The problem with neoniconitoid pesticides, according to this Intercept article, is not that they kill bees directly, but that they weaken their immune systems so that they succumb to fungal infections. Sick bees have an instinct to fly away from the hive and die quietly somewhere to protect the hive. And the concentrations that cause this are so low they are not even detectable in monitoring data.
Hasbro has announced they are phasing out plastic packaging. Now, they are not phasing out all the stuff they make out of plastic, which is most of what they make and sell. But I think it is a good sign that the companies that produce all the packaging might be willing to think of the role they play in waste/pollution/litter/climate crisis, rather than just trying to pin all the blame on consumers. Governments can get involved by either taxing plastic packaging or banning it outright.
The UK is tackling the idea of making companies responsible for the packaging they produce. This makes perfect sense because it will raise revenue in the short term, but hopefully give them the incentive they need to design with “reduce, reuse, recycle” in mind in the longer term.
Businesses and manufacturers will pay the full cost of recycling or disposing of their packaging waste, under a major new government strategy unveiled by the Environment Secretary today (Tuesday 18 December 2018).
The move will overhaul England’s waste system, putting a legal onus on those responsible for producing damaging waste to take greater responsibility and foot the bill.
The announcement forms part of the government’s ambitious new Resources and Waste Strategy, the first comprehensive update in more than a decade. It will eliminate avoidable plastic waste and help leave the environment in a better state than we found it for future generations.
This group, which includes Exxon Mobil, is proposing a four-part plan:
- A $40 per ton tax on carbon rising annually at a gradual rate;
- Tax revenues generated would be refunded to all citizens (hence the name, “Carbon Dividends”);
- This plan would terminate the EPA’s regulatory authority over carbon emissions and specifically terminate the recently enacted Clean Power Plan;
- Require “border carbon adjustments to level the playing field and permit American competitiveness.” (Other relatively high CO2 emitting countries apart from the US are China and Russia).
This article I am linking to is highly skeptical, as are some prominent environmental groups, due to the restrictions it would place on EPA regulation. I’m not sure yet whether I would support it. So far EPA regulation has not accomplished anything. Oil and gas companies must be afraid that it eventually will, and see this as a choice between a predictable and manageable business cost versus an unknown but potentially unlimited risk. What isn’t mentioned here is protection from litigation, which I have heard might also be part of the deal. They might be afraid of that too.
I support pollution taxes in general. I have made a career of helping regulated entities (water utilities in my case) deal with EPA regulations, and I don’t see them as particularly rational, effective, or economical even when the underlying laws are well-thought-out. It might be worth trying something different. Once we have a carbon tax on the books, the actual amount can be adjusted until it is effective, and the concept can potentially be applied to other types of waste and pollution.
The National Academy of Sciences has a new study out on “freshwater salinization syndrome“. If I understand it correctly, it goes something like this: Air pollution and acid rain leach minerals like calcium out of all the concrete we use for pavement and buildings. All the road salt we apply leaches minerals like calcium out of soil and replaces it with sodium. The result is a lot more minerals like calcium in freshwater, which changes its alkalinity, or in high school science terms, its pH and ability to resist changes in pH.
Salt pollution and human-accelerated weathering are shifting the chemical composition of major ions in fresh water and increasing salinization and alkalinization across North America. We propose a concept, the freshwater salinization syndrome, which links salinization and alkalinization processes. This syndrome manifests as concurrent trends in specific conductance, pH, alkalinity, and base cations. Although individual trends can vary in strength, changes in salinization and alkalinization have affected 37% and 90%, respectively, of the drainage area of the contiguous United States over the past century. Across 232 United States Geological Survey (USGS) monitoring sites, 66% of stream and river sites showed a statistical increase in pH, which often began decades before acid rain regulations. The syndrome is most prominent in the densely populated eastern and midwestern United States, where salinity and alkalinity have increased most rapidly. The syndrome is caused by salt pollution (e.g., road deicers, irrigation runoff, sewage, potash), accelerated weathering and soil cation exchange, mining and resource extraction, and the presence of easily weathered minerals used in agriculture (lime) and urbanization (concrete). Increasing salts with strong bases and carbonates elevate acid neutralizing capacity and pH, and increasing sodium from salt pollution eventually displaces base cations on soil exchange sites, which further increases pH and alkalinization. Symptoms of the syndrome can include: infrastructure corrosion, contaminant mobilization, and variations in coastal ocean acidification caused by increasingly alkaline river inputs. Unless regulated and managed, the freshwater salinization syndrome can have significant impacts on ecosystem services such as safe drinking water, contaminant retention, and biodiversity.
It’s a little ironic that this is happening to fresh water at the same time we are worried about ocean acidification. There is also a larger context to me though – even if our waters meet numerical standards we set for water quality, they just don’t have the same chemistry, biology, or links to the land that they used to. This would still happen even if we were able to eliminate all pollution that is directly toxic to aquatic life.
The FDA is finally banning antibacterial soap. Companies have about a year to phase out triclosan and triclocarban, the two toxic chemicals people have been putting on their bodies and in their mouths all these years.
Evidence suggests that the chemicals used in antibacterial soaps can alter hormone cycles and cause muscle weakness, NPR reports. Triclosan also kills good bacteria and could help create germs that are resistant to antibiotics; the chemical has been known to contaminate streams and has been found in human milk and dolphin’s blood, according to Vitals.
While antibacterial soap is often marketed as being more effective than soap and water, experts say that it actually isn’t. Washing your hands with regular soap (if you do it the right way) is just fine.
Hospitals and the food industry can still use antibacterial soap, but otherwise, companies have until September 2017 to rid their products of the banned chemicals or remove those products from the market altogether.
Here’s how to wash your hands like a surgeon:
If I understand this somewhat convoluted abstract from Ecological Economics correctly, empirical evidence shows that environmental regulation can actually increase corporate profitability by incentivizing innovation. The data also show that investors believe the exact opposite.
The Porter hypothesis asserts that properly designed environmental regulation motivates firms to innovate, which ultimately improves profitability. In this study, we test empirically the Porter hypothesis and the competing hypothesis that regulation undermines profitability (“costly regulation hypothesis”). In particular, we estimate the effect of clean water regulation, as reflected in the stringency of firm-specific effluent limits for two regulated pollutants, on the profitability of chemical manufacturing firms. As our primary contribution, we contrast the effect of clean water regulation on actual profitability outcomes and its effects on investors’ expectations of profitability. Our results for actual profitability are consistent with the Porter hypothesis, while our results for expected profitability are consistent with the costly regulation hypothesis. Thus, our empirical results demonstrate that investors do not appear to value the positive effect of tighter clean water regulation on actual profitability.
from Alternet, a new theory on possible environmental causes of autism:
The children exposed to two substances were up to twice as likley as others to develop autism spectrum disorders. The first is styrene, which is used in plastics, paints and is also a product of gasoline combustion in automobiles. The second, chromium, is produced during the processes used in steel manufacturing and other industries.