Must-read recap: The New Lede's top stories
Scientists urge officials to reject LNG; pathogens traveling high in the air; EPA's legal battle over CAFOs, water pollution; EPA denies duty to regulate PFAS in biosolids; rising deaths from CA heat.
Scientists urge US officials to reject LNG export expansion
More than 125 scientists have issued a stern warning to US officials over a rapid expansion of natural gas production, saying the moves threaten to exacerbate the climate crisis and risk further environmental and public health harms.
The scientists delivered their message in a September 12 letter addressed to US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, pushing back against industry claims that expanding natural gas production and consumption is compatible with US and international climate goals.
The concerns from the scientific community come as the US Department of Energy prepares to update an evaluation of liquified natural gas (LNG) export approvals, and as the Treasury Department reviews the climate impacts of various forms of hydrogen production, including production from fossil gas, as it determines tax credit values. The Biden administration paused new LNG export approvals earlier this year to further evaluate their climate impacts. (Read the rest of the story.)
New study finds potentially harmful pathogens traveling high in the atmosphere
A wide variety of fungi and bacteria, including E. coli and other potential human pathogens, have been found high in the atmosphere where they can travel for hundreds to thousands of miles before falling back to Earth, according to new research.
Air samples collected from between roughly a half mile and two miles in altitude (1 kilometer to 3 kilometers) near Tokyo, Japan, carried bacterial species known to be capable of causing health problems such as food poisoning and skin infections, researchers said.
The study, published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that while most of the microbes detected were likely dead, testing confirmed more than ten species of microbes collected from high in the sky were alive. Those were particularly hardy strains, including several found to be antibiotic resistant. One of these, a type of ubiquitous bacteria not known to normally infect humans, was resistant to five different antibiotic drugs. (Read the rest of the story.)
EPA battles environmentalists in court over regulation of CAFOs and water pollution
A coalition of environmental organizations faced off against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in federal appellate court on September 12 in the latest skirmish in a long-running battle over the agency’s regulatory approach to water contamination connected to industrial agricultural operations.
The groups, led by the nonprofit Food & Water Watch, told a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that the EPA must strengthen its oversight of what are known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
The agency is unlawfully allowing roughly half of the nation’s more than 20,000 big livestock and poultry feeding facilities around the country to operate without permits required under the 1972 Clean Water Act, the groups argued to the court. And, they said, the agency is violating the law by authorizing CAFOs to store and spread manure so haphazardly that the drinking water for millions of people is at risk as thousands of streams, lakes and other waterways are polluted with harmful bacteria, nitrates, phosphorus and other contaminants.
The agency has “failed” for more than a decade to adequately regulate these operations, Food & Water Watch lawyer Emily Miller told the court. (Read the rest of the story.)
EPA denies duty to regulate PFAS in sewage sludge spread on farmland
US regulators claim they are not legally required to regulate toxic PFAS chemicals in sewage sludge spread on farmland across the country, according to a court filing the government made this week in response to a lawsuit from an environmental watchdog group.
In its Sept. 9 filing, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asked the US District Court in Washington, DC to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed in June by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) on behalf of a group of Texas farmers and ranchers. The lawsuit claims contamination with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from sewage sludge has sickened and killed the farmers’ livestock, “injured their health, threatened their livelihoods, and devalued their property.”
The agency denied PEER’s claims that it is violating the Clean Water Act by failing to identify and regulate several types of PFAS that have been found in treated sewage sludge used as fertilizer. While the law requires the agency to conduct reviews, there is no requirement for the agency to actually identify “additional toxic pollutants,” the EPA said in its filing. (Read the rest of the story.)
Postcard from California: Rising death toll from extreme heat demands action
(Opinion columns published in The New Lede represent the views of the individual(s) authoring the columns and not necessarily the perspectives of TNL editors.)
On July 7, six German motorcyclists were touring California’s Death Valley National Park as the thermometer hit 129 degrees Fahrenheit – one degree shy of the hottest temperature ever reliably measured on Earth.
As they neared what is known as “Badwater Basin”, the cyclists were overcome by heat and couldn’t go on. Park rangers declared one man dead at the scene. Another was unconscious but recovered after an ambulance rushed him to a Nevada hospital.
Because of the extreme heat, the tragically ironic location and the victim’s nationality, the death received global news coverage. But It was far from the only heat-related death in California or the US that month as dozens of cities from coast to coast set all-time record high temperatures.
New research finds that heat-related deaths in the US have more than doubled in the last 25 years – a deadly toll that researchers say is a significant undercount, as many fatalities tied to high temperatures are not recorded as such. (Read the rest of the opinion column.)