“Judge James Ho is not a nuclear scientist, an expert in energy policy, an atomic engineer, or anyone else with any specialized knowledge whatsoever on how to store and dispose of nuclear waste.
Nevertheless, Ho and two of his far-right colleagues on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit just put themselves in charge of much of America’s nuclear safety regime — invalidating the power of actual nuclear policy regulators to decide how to deal with nuclear waste in the process.”
“If you were to guess America’s biggest source of water pollution, chemical factories or oil refineries might come to mind. But it’s actually farms — especially those raising cows, pigs, and chickens.
The billions of animals farmed each year in the US for food generate nearly 2.5 billion pounds of waste every day — around twice as much as people do — yet none of it is treated like human waste. It’s either stored in giant pits, piled high as enormous mounds on farms, or spread onto crop fields as fertilizer. And a lot of it washes away into rivers and streams, as does synthetic fertilizer from the farms growing corn and soy to feed all those animals.
“These factory farms operate like sewerless cities,” said Tarah Heinzen, legal director of environmental nonprofit Food and Water Watch. Animal waste is “running off into waterways, it’s leaching into people’s drinking water, it’s harming wildlife, and threatening public health.”
Yet in practice, the Environmental Protection Agency appears to be largely fine with all that.”
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“While the entire food sector benefits from agricultural exceptionalism, animal agriculture is especially privileged. Meat and dairy producers get far more subsidies than farmers growing more sustainable foods, like beans, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.”
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“Big Ag often argues its exceptional status is justified because farming is indeed exceptional, given the essential nature of its product: food. But Secchi argues this is the wrong way of thinking about it. Since the early days of American agriculture, farming has been a business like any other, focused on high output, which has led to excess supply and profitable exports around the world.
And we don’t apply exceptionalist logic to any other industry. Energy production, for example, is highly polluting but essential to human flourishing, just like food, so we push to make our laws and economy limit the industry’s externalities and scale renewable forms of energy.”
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“Jefferson’s vision never came to pass. Small farms have been squeezed out by big farms, due in part to American farm policy advocated for by the same elected officials who evoke the Jeffersonian ideal.
What’s left is a highly consolidated agricultural sector, with many farmers precariously employed as contractors for corporations, and a radically uneven distribution of farm wealth”
“Hotter surface water can slow upwelling, a phenomenon that brings nutrients from deep in the water like nitrogen and phosphorus compounds toward the surface, feeding the plankton that form the foundation of the food pyramid. Roughly half of the fish in the world are caught in upwelling zones.
Hotter water also holds onto less oxygen, which can suffocate sea life. Earlier this year, thousands of dead menhaden fish washed up on the shores of Texas, due in large part to high water temperatures. The water itself becomes more acidic as it heats up, which can disrupt coral formation. And when the temperature rises too high, coral will expel the symbiotic algae that live in their tissues, turning completely white. This is called coral bleaching. All these effects of hotter water temperatures can then make coral more vulnerable to disease.
Sargassum, a type of algae, has seen massive and growing blooms in the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean in recent years, but there’s been a record quantity this summer, enough to be seen from the sky, washing up on beaches from South America to Florida. As it rots, it emits smelly, toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. Higher water temperatures are likely a factor here as well.
It’s not clear yet exactly how the alarmingly hot waters of the Caribbean will affect seafood catches, but scientists warn that extreme marine heat has proven devastating to fisheries in the past.”
“When a forest burns, carbon storage is diminished and carbon dioxide is released adding to the concentration of greenhouse gases that are warming Earth’s atmosphere. When forests regrow, they can again absorb carbon from the atmosphere, but it takes a long time — many decades. In the meantime, such a cycle would almost certainly produce more wildfires and could be exacerbated by increased deforestation and inappropriate forest management.”
“”We tried socialism,” says Palmer. “We ran the experiment. It was a catastrophe. Worst environmental record on the planet.”
In China, when socialist leaders noticed that sparrows ate valuable grain, they encouraged people to kill sparrows.
“Billions of birds were killed,” says Palmer.
Government officials shot birds. People without guns banged pans and blew horns, scaring sparrows into staying aloft for longer than they could tolerate.
“These poor exhausted birds fell from the skies,” says Palmer. “It was insanity.”
I pointed out that, watching video of people killing sparrows, it looked like they were happy to do it.
“If you failed to show enthusiasm for the socialist goals of the party,” Palmer responds, “you were going to be in trouble.”
The Party’s campaign succeeded. They killed nearly every sparrow.
But “all it takes is two minutes of thinking to figure, ‘Wait. Who’s going to eat all the bugs?'” says Palmer.
Without sparrows, insects multiplied. Bugs destroyed more crops than the sparrows had.
“People starved as a consequence,” says Palmer. “People confuse socialism with…a ‘nice government’ or a ‘government that’s sweet’ or ‘made up of my friends.'””
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“Many Chinese lakes and rivers are bright green. Fertilizer runoff created algae blooms that kill all fish. A study in The Lancet says Chinese air pollution kills a million people per year.
Wherever socialism is tried, it creates nasty pollution.
In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin wanted cotton for his army. His central planners decided it should be grown near the Aral Sea. They drained so much water that the sea, once the fourth biggest inland lake in the world, shrank to less than half its size.
“Soviet planners caused catastrophic environmental costs to the whole population,” says Palmer.
I push back. “That was then. Now the rules would be different. Now the rule would be: ‘green.'”
“All the time we hear socialists say, ‘Next time, we’ll get it right.’ How many next times do you get?” asks Palmer.”
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“Capitalists destroy nature, too. Free societies do need government rules to protect the environment.
But free markets with property rights often protect nature better than bureaucrats can.”
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“Capitalism also protects the environment because it creates wealth. When people aren’t worried about starving or freezing, they get interested in protecting nature. That’s why capitalist countries have cleaner air.
Also, capitalists can afford to pay for wild animal preserves.”
“”As Justice Brett Kavanaugh writes in a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Sackett v. EPA is likely to hobble the law’s ability to protect several major waterways, including the Mississippi River and the Chesapeake Bay.
The case involves an admittedly quite difficult question of how to read a vague provision of the law. The Clean Water Act prohibits “discharge of pollutants” into “navigable waters.” But it also defines the term “navigable waters” counterintuitively, to include all “waters of the United States, including the territorial seas.”
Both the courts and the federal agencies that enforce this law have struggled over the last half-century to determine which “waters” can be regulated under this uncertain statutory language — a problem exacerbated by the fact that pollutants discharged far from a major waterway can nonetheless migrate into that waterway. A toxic chemical dumped miles from the Mississippi River might find its way to that river through the network of streams, creeks, wetlands, and similar geographic features that feed into it.”
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“As an amicus brief filed by professional associations representing water regulators and managers warned, this new definition will “exclude 51% (if not more) of the Nation’s wetlands” from the Act’s protections. Wetlands often act as filtration systems that slow the seepage of pollutants into major waterways, and as sponges that help control floods.
In short, this opinion will significantly curtail the federal government’s ability to protect American waters.”
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“The specific dispute in Sackett involved Idaho landowners who wanted to fill in what a federal appeals court described as a “soggy residential lot” with dirt and rocks so that they could build a house on it. The lot is near a tributary that feeds into a creek, which itself feeds into Priest Lake, a sufficiently large body of water that no one really questions if it is subject to the Clean Water Act.
Although all nine justices agreed that the Clean Water Act does not apply to this particular lot, they split 5-4 on how to read the act, with Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices in dissent. (Technically, both Kavanaugh’s opinion and Justice Elena Kagan’s separate opinion, which also disagrees with Alito, are opinions “concurring in the judgment,” because all nine justices agreed that the property owners should prevail. But both of those opinions dissent from Alito’s reading of the law.)
The Clean Water Act is not the most precisely drafted law, and its text offers few hints as to what the “waters of the United States” might be. But it does include one pretty clear indication of how the law treats wetlands. One provision of the Clean Water Act applies the law to “wetlands adjacent” to waterways covered by the act.
As Justice Kagan writes in her opinion, “in ordinary language, one thing is adjacent to another not only when it is touching, but also when it is nearby. So, for example, one house is adjacent to another even when a stretch of grass and a picket fence separate the two.”
But Alito’s opinion does not apply the act to all wetlands that are “adjacent” to nearby waterways. Under Alito’s approach, only wetlands that have a “continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right, so that there is no clear demarcation between ‘waters’ and wetlands” are subject to the law’s restrictions on pollution.”
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“regardless of whether the Sackett opinion can be squared with the actual language of the Clean Water Act, it is a binding opinion by the Supreme Court of the United States, and its narrow reading of that act could drastically limit the nation’s ability to fight water pollution.”
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“Near the end of his opinion dissenting from Alito’s approach, Kavanaugh lays out several ways that “the Court’s rewriting of ‘adjacent’ to mean ‘adjoining’ will matter a great deal in the real world.” He warns that this decision “may leave long-regulated and long-accepted-to-be-regulable wetlands suddenly beyond the scope of the agencies’ regulatory authority.””
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“The fundamental challenge facing any water regulator is that water systems are interconnected. As Kavanaugh writes, “because of the movement of water between adjacent wetlands and other waters, pollutants in wetlands often end up in adjacent rivers, lakes, and other waters.”
This explains why Congress not only extended the Clean Water Act to significant waterways, it also extended it to wetlands that are “adjacent” to those waterways. It makes no sense to prohibit pollution dumped directly into the mighty Mississippi, but to permit pollution to be dumped on nearby wetlands that feed directly into the river.
Nevertheless, five justices ruled that Congress’s decision to apply the law to adjacent waterways does not matter.”