Tag: pollution

‘Public Health Betrayal’: EPA Tosses Drinking Water Limits on 4 Toxic PFAS Chemicals

U.S. regulators said Wednesday they will do away with limits on certain types of toxic chemicals in U.S. drinking water, a move that critics warn could expose millions of Americans to dangerous contaminants.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it intends to rescind limits set under President Joe Biden in April 2024 on four types of harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) chemicals widely found in drinking water — perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), perfluorohexane sulfonate (PFHxS), perfluorobutane sulfonate (PFBS) and GenX.

The EPA will keep the limits of 4 parts per trillion in drinking water for two other types of PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), the agency said in a statement.

But, in another move drawing criticism from health advocates, the agency said it will delay the deadline for drinking water systems to comply from 2029 to 2031.

“This is a public health betrayal, plain and simple,” said Melanie Benesh, vice president for government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

“Science is clear: PFAS are dangerous even in tiny amounts. The agency must protect all Americans, not just from two chemicals, but from the entire class of harmful PFAS.”

The four PFAS chemicals the EPA plans to roll back regulations for “are the ones currently in use because industry developed them to replace PFOA and PFOS, so they are the chemicals most likely to increase contamination in the future,” Betsy Southerland, a former EPA senior scientist and a former director in the agency’s Office of Water, said in a statement.

PFAS are types of chemicals that have long been used in a wide variety of products and industrial processes, but many have been linked to health problems that include certain cancers and immune system and reproductive harms.

Countries around the world have been pushing companies to eliminate the use of PFAS, known to be particularly dangerous, such as PFOS and PFOA, but the chemicals remain difficult to eradicate.

A recent study found residents of a Michigan community polluted with PFAS from a paper mill continue to have high levels of the chemicals in their blood, even though the mill closed down 25 years ago.

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Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Pax­ton Pro­tects Texas Envi­ron­ment and Secures $60 Mil­lion Judg­ment Against Recy­cling Com­pa­ny Dump­ing Chem­i­cals into River

Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a judgment of more than $60 million against David Polston and his companies, Inland Environmental and Remediation, Inland Recycling, and Boundary Ventures, for illegally dumping pollutants in Texas waterways and lands. 

In 2019, a tributary of the Colorado River called Skull Creek turned black with chemical pollution, killing fish and wildlife. Additionally, unpermitted pits of petroleum and chemical-laden earth and leaking chemical containers were discovered nearby, in violation of Texas law. The source was a sham recycling facility owned by Polston. Attorney General Paxton immediately sued to stop the pollution and spearheaded years of litigation that achieved an agreed final judgment penalizing Polston and his companies for their extensive environmental misconduct. When Attorney General Paxton learned the owner of the polluted site had been paid for waste disposal on his property, he successfully pursued a court order requiring the landowner to restore the polluted property.

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Geoengineers Want Boeing 777s To Dump Sulfur Into The Sky, Risking Acid Rain Catastrophe: Study

Scientists are proposing to modify Boeing 777 aircraft to spray sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere in an attempt to cool the Earth in the name of debunked, so-called “climate change”—despite fully acknowledging the serious risk of acid rain and other environmental disasters.

A new study published today in Earth’s Future openly admits that this method, called stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), would sharply increase dangerous side effects like acid rain because it requires “three times more” aerosol to achieve the same cooling effect compared to previous high-altitude schemes.

“However, this low‐altitude strategy requires three times more injection than high‐altitude SAI, and so would strongly increase side‐effects such as acid rain,” the study’s authors warn​.

Rather than developing new, specially-designed aircraft to reach the ideal 65,000 feet altitude, researchers from University College London and Yale now propose dumping sulfur at just 42,000 feet—within the existing capabilities of modified 777s​.

The ironic catch?

At lower altitudes, sulfur particles would rain out of the sky much faster—meaning a massive increase in the amount of pollutant dumped into the atmosphere.

Instead of solving anything, their plan could flood the atmosphere with even more toxic material, accelerating the very environmental destruction they claim to be fighting.

The study projects injecting 12 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide per year​—comparable to the volume released by the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991, which famously cooled the planet temporarily but also triggered severe acid rain​.

In fact, the researchers admit outright that this new strategy would mean “a proportionate increase in the side-effects of SAI per unit cooling, such as human exposure to descending particulate matter.”

The new proposal to retrofit Boeing 777s to spray sulfur mirrors the large-scale atmospheric modification that anti-geoengineering expert Jim Lee shows is already being carried out daily through commercial aviation’s sulfur-doped emissions.​

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War Dust and Collateral Inhalation: Israel Breathes in Gaza’s Dust

Over 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, an area slightly smaller than the City of Detroit, Michigan, resulting in the recorded deaths of at least 60,000 Gazans and injuries to hundreds of thousands.

It is impossible to overstate the effects of the abominable bombing war on Gazans, their lives, their families, their health, and their communities.

What has escaped attention up until now is the undeniable environmental and health effects of the bombing of Gazans on Israelis, as well as on citizens of neighboring states, and the potential harm to U.S. military personnel in the region.

A review of explosion physics based on declassified Department of Defense data, as well as blast temperature data and consequent emissions; a review of wind patterns, together with publicly available data of health effects from 9/11, as well as data gathered from U.S. veterans of the Persian Gulf War, yield a shocking conclusion.

Israel, in executing the unprecedented bombing attack on Gaza, is, in effect, bombing itself, with grave consequences for the public health of its people. What is being visited upon Gaza does not stay in Gaza.

The sustained bombing of Gaza pulverizes stone, heavy metals, and the human body. The vaporizing of human beings under extreme heat and pressure combines with dust, water vapor, and metallic particles the size of microns, all blasted upwards, aerosolized, wind-driven across borders, into Israel and surrounding countries.

The unlimited bombing of Gaza has created an unparalleled ecological and biomedical feedback loop. Israel exhales death in Gaza and inhales the Gaza it has vaporized.

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EPA head demands answers from company putting sulfur dioxide into the air to address global warming

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is demanding a company that deliberately sends sulfur dioxide into the air to combat global warming provide detailed information on its practices. Critics of the practice, which is called geoengineering, say it puts potentially harmful pollutants into the air and needs more oversight. 

The company Zeldin is scrutinizing, Make Sunsets, sells “cooling credits.” The credits pay to launch weather balloons made of biodegradable latex containing hydrogen and sulfur dioxide. According to the company, each $5 credit it sells offsets the warming impact of one ton of carbon dioxide for one year. 

Last year, the company posted on its X account videos of balloon launches. According to the Make Sunsets website, the company has sold 125,717 “cooling credits” since February 2023, delivered by 147 balloons. As the balloon rises, the decreasing air pressure causes it to burst. They try to make the balloon burst above 66,000 feet, upon which they issue the “cooling credits.” 

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EPA Chief Visits San Diego, Calls for Urgent Action on Border Sewage Crisis

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin visited San Diego April 22, aiming for collaborative solutions and actions to end the Tijuana River sewage crisis.

The visit “is very important for us to make sure that we aren’t just seeing and hearing firsthand on the ground in Southern California,” Zelding said at the press conference, “but ensuring that the path forward is one of max collaboration and extreme urgency to end a crisis that should have ended a long time ago.”

Zeldin said his counterpart, the Mexican environmental secretary Alicia Bárcena, had conveyed in their meeting the evening of April 21, the willingness of the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, to “have a strong collaborative relationship” with the United States, “to finally solve the issue.”

The Tijuana River pollution has been ongoing for decades, but the crisis has worsened in recent years due to Tijuana’s rapidly growing population and the deterioration of its water treatment infrastructure.

Officials said that over the past five years, more than 100 billion gallons of sewage water have been discharged into the Tijuana River, which flows to the U.S. side and enters the Pacific Ocean, causing air odors, health concerns, and beach closures.

Amidst this, the Department of Defense inspector general found that some Navy SEAL candidates became ill while training in sewage-contaminated ocean water in San Diego’s South Bay.

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Catastrophe Looms Above: Space Junk Problem Grew ‘Significantly Worse’ In 2024

As if you didn’t have enough to worry about, the risk of space junk causing a catastrophic chain reaction that profoundly affects life on Earth rose significantly in 2024, according to the latest annual analysis from the European Space Energy (ESA).

The numbers are mind-boggling. ESA estimates there are now more than 1.2 million orbiting objects larger than 1cm and more than 50,000 larger than 10cm. Of the enormous number of orbiting missiles, only 40,000 are individually tracked by surveillance networks. The number in that category rose by 8% last year. Part of that increase is attributable to the August explosion of China’s Long March 6A rocket, one of the worst junk-generating incidents in decades. “If we extrapolate current trends into the future, as before, catastrophic collision numbers could rise significantly,” the ESA report said.

Don’t judge space junk’s potential for destruction using your Earthly instincts: Traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour in space, even a small object has the potential to inflict major damage. In one incident that demonstrates that fact of physics, a 2mm piece of space once junk put a 5cm-wide dent in a climate satellite. A modest move up the scale brings much more power: “A one-centimeter piece of debris has the energy of a hand grenade,” ESA’s Tiago Soares told DW.  

In an ominous 2009 incident, a Russian Cosmos satellite collided with an Iridium satellite, creating a cloud of about 2,000 pieces of junk measuring 10cm or more. That’s brings us to the nightmare scenario that should fill you with dread: The Kessler Effect. Imagine an initial major impact that creates hundreds of shards, which then start colliding with more orbiting objects, setting off a chain reaction. Actually, you don’t need your imagination.

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The Tesla attacks are proof that the left is turning on itself in orgy of liberal cannibalism

Climate crusaders, those sanctimonious shepherds of the earth, are trading their pious protests for outright carnage as attacks against Tesla vehicles ripple across the country — an orgy of liberal cannibalism that’s as predictable as a vegan toting along his own tofu to a barbecue. 

But setting EVs on fire isn’t the only banner of hypocrisy unfurled lately by eco-warriors — whose extremist ideologies increasingly collide with the real world to reveal their ironic outcomes.

This month, officials in the Brazilian city of Belém paved over tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest and wetland to build a four-lane, eight-mile-long highway necessary to accommodate the roughly 50,000 climate activists who will descend on the city in November for the UN’s COP30 climate summit. 

That’s not all the jet-setting eco zealots will require: The local airport is doubling its capacity, to 14 million passengers; the seaport is being redeveloped to accommodate cruise ships; a 5.3 million square foot sports and entertainment complex is under construction; and a row of hotels is going up along the new “sustainable highway,” as local authorities dub the project.

Across the world, the UK government is moving ahead on plans to bulldoze 4,000 acres of pristine countryside in Dereham and Swaffham to install a solar panel farm, one of several new solar farms under consideration in the gray, rainy little island nation.

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‘Recycling’ Makes Plastic Pollution Worse

If you’re like many people, you’ve always thought a numbered-triangle symbol on the bottom of a plastic container tells you it’s recyclable—giving you peace of mind that when you toss it into a blue bin, it will be turned into something else.

That’s not true. Those symbols are Resin Identification Codes (RICs). Numbered 1 through 7, they only identify the kind of plastic an item is made of. Far from giving a sweeping assurance that RIC-stamped items are recyclable, the symbol frequently indicates a particular item absolutely cannot be recycled.

Reluctant to burden citizens with figuring out which plastics are recyclable—a chore that could dampen participation and cause confusion as recyclability of various plastics changes over time—many municipal recycling programs simply encourage people to toss all their RIC-stamped plastics in the bin and let the recyclers sort it out.

Which ones do recyclers actually want? The most-recycled plastic in America is stamped with a “1,” identifying the item as polyethylene terephthalate (PET). You’ll find it on beverage bottles, cooking oil containers, and many other liquid-containing bottles. A “2” tells you it’s high-density polyethylene (HDPE). Another generally recycling-suitable plastic, it’s used for milk jugs and laundry detergent jugs, and spray-cleaner bottles.

It’s all downhill from there. Chances are your bin has plenty of #5—polypropylene (PP)—which is frequently used for single-serve coffee-maker pods; yogurt, butter, prescription pill and soft tofu containers; and the lids on paperboard raisin cartons. Unfortunately, while there’s been a modest recent uptick in recyclers’ interest, polypropylene generally isn’t being recycled in the United States.

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