Tag: environment

Treasure Hunt Fail: Judge Ends Man’s Decade-Long Quest for $750 Million Bitcoin Fortune

A decade-long legal battle over a lost Bitcoin fortune has ended in disappointment for James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport, Wales, after a court dismissed his lawsuit against the Newport City Council. The man hoped to search a landfill for a hard drive he accidentally threw away more than a decade ago holding Bitcoin now worth $750 million.

Crypto News reports that James Howells, an early Bitcoin adopter from Newport, Wales, in the UK has faced a major setback in his quest to retrieve a discarded hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins, now valued at about $750 million. The IT engineer accidentally threw away the hard drive in 2013 when Bitcoin had negligible value. However, as the cryptocurrency rapidly increased in value, Howells sought the right to excavate the landfill to recover the hard drive, offering to share the treasure with the local community. Now that Bitcoin has achieved the astronomical value of $94,000, Howells demanded £495 million in compensation from the Newport City Council if it continued to block his search.

Despite Howells’ offer to share a portion of the recovered Bitcoin with the council and the local community, Judge Keyser KC ruled that there were no “reasonable grounds” for the claim. The decision was based on environmental concerns and the council’s ownership of the landfill contents. The landfill reportedly holds 1.4 million tons of waste, although Howells claims to have pinpointed the hard drive’s location to a 100,000-ton section.

Reacting to the ruling, Howells expressed his frustration, calling it a “kick in the teeth.” He had assembled a team of experts for the recovery effort and engaged in repeated negotiations with the council, but the local authority maintained that excavation was impossible due to environmental regulations.

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Officials Issue Warning After Oddly Colored Snow Falls on Town: ‘Avoid Ingesting or Direct Skin Contact’

The picturesque sight of snow blanketing a Maine town became something far less attractive.

On Tuesday, residents of Rumford found that instead of fluffy white stuff covering yards and fields, they looked upon brown snow, according to WJW-TV

The town posted an explanation on Facebook, saying the local paper mill was to blame.

“The Town has confirmed that due to a malfunction at the Mill there was a release of spent black liquor which resulted in precipitation of brown or tan colored snow. This is mostly in the areas of Town nearest to the Mill,” it posted.

The post said the snow should be left alone.

“The pH of this substance is 10 which is alkali and therefore a skin irritant. Although it is non-toxic it should not be touched or otherwise put in contact with skin,” the post said.

“We have been in contact with the Mill and they have already rectified the issue and have informed their regulators. In the meantime we are also notifying the school district to let kids know not to play with ‘brown snow,’” the post said.

“It is likely advisable to keep your pets away from this snow. We are hopeful the rain tomorrow will wash most of the substance away and flush it off the ground and people’s homes or property,” the post said.

The post said that Maine Department of Environmental Protection tests showed the pH of the snow was around 8, compared to water, which has a pH of 7.

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‘Outdated’ Marijuana Packaging Rules Make It ‘Impossible’ For Cannabis Industry To Be Environmentally Sustainable, Study Says

A newly published study of product packaging from the commercial marijuana industry concludes that the market shift toward vape pens in recent years has been “a seismic event for cannabis waste,” with packaging from California’s legal market now nearly on par with that of household pharmaceuticals in the state.

But while there’s “a robust infrastructure in place for reverse distribution” of pharmaceuticals, the study notes, “no such infrastructure exists for cannabis waste at large scale.”

The new research, by Oaksterdam University researcher Mitchell Colbert, published this week in the standards organization ATSM International’s Journal of Testing and Evaluation, also highlights how state cannabis regulations contribute to excessive cannabis waste that doesn’t exist for other industries.

The paper describes itself as “a novel attempt to estimate the volume of cannabis consumer packaging waste produced in California each year…and compare it with other household hazardous waste (HHW).”

It notes that while California regulators collected waste data through the state’s track-and-trace program, that information “is not publicly available even with a state Public Records Act request to the [Department of Cannabis Control].” Instead the study looked at a sample of cannabis packaging of 256 California cannabis products from 138 manufacturers, combining those findings with sales data on the number of product units sold.

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Study finds pesticide exposure leads to 41% higher risk of miscarriage

A recent study published in the open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety has found that women exposed to pesticides face a 41 percent higher risk of spontaneous abortion compared to those with minimal or no exposure.

It found that exposure to organophosphate pesticides was the most common exposure type, though the study examined various pesticide classes. (Related: 70% of pregnant women in Indiana have herbicide linked to cancer in their urine.)

The comprehensive review, analyzing data from 18 studies across the United States and Italy, included 439,097 pregnant women aged 16 and older.

Though scientists and researchers are not completely certain as to why exposure to pesticides contributes to miscarriage, they believe that contact with pesticide chemicals causes oxidative stress, inflammation and even endocrine function disruption.

Scientists say pesticides are especially threatening to fetuses as their bodies are small, vulnerable and highly sensitive while developing in the womb. The harmful chemicals within pesticides are capable of crossing the placenta that connects the fetus to the mother’s uterine wall. It is during and after this chemical crossover period that the developing fetus is harmed. The harm involves differentiation, cellular division and developmental problems.

Environmental toxins can harm fetal health during pregnancy. Common sources include consumer product chemicals, alcohol, tobacco and heavy metals – all of which increase miscarriage risk.

Pesticides pose one of the most serious risks during pregnancy. Organic food researchers advise that pregnant women choose organic produce when possible, especially for foods known to have high pesticide residues.

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Report finds cash-strapped NASA still spending MILLIONS on grants to DEI and “environmental justice” initiatives

Despite being severely underfunded, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) still spent millions of taxpayer dollars on grants to initiatives that focus on “environmental justice” and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Records indicate that much of NASA’s $10 million grant spending went to universities to help them study environmental justice in urban areas as well as other places with high concentrations of racial minorities.

For instance, the agency approved $150,000 in funding to Columbia University so it could pair “earth observations and socioeconomic data” and enable students to do environmental justice work in New York City.

Another grant, this time worth $250,000, was paid out to Los Angeles as part of NASA’s Predictive Environmental Analytics and Community Engagement for Equity and Environmental Justice (PEACE) program.

To remedy its observation that “people of color often face higher exposure to air pollutants,” NASA’s PEACE program paid the city to provide pollution data to its residents in “a way that works across communities and cultural differences and specifically analyzes, engages and responds to needs for environmental justice.”

NASA has provided over $5 million for “environmental justice” grants since 2022, according to federal records.

“The environmental justice movement focuses on ensuring communities receive equitable protection from natural and human-induced environmental hazards,” NASA’s webpage on equity and environmental justice reads. “It embodies the principle that all communities should be heard and represented in decision making.”

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Puerto Rico Trash Problem: Understanding the Crisis and Working Toward Solutions

Puerto Rico is grappling with a pressing trash problem that’s not just a visual blight, but a serious threat to its stunning landscapes, marine life, and the environment. The urgency of this crisis is underscored by its far-reaching impacts on health, tourism, and the economy. Let’s delve into the reasons behind this crisis, its profound effects on Puerto Rico, and the ongoing efforts to restore the island to its former glory. 

The Puerto Rico trash problem has been growing for decades. With a population of around 3.2 million, the island generates about 3.7 million tons of waste yearly. Despite being small, the island’s landfills are full and there’s no proper recycling infrastructure. This trash crisis affects everything from health to the economy so solutions are crucial for Puerto Rico’s future.

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80% of Air Samples in California Farm Communities Contain Pesticides

Almost 80% of air samples collected last year in California’s four most agriculture-intensive communities contained pesticide residues, though the concentrations were “unlikely to be harmful to human health,” according to a recently released state regulatory report.

The California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) collected 207 air samples at stations in Oxnard, Santa Maria, Shafter and Watsonville once a week throughout 2023, finding at least one of the 40 pesticides they tested for in 163 of the samples, according to the results.

The monitoring stations detected a total of 19 different pesticides in the air samples, including the herbicide pendimethalin and the fumigant 1,3-dichloropronene (Telone), which have both been linked to cancer.

These chemicals and others detected by CDPR have also been linked to nausea, shortness of breath and eye and respiratory irritation.

Despite being banned in 34 countries, Telone is the third-most heavily used pesticide in California, and CDPR has been criticized for failing to implement regulations that adequately protect mostly Latino farmworkers from the chemical.

The samples were all collected on school grounds, raising concerns among environmental and health advocates about safety risks for children and other vulnerable community members.

“The latest air sampling results continue to show pesticides sprayed on fields drift off site and contaminate the air nearby, a serious concern for those who live, go to school or work near farm fields,” Alexis Temkin, a senior toxicologist at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), said in a press release.

“Some pesticides can drift several miles from fields, putting many people at risk, including farm workers and vulnerable populations like young children, pregnant people and the elderly,” said Temkin.

None of the pesticides in the 2023 air samples were detected at concentrations at or above the levels CDPR considers threatening to public health, CDPR said.

The “detections of pesticides below health protective targets do not indicate risks for people living, working or going to school near agricultural fields,” the state agency said.

Despite detecting the presence of pesticides in the majority of samples, the agency issued a press release earlier this month stating that “95% of all samples analyses had no detectable pesticides.”

The way the agency publicly reported its data misrepresented the findings and appeared intentionally misleading, critics said.

“This is deliberate disinformation intended to deceive the public,” said Jane Sellen, co-director of the Californians for Pesticide Reform. “It’s so industry-serving.”

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WaPo’s Favorite Environmental Group Uses ‘Political’ Research To Link Climate Change to Natural Disasters. It’s Also Bankrolled by WaPo Owner Jeff Bezos.

World Weather Attribution was founded in 2014 to produce research linking extreme weather events to climate change. That research is then funneled to mainstream media outlets, giving them what the group calls the “larger global warming context” as they cover natural disasters.

The group found a friend in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in 2022 announced a $10 million grant to WWA and two other organizations to “scale effective communication on the links between climate change and extreme weather.” The Bezos Earth Fund said the money would provide the WWA an outlet to “reach the most important audience segments via trusted messengers.”

One such messenger is Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, which has cited WWA research in more than 70 stories over the past three years, a Washington Free Beacon review found. It does so uncritically, publishing the group’s non-peer-reviewed findings to suggest that climate change is to blame for recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Milton. Nonpartisan experts in the field, however, are not so sure of WWA’s methods, portraying the group’s flashy studies as rushed, partisan, and “incomplete.”

Bezos’s funding for the group, paired with the Washington Post‘s favorable coverage of its research, raises questions about the newspaper’s declared independence from its billionaire owner. The Post’s stories citing WWA do not acknowledge that Bezos—who purchased the paper in 2013, one year before the group’s founding—also bankrolls WWA.

“The motivation is entirely political,” Ryan Maue, the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said of the climate group. “I’m not sure what the scientific community’s opinion on it is, but my guess is that it has gotten along this far because of its political weight and the media attention that it is given, meaning you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this.”

Maue particularly criticized WWA’s methodology, which consists of determining the probability of a recent extreme weather event, comparing it with the probability of a similar event that occurred decades ago, and attributing the difference to climate change. That leads to flashy findings—but not necessarily accurate ones, according to Maue, who argued that the WWA values speed over accuracy and, as such, produces “incomplete” research.

“What they are able to put out is the headline that climate change made Hurricane Helene worse and then count on the scientific illiteracy of the corporate media in order to produce headlines that become, you know, more and more outlandish, making claims that obviously are not supported by the science,” he told the Free Beacon.

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Court Applies Environmental Law to Biden-Harris Border Disaster

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality estimates that each border crosser leaves approximately six to eight pounds of trash in the desert during his or her journey. If you do the rough math, the total amount of strewn garbage caused by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas greenlighting millions of illegal migrants, all trampling their way across the southern frontier, is stunning. 

Americans have probably wondered why federal environmental law does not prevent, or at least slow, Mayorkas from bringing about this mess. After all, the Biden-Harris administration has done much more than simply benignly tolerate or mildly encourage this massive human movement. The president and his cabinet have not only loudly proclaimed that they “welcome” the arrival of these illegals, but made it clear that this unprecedented immigration was central to their foreign and domestic policy. They have pushed their legal authorities beyond the limit, inventing out of thin air new immigration programs, mobilizing thousands of federal officers, and spending and reprogramming billions of dollars to make it all happen.

On our southern frontier, the resulting chaotic human activity—clandestine camping, trekking, consuming, and disposing—has had a profound impact on the natural environment as well as on towns, ranches, and small communities. Yet Biden-Harris environmental and health officials are silent about the countless heaps and tons of garbage, plastic, and abandoned human junk all over the border region. 

These illegal immigrants have thrown up makeshift encampments wherever they wanted, trampled through private property, disrupted normal activities and—lacking adequate sanitary facilities—deposited human waste all along extremely vulnerable waterways, like the Rio Grande, that are already too inadequate fully to serve the desert-like region. 

In normal times, in the wake of such violent human attacks on land and water, the American environmental protection community would have been on the warpath. But groups like the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, indeed the entire establishment environmental community, have all remained silent and done nothing to respond to the Biden-Harris reckless immigration policy. Resisting this kind of fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants federal policy that enables destructive human activity hostile to the environment is, in theory, their raison d’être. 

Normally, reacting to such a catastrophic environmental situation, groups like Greenpeace would be mobilizing thousands of fanatical activists, some perhaps chaining themselves to close traffic on the bridges over the Rio Grande, while a battery of lawyers from the Environmental Defense Fund would be in federal court filing lawsuits. In theory, they all sincerely believe that man-made activities like the Mayorkas migrant diaspora contribute to climate change and leave lasting damage to unspoiled natural areas. 

Moreover, Biden’s “immigration program” is not only enticing waves of humanity to trample through an unprepared and vulnerable region, but it is also growing the country’s population, practically overnight, by millions of new people. For years, groups like the Sierra Club saw population growth—including by immigration—as fundamentally at odds with protecting the national environment. It is a fair question that conservatives, too, should ask: How many millions do we want living in our country? 

What happened to change the environmental movement was yet another Fabian victory of wokeism ideology. Wokeism (of which open-borderism is a direct offshoot) has seriously infected and subdued the entire U.S. environmental movement. Wokeism conquered the leaders of the American environmental movement just as it did their counterparts in organized labor.

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Georgia environmental official collapses and dies near state Capitol after testifying about toxic BioLab fire

A Georgia environmental official died after suddenly collapsing near the state Capitol on Tuesday during a public meeting on last month’s toxic chemical plant inferno outside Atlanta, officials said.

Kenny Johnson, the Rockdale County Soil and Water Conservation District supervisor, testified alongside business owners and leaders about the BioLab chemical fire in Conyers, about 25 miles outside Atlanta, which spewed clouds of hazardous chlorine gas and smoke throughout the area.

Shortly afterward, the 62-year-old collapsed and was rushed to Grady Memorial Hospital, where he died.

The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office said that due to the circumstances of Johnson’s death, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has agreed to investigate, 11Alive reported.

An official cause of death will be determined once an autopsy is completed.

After delivering his remarks, Johnson “complained of shortness of breath and subsequently collapsed in the hallway” after the meeting, according to a statement from the Georgia House Democratic Caucus.

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