Tag: pollution

Biden’s New Regulation Could Make Up to 1 Million Jobs Vanish, According to Manufacturing Leader

The Biden administration is in the process of putting in place a rule one manufacturing leader says could kill off a million manufacturing jobs.

Jay Timmons, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, made his prediction in an advance copy of his annual state of manufacturing address, according to Fox Business.

The remarks said that while Biden claims to support manufacturers, “what he won’t tell you is that his federal agencies are, at this very moment, working to undermine his manufacturing legacy — those agencies are undermining your success.

“In fact, just two weeks ago, they announced one big regulation that could wipe out up to 1 million jobs. It’s referred to as National Ambient Air Quality Standards or PM2.5,” he said.

“It’s not the name that matters. It’s the consequences. It’s stricter than rules they have even in Europe,” he wrote.

“And in vast portions of the country, we will barely be able to build new manufacturing facilities as a result,” Timmons said.

The rule imposes a stricter air quality standard on what’s known as fine particle pollution.

“Michigan would be one of the states hit hardest. And if new manufacturing investments dry up, that spills over to the rest of the state economy,” Timmons said.

“It affects the family trying to sell their home, the teacher hoping for new investments in schools, the students looking for job opportunities here in the state,” Timmons said

Timmons said that forcing manufacturers to move to other nations defeats the goal of clean air rules.

“And to what end? You cannot solve the world’s environmental challenges by driving manufacturing investment away from the United States to countries with lower standards,” he said.

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US-Mexico border: 100 billion gallons of toxic sewage creating a ‘public health crisis’

The U.S.-Mexico border region faces a public health crisis as billions of gallons of contaminated sewage flow from Mexico into San Diego, California, according to a newly released report.

“South San Diego County is in a total state of emergency related to transboundary pollution, and this is a public health ticking time bomb,” Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre told ABC News. “We are living in conditions that nobody in this great nation should be living in.”

The Tijuana River – which has been classified as an impaired water body, according to the U.S. Clean Water Act — flows north for 120 miles from Mexico to California before reaching the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side of the border in the Imperial Beach, San Ysidro and Coronado coastal areas.

Over the last five years, 100 billion gallons of untreated sewage, industrial waste and urban runoff have been dumped into the Tijuana River, according to the International Boundary and Water Commission.

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Atomic Radius: The legacy of America’s nuclear weapons testing program

Americans are typically told the story of the scientists who built the atomic bomb as an intellectual race for the world’s most powerful weapon during wartime.

More than 100 atmospheric weapons tests were conducted in the U.S. and its territories between 1945 and 1962. It resulted in widespread radioactive fallout across much of the U.S., largely spread by prevailing winds and rain. In addition, contaminated waste was shipped and haphazardly stored across the country, creating new toxic Superfund sites stretching from Colorado to New York.

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A Strange Plastic Rock Has Ominously Invaded 5 Continents

By now, many of us have seen the disturbing photos of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where the vortex forces of the world’s biggest ocean has created two massive patches of plastic waste and other maritime trash that litters our watery globe. But plastics aren’t happy just remaining in the form of a discarded shopping bag or McDonald’s straw—plastics tend to get everywhere. In fact, plastics are so ubiquitous, they reside in your body right now.

Plastics are now also infecting the Earth’s geology—so much that experts are now calling to formally recognize a new kind of sedimentary rock: plastistone. Deyi Hou, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in China, and his colleague Liuwei Wang recently wrote a paper about the emergence of this new plastic-rock fusion.

“Sedimentary rocks are the dominant rock type found on the Earth’s surface, and they are highly susceptible to influence by human activities,” the paper reads. “We contend that these novel plastic forms meet the criteria of a sedimentary rock…we propose the adoption of an existing term ‘plastistone’ with a revised definition to collectively describe these novel plastic forms.”

This past March, geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos reported evidence of a “disturbing” find on a remote island of Trindade, which is about a four-day boat trip from Brazil. It was in this seemingly untouched paradise that geologists discovered stones effectively fused with plastic trash that formed a new type of rock.

And this wasn’t the first example.

Ten years prior, geologists first spotted these hybrid rock specimens on the coast of Hawaii. And since then, these stones have been found across five continents and 11 countries, according to Hou and Wang. Although some experts call these stones plastiglomerate, plastitar, plasticrust, or anthropoquinas, this paper puts forward the term “plastistone”—first coined in 2022—to keep nomenclature aligned with other sedimentary rock, such as limestone, dolostone, sandstone, and mudstone.

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‘I’ve never seen anything like this’: Japan says reason behind 1,200 tonnes of fish washing ashore is unknown

Officials in Japan have admitted they are struggling to determine why hundreds of tonnes of fish have washed ashore in recent days.

Earlier this month, an estimated 1,200 tonnes of sardines and mackerel were found floating on the surface of the sea off the fishing port of Hakodate in Hokkaido, forming a silver blanket stretching for more than a kilometre.

On Wednesday, officials in Nakiri, a town on the Pacific coast hundreds of miles south of Hokkaido, were confronted with 30 to 40 tonnes of Japanese scaled sardines, or sappa, which had been observed in the area a couple of days earlier.

Local fishers scrambled to collect the fish, fearing their carcasses would lower the oxygen content of the water as they decompose and damage the marine environment.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” a fisher who has worked in the area for 25 years told the Mainichi Shimbun. “It was only around last year that we began to catch sappa in Nakiri. It makes me wonder if the marine ecosystem is changing.”

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Massachusetts Marijuana Retailer Encourages Package Recycling With Discounted $4 Joint Offer

One of the state’s cannabis retailers is encouraging customers to recycle the plastic that encases certain cannabis products by offering them a $4 pre-rolled joint for every piece of packaging they return.

In the heavily regulated cannabis industry, nearly every product is required to come in child-resistant packaging that is typically made of plastic. Most of that plastic is not recyclable and ends up in the trash or tossed on the ground.

“Living in the city of Boston, I saw these [pre-roll] tubes all over the streets, they’re everywhere,” said Ture Turnbull, who with Wes Ritchie owns Tree House Craft Cannabis dispensaries in Pepperell and Dracut. “So we looked at what needed to be done, what the industry was doing to address this, what the policies around this were, and what opportunity there was for us to do right.”

Tree House’s recycling program incentivizes consumers to bring back their used packaging to the dispensary. Specifically, customers can return the plastic pop-top tubes that hold pre-rolled joints and the square-lidded containers that hold marijuana flower. For each piece of packaging customers return, they can buy a pre-rolled joint for $4—a price that yields savings ranging from $4 to $8 depending on what joint is on offer.

The brand of the pre-roll currently being offered is the company’s own Yellow Brick Road. Since May, when Tree House started the program, customers have returned more than 6,000 pieces of packaging and the company has offered an equivalent number of $4 pre-rolls.

“We literally had to put our money where our mouth is to create this incentive program because it has a monetary hit to us, but a benefit to the consumer, and that’s the only way we could actually see it taking off, to incentivize it,” said Turnbull. “This is the first try at a serious program that says: Let’s take the plastic and recycle it. Let’s take this environmental concern seriously.”

Tree House uses the recycled packaging in two ways. If the packaging is intact, it’s reused to package new products. If not, the company commissions artwork for its dispensaries that incorporates the plastic.

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Tiny Fraction Of Global Elites Emit As Much Carbon As Bottom Two-Thirds Of Humanity

Critics who rail against the hypocrisy of wealthy global elites jet-setting on carbon-spewing private planes while pontificating about the need for the rest of us to cut our climate footprints just got a boost from a new study.

It turns out that the world’s richest 1 percent emit about the same amount of carbon as the world’s poorest two-thirds, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Oxfam International.

This means that a small sliver of global elites, or 77 million people, have produced as much carbon as the 5 billion people that make up the bottom 66 percent by wealth, per the study.

The study also estimates that it would take roughly 1,500 years for someone in the bottom 99 percent to produce as much carbon as the wealthiest billionaires do in just one year.

The study was based on research compiled by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and examined the emissions of various income groups up to 2019. In summary, it suggested that the private jet-setting class of global leaders and policymakers, who take private planes to lead summits addressing the assumed dangers of climate change, may warrant charges of hypocrisy.

The analysis was published as global leaders prepare to meet for climate talks at the COP28 summit in Dubai later in November, where, much like other climate conferences, some elite participants will likely pontificate on the need for ordinary folk to end their reliance on cheap fossil fuel energy to make their ends meet.

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Recycling Eco-Myths Is The Existential Threat

By promising a relatively simple solution to an alleged problem, it has enabled the left to control behavior through a made-up morality that stigmatized dissent – Only bad people refuse to recycle.

Like most progressive interventions – from welfare policies that destroyed families while increasing dependency, to drug use reforms that have filled city streets with desperate addicts – recycling plans that sound good on paper (and plastic) have continuously collided with reality so that even liberal outlets such as the New York Times (“Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not”), NPR (“Recycling plastic is practically impossible — and the problem is getting worse”) and the Atlantic magazine (“Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work”) have finally admitted its failures.

The same dynamic is now at work regrading a far more significant green fantasy: the left’s push to decarbonize the U.S. and other Western industrial economies during the next few decades and attain an eco-purity calculus known as Net Zero. While brandishing the moral cudgel with full force – President Biden describes climate change as “an existential crisis,” i.e., every person and puppy will die if we don’t submit to his agenda – the left also suggests the transition will be easy-peasy: Just build some windmills, install some solar panels, and swap out your car, stove, and lightbulbs for cleaner and cheaper alternatives.

Though much of the cheerleading media downplays this fact, it is already clear that Biden’s enormously expensive, massively disruptive goal is a pipe dream. In a recent series of articles, my colleagues at RealClearInvestigations have reported on several of the seemingly intractable problems that the administration and its eco-allies are trying to wish away.

The dishonesty begins with the engine of the green economy – the vast array of wind and solar farms that must be constructed to replace the coal and gas facilities that power our economy. James Varney reported for RCI that the Department of Energy’s official line is that the installations required to meet Biden’s goal of “100% clean electricity” by 2035 will require “less than one-half of one percent of the contiguous U.S. land area” – or roughly 15,000 of the lower 48’s roughly 3 million square miles. However, Varney noted, “the government report that furnished those estimates also notes that the wind farm footprint alone could require an expanse nine times as large: 134,000 square miles. That is equivalent to the land mass of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky combined – plus all of New England.

Echoing the 19th century adage that figures don’t lie, but liars figure, the discrepancy mostly involves estimates of what can be built around the windmills. Each turbine’s footprint is relatively small, but they have to be spaced far apart. The DOE’s smaller number is based on the fanciful assumption that all the surrounding land can be used for agriculture and other purposes, while the larger figure assumes none of it will. The truth probably is somewhere in between. That the government is trumpeting the impossibly small number – while ignoring the additional land needed to build transmission lines which will carry the current to end users – is telling and troubling.

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Yet Another Study Links Lower Sperm Count with Pesticides

A new review of existing studies on insecticides has found “sufficient evidence” that exposure to high levels of insecticides is associated with lower sperm concentration in men. The review focused on organophosphate (OP) and N-methyl carbamate (NMC) insecticides. The researchers said their systematic review and meta-analysis are the most comprehensive on this topic to date.

The paper, “Adult Organophosphate and Carbamate Insecticide Exposure and Sperm Concentration: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Epidemiological Evidence,” was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It sought to answer the question, “What is the association between adult exposure to OP and NMC insecticides and sperm concentration?”

The researchers concluded that “the strength of evidence of an association between higher adult OP and NMC insecticide exposure and lower sperm concentration is sufficient enough to warrant concern, particularly in light of observed downward trends in semen quality.”

Although the paper acknowledges numerous factors that impact sperm concentration, such as age, nutrition, and lifestyle, they also point the finger at “reproductive toxicants in the environment,” particularly endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

“Reproductive toxicants are ubiquitous in the environment, and usually go unnoticed until unintended adverse effects are observed,” they write. “Pesticides are a prime example in that pesticides have known endocrine disrupting and reproductive effects but continue to be manufactured and widely applied, resulting in occupational and environmental exposures.”

Regarding occupational exposures, the review noted that workers exposed to toxins in the course of their job “generally experience higher exposures than the general population.” However, they also noted that because of widespread exposure to the chemicals in the environment, “even a small magnitude of effect could have consequential impacts on sperm concentration at a population level.”

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They Promised “Advanced Recycling” for Plastics and Delivered Toxic Waste

HEAD SOUTH ON state Highway 96, past a stretch of soybean crops and tobacco fields, and you’ll arrive in Zebulon, North Carolina, population 8,665. There, on a quiet stretch of Industrial Drive, sits a nondescript commercial building. It’s easy to miss; the name on the front door is barely legible. But atop that humble three-acre lot lies a leading solution to the global plastic pollution crisis — well, according to the plastic industry.

The facility is home to the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week operations of Braven Environmental, a company that says it can recycle nearly 90 percent of plastic waste through a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis. Traditional recycling is able to process only about 8.7 percent of America’s plastic waste; pyrolysis uses high temperatures and low-oxygen conditions to break down the remaining plastics, like films and Styrofoam, ideally turning them into feedstock oil for new plastic production.

The American Chemistry Council, the country’s leading petrochemical industry trade group, claims that chemical recycling will create a “circular economy” for the bulk of the world’s plastic, diverting it from oceans and landfills. Plastic giants have gone so far as to dub the process “advanced recycling,” but environmentalists say this is a misnomer because the majority of the plastic processed at such facilities is not recycled at all. In fact, researchers have found that the process uses more energy and has a worse overall environmental impact than virgin plastic production. Numerous companies have tried and failed to prove that chemical recycling is commercially viable.

Despite these challenges, lawmakers nationwide are now embracing the technology, thanks to a massive lobbying push from the ACC and other petrochemical groups. As of September, 24 states have passed industry-backed bills that reclassify chemical recycling as manufacturing. The change effectively deregulates the process, since manufacturing facilities tend to face less stringent guidelines than waste incinerators.

As one of only seven commercial facilities currently operating in the United States, Braven Environmental is at the vanguard of the growing chemical recycling boom. An Intercept investigation, however, found numerous issues at its Zebulon facility.

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