Author: jbkrygier

Map source: LA Times “Exide’s troubled history: years of pollution violations but few penalties”

Making polluters pay for their externalities:

A bill currently sits on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk that proponents say will provide long-needed oversight of the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), the state agency responsible for regulating hazardous waste generation, management and toxic cleanup in California.

Broadly prescriptive, Assembly Bill 995 includes a requirement to develop a hazardous waste management plan, and significant changes to the way hazardous waste fees are calculated and managed in an attempt to help plug major financial holes within the agency. According to community advocates, it also creates new and vital safeguards for some of the state’s most vulnerable, environmentally burdened communities.

Many environmental experts, legislators, community members and other critics of the DTSC say sweeping agency reforms like those included in the bill are a long time coming. And they say they are needed to prevent another environmental and fiscal disaster like Exide from happening again. Pollution from the former Exide Technologies lead battery recycling facility in Southeast L.A. has contaminated as many as 10,000 homes, impacted some 100,000 people and already cost taxpayers more than $250 million in cleanup costs, with waning hopes of the polluters ever being held fully financially accountable.

Source: Capital & Main

Senate Republicans and Democrats reached an agreement last week on a plan to phase out chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which contribute to climate change. The plan would cut the use of HFCs 85 percent by 2035, a target that is in line with an international treaty called the Kigali Amendment — which the Trump administration has refused to join.

HFCs are the secret sauce in air conditioners and refrigerators that actually cool the air. The refrigerants cycle between liquid and gas as they flow through these appliances. If there’s a leak, they are emitted into the atmosphere, where they can be thousands of times more powerful at warming the planet than carbon dioxide.

There are already less-damaging alternatives to HFCs available. Phasing them out would create thousands of jobs building new appliances, according to industry groups, and could help the world avoid an estimated 0.5 degree C (0.9 degree F) of warming. The bipartisan plan will be included as an amendment to an upcoming energy bill, although it’s unclear whether it will make it through Congress or past Trump’s pen.

Source: Grist

COVID-19 can be made more serious — and, in some cases, more deadly — by a specific type of industrial emission called hazardous air pollutants, or HAPs, according to new peer-reviewed research by ProPublica and researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The study, published Friday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found this association in both rural counties in Louisiana and highly populated communities in New York.

The analysis examined air pollution and coronavirus deaths in the roughly 3,100 U.S. counties and found a close correlation between levels of hazardous pollutants and the per-capita death rate from COVID-19.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines HAPs as chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer and other serious health problems. Under the Clean Air Act, industrial facilities emitting these pollutants are subject to regulations.

Hazardous air pollution may help explain the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths in communities like West Baton Rouge Parish, home to Port Allen. With 39 deaths as of Sept. 7, the parish’s per-capita death rate from COVID-19 ranked it among the top 3% of all U.S. counties with at least 30 deaths. Several of its neighbors in Louisiana’s industrial corridor also rank near the top of the list.

Source: ProPublica

The recent nasty fires in California (and elsewhere – see this interactive fire map) have given rise to interest in fire science, fire ecology, and related careers and research. The Berkely Fire Research Lab has compiled a series of wide-ranging videos and resources on fire and fire science:

After exploring our website or seeing one of the hundreds of news articles on wildfires, you might ask how you can learn more? What fire science or fire protection engineering is? And is there a career in it? Well, here we would like to give you a little introduction into the basics of Fire Protection Engineering and Fire Science. These resources have been compiled to answer common questions and are intended to give you an insight into the field from the basics to advanced topics. But if you are curious about more feel free to reach out to us on twitter (@gollnerfire or @FranzHRichter).

Source: Berkely Fire Research Lab

In a world-first, the extent of human development in oceans has been mapped. An area totalling approximately 30,000 square kilometres—the equivalent of 0.008 percent of the ocean—has been modified by human construction.

The extent of oceanmodified by human construction is, proportion-wise, comparable to the extent of urbanised land, and greater than the global area of some natural marine habitats, such as mangrove forests and seagrass beds.

Source: Phys.org News

Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.

..in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbines—a 71.9-percent reduction in the annual fatality rate.

Source: ArsTechnica

The National Science Foundation is awarding Ohio Wesleyan University a one-year, $86,735 grant to oversee the creation of online teaching tools that advance field ecology and data science.

Laurel J. Anderson, Ph.D., OWU’s Morris Family Professor of Natural Sciences, is the principal investigator on the federal grant. She also is president of the Board of Directors for the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN), a consortium of colleges and universities that will work together to create the new teaching tools. Dr. Anderson will partner with Dr. Tim McCay from Colgate University to administer the project.

“The pandemic has created an urgent need to reimagine our teaching of field ecology, which is usually done with in-person field trips,” said Dr. Anderson, who helped to found EREN in 2010.

“However, field ecologists also use computer technology extensively to explore natural patterns at large scales,” she continued. “These projects allow us to meet our need to socially distance and have students collecting data wherever they happen to be. Then, we use online tools and datasets to see how their data fits into large-scale patterns.”

More: PRESS RELEASE: Advancing Science