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frack-turing the environment...Increasingly, U.S. shale firms appear unable to pay back investors for the money borrowed to fuel the last decade of the fracking boom. In a similar vein, those companies also seem poised to stiff the public on cleanup costs for abandoned oil and gas wells once the producers have moved on. “It’s starting to become out of control, and we want to rein this in,” Bruce Hicks, Assistant Director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division, said in August about companies abandoning oil and gas wells. If North Dakota’s regulators, some of the most industry-friendly in the country, are sounding the alarm, then that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the nation. In fact, officials in North Dakota are using Pennsylvania as an example of what they want to avoid when it comes to abandoned wells, and with good reason. The first oil well drilled in America was in Pennsylvania in 1859, and the oil and gas industry has been drilling — and abandoning — wells there ever since. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) says that while it only has documentation of 8,000 orphaned and abandoned wells, it estimates the state actually has over a half million. “We anticipate as many as 560,000 are in existence that we just don’t know of yet,” DEP spokesperson Laura Fraley told StateImpact Pennsylvania. “There’s no responsible party and so it’s on state government to pay to have those potential environmental and public health hazards remediated.” According to StateImpact, “The state considers any well that doesn’t produce oil and gas for a calendar year to be an abandoned well.” That first oil well drilled in Pennsylvania was 70 feet deep. Modern fracked wells, however, can be well over 10,000 feet in total length (most new fracked wells are drilled vertically to a depth where they turn horizontal to fracture the shale that contains the oil and gas). Because the longer the total length of the well, the more it costs to clean up, the funding required to properly clean up and cap wells has grown as drillers have continued to use new technologies to greatly extend well lengths. Evidence from the federal government points to the potential for these costs being shifted to the tax-paying public.
Read more: https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/10/18/public-paying-cleanup-fracking-boo...
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taking care of the planet...
A few degrees of warming is incredibly significant.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strongly recommends limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5°C, to avoid the impacts of climate change steeply escalating. Even at 1.5°C of global warming, times will be tough. But the impacts amplify rapidly between just 1.5°C and 2°C of temperature increase, as visible in the following infographic.
protecting the sciences...
Q: What are you most looking forward to doing that you couldn’t do as the director?
A: I’m looking forward to being able to speak out. I have strongly disagreed with certain things done within the past 2.5 years by the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA, such as] backing down on the decision to ban chlorpyrifos. The science strongly demonstrated that chlorpyrifos and other organophosphate pesticides are associated with an increased risk of learning and memory and behavior problems in children. I found that an extremely disturbing decision.
Q: As you step down, what are some of the key issues facing environmental health research?
A: It’s become very clear to me [that there is a] real interaction between different kinds of environmental stressors. We’re finding that, for example, the interaction between nutrition and environmental stressors, the interaction between our microbiome and nutrition and environmental stressors. It’s not one thing alone.
Much of our toxicology testing ignored the extreme variability that exists within a population. We’ll often say, “Rats don’t do this,” or “Mice don’t do this,” and that’s based upon studies in one strain of mouse or one strain of rats. There was a study done a couple of years ago called the 1000 Genomes study. They found, looking at toxicity from about 179 different chemicals, that for many chemicals the inherent susceptibility varied by 100- to 200-fold. Those are things we’re just not thinking about as much as we should.
I think another issue that has become absolutely front and center is the whole issue of windows of susceptibility. The developing fetus, its susceptibility can be totally different than the child, than the adolescent, than the young adult. We need to understand “What are these windows of susceptibility?” And then also understand that early life exposure may set the trajectory for the rest of your life.
I’ve learned a lot about the importance of human observational studies and how powerful studies can be when you do prospective longitudinal studies. In other words, when you recruit a population, take measures at that time and then you follow that population over time. That can be so insightful into the relationships between exposure and effect.
Q: Those sound like the kinds of studies that the current EPA leadership has targeted for de-emphasis in setting regulatory standards.
A: They absolutely have been. And that’s because those are the studies that demonstrate that some of the substances, which I would like to see regulated, [can have human health effects, but] they don’t want to do it. I think there are some people who are driven more by the dollar sign than they are by concerns for human health.
Q: You have said you plan to continue doing research at the institute. What will you be studying?
A: We’re doing some very exciting work, especially some of the work with these novel PFAS [per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance] chemicals, and their impact on the blood-brain barrier.
I could talk on and on about PFAS. They make dioxin look easy. There are 5000 and the number keeps growing. There are multiple nuclear receptors which can be impacted by PFAS. There are also many other pathways that are affected. Of the thousands of PFAS, really, there’s only a fair amount of data on two of them.
We’re going to have to start asking the question: Does the benefits of having totally stain-resistant carpet overweigh the risk of having increasing blood levels in our population, where we have a wealth of mechanistic animal and now epidemiology studies are showing that adverse effects can occur?
Q: What impact has politics had on research and on scientists at NIEHS in recent years?
A: We’ve been overall pretty fortunate. … One reason I stayed as a director as long as I did was I wanted to protect my institute. I think there’s been a chilling impact on certain kinds of research … [for example] fetal tissue research. [This past June, NIH stopped supporting in-house research using fetal tissue from elective abortions. In September, it imposed new requirements on non-agency scientists who propose experiments using fetal tissue.] And that despite the benefits from working with fetal tissue, in developing an understanding not only of the mechanisms of development, but [also] understanding how different exposures can alter those mechanisms.
Read more:
doi:10.1126/science.aaz8972
we know it will, but when?...
IS THE HUMAN race [sic: it should be human species] approaching its demise? The question itself may sound hyperbolic — or like a throwback to the rapture and apocalypse. Yet there is reason to believe that such fears are no longer so overblown. The threat of climate change is forcing millions around the world to realistically confront a future in which their lives, at a minimum, look radically worse than they are today. At the same time, emerging technologies of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are giving a small, technocratic elite the power to radically alter homo sapiens to the point where the species no longer resembles itself. Whether through ecological collapse or technological change, human beings are fast approaching a dangerous precipice.
Read more:
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/19/bill-mckibben-falter-book-human-game...
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cartoons and images for the planet...
a judgement call? idiots!...
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There will be winners and losers from climate change, and that means the climate is not getting "worse".
Key points:That's the view inside Australia's Department of Environment, which insists it provides "frank and fearless" advice to Federal Government ministers.
Jo Evans, deputy secretary of the department, told a Senate hearing on Monday that whether you used "worse" or "better" to describe climate trends depends on where you were on the globe.
"Some parts of the world — they will find some of those changes working to their advantage, some of them not so much," she said.
Last year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified the people and places at a higher risk from rising temperatures.
"Populations at disproportionately higher risk of adverse consequences with global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius and beyond include disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, some indigenous peoples, and local communities dependent on agricultural or coastal livelihoods," the report warned.
"Regions at disproportionately higher risk include Arctic ecosystems, dryland regions, small island developing states, and least-developed countries."
Read more:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-21/department-of-environment-says-so...
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This ABC report is a weakling — even if accurately describing what the assistant to the government Jo Evans twisting global warming effects to a geographical position advantage. The main problem is her wishy-washy assessment is linked to a rise of 1.5 degree Celsius, while the rise by 2100 is likely to be more than double this figure, leaving many people in the lurch — not counting the damages to natural habitats. As well, the caption to the picture of the Arctic is faulty:
PHOTO: Warmer temperatures could unluck the Arctic for shipping and mineral extraction. (Supplied: Amelie Meyer)
Did the kids writing for ABC online mean:
PHOTO: Warmer temperatures could unlock the Arctic for shipping and mineral extraction. (Supplied: Amelie Meyer)?
Jo Evans is a deceiving idiot working for an idiotic government...
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horsing around...
By John R. Platt, The Revelator. Originally posted on The Revelator.
William Perry Pendley wants you think that what he thinks doesn’t matter.
Pendley spent four decades advocating for the corporate exploitation of U.S. public lands. He now serves the Trump administration as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for much of those same public lands.
Over the years Pendley, a self-styled “Sagebrush Rebel,” has pushed for the wholesale divestment of public lands from federal control, denied the existence of climate change and the hole in the ozone layer, denigrated the press, and called illegal immigrants a “cancer,” among other radical, extremist positions.
But now he’d have you believe that those actions and opinions no longer matter.
“My personal opinions are irrelevant,” Pendley said during an on-stage panel moderated by Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post earlier this month at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Fort Collins, Colorado. “I have a new job now,” he told the audience. “I’m a zealous advocate for my client. My client is the American people, and my bosses are the president of the United States and Secretary Bernhardt. So what I thought, what I wrote, what I did in the past is irrelevant. I have orders, I have laws to obey, and I intend to do that.”
That appearance represented just one part of what appears to be a broader media strategy to rehabilitate Pendley’s image, including