Free Republic

Ask a believer: What's the difference between climate alarmism and child abuse? If he pauses to think for more than one second, then that's too long. Conservatives are American thinkers. Liberals are American feelers. Remember Earth Day, 1970? Here's Dan Rozek, writing in the Daily Herald, Sunday 22, 1990: "On the eve of Earth Day 1970, gloomy scientists and environmentalists questioned whether humanity would be around for this year's 20th anniversary celebration. Some worried mankind could not long survive without fatally fouling the planet and predicted mass deaths from pollution in 15 to 30 years. Even if man managed to...

3 April 2007 In one of the most important decisions in environmental law, the US Supreme Court has ruled that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant and that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the right to regulate CO2 emissions from new cars.

Last week it was revealed that 54 oil tankers are anchored off the coast of Britain, refusing to unload their fuel until prices have risen. But that is not the only scandal in the shipping world. Today award-winning science writer Fred Pearce – environmental consultant to New Scientist and author of Confessions Of An Eco Sinner – reveals that the super-ships that keep the West in everything from Christmas gifts to computers pump out killer chemicals linked to thousands of deaths because of the filthy fuel they use. We've all noticed it. The filthy black smoke kicked out by funnels...

N. Korea: Rational Pollution Advice Causes Devastation By Moon Sung Hwee, from Jagang in 2006 [2009-11-24 18:08 ] The Soil Research Institute at Hamheung Chemical Engineering University has been dissolved and all researchers and cadres associated with it dismissed. The action was apparently taken because they submitted a paper which spoke negatively of the actual condition of polluted soil in the country and measures to deal with it to the Central Committee of the Party. A source from South Hamkyung Province revealed the news to the Daily NK last Saturday in a telephone interview, saying, “The Soil Research Institute sent...

YERINGTON, Nev. (Nov. 21) -- Peggy Pauly lives in a robin-egg blue, two-story house not far from acres of onion fields that make the northern Nevada air smell sweet at harvest time. But she can look through the window from her kitchen table, just past her backyard with its swingset and pet llama, and see an ominous sign on a neighboring fence: "Danger: Uranium Mine." For almost a decade, people who make their homes in this rural community in the Mason Valley 65 miles southeast of Reno have blamed that enormous abandoned mine for the high levels of uranium in...

A SENIOR CSIRO environmental economist has gone public to accuse the science body of trying to gag his report attacking the Federal Government's climate change policies. The paper, by Clive Spash, criticises the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and argues that direct legislation or a tax on carbon is needed... Dr. Spash also wrote that the economic theory underpinning emissions trading schemes was far removed from the reality ... He said trading schemes were ineffective ... He claims the CSIRO had tried to block the publication of the report, despite it being internationally peer reviewed and accepted by the journal New...

Long-standing 'canary in the coal mine' role questioned.Frogs aren't always the first to suffer from pollution.Digital Vision The health of amphibians is commonly used to give a rough assessment of pollution levels in an area, but an analysis of more than 20,000 toxicity studies now suggests that these creatures are relatively resilient and not well suited to the task.The finding could have a significant effect on the way that the environment is assessed. Conventional wisdom suggests that if an amphibian population is thriving, the area is probably clear of pollutants. But the survey shows that other species, such as shelled...

In a striking change of direction, the California Coastal Commission Wednesday voted 8-4 to give San Diego its third exemption from pollution standards set by the federal Clean Water Act. Just two months ago, commissioners overwhelmingly to deny the five-year waiver from “secondary” treatment levels at the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant. The facility processes sewage from more than 2.2 million people in and outside of the city's limits. The commission's reversal saves San Diego from having to retrofit the facility at a price tag of up to $1.5 billion. The last major step is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,...

Estrogen – from artificial contraception pills, consumed daily by tens of millions of women – is making its way through sewage treatment plants and severely pollutes our waterways with chilling consequences. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar reacted to an August report that emissions from coal-fired power plants have led to widespread mercury pollution in our rivers and streams by saying: "this science sends a clear message that our country must continue to confront pollution, restore our nation's waterways, and protect the public from potential health dangers." Who, after all, wants toxic levels of mercury in our rivers? But mercury is not...

Pollution regulators sue Neb. ethanol plant owner September 24, 2009 By The Associated Press OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Federal regulators say an ethanol plant near Sutherland has violated pollution rules by emitting too much carbon dioxide and failing to obtain proper permits for an expansion project. The Environmental Protection Agency filed a lawsuit against Midwest Renewable Energy LLC seeking civil penalties and fines. Company officials declined to comment because they had not seen the lawsuit.

Enlarge ImageGrowing problem. Increasing reliance on biofuels is expected to further deplete dissolved oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio The push to ramp up biofuel production may reduce oil imports, but it's likely to come at a high environmental cost: It will boost the size of the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone, a huge swath so depleted of oxygen that almost nothing can live there, according to a new analysis. The gulf's dead zone is already a major environmental problem. First spotted in 1971, it now spans 14,600 square kilometers, or...

HONG KONG (Reuters) - One needs to look no further then the river that runs through Shangba to understand the extent of the heavy metals pollution that experts say has turned the hamlets in this region of southern China into cancer villages. The river's flow ranges from murky white to a bright shade of orange and the waters are so viscous that they barely ripple in the breeze. In Shangba, the river brings death, not sustenance. "All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank from the river died. If you put your leg in the water, you'll get...

Beijing, ChinaA string of serious poisoning incidents caused by industrial pollution have triggered strong public protests across China, but experts say the events could represent an opportunity to improve the nation's environmental protection.A serious case of pollution in Fengxiang County in northwestern Shaanxi Province in early August led to 174 children from three villages being diagnosed with lead poisoning, with 851 of 1,016 children tested found to have abnormally high levels of lead in their blood.The poisoning, very likely caused by pollution from a nearby smelter, has led to violence among outraged parents, who reportedly smashed trucks and tore down fences...

This spring we wanted chicken manure spread on the pastures because it is incredibly rich in nutrients, the best “natural” fertilizer known to man, and quite inexpensive, comparatively speaking. So I asked one of my truck driver friends, who cleans out houses for Sanderson Farms affiliates, to bring me several dump truck loads. “No can do, because they aren’t having it done, this year,” quoth he. How odd. I mulled that over off and on for months, and today I got the answer. The greenies are at it again! THIS time they are claiming that litter (sawdust and, ah, processed...

<p>SORRY, the new Chevrolet Volt does not promise a "green" revolution -- indeed, the car could trigger a whole new wave of blackouts.</p> <p>Chevrolet notes that the key to high-mileage performance to the tune of 230 miles per gallon "is for a Volt driver to plug into the electric grid at least once each day" to get "40 miles of electric-only, petroleum-free driving."</p>

Independent teams of researchers in the UK and the US have shown that nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere can participate in chemical reactions on the surfaces of buildings, indoors and outdoors, producing harmful pollutants including the respiratory irritant nitrous oxide, the toxic gas nitrosyl chloride and hydroxyl radicals. Rod Jones' team at the University of Cambridge in the UK investigated the fate of NO2 when it comes into contact with glass that has been coated with titanium dioxide.1 TiO2-coated glass is available commercially as a self-cleaning product in which the TiO2 photocatalytically degrades organic dirt in the presence of sunlight. In...

For years, the Bush administration was criticized for not cleaning up enough of the nation's most contaminated waste sites. The Obama administration plans to do even less. Environmental groups and some Democratic lawmakers railed against President George W. Bush's cleanup record. But this time, they're shying away from speaking out against a popular president who's considered an ally in the fight to clean up the environment. Associated PressFewer EPA cleanups are planned under the administration of President Barack Obama, above. In Obama's first two years in office, the Environmental Protection Agency expects to begin the final phase of cleanup at...

The social and economic costs of lost productivity and wasted fuel from traffic-choked streets are estimated to be $87 billion a year, according to the Texas Transportation Institute’s 2009 Urban Mobility Report. So far, federal, state and local efforts — focused mostly on expanding road capacity — have been largely unsuccessful at slowing the growing congestion on U.S. roads. Transportation experts now advocate a different approach, changing the emphasis from increasing supply to reducing demand. To reinforce smart growth policies, plug mounting transportation funding gaps and achieve immediate traffic relief, London, Stockholm, Singapore, Milan and three cities in Norway have...

The 50th anniversary this year of the shooting of Hitchcock's film Psycho will be employed to demonstrate how a one-minute shower will help conserve water and the environment.The Royal Society of Chemistry is seeking a lookalike of Janet Leigh, who played the part of Norman Bates' shower victim in the celebrated horror movie.The RSC is to make a tasteful video, called Shower Murder, to go on its website to illustrate how a shower can be taken effectively in just 60 seconds, so avoiding the huge wastage of water and the contamination that many in Britain cause currently.   RSC chief...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another..."If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

Regulation: Ignoring the first rule of holes, a bankrupt state passing out IOUs welcomes an EPA waiver allowing it to further kill its economy. Too bad the state can't stop the air pollution imported from a growing China. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday granted California its long-standing request — denied by the Bush administration — for a waiver to allow it to impose even more stringent air pollution rules than currently required by the federal government.The way is now clear for implementation of a 2002 state law requiring new cars to increase their fuel economy 40% by 2016....

No American city is among the top 50 cities in the world for air pollution according to the World Bank. (1) Another list, ‘The Top Ten of the Dirty Thirty,' compiled by the Blacksmith Institute of New York compared the toxicity of contamination, the likelihood of it getting into humans and the number of people affected. Places were bumped up in rank if children were impacted. No US or European sites made the list. Sites in China, India and Russia occupied six of the top ten spots. Some examples: at Linfen in Shanxi province-the heart of China's coal industry-industrial and...

WASHINGTON —EcoAmerica's summary of the group’s latest findings and recommendations was accidentally sent by e-mail to a number of news organizations. They say "Global Warming" turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes. Instead, talk about “our deteriorating atmosphere.” Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past.” Don’t say cap and trade; use “cap and cash back” or “pollution reduction refund.” Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS: shared American ideals, freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy,...

This time of year, many Americans are concerned with sunburns. In some areas, they should pay more attention to smog. The reason? Though invisible, air pollution is a threat to 186 million Americans, according to a new report released by the American Lung Association. The annual report--State of the Air 2009--found that six in 10 Americans live in counties where ozone or particle pollution has reached dangerous levels. Both types of pollution can be deadly and have been linked to respiratory conditions like asthma, emphysema and bronchitis, and there is also evidence that particle pollution increases risk of heart attacks...

It has long been a community concern about the toxic waste that auto and other factories emit, but consider for a moment how much more potent these toxic chemicals, solvents and substances have been at ground zero for the workers and retirees who spent decades working with and closely around them. Since autos were first produced more than a century ago, workers have been exposed for long periods of time to a vast chemical soup of health hazards unique to building those vehicles. Those hazards included breathing paint vapors and solvents, the production and plating of die cast parts, welding...

Today, outspoken climate skeptic Sen. James Inhofe co-introduced legislation to direct the EPA to research how reducing the emission of “a dangerous pollutant” might “improve public health and reduce global warming.” What’s more -- the Oklahoma Republican’s partners in the bill include two of the Senate’s most alarming carbo-chondriacs -- Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA). No, it’s not a belated April Fools’ Day -- although you're close. It’s Earth Day, and the pollutant isn’t CO2 or even a gas for that matter -- although it is a form of carbon. It’s black carbon, an aerosol produced predominantly by...

The state Department of Ecology in 1996 officially declared Burnt Bridge Creek to be severely polluted with fecal coliform. The environmental regulators, it turns out, had unwittingly contributed to the problem. This week, Vancouver city workers made a startling discovery near the regional office shared by Ecology and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife at 2108 Grand Blvd. At some point in the building's history, a sewer pipe that was supposed to be connected to the city's sanitary sewer main had been incorrectly connected to a stormwater line instead. "The only thing that's supposed to be in the stormwater...

Obama may fire pollution particles into stratosphere to deflect sun's heat in desperate bid to tackle global warming President Barack Obama is considering a radical plan to tackle global warming by firing  pollution particles into the stratosphere to deflect some of the sun’s heat.The controversial experiment was touted yesterday as a possible last resort to help cool the Earth’s air by the president’s new science advisor John Holdren.‘It’s got to be looked at. We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table,’ said Mr Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Holdren, director...

The U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington ruled that the Clean Air Act authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate agriculture in the United States. The case stemmed from the American Farm Bureau Federation’s appeal of a 2006 EPA effort to hold farms to the same standards as cities with regard to particulate air pollution. EPA spokeswoman Virginia Landers lauded the court for rejecting the argument that farming naturally entails stirring up dust. “When you get right down to it, the whole agricultural process of turning over the soil to plant crops is unnatural,” Landers observed. “No plant sows...

Solar panels and wind turbines: Will President Obama’s green economy work? The much-anticipated “green dream team” has taken office. Alternative energy is a pillar of President Obama’s economic recovery plan and a defining issue of his presidency. Such energy, he says, will reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, clean up the air, and provide millions of jobs. “We have heard president after president promising to chart a new course,” he said in December when he announced his new energy and environment team. “This time has to be different. This time we cannot fail.” Clean, abundant, inexpensive energy would be a...

21:28 PST Sausalito -- A southern Marin County sanitation district under federal orders to replace aging infrastructure will have spilled 300,000 gallons of bacteria-laden sewage into San Francisco Bay by noon today after a rupture in a sewage treatment plant pipeline.

Drug waste creates highest disaster zone in Andhra 27 Jan 2009, 0233 hrs IST, MARGIE MASON, AP PATANCHERU: When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000. And it's not just ciprofloxacin. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. It is the highest...

Enlarge ImageBiopharming? Treated sewage sludge, here about to be spread on fields, commonly contains antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals.Credit: U.S. Geological Survey What's the downside to clean water? Dirty sludge. A nationwide survey of sewage treatment plants shows that the sludge they produce--the residue from cleaning up wastewater--contains a wide variety of toxic metals, pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and other compounds, including some antibiotics in surprisingly high concentrations. That's significant because every year more than half of the roughly 7 million metric tons of these so-called biosolids produced in the United States are applied as fertilizer to farm fields. Whether the...

Inaugural revelers are lucky they didn't get fined for littering. As crowds cleared the city Tuesday, their trash covered the National Mall and Washington Monument grounds after President Barack Obama's inauguration. They left behind plastic bottles, newspapers, food wrappers, gloves and even American flags they had been waving. Trash bins overflowed with items people tossed.

The Presidential Inauguration Committee is hoping that the estimated 2 million people who come to see Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday will do like good hikers everywhere do: leave Washington, D.C., as clean as they found it. Thousands of people have volunteered to lend a hand in what is being touted as the "greenest inauguration in history," and for many of them that will mean picking up trash, recyclables and even horse manure along the Mall in Washington after Obama takes the oath of office. "This will be the greenest inauguration...

What Are the Types of Bottled Water? There are several types of bottled water on the market today and each kind has a different level of quality and method of production. Spring water and purified water represent the main options available to the consumer. There seems to be a belief among many consumers that spring water represents the best option for those looking for the purest water. However, in reality this is a misconception brought on by clever marketing from spring water companies. Upon closer inspection it becomes clear that the for the purity concerned water drinker, purified bottled water...

he contraceptive pill is polluting the environment and is in part responsible for male infertility, a report in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said Saturday. The pill "has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature" through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, in the report. "We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill," he said, without elaborating further. "We are faced with a clear...

Massive coal-ash spill causes river of sludge and controversy What may be the nation's largest spill of coal ash lay thick and largely untouched over hundreds of acres of land and waterways Wednesday... By SHAILA DEWAN KINGSTON, Tenn. — What may be the nation's largest spill of coal ash lay thick and largely untouched over hundreds of acres of land and waterways Wednesday after a dam broke this week, as officials and environmentalists argued over its potential toxicity. Federal studies long have shown coal ash to contain significant quantities of heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and selenium, which can...

Toxic air pollution spikes from California's 21 refineries may be sharply curtailed in the wake of a U.S. Court of Appeals decision Friday in Washington. In a suit brought by the Sierra Club and other groups, the court struck down a 14-year-old federal regulation thatallowed refineries, chemical plants and other industrial plants to exceed pollution limits during start-ups, shutdowns and equipment outages. Public health advocates in Southern California's oil refinery hub hailed the decision, saying that facilities routinely operate in malfunction mode to evade pollution caps. ... The Environmental Protection Agency regulation amounted to a "gaping loophole," according to the...

Coal miners used canaries to warn them of noxious gases for generations. Today's substitute may be the everyday goldfish: it can act as an aquatic canary to warn scientists when something bad is brewing in the waters, according to new research.

XIDITOU COUNTY, China (Reuters) - Once an isolated haven, the Chinese village of Liukuaizhuang is now a tainted hell, surrounded by scores of low-tech factories that are poisoning its water and air, and the health of many villagers. One in fifty people there and in a neighboring hamlet have been diagnosed with cancer over the last decade, local residents say, well over ten times the national rate given in a health ministry survey earlier this year. Many fear they are paying for the country's breathtaking economic expansion with their lives, as surrounding plants making rubber, chemicals and paints pour out...

SACRAMENTO, Calif, Dec 12, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Will Dramatically Cut Largest Source of Deadly Diesel Pollution in State The California Air Resources Board today approved two diesel truck regulations that will dramatically cut the largest source of diesel pollution in the state and are the first of their kind in the United States, according to Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The Air Resource Board estimates that the truck regulations are expected to save 9,400 lives between 2010 and 2025 and greatly reduce health care costs. "In passing these rules, California will continue to lead a nationwide movement to protect...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California's utilities, refineries and large factories must transform their operations to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of a new climate plan before state regulators. On Thursday, the California Air Resources Board was expected to adopt what would be the nation's most sweeping global warming plan, outlining for the first time how individuals and businesses would meet a landmark 2006 law that made the state a leader on global climate change. It would hold California's worst polluters accountable for the heat-trapping emissions they produce _ transforming how people travel, utilities generate power and businesses use electricity. At...

The black soot that big rig trucks belch from their chugging diesel engines may soon become a thing of the past. In one of the more far-reaching smog regulations that California has ever proposed, state air regulators are considering a first-in-the-nation plan that would require nearly every privately owned, heavy diesel truck in the state to install a filter that would reduce emissions of soot from their rigs by 85 percent. The new regulation would affect 1 million truckers, half of them registered out of state who regularly drive on California freeways. If approved by the California Air Resources Board...

Oxfam calls for £34 billion per annum to help poor cope with climate change Green taxes on pollution, aviation and shipping should contribute to a £34 billion annual fund to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, according to Oxfam. The charity say the fund should be set up as part of this week's UN Climate Change conference in Poznan, Poland, to help people coping with floods and drought in the wake of climate change.

BEIJING: A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations. The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, wood-burning kitchen stoves and coal-fired power plants, these plumes of carbon dust rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America but are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, says...

The earth will warm about 2.4 degrees C (4.3 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels even under extremely conservative greenhouse-gas emission scenarios and under the assumption that efforts to clean up particulate pollution continue to be successful, according to a new analysis by a pair of researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. That amount of warming falls within what the world's leading climate change authority recently set as the threshold range of temperature increase that would lead to widespread loss of biodiversity, deglaciation and other adverse consequences in nature. The researchers, writing in the online edition of...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- At least 49 offshore oil platforms, all with production of less than 1,000 barrels a day, were destroyed by Hurricane Ike as it raced across the Gulf of Mexico, and some may not be rebuilt, the Interior Department said Thursday. It said in the latest hurricane damage assessment that the platforms altogether accounted for 13,000 barrels of oil and 84 million cubic feet of natural gas a day. There are more than 3,800 production platforms in the Gulf producing 1.3 million barrels of oil and 7 billion cubic feet of gas each day. Most remain shut down.

Alternative energy doesn't always mean solar or wind power. In fact, the alternative fuels developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical and biological engineering professor James Dumesic look a lot like the gasoline and diesel fuel used in vehicles today. That's because the new fuels are identical at the molecular level to their petroleum-based counterparts. The only difference is where they come from. Click Here! Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, Dumesic and his team have developed a process that creates transportation fuels from plant material. The paper, published in the Sept. 18 online version...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) _ The request caught dairy farmer Brian Ziehm off guard: Would he devote an acre of his fields near the Vermont line this fall to grow stinkweed? "It was like, 'What the heck? I've been trying to get rid of these things for 30 years. Now you want me to plant them?'" But Ziehm happily agreed to grow the hardy weed called field pennycress — a.k.a. stinkweed — to help test a potential new source of fuel for the booming biodiesel market. A handful of fields around upstate New York will be planted with pennycress later this...