Air pollution is much more harmful than you know: Vox

"The Trump administration is making a bad problem worse. 

Air pollution — mostly fine particulates, but also ozone and nitrogen oxides — has risen in recent years, in part due to ongoing rollbacks of regulations relating to air pollution, leading to what a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon estimate is nearly 10,000 extra deaths per year. 

Policymakers in the Trump administration seem determined to

ABC

continue down this course. On November 11, Lisa Friedman of the New York Times reported on a draft memo circulating among Environmental Protection Agency officials that, if enacted, would sharply limit the kinds of scientific studies the agency can use to consider the impact of air pollution. Yet there’s good reason to believe the EPA and other global public health agencies should be moving in the opposite direction and considering a wider range of studies about the harms of air pollution. 

That’s because in addition to its impacts to lung and cardiovascular functioning, it seems increasingly clear that pollution has a significant effect on cognitive function over both the short and long term. A spate of studies released in recent years indicate that people work less efficiently and make more mistakes on higher-pollution days, and that long-term exposure to air pollution “ages” the brain and increases the odds of dementia. 

These consequences are not nearly as dramatic as dying, of course. But they are spread across a huge swath of the population. And since cognitive function is linked to almost everything else in life, the implications are potentially enormous. 

Many current EPA documents don’t mention the impact of air pollution on brain functioning, and landmark Obama-era regulatory efforts like the Clean Power Plan don’t cite cognitive benefits as part of their cost-benefit analysis. But a growing body of research indicates that the harms of air pollution are more wide-ranging and systematic than we’ve realized.

The new research on pollution and cognition ......"

Read more. Original Vox article

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Related: Climate change forcing millions out of homes: report: 9 NEWS

Related: Sydney smoke three times worse this NSW bushfire season, but health effects from 'medium-term' exposure unclear

Taylor avoids mention of bushfires as Australia given a zero for climate policy: RenewEconomy

"Australia has outdone itself in its latest performance on climate ambition. In an entirely fossil-worthy result Australia has just received a massive gong in the annual Climate Change Performance Index released today by Germanwatch, New Climate Institute and the Climate Action Network,” the Fossil of the Day citation says.

“What really jumps out is that while the Australian government is saying that it is taking meaningful action on climate change, it received a ZERO out of 100 on climate policy in the CCPI. On any measure zero is an outright failure! It’s no wonder that Australia’s climate pollution has been going up and up under the current government.”

It is understood that Angus Taylor had intended to leave Madrid following his address to the conference, but it is unknown whether he may now extend his stay, as the issue of the Kyoto carryover has yet to be resolved.

New Zealand and South Africa have effectively been appointed as mediators in the dispute over the Kyoto carryover issue, as Australia locks horns with over 100 other countries that want to see the Kyoto-era units excluded from the Paris Agreement.

A certain answer on whether other countries will consent to Australia using its surplus Kyoto units to meet its 2030 target may not be known until the closure of the conference at the end of the week."

Read the complete article 

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'Sydney is angry': Protesters march to demand urgent action on climate change: SMH

By Laura Chung and Matt Bungard

Updated December 11, 2019 — 7.35pm

 

An estimated 20,000 protesters marched from Town Hall to Hyde Park on Wednesday evening, taking over George Street to demand stronger climate action as bushfires continue to rage across the state.

The event, titled "NSW is Burning, Sydney is Choking - Climate Emergency Rally!", was swiftly set up on Facebook last week by Extinction Rebellion, Uni Students for Climate Justice, and Greens MP David Shoebridge, in response to horrendous air conditions and ongoing bushfires across the state.

Thousands of protesters gathered at Town Hall on Wednesday.Credit:Wolter Peeters

Buses were diverted away from Elizabeth Street and Park Street because of the march, with some buses delayed by up to 30 minutes and more than 60 routes affected.

After a series of speeches, the crowd began marching down York Street at 6.40pm, before turning onto Park Street and heading east towards Elizabeth Street and Hyde Park.

NSW Police Inspector Gary Coffey said "it’s a very big crowd", and later told the Herald there were an estimated 20,000 people in attendance.

Chloe Rafferty, one of the organisers, said she was angry about the lack of climate action from all levels of government.

"The state is angry, Sydney is angry," she said. "I have hope that people will see the need to take action into their own hands and disrupt business as usual, we can't let the biggest city in Australia having hazardous air quality become the new normal."

High school student Amy Lamont addressed the thousands of protesters wearing P2 face masks and said: "The reality is these fires will be around all summer."

"The rage we all rightly feel right now needs to grow if we have any chance of actually challenging that destruction of the status quo that is burning around us," she said.

"Only we, the majority, have the ability to hold the rich and political elites in this country accountable.

"Students shouldn't have to worry when going to school that they might come back to a burnt home."

David Whitson has been attending protests dressed as a koala since October.

"When you talk about silent Australians, I don’t think of anything more silent than our beloved flora and fauna," he said.

The loss of wildlife, especially Koala Bears, were the focal point for this protest sign.Credit:Wolter Peeters

He said he thought bushfires would occur early next year, but "it’s caught everyone by surprise how early and severe the fires are".

Fire Brigade Employees Union state secretary Leighton Drury has been a firefighter for 20 years and said the fires ravaging NSW are the "worst we’ve had in decades".

Read the whole article 

  Related :

Australia bushfires factcheck: are this year's fires unprecedented? : The Guardian

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Climate explained: seven reasons to be wary of waste-to-energy proposals

"I was in Switzerland recently and discovered that they haven’t had any landfill since the early 2000s, because all of their waste is either recycled or incinerated to produce electricity. How “green” is it to incinerate waste in order to produce electricity? Is it something New Zealand should consider, so that 1) we have no more landfill, and 2) we can replace our fossil-fuel power stations with power stations that incinerate waste?

Burning rubbish to generate electricity or heat sounds great: you get rid of all your waste and also get seemingly “sustainable” energy. What could be better? 

Many developed countries already have significant “waste-to-energy” incineration plants and therefore less material going to landfill (although the ash has to be landfilled). These plants often have recycling industries attached to them, so that only non-recyclables end up in the furnace. If it is this good, why the opposition?

Here are seven reasons why caution is needed when considering waste-to-energy incineration plants.

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Read more: Why municipal waste-to-energy incineration is not the answer to NZ's plastic waste crisis

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Stifling innovation and waste reduction

1. Waste-to-energy plants require a high-volume, guaranteed waste stream for about 25 years to make them economically viable. If waste-to-energy companies divert large amounts of waste away from landfills, they need to somehow get more waste to maintain their expensive plants. For example, Sweden imports its waste from the UK to feed its “beasts”. 
   
2. The waste materials that are easiest to source and have buyers for recycling - like paper and plastic - also produce most energy when burned.
   
3. Waste-to-energy destroys innovation in the waste sector. As a result of China not accepting our mixed plastics, people are now combining plastics with asphalt to make roads last longer and are making fence posts that could be replacing treated pine posts (which emit copper, chrome and arsenic into the ground). If a convenient waste-to-energy plant had been available, none of this would have happened.
   
4. Waste-to-energy reduces jobs. Every job created in the incineration industry removes six jobs in landfill, 36 jobs in recycling and 296 jobs in the reuse industry.
   
5. Waste-to-energy works against a circular economy, which tries to keep goods in circulation. Instead, it perpetuates our current make-use-dispose mentality.
   
6. Waste-to-energy only makes marginal sense in economies that produce coal-fired electricity – and then only as a stop-gap measure until cleaner energy is available. New Zealand has a green electricity generation system, with about 86% already coming from renewable sources and a target of 100% renewable by 2035, so waste-to-energy would make it a less renewable energy economy. 
   
7. Lastly, burning waste and contaminated plastics creates a greater environmental impact than burning the equivalent oil they are made from. These impacts include the release of harmful substances like dioxins and vinyl chloride as well as mixtures of many other harmful substances used in making plastics, which are not present in oil.
   

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Read more: Circular fashion: turning old clothes into everything from new cotton to fake knees

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Landfills as mines of the future

European countries were driven to waste-to-energy as a result of a 2007 directive that imposed heavy penalties for countries that did not divert waste from landfills. The easiest way for those countries to comply was to install waste-to-energy plants, which meant their landfill waste dropped dramatically.
New Zealand does not have these sorts of directives and is in a better position to work towards reducing, reusing and recycling end-of-life materials, rather than sending them to an incinerator to recover some of the energy used to make them.

Is New Zealand significantly worse than Europe in managing waste? About a decade ago, a delegation from Switzerland visited New Zealand Ministry for the Environment officials to compare progress in each of the waste streams. Both parties were surprised to learn that they had managed to divert roughly the same amount of waste from landfill through different routes.

This shows that it is important New Zealand doesn’t blindly follow the route other countries have used and hope for the same results. Such is the case for waste-to-energy.

There is also an argument to be made for current landfills. Modern, sanitary landfills seal hazardous materials and waste stored over the last 50 years presents future possibilities of landfill mining. 

Many landfills have higher concentrations of precious metals, particularly gold, than mines and some are being mined for those metals. As resources become scarcer and prices increase, our landfills may become the mines of the future.

From The Conversation 

Related: 

The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me : The Guardian

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The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me : The Guardian

Let’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the “first great extermination”. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human societies) as an extinction event makes this catastrophe sound like a passive accident.

While we are all participants in the first great extermination, our responsibility is not evenly shared. The impacts of most of the world’s people are minimal. Even middle-class people in the rich world, whose effects are significant, are guided by a system of thought and action that is shaped in large part by corporations.

We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism.

The Guardian’s polluters series reports that just 20 fossil fuel companies, some owned by states, some by shareholders, have produced 35% of the carbon dioxide and methane released by human activities since 1965. This was the year in which the president of the American Petroleum Institute told his members that the carbon dioxide they produced could cause “marked changes in climate” by the year 2000. They knew what they were doing.

Even as their own scientists warned that the continued extraction of fossil fuels could cause “catastrophic” consequences, the oil companies pumped billions of dollars into thwarting government action. They funded thinktanks and paid retired scientists and fake grassroots organisations to pour doubt and scorn on climate science. They sponsored politicians, particularly in the US Congress, to block international attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. They invested heavily in greenwashing their public image.

These efforts continue today, with advertisements by Shell and Exxon that create the misleading impression that they’re switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In reality, Shell’s annual report reveals that it invested $25bn in oil and gas last year. But it provides no figure for its much-trumpeted investments in low-carbon technologies. Nor was the company able to do so when I challenged it.

Read The Guardian's George Monbiot article 

See also:

Climate change forcing millions out of homes: report: 9 NEWS

 

 

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BP Challenged On Adverts That 'Mislead Consumers' Over Polluting Portfolio

Environmental lawyers have made a formal complaint against oil giant BP, claiming its latest advertising campaign is misleading consumers about its commitment to tackling climate change.

The challenge, filed today by legal campaign group ClientEarth, is the first time a complaint has been made about a fossil fuel company’s alleged greenwashing under international corporate rules.

ClientEarth has also launched a petition calling for a ban on all fossil fuel advertising unless it comes with a tobacco-style health warning.

The complaint focuses on BP’s ‘Keep Advancing’ and ‘Possibilities Everywhere’ campaigns — its biggest marketing blitz since before the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. Adverts are currently being shown across billboards, newspapers and television in the UK, US and Europe as well as online.

ClientEarth climate lawyer Sophie Marjanac described the campaigns as a “smokescreen”, echoing criticism earlier this year that labelled BP’s approach as “deceptive and hypocritical”.

Read the complete DESMOG article 

See also:

‘War against nature must stop’: UN chief

 

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Climate change forcing millions out of homes: report: 9 NEWS

"Climate-fuelled disasters have forced about 20 million people a year to leave their homes in the past decade, according to a new report from Oxfam.

This equates to one every two seconds - making the climate the biggest driver of internal displacement for the period, with the world's poorer countries at the highest risk, despite their smaller contributions to global carbon pollution compared to richer nations.

People are seven times more likely to be internally displaced by floods, cyclones and wildfires than volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and three times more likely than by conflict, according to the report released today."

"Nobody has been prepared to talk about money and so that's one of the critical issues that will be on the table in Madrid," said Gore.

"Ultimately somebody is going to have to pay the price for these impacts and at the moment that price is being paid by the poorest communities in the world."

And while current data shows lower risk in developed nations, projections suggest that is set to change.

"Rich countries are not immune either from the threat of displacement," said Gore.

"Climate change is not going to discriminate."

Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, told CNN that increasing numbers of internally displaced people can be attributed in part to a growing population living in high-risk areas."

Read the article 

Related: 

Australia bushfires factcheck: are this year's fires unprecedented? : The Guardian

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#jailclimatecriminals   #gaolclimatecriminals