Month: July 2019

Carmakers On Clean Air: “No, Obama had it Right”

Not even the Republican’s most reliable clients are going along with the rape of clean air and climate regulation.

Washington Post:

Four automakers from three continents have struck a deal with California to produce more fuel-efficient cars for their U.S. fleets in coming years, undercutting one of the Trump administration’s most aggressive climate policy rollbacks.

The compromise between the California Air Resources Board and Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW of North America came after weeks of secret negotiations and could shape future U.S. vehicle production, even as White House officials aim to relax gas mileage standards for the nation’s cars, pickup trucks and SUVs.

Mary D. Nichols, California’s top air pollution regulator, said in an interview Wednesday that she sees the agreement as a potential “olive branch” to the Trump administration and hopes it joins the deal, which she said gives automakers flexibility in meeting emissions goals without the “massive backsliding” contained in the White House’s current proposal.

“What we have here is a statement of principles, intended to reach out to the federal government to move them off the track that they seem to be on, and on to a more constructive track,” Nichols said, adding that the companies approached California officials last month about a potential compromise.

In a joint statement, the four companies said their decision to hash out a deal with California was driven by a need for predictability, as well as a desire to reduce compliance costs, keep vehicles affordable for customers and be good environmental stewards.

“These terms will provide our companies much-needed regulatory certainty by allowing us to meet both federal and state requirements with a single national fleet, avoiding a patchwork of regulations while continuing to ensure meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reductions,” the group said.

The White House argues that more lenient standards would lower the sticker price of vehicles and encourage Americans to buy newer, safer cars. But California has vowed to enforce stricter requirements to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and the auto industry itself has implored the Trump administration to try to find common ground with California.

Coal Miners get Shaft from Trump

Most unsurprising development this week.

Reuters:

A group of coal miners afflicted with black lung disease met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday as part of an effort to convince lawmakers to restore a higher excise tax on coal companies to help fund their medical care, but several said the meeting left them discouraged. 

McConnell, the Republican leader who represents Kentucky – one of the states that has seen a rebound in the progressive respiratory illness – told them their benefits would be safe but gave no assurances about the excise tax and left without answering questions or offering details, several of the miners who attended the meeting said. 

“We rode up here for 10 hours by bus to get some answers from him because he represents our state,” said George Massey, a miner from Harlan County, Kentucky who spent two decades in the mines and is on disability. “For him to come in for just two minutes was a low-down shame.”

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Climate May be Pumping Super Infections

New York Times:

Last May, an elderly man was admitted to the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery. A blood test revealed that he was infected with a newly discovered germ as deadly as it was mysterious. Doctors swiftly isolated him in the intensive care unit.

The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe. Over the last five years, it has hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, swept through a hospital in Spain, forced a prestigious British medical center to shut down its intensive care unit, and taken root in India, Pakistan and South Africa.

Recently C. auris reached New York, New Jersey and Illinois, leading the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to add it to a list of germs deemed “urgent threats.”

The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.

“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”

C. auris is so tenacious, in part, because it is impervious to major antifungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world’s most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections.

Denver Post:

Three years ago, U.S. health officials warned hundreds of thousands of clinicians in hospitals around the country to be on the lookout for a new, quickly spreading and highly drug-resistant type of yeast that was causing potentially fatal infections in hospitalized patients around the world.

Candida auris has become a serious global health threat since it was identified a decade ago, especially for patients with compromised immune systems. It has been reported in more than 30 countries and is probably more widespread than that because the organism is hard to identify without specialized laboratory methods.

It is resistant to multiple antifungal drugs, and can spread between patients in hospitals and other health care facilities and cause outbreaks. The fungus can lead to infections of the bloodstream, heart or brain, and early studies estimate that it is fatal in 30 percent to 60 percent of patients.

Researchers have never been able to isolate the fungus from the natural environment or figure out how genetically distinct versions emerged independently at roughly the same time in India, South Africa and South America.

Now researchers in the United States and the Netherlands have a new theory: They propose that global warming may have played a key role and suggest that this may be the first example of a new fungal disease emerging from climate change, according to a study published Tuesday in mBio, a journal of the American Society of Microbiology.

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Greta Thunberg to French Parliament: “Perhaps you are Not Mature enough”

Deluge Drowns Brooklyn

Helloooo…anybody paying attention?

USAToday:

Trains and planes were delayed while cars and pedestrians slogged through knee-deep water in battered Brooklyn as flash flooding swept through parts of the borough following days of intense heat and power outages.

The storms hit late Monday and early Tuesday. The National Weather Service posted a Flash Flood Warning that included Brooklyn and neighboring Queens. Parts of New Jersey also took the brunt of the storms, and widespread power outages were reported.

The first storms hit during rush hour, and gridlock prevailed.

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Last Letter from a Glacier

Price of Oil:

So is this how it ends?

As our climate emergency deepens, as the once great Arctic icescapes melt before our eyes, and once majestic glaciers break up and melt and disappear, we are left to put plaques in their place to lament our lost world.

Our children and their children will inherit places full of eulogies that are a poignant tribute to out lost world and perverse reminder of the power of the oil barons and their backers like the Koch brothers, who put personal wealth and profit above everything else.

The first plaque to a glacier that is no more will be erected by scientists next month in Iceland. Researchers from Rice University in Houston will install a monument for the former Okjökull glacier in Borgarfjörður, Iceland.

As we know, the Arctic is warming rapidly and is on the frontline of climate change. As our world warms, the regions glaciers weep.

Iceland’s 400-plus glaciers have been melting steadily, now losing roughly 11 billion tons of ice every year. Scientists fear that by 2200, Iceland will no longer be a land of ice. All the country’s glaciers will have disappeared.

A century ago, the Okjökull glacier covered 15 sq km (5.8 sq miles) measuring some 50 metres thick. But ravaged by warming temperatures, it has now shrunk to barely one square km of ice less than 15 metres deep, meaning it is no longer classified as a glacier. It is now seen as “dead ice.”

The plaque to the lost glacier is inscribed in Icelandic and English and is “a letter to the future” authored by one of Iceland’s most prominent writers, Andri Snaer Magnason.

Magnason writes: “In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

What’s left of the Okjökull glacier.

CNN:

The demise of Okjökull, the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change, will be memorialized with a plaque by researchers from Rice University in Houston.

Yes, we are memorializing glaciers now, and no, this is not a joke.

The monument to Okjökull glacier in Borgarfjörður, Iceland, will be installed on August 18 in a public ceremony.

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