Tag: environment

“I’m just a number to them”: Garden Grove residents demand closure of GKN plant after toxic emergency

On Tuesday evening, California officials lifted the remaining mandatory evacuation orders for some 16,000 residents in Garden Grove, California, who live near an overheated chemical tank at a GKN Aerospace facility. Evacuation orders for some 50,000 residents were initially issued last Thursday, rescinded later that same evening, and then reissued Friday morning.

A 34,000-gallon storage tank at the facility containing methyl methacrylate (MMA), a volatile and flammable chemical, was found to be leaking. The chemical is not only dangerous when inhaled, but also posed the risk of causing a massive toxic explosion.

While the evacuation orders were lifted Tuesday night, police and emergency personnel are maintaining a several-block closure around the facility as chemicals continue to leak from the ruptured tank.

In addition to thousands of residences, several schools are also located close to the facility.

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Residents of Polluted Areas Say Trump’s Regulatory Rollbacks Are “Getting Really Scary”

ita Robles’s life is ruled by allergies, the worst effects from which can last for months at a time. She uses rescue inhalers, a nebulizer, and a maintenance inhaler — on top of a slew of other medications. Even then, it’s often not enough.

“There are times when I’m outside just walking to the driveway and it’ll feel like something catches in my throat, and it causes me to go into a choking fit,” Robles told Truthout. “It’s miserable.”

Robles lives in a Houston, Texas, neighborhood suffocated by heavy industry — Denver Harbor, the largest petrochemical hub of the U.S. Robles, 56, calls the neighborhood a “disaster.”

She’s just one of millions of Americans, however, living in communities where people’s quality of life is secondary to the hum of big business — communities at the front line of the government’s regulatory rollbacks and budget cuts.

Since Donald Trump came back into office in January 2025, the federal government has either succeeded in, or is attempting to, weaken and roll back many of the country’s key environmental regulations and other broader programs. Things could get worse if the proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget is approved, with its 52 percent cut in funding under the latest agency head, former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin.

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How America’s Recycling Program Failed—and Scarred the Environment

In March 2019, The New York Times ran a shocking story exploring why many prominent US cities were abandoning their recycling programs.

“Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy,” Times business writer Michael Corkery reported. “In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill.”

Philadelphia and Memphis were not outliers. They, along with Deltona, Florida, which had suspended its recycling program the previous month, were just a few examples of hundreds of cities across the country that had scrapped recycling programs or scaled back operations.

Since that time, cities across the country have continued to scrap recycling programs, citing high costs.

“The cost of recycling was going to double, and the town wasn’t going to be able to absorb that cost,” said Dencia Raish, the town clerk administrator for Akron, Colorado, which ended its program in 2021 and now sends “recyclables” to a landfill.

While many Americans likely are distraught about America’s failed recycling experiment, a new video produced by Kite & Key Media reveals that abandoning recycling—at least in its current form—is likely to benefit both Americans and the environment.

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EV Pollution: Converting the World to EVs Would Be an Environmental Disaster

In 2024, President Biden said he wanted 56% of all new cars sold in the United States to be electric vehicles by 2032. California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly mandated that 35% of new 2026 model cars sold in the state be zero-emissions vehicles, rising to 68% in 2030 and 100% in 2035.

The European Union announced in 2023 that, from 2035 onward, all new cars coming onto the market could not emit any CO2. The United Kingdom similarly announced a 2030 ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars.

The reaction from the U.S. auto industry was blunt. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation said it “will take a miracle” for all states following California’s rules to reach 100% new zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035.

They are correct. The environmental impact would be devastating. The people claiming to save the world with electric cars could end up destroying it.

Replacing every vehicle on Earth with an EV, all 1.5 to 1.6 billion of them, would be effectively impossible. There are not enough minerals to manufacture all of the batteries required. In addition, there is not enough global processing capacity, and such a transition would require incredible amounts of labor. Many of these minerals are already being mined by children and by workers laboring under hazardous and toxic conditions that amount to modern slavery.

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New Investigation Exposes How Much Roundup Is Being Sprayed in Northern California’s Forests

In remote Northeast California, about 10 miles outside the lumber mill town of Chester and a half-hour’s drive from the old hunting cabin I bought and fixed up about a decade ago, I steer my old Toyota Tacoma down a bumpy dirt road to where the Lassen National Forest gives way to private timberland. Lilly rides shotgun.

We’d come to this exact spot seven years ago. Lilly, my sharp-eyed border collie, had jumped out of the truck and chased a rabbit through a meadow of knee-high grass, returning covered in mud and burrs. The landscape was straight out of an L.L.Bean catalog: a flower-dotted meadow buzzing with life. Douglas firs, incense cedars, and some of the tallest sugar pines on the planet sheltered protected species ranging from gray wolves to Pacific fishers and northern goshawks. The Sierra Nevada red fox, one of California’s rarest mammals, was known to live nearby, amid the vast patchwork of private and public lands. The Lassen area is where I come to reset, forage for wild mushrooms, and let stress evaporate.

But today, I’m looking out over a barren, sun-bleached expanse that stretches across the former meadow and up the sides of denuded mountains as far as the eye can see. No birds. No animals. No insects. No big trees. Just some waist-high piles of volcanic rock, a nod to the still-active Lassen Peak nearby. It is eerily quiet—desolate. The Dixie Fire roared through here in July 2021, burning nearly 1 million acres. The Park Fire three years later took out another 430,000 acres nearby. But the fires aren’t directly responsible for what I’m seeing today. People did this.

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The World’s Worst Environmentalist Alarmist Just Died, and One Viral Clip Shows How Evil He Really Was

Paul Ehrlich died last week. I doubt he would have minded, considering he thought there should have been a lot fewer people on earth. Really, if he wanted to put his money where his rhetoric was, he should have checked out a bit earlier.

Ehrlich, who passed away at the age of 93 on Friday, was a Stanford University biologist best known for his 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” The thesis was effectively in the title — overpopulation would kill us all.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” he wrote in the book, predicting that four billion humans would die.

Well, this didn’t work out as planned. In his obituary, The New York Times did put an “austere religious scholar” twist on his legacy, noting in the subtitle that “he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”

I guess they figured that was defensible because there are over eight billion people on the planet now and they’ll all die eventually, if not writhing from hunger due to that pesky population bomb that never happened.

There are plenty of reasons to loathe both Ehrlich himself and the legacy he leaves behind, but this clip from 1970 making the rounds should neatly demonstrate why we oughtn’t lament the loss.

Ehrlich was being asked what the government should do to control the population. He said he was “against government interference in our lives” to start with, which turned out to be just as much of a lie as the rest of his life’s work.

“The very first thing the government should do is try and take the pressure off to reproduce,” Ehrlich said. “There’s a lot of pressure in our society now to reproduce.”

“If you’re single, people try and push you into getting married,” he added. “The idea is that nobody should escape. So there’s pressure to get married.”

“Young couples, if they don’t have children, people say, gee, they must be sterile,” he continued. “They never say, gee, maybe they like good wine and going to the theater and so on. They prefer that to scraping diapers. So there’s pressure to have children.”

At least in that respect, Ehrlich has succeeded, although not through government intervention: We’ve convinced an entire generation that they should care about fleeting pleasures more than the greatest joys in life, although we’ve made them feel guilty about that, too. (Wine has a carbon footprint, after all!)

However, Ehrlich wanted more — he wanted White House intervention.

“The president ought to say, from now, here on out, no intelligent, patriotic American family ought to have more than two children, preferably one, if you’re starting a family now,” Ehrlich said. “Not any law, but just say this is what responsible people do.”

And then he said there should be a law — of the most ridiculous sort.

“He ought to make the FCC see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light on television, wherever they appear,” Ehrlich continued. “There ought to be a tremendous amount of television time devoted to spot commercials, the sort we’ve had against smoking. But ones in the middle, say, in the middle of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’ you get a scene which shows Los Angeles in the smog and it just says, ‘This city has a fatal disease. It’s called overpopulation.’ So long.”

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Hollywood Hypocrisy Exposed As Elites Leave Trash-Filled Auditorium, Ignore Squalor on Streets Outside

Here’s a travel secret: Hollywood Boulevard should not be on your must-see places to visit. In fact, a recent travel guide showed that tourists rated it the “worst” tourist destination in the world. 

It’s dirty, impossible to get to by public transportation, its streets are crawling with crazy people and homelessness, and there’s not really anything to see. Except for a few newer buildings, entire blocks look old and decaying.

It is, however, home to the Academy Awards, which is held in the state-of-the-art Dolby Theater, and if you manage to make your way inside there, you’d forget all about the sleaziness outside.

Hollywood celebs are continually going on about the danger of waste, the planet dying from climate change, and the perils of overconsumption. That doesn’t mean any of their rules apply to themselves, however.

“Clean up on aisle ALL,” said one viral tweet in response.

“Aren’t some of them environmentalists?” wrote another observer on X.  “Where’s all that ‘protect the planet’ energy now?”

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So, Is That Why the Washington Post Isn’t Covering DC’s Raw Sewage Nightmare?

It’s a total s**t show in Washington, DC. For those not following, four weeks ago, an underground sewage line failed, and the Potomac, which is already disgusting, has been flooded with hundreds of millions of gallons of human waste. If it hasn’t taken the title, it will soon for being the worst wastewater spill in US history. 

To boot, it won’t be fixed for another 10 months. It should be covered, in The Washington Post of all places, but it isn’t. Maybe that’s because there’s a Joe Biden connection: the CEO and general manager of DC Water is David L. Gadis, who the former braindead president picked to serve on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council to “serve with distinction as the sole expert on the Council from the wastewater utilities sector” in 2022.

DC Water says the underground sewer line that burst and began spewing wastewater into the Potomac River four weeks ago could take another 10 months to repair. 

Although DC Water crews continue to successfully divert the majority of the sewage away from the river, officials say more than 240 million gallons of sewage has made its way into the Potomac. 

In the latest spillover, a mass of flushed wipes clogged the utility company’s temporary pumps, releasing an additional 600,000 gallons of sewage water into the Potomac. 

“The risk of flow entering the Potomac River exists until we can get the flow back into the Potomac Interceptor. Right now, it’s bypassed through the C&O Canal and then routed back into the Potomac Interceptor,” DC Water COO Matthew Brown said. 

“And so that is our goal. That is what we are working towards. And there are people on site 24 hours a day working to make this happen,” he said. 

Brown is the first high-level DC Water official to have spoken publicly about the incident. 

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Insect Loss As an Early Warning of Systemic Biological Failure

n medicine, silence can be more alarming than noise. For example, a patient who abruptly stops voicing discomfort or a monitor that ceases activity may signal system failure rather than resolution. Ecology presents a similar scenario, and currently, the silence is deeply concerning.

Insects are disappearing across vast regions globally. This is not a modest decline or a simple geographic shift, but a rapid vanishing of beetles, butterflies, moths, flies, mosquitoes, bees, and entire functional groups. This phenomenon is not speculative or anecdotal; it is among the most consistently documented biological trends of the past 50 years and remains insufficiently addressed. For context, the total biomass of lost insects is comparable to the combined weight of all commercial aircraft worldwide, representing a profound ecological and economic loss.

For decades, insects were treated as background noise—annoyances at best, pests at worst. Their abundance was assumed, their resilience taken for granted. We designed agricultural systems, urban environments, chemical interventions, and technological solutions on the unspoken assumption that insects would always be there. They were too numerous to fail.

This assumption has proven incorrect.

The Data Are Not Subtle

One of the most widely cited early warnings came from a long-term German entomological study that tracked flying insect biomass across protected areas over nearly three decades. The result shocked even the investigators: a decline of more than 75% in total flying insect biomass between 1989 and 2016.¹ These were not industrial zones or pesticide-saturated fields. They were nature preserves. However, many regions like Africa and large parts of Asia still lack comprehensive, long-term insect monitoring, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of global insect declines.

Subsequent studies confirmed that this was not an anomaly. A global review published in Biological Conservation concluded that approximately 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction, with declines accelerating in recent decades.² Longitudinal data from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, North America, and East Asia tell the same story with local variation but consistent direction.³-⁶

The loss is not limited to rare or specialized species. Common insects—the ones that once filled the air—are disappearing fastest. Entomologists now openly discuss “functional extinction,” a state in which species technically still exist but no longer play their ecological roles in meaningful numbers.⁷

The significance of this issue is often underestimated.

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UK’s Countryside Trash Horror: Oxfordshire River Turns Into Third-World Dump

Shocking footage from Oxfordshire reveals a massive illegal fly-tip turning the picturesque River Cherwell into a wasteland of rubbish, piled 20 feet deep and stretching 500 feet long. 

This environmental outrage, dubbed a “catastrophe” by locals, highlights how the once-pristine English countryside is devolving into scenes reminiscent of third-world pollution hotspots, where unchecked dumping poisons rivers and landscapes.

The enormous heap, estimated at hundreds of tonnes of plastic, foam, wood, and household waste, appeared overnight in a floodplain near Kidlington, just meters from the A34 and the River Cherwell. 

The pile is one of the UK’s largest fly-tips ever recorded, posing severe risks to wildlife, water quality, and public health with fears of toxins leaching into the river. 

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