Here is what Hillary Clinton said as she came out against the Keystone XL pipeline. (h/t @betsy_klein) pic.twitter.com/iVzU07U12o
— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) September 22, 2015
Category: Environmental
The frogs are turning female
A surprising study has found that frogs in suburban lakes tend to be mostly female, and suggests that urbanization and estrogenic wastes are likely turning male frogs female. In a study published September 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers sampled hundreds of young frogs from 21 ponds in Connecticut, which… Continue reading “The frogs are turning female”
More climate change fallout
Poor kid. Lots more cases of this stuff now that the water is so much warmer:
(NEWSER) – A 14-year-old Houston boy who contracted a brain-eating amoeba while swimming in a Texas state park with his cross-country running teammates died over the weekend, reports the Houston Chronicle. Michael John Riley Jr. died 17 days after he contracted primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) while swimming in a freshwater lake at Huntsville State Park. Michael’s family wrote on Facebook that the three-time junior Olympian “fought a courageous fight over the past week, allowing him to move on to be with the Lord for future heavenly tasks, a beautiful set of wings, and a pair of gold running shoes.”
PAM is caused by the Naegleria fowleri amoeba. “They get water up their nose with those organisms in there,” an epidemiologist told the Chronicle. “They start invading the nasal tissues. They basically go all the way to the brain and you get a brain infection.”
Breaking the scale
Not that any of us are ever likely to own one, but this is really kinda cool and I’m thrilled that an American car is setting the standard on this. (But it’s the Brits who have designed roads that will charge your electric car as you drive!)
This score is kind of insane.
Tesla Motors Inc.’s all-wheel-drive version of the battery-powered Model S, the P85D, earned a 103 out of a possible 100 in an evaluation by Consumer Reports magazine.
The combination of power and efficiency was so off-the-chart that the group had to recalibrate its ratings methods “to account for the car’s exceptionally strong performance,” according to a statement. Ultimately, the car was given a score of 100 that set a new standard for perfection.
The Tesla sedan is the quickest Consumer Reports ever tested, accelerating to 60 miles (97 kilometers) per hour from a stop in 3.5 seconds using the car’s “insane mode.” (Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has since released an even-faster “ludicrous mode.”) The P85D is a high-performance, all-wheel-drive version of the all-electric Model S that achieved the equivalent of 87 miles per gallon of gasoline.
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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
And I see the Chinese have learned that putting dangerous, unregulated toxins in the midst of populated areas is a lot cheaper… for a while.
It boggles the mind: You can see the devastation everywhere: in the hollowed-out shells of buildings, in the anguished faces of relatives, in the parade of scorched cars. But what set off the terrifying explosions that ripped through warehouses containing hazardous chemical materials, shooting fireballs across the sky and shaking buildings more than 2 miles away?… Continue reading “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”
Teflon and DuPont
I’ve always heard awful, awful things about DuPont, a company that pretty much owns the feudal state of Delaware and considers employees to be serfs. This Intercept story is illustrative:
Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story of DuPont’s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle — culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September — a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.
This story is based on many of those documents, which until they were entered into evidence for these trials had been hidden away in DuPont’s files. Among them are write-ups of experiments on rats, dogs, and rabbits showing that C8 was associated with a wide range of health problems that sometimes killed the lab animals. Many thousands of pages of expert testimony and depositions have been prepared by attorneys for the plaintiffs. And through the process of legal discovery they have uncovered hundreds of internal communications revealing that DuPont employees for many years suspected that C8 was harmful and yet continued to use it, putting the company’s workers and the people who lived near its plants at risk.
The best evidence of how C8 affects humans has also come out through the legal battle over the chemical, though in a more public form. As part of a 2005 settlement over contamination around the West Virginia plant where Wamsley worked, lawyers for both DuPont and the plaintiffs approved a team of three scientists, who were charged with determining if and how the chemical affects people.
In 2011 and 2012, after seven years of research, the science panel found that C8 was “more likely than not” linked to ulcerative colitis — Wamsley’s condition — as well as to high cholesterol; pregnancy-induced hypertension; thyroid disease; testicular cancer; and kidney cancer. The scientists’ findings, published in more than three dozen peer-reviewed articles, were striking, because the chemical’s effects were so widespread throughout the body and because even very low exposure levels were associated with health effects.
‘California’s burning’
From what I hear, an awful lot of Californians are ignoring the drought restrictions in favor of a green lawn and clean cars:
Gov. Jerry Brown, appearing at the site of a wildfire that has charred nearly 70,000 acres in Lake, Yolo and Colusa counties since last week, said Thursday that the ferocity of fires raging across drought-stricken California should serve as a “wake-up call” to climate change skeptics.
“The climate is unstable,” the Democratic governor told reporters after meeting with fire officials and people affected by the fire. “You can imagine, if the drought continues for a year or several years, California could literally burn up.”
Brown, who called a state of emergency last week in response to the fires, has long emphasized ties between climate change and wildfires, with rising temperatures contributing to drier forests. He urged Republican presidential candidates in a letter Wednesday to address climate change in their first debate, on Thursday night, and he told reporters, “My message is real clear: California’s burning. What the hell are you going to do about it?”
Clinton refuses to answer on Keystone XL
I just don’t understand why she won’t answer, because her refusal to answer is going to piss off twice as many people as answering would:
Hillary Clinton took a strong stance on clean energy Monday, telling a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, that her efforts to tackle climate change would parallel President John F. Kennedy’s call to action during the space race in the 1960s.
“I want to get the country back to setting big ambitious goals,” Clinton said. “I want us to get back into the future business, and one of the best ways we can do that is to be absolutely ready to address the challenge of climate change and make it work to our advantage economically.”
Her remarks tracked closely with an ambitious plan her campaign released Sunday night, which set a target of producing enough renewable energy to power all the nation’s homes and businesses by 2027.
“America’s ability to lead the world on this issue hinges on our ability to act ourselves,” she said. “I refuse to turn my back on what is one of the greatest threats and greatest opportunities America faces.”
Still, the Democractic front-runner refused — as she has several times before — to say whether or not she supports construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. That project, which would carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries and ports in the United States, is seen by many environmentalists as a blemish on President Barack Obama’s climate record. It has been stalled for years in a lengthy State Department review that began when Clinton was still Secretary of State. The Obama administration has resisted several recent attempts by Congress to force Keystone’s approval, but it has yet to make a final decision on the project — although one is expected sometime this year.
“I will refrain from commenting [on Keystone XL], because I had a leading role in getting that process started, and we have to let it run its course,” Clinton said, in response to a question from an audience member.
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The holes in Hillary’s climate plan
It would be nice if just once, she came right out and told us what she has planned — keeping in mind, of course, that she intends to govern and won’t really offer voters a Christmas list of what they want if she can’t deliver:
Hillary Clinton’s newly unveiled climate vision sounds ambitious on its face: 500 million new solar panels from coast to coast, eco-minded energy tax breaks and enough green power to keep the lights on in every U.S. home.
But just as glaring were the details she left out.Does Clinton support or oppose the Keystone XL oil pipeline? Or Arctic offshore drilling? Or tougher restrictions on fracking? Or the oil industry’s push to lift the 1970s ban on exporting U.S. crude oil? Clinton avoided all those questions in the solar-heavy climate plan she outlined Sunday night, and in her speech promoting it Monday in Iowa — and she declined yet again Monday to say where she stands on Keystone.
That means that liberals longing for Clinton to erase what they see as the dirtiest spot on President Barack Obama’s environmental record — his support for an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that includes domestic oil and gas drilling — have to keep waiting. Greens want to cheer for Clinton, but Democratic rivals Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley are already trying to outflank her with even more ambitious climate plans, while the GOP attacks her from the right.
“Clinton’s climate plan is remarkable for what it doesn’t say, yet,” California-based environmental activist R.L. Miller, who founded the Climate Hawks Vote PAC, said in a statement. Specifically, she added, Clinton offered “no effort to keep fossil fuels in the ground, no price on carbon; no word on Keystone XL, Arctic oil or other carbon bombs; no word on fracking.”
Climate activists are also looking for the Democratic front-runner to put some distance between herself and her record at the State Department, which issued a series of studies finding no significant environmental obstacles to approving Keystone.
“We’re expecting a reset” of the former secretary’s platform, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in an interview, “and a completely different climate and energy policy than the last time she ran for president.”
While Clinton’s pitch to boost renewables to a 33-percent share of the nation’s power supply is “a positive first step,” Brune added, “we’re looking for her to reconcile her climate and energy policies, which is something Obama has not yet been able to do effectively.”
Fukushima daisies
So life is turning into one long Simpsons episode:
Photos of flowers on Twitter and Instagram may be as commonplace as sunsets and selfies, but one Japanese amateur photographer has captured something a bit more unique than a beautiful bloom.
Twitter user @san_kaido posted a photo of mutated yellow daisies last month, found in Nasushiobara City, around 70 miles from Fukushima, the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster. The photos show daisies with fused yellow centres and with the petals growing out the side of the flower.
The daisies are not the first deformed plants found after the disaster. In 2013, the Daily Mail posted photos of mutated vegetables and fruit, attributing the apparent abnormalities to high levels of radiation found in the groundwater.
The daisy photos come four years after the Fukushima Daichii Nuclear Power Plant meltdown which was caused after a devastating earthquake and tsunami knocked out three of the plant’s nuclear reactors.
