A federal court in California ruled late Tuesday against the Environmental Protection Agency, ordering officials to take action over concerns about potential health risks from currently recommended levels of fluoride in the American drinking water supply.

The ruling by District Court Judge Edward Chen, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, deals a blow to public health groups in the growing debate about whether the benefits of continuing to add fluoride to the water supply outweighs its risks. //

"One thing the EPA cannot do, however, in the face of this Court's finding, is to ignore that risk," he wrote.

Michael Connett, a partner at the law firm Siri & Glimstad and the lead attorney for the groups who brought the lawsuit, said the law now requires EPA to take action to remove the risk of fluoride.

"From our vantage point, the obvious way of eliminating the risk from adding fluoride chemicals to drinking water is to stop adding them," he told CBS News.

Legal Insurrection readers may recall that in 2019. I covered a book entitled “The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened” by Dr. Susan Crockford. The University of Victoria professor analyzes the latest data and reviews the questionable values in official estimates, concluding that polar bears are thriving.

Subsequently, she was fired from her position at the university.

However, it didn’t stop what she wrote from being true.

The polar bear, the iconic image of the climate crisis, has entirely lost its eco-activist mascot status. Climate expert Bjorn Lomborg (President of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution) recently examined the numbers in a New York Post piece and came to the same conclusion. //

henrybowman | September 17, 2024 at 8:19 pm
Polar bears, ozone holes, rampant famines, rising sea levels, killer bees, COVID, insurrectionists, space aliens, Godzilla.

Alaska is also rich in resources, not least of which are crude oil and natural gas, those two commodities that are so vital to our economy. Much of that gas and oil flows through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. This Alaska pipeline is a vital piece of American infrastructure. Running 800 miles across the Great Land, much of it through the wilderness, TAPS brings 450,000 barrels a day of crude oil to American consumers; that's about 3.5 percent of American production.

The Biden-Harris administration is considering further restricting oil development in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve (NPR-A), the nation’s largest swath of public land. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will be soliciting public comment on whether to expand or designate new “special areas” in the 23-million-acre reserve. //

This June, these environmental groups filed a legal petition to the U.S. Department of Interior to phase-out and decommission TAPS: the Center for Biological Diversity; Pacific Environment; Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic; Alaska Community Action on Toxics; Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition; and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (also see here).

“[TAPS] is approaching the end of its useful life due to mounting climate change-driven damages to both the aging pipeline infrastructure and the entire Arctic ecosystem,” the six petitioners state, also citing “the imperative for the United States to rapidly transition away from fossil fuel-based energy.” //

This, in turn, conflicts with federal law by preventing the fulfillment of the Alaska’s statehood entitlement; economic development, including responsible resource development, to assure Alaska’s future prosperity; and the long-term settlement of land ownership across the state. //

anon-eoij
20 hours ago
Correction: the daily volume is 450,000 bpd, not 45,000. Best job in my life was as an engineer on TAPS from 1980-1995. A wonderful adventure for a young man.

Some 500 miles west of Beijing, in the desert of the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, a solar-power project is underway that is — even by China’s standards — audacious in scale and, most remarkably, in ambition.

Officials in Ordos are over the next several years going to install 100 gigawatts of solar panels — more than three times as much capacity as the United States is currently building nationwide — along a stretch of land 250 miles (400 kilometers) long and 3 miles (5 km) wide.

The goal isn’t just to generate huge amounts of clean power. It is also to restore a no man’s land, bringing greenery and even livestock to an area roughly the size of Puerto Rico. In doing so, the local authorities are doubling down on two of China’s most successful efforts of recent years: An epic expansion of solar power, and major progress in combating desertification. //

Initially, those operating in desert climes adopted measures such as creating sand barriers and planting trees in order to safeguard their operations. “They must take actions to minimize the damage they would bring to the local ecology and environment while also protecting their own bases from being damaged by sandstorms,” Wang Weiquan, the general secretary of the Energy and Environment Committee of China Energy Research Society, a Beijing-based NGO, told me. “Much to their surprise, they found that their work led grass to grow in the desert.”

Indeed, according to a 2022 study, desert-based solar power projects have resulted in “a significant greening trend”: About one-third of the land under solar plants built in 12 Chinese deserts has seen vegetation grow.

As another recent study showed, solar panels do not only create shade, enabling plants and vegetables to grow, but also reduce the ground wind speed, preventing sand from being picked up.

Solar companies saw opportunities: They started to search for suitable crops to grow under the panels. One plant they found worked was liquorice, which can survive in the harsh environment and make the soil more fertile by absorbing nitrogen from the air and converting it to the ground. //

There are also environmental concerns. For one, most Chinese developers build their desert bases by bulldozing sand dunes, and this could ultimately lead to sand and dust storms, a Chinese sand-control expert told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. A previous study also showed that covering the Sahara with solar panels may, in fact, worsen global warming by potentially increasing surrounding air temperatures markedly and reshaping rainfall patterns worldwide.

Last November, Virgin Atlantic Airways made headlines for completing the world’s first transatlantic flight using “100 percent sustainable aviation fuel.”

This week, the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) of the U.K. banned a Virgin radio ad released prior to the flight, in which they touted their “unique flight mission.” While Virgin did use fuel that releases fewer emissions than traditional supplies, the regulatory agency deemed the company’s sustainability claim “misleading” because it failed to give a full picture of the adverse environmental and climate impacts of fuel.

Annual Air Trends Report

Nationally, concentrations of air pollutants have dropped significantly since 1990:

• Carbon Monoxide (CO) 8-Hour, 81%
• Lead (Pb) 3-Month Average, 88% (from 2010)
• Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) Annual, 60%
• Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) 1-Hour, 54%
• Ozone (O3) 8-Hour, 22%
• Particulate Matter 10 microns (PM10) 24-Hour, 34%
• Particulate Matter 2.5 microns (PM2.5) Annual, 42% (from 2000)
• Particulate Matter 2.5 microns (PM2.5) 24-Hour, 42% (from 2000)
• Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) 1-Hour, 90%

Past research targeted DEHP exposure as directly correlating with preterm birth. These findings resulted in restrictions on DEHP use, causing manufacturers to create alternatives. But the findings of this new study reported that these replacements may be more dangerous than DEHP, thus leading to an even greater rise in preterm births since they are now in multiple daily items, including food product packaging. //

One step would be to replace any plastic food storage containers or water bottles with stainless steel or glass containers. If you still have some plastic containers, avoid microwaving food or drinks in them or putting them in the dishwasher (or use the top rack) to lessen the extent of your phthalate exposure, as exposure to high heat speeds up phthalate release. Additionally, checking plastic recycling codes and avoiding ones higher in phthalates, such as those marked with recycling code 3, can make a difference.

Proponents argue that it’s better for our health and the environment. Science suggests otherwise

Anders - who was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission - took the iconic Earthrise photograph, one of the most memorable and inspirational images of Earth from space.

Taken on Christmas Eve during the 1968 mission, the first crewed space flight to leave Earth and reach the Moon, the picture shows the planet rising above the horizon from the barren lunar surface.

Anders later described it as his most significant contribution to the space programme.

The image is widely credited with motivating the global environmental movement and leading to the creation of Earth Day, an annual event to promote activism and awareness of caring for the planet.

Speaking of the moment, Anders said: "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth."

In June of last year, a 14,000-panel 5.2 MW solar panel farm called the Scottsbluff Community Solar Array in Nebraska was blasted by baseball-sized hail. There wasn’t any question that the array would be brought back online because the power company had no choice. Leaving it would have been a PR disaster worse than having the array destroyed by hail.

It took 7 months to bring it back online. //

Solar releases a nasty thing called nitrogen trifluoride. And, what, pray tell is NF3’s impact on the environment? It is reportedly 17,000 times worse for the atmosphere than the dreaded CO2.

And there are other inconvenient facts like 80 percent of the silicon torn from the earth during the mining is eventually lost making crystalline silicon. A cancer biologist named David H. Nguyen noted that toxic chemicals associated with solar farms include cadmium telluride, cadmium gallium, copper indium selenide, and a bunch of other nasty toxins. Sometimes you have to wreck the environment to save it.

Solar acolytes will grudgingly admit that there is a chemical downside to manufacturing solar panels – like a byproduct called silicon tetrachloride. It’s toxic and, if not handled properly, will cause severe burns. If it is inadvertently combined with water it can create hydrochloric acid. But hey, they are made in China so, never mind. //

Northeast of Edward Air Force Base sits the tiny town of Boron. The surrounding desert is home to desert wildlife including the Joshua tree. It will soon be home to a vast solar farm owned by Aratina Solar Center. Joshua trees can survive 200 years in the desert heat but they won’t survive in Aratina’s heat sink of a project.

About 3,500 Joshua trees will be uprooted and destroyed to make room for the solar farm. Aratina (owned mostly by a private equity group known as KKR). To mitigate the bad press, Aratina is shredding trees on-site rather than piling them like so many corpses. //

On completion, the project will blacken about 2,300 acres but it will generate power for up to 180,000 homes. //

Sometimes you gotta kill a tree, to save a tree.  

As global governments push for a rapid transition to electric vehicles and to wind and solar power, they are creating a demand for copper that threatens to undermine the very goals they seek to achieve.

According to a recent International Energy Forum report, electrifying the global vehicle fleet would require the opening of 55% more new copper mines than are already needed, and twice the total amount of copper that has ever been mined throughout human history over the next three decades. //

Since copper is a core component in electronics, raising the cost of copper makes it far more difficult for developing areas of the world to access energy. Copper is a crucial component in electric vehicles. A typical EV requires nearly 200 pounds of copper, or about four times the amount needed for a combustion-engine vehicle. //

The energy industry is facing government mandates for wind and solar. A typical 3-megawatt wind turbine requires 9 tons of copper, more than the weight of a school bus. Wind power requires more than seven times the amount of copper to produce the same amount of energy that natural gas or coal does, and five times the copper as nuclear power. //

Policymakers pushing for a rapid shift to EVs and renewables are also responsible for the red tape in mining for critical minerals. Without more mining, the planned EVs won’t be built. Even Chinese critical materials won’t get America all the way to its EV targets.

The agriculture committee (AGRI) in the most recent European Parliament was known for leaning conservative, especially compared to the environment committee (ENVI), with the two clashing over the EU's green farming agenda, the Farm to Fork strategy. AGRI was also strongly pro-farmer — due in large part to the number of farmers who served on it.

Next month’s European election could return a more right-wing assembly to oversee the EU’s €387 billion farm budget, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. At the same time, Green Party lawmakers — the most vocal supporters of the Green Deal — could lose up to a third of their seats, while the number of Socialist and Liberal MEPs could also shrink.

What does this mean for European agriculture?

In practice this means there’s unlikely to be a viable coalition of the center-left, liberal, Green and left that can secure deals such as the nature restorationlaw that sparked controversy in this past term. Meanwhile, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) will find it easier to build majorities with groups further to the right.

This might make less of a difference in AGRI as groups from the far right to the center left often vote together. However, a further rightward shift will confirm an existing trend: Out with the Green Deal, and in with the “Farm Deal.”

The polio epidemic that gripped the United States in the mid-20th century remains etched in history as a harrowing chapter of disease and public health challenges. However, recent revelations and research shed new light on the potential link between DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and the misdiagnosis of polio cases during that era.

In the 1940s and 1950s, as the “polio epidemic” unfolded, outbreaks were notably clustered in regions with large commercial farms where DDT was extensively used as a pesticide. The timing of these outbreaks during the summer and early fall coincided with heightened DDT application and increased human exposure, particularly among children who frequented rivers, lakes, and streams contaminated with DDT runoff from agricultural activities.

What’s intriguing is that the symptoms of paralytic polio, a severe form of the disease, closely mimic those of DDT poisoning. Both conditions can cause muscle weakness, paralysis, respiratory difficulties, and neurological symptoms, leading to potential misdiagnosis and confusion among healthcare providers during the epidemic.

Further complicating matters was the widespread use and endorsement of DDT as a safe and effective pesticide, touted for its ability to control insect-borne diseases and improve agricultural productivity. The public perception of DDT as a panacea for pest control overshadowed potential health risks and unintended consequences, including its role in misdiagnosed polio cases.

Now we see that in Africa, the great apes are endangered by climate change; it's not like you might think, these apes are endangered by the mining of raw materials for electric vehicle batteries, which is destroying their habitat.

Mining companies hunting critical minerals could wipe out more than a third of Africa’s remaining great apes, a new study has found. //

Mining booms — whether for coal or cobalt — tend to be staggeringly destructive processes: A feedback loop of new roads pushed into the forest, which draw in job-seeking colonists, who further clear habitat.

This dynamic is particularly stark in Africa, where some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium lie beneath the soil — and nearly half a million great apes live in the forests above.

European farmers are reshaping the political landscape across the Atlantic just months before the EU’s parliamentary elections.

Apparently, normalcy has been restored to NYC to the point that Mayor Eric Adams has approved controversial rules regulating the amount of delicious, smokey aroma generated from the area’s pizzerias.

Democrat Mayor Eric Adams has approved a new green plan that requires facilities using wood- and coal-fired stoves to cut their smoke by 75 percent.

More than 130 businesses will be impacted by the law, including many famed pizza joints. Businesses can apply for an exemption from the mandate – which goes into effect on April 27 – but they must prove they can not financially meet the requirements.

Still, business must then cut their emissions by 25 percent. //

The costs of the ventilation control systems are enormous, and they are likely to force many pizzerias to close. //

To cook pizza in the traditional way, ovens need to reach 1,200 degrees. Only coal-fired ovens can reach such high temperatures. //

From April 2020 to July 2022, Gotham’s population fell by nearly a half million people, or 5.3% — wiping out almost three-quarters of the gains over the previous decade, DiNapoli reports, citing Census figures.

That was more than double the state’s 2.6% drop, and it came while the nation overall was expanding by 0.6%.

“Maui on its best day… 1” is the way Bezos describes the space habitat environment’s attractive force to depopulate Earth, turning it into a nature preserve. This is an orders of magnitude greater “Scale of the problem” than has been addressed in the prior two original posts here by Keith Henson regarding SPS 1 and CO2.

I’ve been working this angle since the 1980s Sierra Club retreats in the Laguna Mountains outside San Diego with the theme “What Good Are Humans?”.

Most recently has been my proposal to depopulate Earth’s land masses with self-replicating “Maui on its best day…” artificial atolls in the Western Pacific doldrums built with in situ resources of both mass and energy:

jimbowery.blogspot.com

Exponential Remediation of Civilization's Footprint 3
Introduction " The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function ."...

The economics start out being the real estate value of “Maui on its best day…” atolls supporting 100,000 people each. After 16 doublings (to accommodate all 7 billion of Earth’s population) the industrial learning curve reduces the cost of a beach front condo to under $10,000 per family of four. Back of the envelope calculations indicate this could happen within 15 years of the first atoll “cell” capable of self-replication.

The only big environmental challenge is chlorine waste produced by the replication of these artificial atolls. That Cl2 may be injected into the connate fluid 1 available 1000ft beneath the already several-kilometer deep ocean floor turning it into CaCl2:

Secretary Pete Buttigieg @SecretaryPete
·
Extreme weather is expected to be the top factor in supply chain disruptions next year. It reminds us how urgently we must work to set up our infrastructure for climate resiliency.
foxweather.com
Extreme weather expected to be top logistics disruptor for supply chains in 2024
3:20 PM · Jan 7, 2024 //

After the lies we were told in 2020 and 2021, I've become a skeptic/cynic whenever the government warns me about something.

In theory, the supply chain disruption in 2020 and 2021 was caused by COVID. But was it? The disruption was caused by the government's regulatory response to a crisis they created and amplified. //

In short, I see this as the leading edge of a gaslighting campaign to increase government control over our lives, and that will peak in time for Joe Biden to blame a major disruption of US supply chains that they see coming on anything but his policies. //

Wilsonreagan
4 hours ago
They are setting us up for climate lock downs. Covid was the test.

“We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles” - Thomas Edison

Edison was dreaming big when he said that. //

Belgium was dreaming big when they built the Atomium. It took 18 months to design and another 18 months to build. //

J'ai vu le futur. “I have seen the future.” These words are displayed inside the structure like a mantra for humankind. It’s not wrong. Consider the structures we admire the most: the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Easter Island heads, etc. We do not argue that these structures are too big. We visit them because they are so big, to marvel at their bigness.

For much of human history, we have tried to show our greatness, or to celebrate that which we have believed to be greater than us, through constructing large monuments.

So why are large-scale projects now so heavily criticised?

It may not surprise you that the idea that big is bad came from an anti-growth, anti-technology activist.

E F Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered in 1973. The book argues in favour of what Schumacher calls small, “appropriate” technologies as a superior alternative to the general ethos of "bigger is better". The latest edition of the book features a foreword by depopulation and degrowth activist Jonathon Porritt.

The book is a holy text for degrowthers, anti-progress activists, and Malthusians alike. It suffers from the recrudescence of the common fallacy of man versus nature, as Schumacher argues that “The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.” //

What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it. Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.”

Consider that last statement. “Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.” And yet we have heating, lighting, telephones, the Internet, shoes, glasses, clothes, and so on, thanks to science - not Shakespeare (though I take no umbrage with the Bard). The greatest irony of this statement is that we only have books like Schumacher’s and Shakespeare’s thanks to science and technology.

That a prophet of such pessimism and blinkered thinking has influenced our ideas of large-scale technology ought to concern us. While activists argue against large-scale technological projects, note that when they consider the structures to be works of art the same argument is seldom made. For example, the construction of the Sagrada Família, the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world, began in 1882 and continues to this day. For the most part, people do not cry “it’s too big!” or “what about the cost?!” regarding the church. They allow it to be built. They want to see it finished. Similarly, the Notre-Dame is being rapidly rebuilt after it caught fire in 2019. //

The fact is that we need one - power plants - to have the other - the Sagrada Família, Notre-Dame, etc.

Back to the Atomium. With this single structure, Belgium depicted its love of physics through art. The country wanted to highlight and promote the post-war ideal of peacefully applying atomic research and other advancements in technology, and with over 600,000 visitors per year, the Atomium has achieved this aim. //

Schumacher and I do agree on one thing. He wrote: “To talk about the future is useful only if it leads to action now.” Indeed, we should act now and start building. Large-scale nuclear energy is needed to displace fossil fuels, and committing to it represents the veriest foresight. Without new power plants, we cannot hope to overcome the vicissitudes of tomorrow and maintain the progress that led us here, and beyond. Sometimes we need to dream big and build big. Or, to put it less elegantly, we should go big or go home.

As US dams age, removal is always an option—and it can be done well. //

Wending its way from the Olympic Mountains to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington’s Elwha River is now free. For about century, the Elwha and Gilnes Canyon Dams corralled these waters. Both have since been removed, and the restoration of the watershed has started.

The dam-removal project was the largest to date in the US—though it won’t hold that position for long. The Klamath River dam removal project has begun, with four of its six dams—J.C. Boyle, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and Iron Gate—set to be scuppered by the end of the year, and the drawdown started this week. (In fact, Copco No. 2 is already gone.)

Once the project is complete, the Klamath will run from Oregon to northwestern California largely unimpeded, allowing sediment, organic matter, and its restive waters to flow freely downriver while fish like salmon, trout, and other migratory species leap and wriggle their way upstream to spawn. //

The Dark Ars Praefectus
7y
10,623
org said:
That's too absolutist. Many small dams can only generate a few hundreds of kW or low double digit MW. That's a drop in the bucket for power generation but their local impact can be huge. I guess I mean you have to do case by case analysis to see when it's worth it.

Using the article as an example, the four dams being removed from the Klamath are John C Boyle (90 MW), Copco 1 (20 MW), Copco 2 (27 MW), and Iron Gate (18 MW). The four produced 686,000 MWh annually, or about 50.5% of their nameplate capacity. //

QuantifiableQuoll Ars Centurion
7y
272
greendave said:
Would have liked to see a discussion of the cost of these removals (reportedly $40-60 million for the two on The Elwha River, and $350 million overall for restoration). Those numbers seem exorbitant and make it hard to imagine that we'll be able to afford much removal/restoration in the long term.
The only reason PacificCorp, owner of the dams, agreed to the removal of the Klamath dams is because it was cost prohibitive to keep them in place. They needed mandatory upgrades and were already not competitive in a power generation market full of windmills/turbines/whatever and newer dams.

Source https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/klamath-river-dam-removal/