Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Home insurance in California and Florida is up big thanks to climate change. Polluters get a massive subsidy through their pollution’s negative externality, and they spend the big bucks on lobbyists and propaganda to prevent environmental protection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHTDDJtuWv4
“While estimates vary, studies agree that air pollution has caused great harm to human health. Max Roser at Our World in Data reviewed information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) on global air pollution mortality estimates. WHO and IHME report that between 4.2 million and 4.5 million people die prematurely from exposure to outdoor air pollution annually. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) calculated that 3.6 million people prematurely die as a result of air pollution from burning fossil fuels. The PNAS study estimated that the 194,000 annual premature deaths in the U.S. resulting from fossil fuel air pollution amounted to the annual loss of 5.7 million life years.
Contrast these estimates with the number of deaths associated with generating nuclear power. The 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown caused no injuries or deaths, and Fukushima’s 2011 tsunami-caused disaster may have led to just one radiation-related death years later.
Chernobyl’s reactor blast killed two workers, and 47 emergency workers who doused the core fires later died of radiation exposure. The good news is that a 2018 report by the United Nations’ Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation noted that most people downwind “were exposed to radiation levels comparable to or a few times higher than annual levels of natural background.” Consequently, the report concluded that the “vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences due to the radiation from the Chornobyl accident.”
Using air pollution data derived from satellite observations, the NBER economists generally find that bringing a reactor online significantly reduces ambient fine particulate air pollution around the nearest cities. Using estimates provided by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index, they calculate how much life expectancies would have increased owing to reduced air pollution had the extrapolated trend in constructing new nuclear power plants not stalled.
The economists reckon that the construction of each additional nuclear power plant, by reducing air pollution, could save more than 800,000 life years. “According to our baseline estimates, over the past 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of [nuclear power plants] worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the slowdown of new construction in democracies,” they report. “Our calculations thus suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democratic countries due to the decline in [nuclear power plant] growth in these countries after Chernobyl.” They estimate the U.S. lost 141 million life years due to the slowdown in nuclear power deployment.
Cautioning that their estimates are only intended to illustrate a hypothetical timeline in which nuclear power plants continued to grow at the same rate as before the Chernobyl disaster, the researchers nonetheless conclude that “air pollution would have likely been much lower, which in turn, would have had significant health benefits.””
https://reason.com/2024/11/29/nuclear-power-saves-lives/
“India and Pakistan are losing ground to a common deadly enemy. Vast clouds of dense, toxic smog have once again shrouded metropolises in South Asia. Air pollution regularly spikes in November in the subcontinent, but this year’s dirty air has still been breathtaking in its scale and severity. The gray, smoky pollution is even visible to satellites, and it’s fueling a public health crisis.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/387135/india-pakistan-air-pollution-delhi-lahore-aqi
“Producing plastics from fossil fuels emits a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which contributes to warming the planet. An April study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that in 2019 “global production of primary plastics generated about 2.24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent,” which represents 5.3 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. So switching to plastic alternatives would help slow man-made global warming, right?
Not so fast, says a new study in Environmental Science & Technology, which finds that “replacing plastics with alternatives is worse for greenhouse gas emissions in most cases.” The European researchers report that in “15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their alternatives.”
The researchers considered emissions from production, transportation, use, and end-of-life disposal, including landfilling, incineration, recycling, and reuse. Calculating the product life cycles, plastic products release 10 percent to 90 percent fewer emissions than do plausible alternatives—often because it takes less energy to make and transport them.
Take the perennial plastic vs. paper conundrum about grocery bags. In the U.S., more than 500 cities and 12 states have banned plastic grocery bags. However, the researchers find that plastic grocery bags emit 80 percent fewer greenhouse gases than paper bags. Producing paper bags emits three times the greenhouse gases of plastic ones, and transportation emissions are higher because paper bags weigh six times more than plastic bags. Additionally, paper bags emit globe-warming methane as they rot in landfills.
Alternatives to plastic bottles are aluminum cans and glass bottles. Even though aluminum cans are often recycled, the researchers find that over their life cycle, they emit twice as many greenhouse gases as plastic bottles. Glass bottles emit three times more.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/27/plastics-are-better-for-the-climate/
“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”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/8/31/23852325/farming-myths-agricultural-exceptionalism-pollution-labor-animal-welfare-laws
“For the first 40-something years of the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Environmental Protection Agency could show progress toward cleaner air — even if it was sometimes slow or uneven. The agency issued regulations for sources of the pollutants it was set up to tackle, like diesel car tailpipes and coal power plants, and over time, the air quality improved.
But the trend changed abruptly about five years ago, when pollution from wildfires, heat, and drought — trends worsened by climate change — began to overtake these gains.”
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“Ozone and fine particulate matter affect the entire body in all stages of life. They impact the young and old, pregnant people and the developing fetus, and can cause and worsen respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and worse cognition. Their sources can be a bit different, though. Burning oil, gas, and coal, whether at the tailpipe or power plant, releases pollutants that cause both ozone and particulate matter. Ozone also is more likely to form in hot weather, while wildfires tend to be much worse for particulate matter.”
“The proposed rules are a less elegant and splashy solution than the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, but the complex set of proposals also stands a better chance of withstanding court scrutiny. The EPA breaks down requirements based on the type of plant, its size, and how often it is in use. Utilities, working with states, would ultimately decide how to meet the EPA’s emissions rates by choosing among available technologies. Coal plants, for instance, could fire less carbon-intensive fuels such as hydrogen and gas, to supplement coal. Coal and gas plants can also install carbon capture and storage or sequestration, a technology that removes carbon dioxide at the smokestack to eventually store it underground. Or a plant could bypass all this if it sets a retirement date in the medium term.
As a result, existing coal plants would cut their carbon pollution 90 percent by the end of the decade, unless a plant sets a retirement date before 2040. Existing gas plants get more leeway — only the largest gas plants, less than a third in operation, will have to slash their pollution by 90 percent by 2035.
The EPA makes a dent in coal pollution especially, but it doesn’t eliminate power plant pollution entirely. It leaves a mixed bag of winners and losers.”
“Under current procedures, regulators typically assess pollution from new facilities or projects on a plant-by-plant basis rather than in conjunction with existing emissions from other sources. This method underestimates the health risks, community advocates say.
By instructing agencies to research and incorporate new data on those cumulative impacts and involving communities early in the process, Biden marries two of the “four historic crises” he identified on the campaign trail in 2020: climate change and racial inequality. Most people who face outsized health and climate vulnerabilities from concentrated pollution sources are people of color and low-income households.”
“Ukraine covers less than 6 percent of Europe’s land area, but it’s home to more than a third of the continent’s biodiversity. It’s also highly industrialized, with hundreds of chemical plants, nearly 150 coal mines, and more than a dozen nuclear reactors — including Europe’s largest.
So, one obvious problem is the destruction of these facilities. In March, shelling in the northern Ukrainian town of Novoselytsya caused an ammonia leak at a fertilizer factory, threatening residents by contaminating groundwater and soil. Then there are those exploding tanks of nitric acid. Meanwhile, damage to coal-fired power plants can cause electrical water pumps to fail, allowing contaminated water in mines to spill over and pollute the groundwater.”
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“Russia has also attacked oil and gas storage facilities, lighting up the sky with explosions that pollute the air and release carbon dioxide.”
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“The stuff inside the rockets that both sides are using can poison the environment, too, according to the Ukrainian advocacy group Center for Environmental Initiatives Ecoaction. When they explode, artillery rockets can produce a number of noxious substances including hydrogen cyanide vapor and nitrogen oxides, which can cause acid rain, Ecoaction said.
In April, the Ukrainian army shot down a Russian missile, and some of the debris fell on an agricultural site, leaking toxic chemicals into the soil and water, CNN’s Ivana Kottasová reported. Officials told people living nearby not to drink water from wells and there were reports of dead fish in a river several miles away, Kottasová reported.”
“While the 2008 Games were marked by some of the worst air quality in Olympic history, China’s “war against pollution” has advanced so much since that Olympians this month could glimpse the previously smog-enshrouded mountains surrounding the city. Air pollution in the capital has decreased by 50 percent since the 2008 Olympics, which if maintained will lead to four years of additional life for the average Beijing resident.”
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“Thousands of miles away in Delhi, air pollution has remained at pervasively high levels for the past few months. The Indian capital’s winter air pollution spike is coming to an end, but the annual cycle — driven by cooler air, cooking and heating fires, seasonal agricultural burning, and the Diwali festival — will persist without further action.
Winter in Delhi is accompanied by a pervasive smell of toxic smoke, by coughing and nausea indoors and outdoors, and by increased hospitalizations for respiratory and cardiac-related illnesses. This past November, Delhi even instituted a partial lockdown for non-Covid reasons, shutting down schools and construction for several days and imposing a work-from-home order for government employees in an effort to reduce air pollution. Throughout the winter into January, Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted the city’s bad air pollution levels every day, raising awareness about the issue.
Air pollution in Delhi comes from nearly every source possible: power plants, vehicle emissions, construction dust, agriculture, and the burning of coal for home cooking and heating. All of these activities create particulate matter — minuscule air pollution particles that contribute to cancer, lung and cardiovascular disease, and even cognitive decline.”
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“Millions of deaths per year are attributed to air pollution, and it reduces average global life expectancy by 2.2 years. Air pollution is one of the most pressing public health problems in the world, and one of the most neglected, as Vox’s Dylan Matthews has written. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, poverty, malaria, pneumonia, and diarrheal disease deaths were on the decline, along with maternal and child mortality rates; air pollution, on the other hand, was getting worse in many places.”
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“For decades, public health officials have known that bad air quality can increase the risk of conditions like heart disease, stroke, lower respiratory infections, lung cancer, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), dementia, mental illness, premature births, and more. But the true extent of the problem — such as the fact that air pollution can be worse for health than heavy smoking, for example — is only now becoming clear, as is the full extent of the threat.”
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“Since the fuel sources that produce air pollution also provide necessities such as electricity, vehicles, factory-made goods, and heating, policymakers face tough decisions on how to deal with air pollution-related health concerns while not eroding well-being in other ways.”