environment

November 2, 2022

A dire warning: California report documents climate impacts

By Pam Strayer

California is getting hotter and drier, and extreme weather events are increasingly disrupting the state’s natural environment and the lives of the nearly 40 million people who live there, according to a study released by state officials this week.

The 664-page report, compiled from research by more than 100 state scientists and experts, concludes that the state is experiencing a rapid decline in key indicators of ecosystem health related to climate change. The report identifies dozens of significant threats that could weaken California’s status as the fifth largest economy in the world, currently valued at $3.4 trillion.

“Across the state, we live the experience of extreme weather, deepening drought. and deadly wildfires and heatwaves,” said California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) Secretary Yana Garcia. “This report shows scientifically what we know from experience.”

Among the worrisome findings is the extent to which drought is taking a hold on the state. California has been getting drier since 1895 but by the end of the 2021 water year (which began in October 2020 and ended in September 2021), drought conditions were comparable to the most severe drought period on record, according to the report.

The period from 2000 to 2021 was the driest 22-year period over the past 1,000 years for California and much of the southwestern US, what scientists refer to an emerging “megadrought” era.

October 28, 2022

Postcard from California: Carbon capture won’t solve climate crisis

Four miles from my house, a Silicon Valley company wants to drill an 8,000-foot-deep well to store millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the greenhouse gas identified as the main cause of the climate crisis.

The well, planned at the site of a former Army ammunition plant in Riverbank, Calif., could be one of a network of CO2 storage wells California is hoping will help the state reach its ambitious climate goals.

The idea is to trap emissions from petrochemical refineries, power plants and other industrial and agricultural sources, super-chill them into liquids that are piped through earthquake-vulnerable terrain, and pumped deep underground to to keep them from heating up the atmosphere.

This Rube Goldberg-like scheme is called carbon capture and sequestration. The captured CO2 can also be used in other industrial processes. A related scheme, direct air capture, sounds even more like science fiction, making use of giant vacuums to suck existing CO2 out of the atmosphere.

At first carbon capture may sound like a smart idea: The company seeking a permit to drill in Riverbank is named Aemetis, which it says means “one prudent wisdom.” But the type of carbon capture Gov. Gavin Newsom’s climate policy counts on to reach “net-zero” CO2 emissions by 2045, is neither wise or prudent.

October 21, 2022

A human toll- paraquat users blame Syngenta for Parkinson’s disease

By Carey Gillam and Aliya Uteuova

When Illinois farmer Ron Niebruegge was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 55, he was certain it must be a mistake. Niebruegge had always been healthy and active, someone who loved horseback riding and taking his wife dancing on weekend nights.

But a dizzy spell and a fall in 2007 led him to visit a neurologist, and then another. Both doctors agreed that the little things Niebruegge had started to notice – a left arm that didn’t seem to work quite right, some stiffness in his joints – were undeniable signs of the onset of Parkinson’s, a progressive debilitating brain disease for which there is no cure.

Now 70 years old, Niebruegge lives a very different life: The horses he loved have been given away and the horse trailer sold. Dancing is a thing of the past; Niebruegge struggles simply to walk across a room. He uses a cane but falls so frequently and unexpectedly that he fears leaving home.

One recent fall left him with a dislocated shoulder that required surgery. And his wife of 49 years has transitioned from dance partner to caregiver.

Niebruegge is far from alone. More than 8 million people globally suffer from what scientists see as the fastest growing neurological disorder in the world. And while scientists see multiple toxins as potential causes, one pesticide popular with farmers across the US has been prominently linked to the disease: a weed killer called paraquat that has grown in use over recent decades.

The longtime manufacturer of paraquat, Syngenta AG, along with Chevron USA, the successor to a former US paraquat distributor, are now being sued by thousands of Parkinson’s sufferers. The plaintiffs claim scientific studies show that exposure to paraquat can cause, or significantly increase the risk of, Parkinson’s disease, but rather than warn users, the companies prioritized paraquat sales over human health.

October 12, 2022

New study says more than 57,400 US sites have PFAS contamination

Scientists have identified more than 57,400 sites in the United States that can be presumed to be contaminated with toxins linked to cancer and other health problems, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The sites identified by the analysis include 49,145 industrial facilities, 4,255 wastewater treatment plants, 3,493 military sites, and 519 airports. A map of the sites is publicly available on a PFAS Project Lab website.

PFAS, an acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of thousands of chemicals commonly used to make such things as food packaging, cookware, fabrics, paints, and fire-fighting foams. Exposures to some types of PFAS have been linked to a range of adverse human health issues, including certain types of cancer, birth defects, and reproductive issues.

September 30, 2022

New study sees link between pesticide and arthritis

By Grace van Deelen

Exposure to a commonly used pesticide could put people at higher risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis, according to a new study.

The findings, published last week in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research, looked at potential links between the disease and a class of chemicals known as pyrethroids, which are found in many commercial products used to control insects, including household bug killers, pet sprays and shampoos.

Using data collected as part of a long-term study of US residents called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the research team said they looked at levels of pyrethroids found in urine samples of the more than 4,000 study participants and analyzed how the exposure correlated with incidences of the disease.

The research team, which was led by scientists from Anhui Medical University in Hefei, China, concluded that levels of pyrethroid indicators in the urine of those who had self-reported a rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis were “significantly higher” than those who had not reported the diagnosis.

September 26, 2022

High levels of toxic PFAS found in pesticides used in farming

By Shannon Kelleher

Widely used pesticides contain concerning levels of toxic “forever chemicals” called PFAS, adding to concerns about the human health risks posed by pesticides that are used in growing food, according to a study published last week.

The study found a type of PFAS called PFOS at levels hundreds of thousands of times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers safe in 6 out of 10 insecticides tested, including malathion, one of the most commonly applied insecticides in the world.

PFOS was found at levels ranging from 3,920,000 to 19,200,000 parts-per-trillion (ppt), far higher than the EPA’s health advisory for PFOS in drinking water, which is set at 0.02 ppt. PFOS is no longer manufactured in the US and has been linked to cancer, as well as problems with the liver, thyroid, and immune system.

PFAS chemicals, including PFOS, were also found in soil samples, corn kernels, string beans, and peanuts that had been sprayed with pesticides at a government research laboratory in Lubbock, Texas, where the study was conducted.

“The level of PFAS absorption by plants detected in this study suggests that this exposure pathway poses a major threat to the safety of our food supply,” Tim Whitehouse, executive director of the government watchdog group PEER, wrote in a Sept. 26 letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan.

“For this reason, it is quite possible that PFAS in our food is a bigger PFAS exposure pathway than water. This threat is not merely to the safety of U.S. agriculture but of the world’s food supply, as these pesticides are widely applied in other countries,” Whitehouse wrote in the letter.

September 21, 2022

Solar power helping health care facilities gain climate resilience

By Pam Strayer

It is not easy to rattle Rosa Vivian Fernandez. As the CEO of a California healthcare clinic that primarily serves a low-income, largely Hispanic community, Fernandez sees the harsh struggles faced by disadvantaged populations on a daily basis. But when she traveled to Puerto Rico in 2017 to visit extended family members, Fernandez was shocked to see how deeply Hurricane Maria had devastated the island infrastructure, including the ability of healthcare providers to serve people in need.

More than 5,000 people died due to the violent Atlantic storm, which caused an estimated $92 billion in property damages, wiping out the electrical grid.

“All the healthcare centers–the ones that did not get flooded or destroyed by the storm–went down,” she said. “People died from the lack of services.”

Power to a children’s hospital in San Juan was restored when Tesla deployed its own solar panels and batteries after the 2017 hurricane, setting them up in the hospital parking lot. But this week most of Puerto Rico was again without power in the wake of yet another hurricane, forcing a cancer hospital on the island to relocate its patients when a backup generator failed.

After her 2017 visit, Fernandez realized the clinic she heads, San Benito Health Foundation in Hollister, California, could also be vulnerable to power failures that could jeopardize patient health. California’s record heat waves and other factors are increasingly taxing an already strained electrical power grid. Something had to be done, she decided.

Today, the 17,000 square-foot-clinic San Benito clinic is 100% solar powered, relying on a $1.7 million, self-contained microgrid of solar panels that collect energy, along with batteries to store the energy, and a controller that manages the system.

September 14, 2022

Court smacks USDA for lack of transparency in GMO labeling

By Carey Gillam

Years of legislative and court battles over the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) food took another turn this week when a federal court determined on Tuesday that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) erred in allowing food companies to label GE products simply with digital codes that consumers have to scan, without any accompanying disclosure options.

Under USDA rules that took full effect earlier this year, food made with genetically modified crops can be labeled simply as “bioengineered” (BE), or come with a QR code guiding consumers to more information online, among other options.

But the court said those rules did not comply with the law, and found that the USDA knew that allowing “standalone electronic disclosure” would not provide consumers “sufficient access” to disclosures about bioengineering involved in creating certain products.

September 12, 2022

EPA confirms PFAS can leach from shipping containers into food, other products

By Shannon Kelleher

Toxic chemicals knowns as PFAS leach from the walls of shipping containers into the products they contain, potentially contaminating food, pesticides, and other products transported all over the world, according to study by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The findings provide fresh evidence backing concerns that per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances used to coat the insides of shipping containers can contaminate the contents of those containers. The EPA analysis found that 8 types of PFAS compounds leached into water and methanol samples stored in fluorinated high-density polyethylene (HDPE) containers after just one day.

The EPA said the analysis provided “a clear indication” of the migration of PFAS from container walls to the liquid solutions in the container. The agency said the amount of PFAS leached into the solutions generally increased with time during the agency’s 20-week testing period.

The levels of contamination the EPA found were higher than the health advisory threshold of about 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) EPA recently set for PFOA, one of the PFAS chemicals identified in the barrels.

September 8, 2022

Postcard from California: Can new laws slow the “plastics pandemic?”

In July, a 130-foot vessel called the Kwai docked in Sausalito carrying a sickening cargo: 96 tons of plastic garbage and other trash recovered from the Pacific Ocean during a 45-day voyage from Honolulu.

Before arriving in California, the Kwai had sailed through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an area more than twice the size of Texas that has been described as a “cloudy soup” of plastic debris and other trash accumulating in a vortex of swirling ocean currents.

The voyage was a project of the nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute in partnership with the government of the Marshall Islands, which like other island nations is acutely threatened by rising sea levels from the melting of polar ice caps and icebergs. Since 2009, the institute’s Pacific expeditions have recovered nearly 700,000 pounds of trash; 340,000 pounds were collected in 2020 alone.

Each year, approximately 460 million metric tons of these plastics become plastic waste, and more than 90 percent does not get recycled.