, New York. Reuters/Eduardo Munoz

The unexpected ways climate change harms your health

By on 4 Apr 2016commentsShare

Climate change is bad for your health. There’s no question that the impacts of a warming world — harsher heat waves, increased flooding — will put a strain on our nation’s public health. Take one example: studies predict some 11,000 additional heat-related deaths during summers about 15 years from now.

But other health-related climate consequences have proven more difficult to tease out and thus more difficult to quantify. The White House released a scientific report on Monday that draws on research from eight federal agencies to provide the most comprehensive look yet at climate’s health impacts.

“I don’t know that we’ve seen something like this before, where you have a force that has such a multitude of effects,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told reporters when previewing the report. “As far as history is concerned, this is a new type of threat that we’re facing.”

Here are some of the more unexpected consequences of climate change identified in the report:

Americans are at greater risk of eating contaminated food. Higher temperatures and more extreme weather create perfect conditions for dangerous contaminants to make their way into the food supply. For example, researchers found a link between higher ocean temperatures and mercury accumulation in seafood. Warmer weather and flooding also raises the chance for foodborne illnesses like salmonella.

More of the water we drink may be unsafe. The same problems in food affect water quality, with extreme weather and floods raising the risk of bacteria, pathogens, and other contaminants. Plus, higher temps give harmful algae the opportunity to thrive in new, more widespread parts of the country. Compounding the problem is when flooding overwhelms our existing and quite creaky water infrastructure.

Mosquitoes and ticks will be more than an itchy nuisance. Mild winters and early warmer seasons allow insects to travel further and faster, carrying illnesses like Lyme Disease with them.

Disasters will compromise mental health for already-vulnerable populations. Just think about the stress that extreme weather events like Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy add to people’s lives: displaced families, economic losses, ruined livelihoods. For children, the elderly, and pregnant women, who are among the most vulnerable, these conditions can lead to post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression.

The air you breathe is dirtier. Fossil fuels make our air dirtier — that’s obvious. But greenhouse gases can impact air quality in other ways. Climate change affects weather and precipitation patterns, changing how smog and particulate matter moves over cities. More wildfires add pollution  to the air, too.

Lives are literally at stake if we don’t act on climate change. Even a small global change in average temperature can hurt people at the extremes, and the same holds true for health — affecting the poor, indigenous, very young, and very elderly people the most.

“The public health case for climate action is really compelling beyond words,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy said. “It’s not just about glaciers and polar bears. It’s about the health of our kids.”

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The unexpected ways climate change harms your health

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Pollution is now coming from Donald Trump’s golf course, in addition to his mouth

by JermainDuCane Posted on March 31, 2016

Pollution is now coming from Donald Trump’s golf course, in addition to his mouth

By on 31 Mar 2016commentsShare

Donald Trump has been spewing forth a stream of repugnant verbal pollution for months. Now he stands accused of producing a more literal kind of pollution — one that could contaminate the source of drinking water for the city where he so badly wants to live.

In 2009, the Trump National Golf Course 15 miles outside Washington, D.C., cut down an estimated 465 mature trees along the banks of the Potomac River, which provides drinking water to 5 million people. The head of the nonprofit Potomac Conservancy, Hedrick Belin, is now charging that the removal of trees along that 1.5-mile stretch could be worsening erosion and runoff into the river.

“It’s the single largest stretch of river upstream of D.C. without any trees on it whatsoever,” Belin told Grist. “If you’re flying into the National Airport in D.C., you can see it from the air. The contrast is so stark.” And those missing trees matter for water quality: “Trees are nature’s Brita filter,” he says, noting that they capture pollutants before they enter waterways. “When Trump makes an egregious move like this, we’re gonna call it out.”

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Ed Russo, who has overseen environmental work on Trump’s golf courses, said that some of the trees were weak and susceptible to disease. Russo, who has been identified in the past as a special projects manager, spokesman, environmental consultant, planning consultant, and project director for the Trump Organization, also claimed that the trees were causing erosion, and that the grasses planted in their place are more environmentally beneficial. As The Washington Post sardonically put it in 2011, Russo’s ideas “often go against the grain of conventional scientific wisdom and soil conservation practice.”

Russo fired back against Belin’s allegations with bombast worthy of Trump himself: “This is a spectacular environmental net gain we did,” he told the Washingtonian this week. “Nobody required Donald Trump to do it. He did it because it was the right thing to do. Everyone agrees with me except Hedrick what’s-his-name.”

The shoreline of Donald Trump’s National Golf Course along the Potomac River.

It’s not the first time the Republican presidential front-runner’s golf courses have been targeted for poor environmental practices. In 2011, New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection cited the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., for a series of violations, including cutting down trees and fouling wetlands. And Scottish scientists reportedly criticized efforts to stabilize sand dunes at Trump’s course in Scotland, which was also the site of a bitter battle between the business mogul and proponents of a large coastal wind farm.

Trump, who has both touted his own “great environmental record” and pledged to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, has not weighed in on the tree-clearing himself. The Trump Organization, the Trump campaign, and Ed Russo did not respond to requests for comment.

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Pollution is now coming from Donald Trump’s golf course, in addition to his mouth

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Chipotle aims for a Better Burger (without making anyone sick)

by UlrichFocken Posted on March 31, 2016

Chipotle aims for a Better Burger (without making anyone sick)

By on 31 Mar 2016commentsShare

Stop the presses: Your favorite purveyor of burrito bowls and foodborne illness is branching out into burgers.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Chipotle Mexican Grill is developing a new burger chain. The name? Better Burger.

Better Burger will continue Chipotle’s existing model of providing fresher fast food than the classic preservative-laden slop you find at most American chains. Chipotle currently has around 2,000 burrito joints around the U.S., but sales and stocks plummeted last year after roughly 500 people in 13 states contracted food poisoning from the eatery.

The great E. coli, salmonella, and norovirus outbreaks of 2015 also forced the chain to close several stores around the country, and led to at least one lawsuit. In February, Chipotle closed all its stores for a day to discuss the crisis and proper food-handling protocol with employees. It also gave away a whole lot of burritos.

Diversifying the revenue stream could be a wise move, according to the WSJ, as the fresher fast food market has gotten increasingly crowded by competitors like Shake Shack and Five Guys. As to whether or not Better Burger will actually be a better burger, stay tuned, but it certainly can’t be any worse than the 14-year-old McDonald’s hamburger that looks the same as the day it was made. Or can it?

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Chipotle aims for a Better Burger (without making anyone sick)

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Porter Ranch CEO got a $3 million bonus after a massive natural gas leak

by RebeccaQ50 Posted on March 31, 2016

Porter Ranch CEO got a $3 million bonus after a massive natural gas leak

By on 31 Mar 2016commentsShare

Most of us aren’t rewarded for causing major health, environmental, and public relations disasters on the job. But most of us aren’t the CEOs of fossil fuel companies.

The Los Angles Times reports that Debra L. Reed, chairman and CEO of Sempra Energy, the parent company of the natural gas producer responsible for the enormous natural gas leak at Porter Ranch received a $3.17 million bonus in 2015, bringing her total compensation for the year to $16.1 million. But before you start moaning about the 1 percent and executive compensation, take heart: Before Reed received her bonus, her salary was cut by a whooping $130,000, or less than 1 percent of her total pay, because of the disaster. Poor thing.

At its peak, the Porter Ranch leak released 60 tons of natural gas per hour, and residents of the Los Angeles neighborhood reported headaches, nausea, and severe nosebleeds, as well as eye, ear and throat infections. More than 10,000 Porter Ranch residents (and two schools) were forced to temporarily relocate, which cost the company about $2 million a day. The leak lasted from October 2015 until February 2016.

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The environmental impact was massive as well. The leak was particularly damaging because of the amount of methane — a greenhouse gas more potent that carbon dioxide — released. Porter Ranch’s greenhouse-gas impact was even larger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and every day of the leak was equivalent to building six coal-fired power plants or putting an extra 4.5 million cars on the road.

And for this, Debra Reed received an extra $3 million.

So how is it possible that Reed would receive anything other than a boot out the door? LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik put it well: “It’s the result of a daisy-chain culture among corporate executives who sit on each others’ boards and judge each others’ performance in a near-vacuum.”

In other words, it’s friends voting on friend’s compensation.

Porter Ranch residents, naturally, were not pleased at the revelation of Reed’s bonus. “This sends out a signal that as long as the dollars are there, the impact on people, homes and the environment doesn’t matter,” Paula Cracium, president of the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council, told Hiltzik. “That’s not the signal we need to send to executives who have so much power.” But for every under-performing CEO who gets handsomely rewarded for his or her mistakes, that’s exactly the message we’re sending.

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Porter Ranch CEO got a $3 million bonus after a massive natural gas leak

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India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

by CandelaTonkin Posted on March 29, 2016

India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

By on 29 Mar 2016commentsShare

India has a grandiose vision for its 1.2 billion people to drive only electric vehicles by 2030. And that’s not even the most ambitious part — the government thinks it can do it without spending a dime.

“We are trying to make this program self-financing,” Power Minister Piyush Goyal said at a youth conference this week, according to The Times of India. “We don’t need one rupee of support from the government. We don’t need one rupee of investment from the people of India.”

Goyal noted that a small working group of politicians will meet in early April to hammer out the details of the goal, which could include a program to incentivize buying electric cars by making them zero-down investments. Later on, the money the car owners would have spent on gas could go to paying off the price of the vehicle, according to Goyal.

As far as number of cars owned per household, India ranks low on the list, with just 6 percent of households reporting they own a car. But that number is expected to grow exponentially as the economy expands.

It’s not the first time India has announced sweeping sustainability plans under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sometimes to mixed results. Last October, the world’s third biggest greenhouse gas polluter announced its new climate plan, promising to obtain 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (primarily solar) by 2030. But earlier this year, the World Trade Organization ruled that provisions of Modi’s solar plan shut out international companies, particularly the U.S., from India’s burgeoning solar market. Most recently, the country levied a 4 percent “green” tax on new passenger vehicle sales, part of an effort to fight air pollution and traffic congestion.

India has no time to waste to tackle its pollution problem as its capital, New Delhi, already has worse air quality than Beijing.

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Arctic sea ice hits another record low

by BarbraLlanas529 Posted on March 29, 2016

Arctic sea ice hits another record low

By on 29 Mar 2016commentsShare

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports that a record amount of the Arctic sea never froze this winter. Ice extent, which usually hits a wintertime maximum around mid-March, was at a record-low for the second year in a row, 5,000 square miles below 2015’s record-low maximum extent. This year’s maximum extent is 431,000 square miles below averages from 1981 to 2010.

It’s a pattern that will likely continue, according to NASA Arctic sea scientist Walter Meier. “It is likely that we’re going to keep seeing smaller wintertime maximums in the future because in addition to a warmer atmosphere, the ocean has also warmed up,” Meier said. The amount of sea ice can vary a lot from year to year, but we’re seeing “significant downward trend” from warming conditions, Meier added.

This new record comes after another year of record high temperatures across the globe: 2015 broke the record for high temperatures set by 2014, and February of this year was the hottest month on record. And the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. “I’ve never seen such a warm, crazy winter in the Arctic,” said NSIDC director Mark Serreze. “The heat was relentless.”

Arctic sea ice is vital to stabilizing Earth’s temperature, according to NASA; when it melts, the oceans absorb more sunlight and warm ever faster. Subsequently, this melts more sea ice, contributing to to global sea level rise. It’s a cycle. A very disturbing cycle. You can watch a visualization from NASA below.

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Arctic sea ice hits another record low

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Alarm clock appeals to your good nature to break your snoozing habit. We have a better idea

by SherriMcLean9 Posted on March 28, 2016

Alarm clock appeals to your good nature to break your snoozing habit. We have a better idea

By on 28 Mar 2016commentsShare

You awake to the roar of an African lion. Bleary-eyed, you grab your phone and hit snooze to silence the feline’s growls — and in doing so, donate $1 to a conservation fund.

That’s the premise of an app called Zooster, the world’s first “charitable alarm clock.” After the howl of a grey wolf or the squeak of a dolphin wakes you from your beauty sleep, you can either dismiss the alarm or hit snooze. If you do the latter, the app automatically donates your money to a charity that supports the animal whose wake-up call you ignored.

Sure, you might not be prepared to make informed monetary decisions in your state of morning grogginess — but at least it’s for a good cause, right? This leads us to the crucial problem with Zooster: Wouldn’t donating to a terrible cause get you up faster?

Introducing Eschewster: the app that will help you abstain from hitting snooze and donating a dollar. We brainstormed some ideas for the world’s second charitable alarm clock that’ll get you out from under those covers in a hurry:

Get up now or $1 goes to the NRA
Get up now or $1 goes to the travel budget of that dentist who killed Cecil
Get up now or $1 goes to the Rachel Dolezal Center For Diversity
Get up now or $1 goes to expanding George W. Bush’s personal Texas ranch
Get up now or $1 goes to a climate denial group of your choice
Get up now or $1 goes to developing toilet paper even thinner than one-ply
Get up now or $1 goes to Kanye West’s debt reduction fund
Get up now or $1 goes to the making of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 3
Get up now or $1 goes to the initiative to build an even bigger proposed pipeline, Keystone XXL

App developers, take note! Until Zooster’s official launch this fall, we could use some extra incentive to get up in the mornings. It’s not exactly the cock-a-doodle-do that served as the alarm for your agrarian ancestors, but the moral of the story is the same: If you snooze, you lose.

(That is, unless you end up snoozing and donating to Grist.)

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Alarm clock appeals to your good nature to break your snoozing habit. We have a better idea

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Huge wind project moves forward despite states’ objections

by gildabanner5225 Posted on March 28, 2016

Huge wind project moves forward despite states’ objections

By on 28 Mar 2016commentsShare

The Department of Energy announced Friday it will permit a major expansion of the nation’s wind energy lines.

The power line project, which will move 4,000 megawatts of power from Texas and Oklahoma through Arkansas and into the Southeast, has faced opposition from landowners and state leaders, but the DOE used a provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to bypass state approval of the project. It is projected to cost $2.5 billion and bring power to 1.5 million homes.

While clean energy advocates may be celebrating, not everyone is as pleased.

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“Basically this decision says that Washington, D.C., knows more than the people of Arkansas do about whether to build across the state giant, unsightly transmission towers to carry a comparatively expensive, unreliable source of electricity to the Southeast where utilities may not need the electricity,” said Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander. “This is the first time federal law has been used to override a state’s objections to using eminent domain for sitting electric transmission lines. It is absolutely the wrong policy.” The Republican senator has received a 20 percent lifetime score on his environmental voting record by the League of Conservation Voters, which is admittedly better than most of his peers.

The DOE, however, says the project will do much to modernize the nation’s energy grid, as well as help address climate change from carbon emissions.

“Moving remote and plentiful power to areas where electricity is in high demand is essential for building the grid of the future,” said Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz in a statement. “Building modern transmission that delivers renewable energy to more homes and businesses will create jobs, cut carbon emissions, and enhance the reliability of our grid.”

The effort to modernize the grid has largely stalled since the ’80s, as the New York Times reports, despite increasing urgency from the threat of climate change. While the company building the line, Clean Line Energy Partners, will be required to acquire the land the lines are built across, the developers will be able to use eminent domain if negotiations fail by invoking the Energy Policy Act.

Construction is projected to begin in 2017.

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Huge wind project moves forward despite states’ objections

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Marijuana is legal in Colorado, but rain barrels still are not

by JosetteSeely Posted on March 26, 2016

Marijuana is legal in Colorado, but rain barrels still are not

By on 25 Mar 2016commentsShare

While it’s perfectly legal for Colorado residents to sit around in their soft pants with one hand wrapped around a bong and the other in a Cheetos bag, there’s one surprising thing that could get them in trouble with the law: rain barrels.

Colorado is the only state in the nation that bans the use of rain barrels. According to the state constitution, all moisture that falls from the sky and into Colorado’s borders is owned by the “people” — which really means it’s owned by the state. Water is allocated according to a complicated web of water rights. All of the rain and snow that fall into residents’ yards must be allowed to flow unimpeded into waterways, for instance, where it then becomes the property of whoever owns the rights — generally ranchers, farmers, drinking water providers, and developers. This system goes back more than a century, and rights are granted based on claim date: The longer you’ve had a claim, the higher priority it gets.

As you may imagine, the rain barrel ban is unpopular among those without water rights — namely, people who would like to store snowmelt or rainwater and use it to water their gardens or even flush their toilets. And the issue has become increasingly contentious as drought in Western states has made water an even more precious — and limited — resource.

There have been many attempts to reform Colorado’s water laws in the statehouse, but none have passed. The latest attempt is proposed by Democratic state Rep. Jessie Danielson, who is sponsoring a bill that would permit Colorado residents to collect up to 110 gallons at a time, or two barrels’ worth. “If I can shovel snow off from my sidewalk and put it on my lawn, why can’t I use a rain barrel to take it from my sidewalk to put on my tomato plants?” Danielson asked during an interview with CBS Denver.

It’s a good question, but one that may not be resolved anytime soon. Although the bill passed in the state House by 61 to 3, it has stalled in the GOP-controlled Senate. One of the strongest opponents of the bill, as ThinkProgress reports, is Republican Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, whose district is home to farmers and ranchers concerned that rain barrels would reduce their own share of water. “It’s like growing flowers,” Sonnenberg said last year about rain barrels. “You can’t go over and pick your neighbors’ flowers just because you’re only picking a few. They’re not your flowers.”

The irony here is that research shows that rain barrels actually don’t affect the amount of water that will reach streams and rivers by any detectable level. Most rain is absorbed into the land before it reaches waterways anyway. Time to flush away some out-of-date thinking.

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Marijuana is legal in Colorado, but rain barrels still are not

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Watch the horror of a Republican senator forced to pick between Trump and Cruz

by myrnat640422 Posted on March 25, 2016

Watch the horror of a Republican senator forced to pick between Trump and Cruz

By on 25 Mar 2016commentsShare

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham went on the The Daily Show to explain his endorsement of Texas Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz for the GOP nomination, but mostly ended up chortling with host Trevor Noah about how “completely screwed up” his own party has become.

“He was my 15th choice, what can I say?” Graham said of Cruz, who he’d previously slammed at the Washington Press Club Foundation Dinner in February with the line, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you.”

But with Donald Trump leading in the race for delegates, Graham and many other establishment Republicans are between rock and a hard place — or, as Graham put it, left to choose between “being shot in the head” (Trump) or “being poisoned” (Cruz). So, he and others like Jeb Bush are hopping on the “Ted Train” in a last-ditch attempt to stop the Donald from netting the presidential nomination.

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