Environmental Matters of Note

#Justin Worland, "Tapped Out," TIME, March 2-9, 2020.
"More that 30 million Americans lived in areas where water systems violated safety rules at the beginning of last year, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency." "In the Navajo Nation where more than 300,000 people reside in a territory that stretches across parts of Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, residents unknowingly drank and played in water that uranium mining had made extremely hazardous." "A striking number of people,including babies,show traces of uranium in their blood. Infections develop in those who dare to shower in it."

"A 2017 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's drinking-water infrastructure a rating of D, and assessed that the U.S. needs to invest $1 trillion in the next 25 years for upgrades."

#Isadur M. Goklany, a long-time Department of Agriculture employee, put misleading climate change language in at least nine reports. Goklany instructed department scientists to add in their reports that rising carbon dioxide levels are beneficial because it "may increase plant water use efficiency," and lengthen the agriculture growing season." The language claiming there's a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming have become known as "Gok's uncertainty language."

#Sam Knight, "Betting the Farm," The New Yorker," February 17 & 24, 2020.
"Between 1990 and 2010, the area of crops treated with pesticides in the United Kingdom increased by fifty per cent." "Researchers studied more than three thousand species and found that sixty per cent were in decline."

"An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand miles of the U.K.'s hedges were destroyed in the second half of the twentieth century." "Between 1967 and 2010, the population of the gray partridge, the country's traditional quarry, fell by ninety-one per cent."

#Chloe Zilliac, Goldman Sachs Says No to Arctic Oil," Sierran, March/April 2020.
"In December, Goldman Sachs became the first US bank to announce it would no longer finance oil projects in the Arctic, citing concerns about how drilling would affect the indigenous peoples of Alaska ad endangered species, and how it would contribute to the climate crisis. The bank's new policy is a milestone in the fight to preserve the 5 million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Congress opened for drilling in 2017."

#Belinda Luscombe, "Forgotten Country." TIME, February 3, 2020.
"More than eight times as much land was burned in Australia, as in the California fires in 2018, but Australia has lost fewer than one-seventh s many homes." "Normally a reliable carbon absorber, the [trees/bush] instead has pumped hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, along with enough smoke to briefly make Australian cities the most polluted in the world."

#"Legal battle over the Endangered Species Act," The Week, August 30, 2019.
"Officials will be barred from protecting habitats of threatened species unless they can 'reasonably determine that the effects of climate change is likely,' phrasing meant to prevent regulators from anticipating the effects of climate change. And for the first time, officials will be allowed to calculate impacts of protecting a species, a move by some business groups."

"An estimated 99 percent of listed species have avoided elimination, which is the only metric that matters."