Pollution

"In a new draft document, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) science advisers recommended that the agency tighten its air quality standards for soot pollution after the Trump administration declined to make such a move.

The new draft that was released Friday by the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) says “all CASAC members agree that the current level of the annual standard is not sufficiently protective of public health and should be lowered.”

"Studies in Kern County, performed by oil industry consultants, cannot answer fundamental safety questions about irrigating crops with “produced water,” the board’s own panel of experts concedes."

"About 86 percent of people living in urban areas worldwide — 2.5 billion people — are being exposed to air pollution levels roughly seven times greater than World Health Organization guidelines, according to new research, led by George Washington University researchers and published in the Lancet Planetary Health journal."

"President Biden made an emotional pledge yesterday to “end cancer as we know it” by reinvigorating the Cancer Moonshot initiative he first launched in 2016, just one year after his son Beau succumbed to the disease."

"Protecting people from exposure to toxic “forever chemicals” will be a top priority for new state regulations throughout the U.S. in 2022, according to a new analysis."

"After years of largely neglecting the buildup of plastic waste in Earth’s environment, the U.N. Environment Assembly will meet in February and March in the hopes of drafting the first international treaty controlling global plastics pollution."

"A growing constellation of methane-detecting satellites is giving researchers new and disturbing insights into “super emitters” around the globe — from pipelines in Russia to North America’s oil fields. But as the reams of data reveal the depth of the problem, they also have made clear a potential tool to combat climate change, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science."

"If you think it’s not our fault, urine denial."

"Peacocks may lose their legally mandated welcome in some neighborhoods across Miami-Dade after county commissioners agreed to loosen a law protecting the divisive birds."