All posts tagged "Pollution"

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to reverse a longstanding policy that calculated the health benefits of reducing air pollution.

The agency has referred to "estimates of avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths to justify clean-air rules" for decades, and that is now set to end under the Trump administration, according to a New York Times report.

The Times reportedly obtained internal agency emails and documents indicating that the EPA will no longer factor the "gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone, when regulating industry." ...

The climate, energy and environment ministers of the leading Western industrialised nations (G7) have agreed on a coal phase-out by 2035 at their meeting in Italy, British and Italian officials said Monday. The decision was confirmed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs on Monday evening. A ministry spokesman said that Germany had played a key role in the decision to set a clear end date for coal-fired power generation for all G7 countries. British Energy Secretary Andrew Bowie had previously publicised the agreement. "Yes, we have an agreement to phase out coal in the first hal......

This story was originally published and produced by Grist and co-published with El País. A Spanish-language version can be read here.

On the morning of June 12, 2022, Ángela Astudillo, then a law student in her mid-20s, grabbed her water bottle and hopped into her red Nissan Juke. The co-founder of Dress Desert, or Desierto Vestido, a textile recycling advocacy nonprofit, and the daughter of tree farmers, Astudillo lives in a gated apartment complex in Alto Hospicio, a dusty city at the edge of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, with her husband, daughter, bunny, and three aquatic turtles.

Exiting the compound, Astudillo pinched the wheel, pulled over next to a car on the side of the road, and greeted Bárbara Pino, a fashion professor, and three of her students, who were waiting inside. ...

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Last year, climate change came into sharp relief for much of the world: The planet experienced its hottest 12-month period in 125,000 years. Flooding events inundated communities from California to East Africa to India. A heat wave in South America caused temperatures to spike above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of winter, and a heat dome across much of the southern United States spurred a 31-day streak in Phoenix of 110 degree-plus temperatures. The formation of an El Niño, the natural phenomenon that raises temperatures globally, intensified extreme weather already strengthened by climate change. The U.S. alone counted 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 — more than any other year.

Yet this devastation was met by some of the largest gains in climate action to date. World leaders agreed for the first time to “transition away” from oil and gas at the annual United Nations climate summit, hosted last month by the United Arab Emirates. Funds and incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, started to roll out to companies and municipalities. Electric vehicle sales skyrocketed, thousands of young people signed up for the first-ever American Climate Corps, and companies agreed to pay billions of dollars to remove harmful chemicals called PFAS from drinking water supplies....

Washington (AFP) - From Quebec to British Columbia to Hawaii, North America is facing an extraordinary wildfire season -- and regions both near and far have found themselves increasingly blighted by smoke exposure. Here's what you should know about air pollution from these blazes. What we knowOne of the defining aspects of smoke from wildfires is "particulate matter" -- toxins that, in their numbers, can make smoke visible. Particulate matter of 2.5 micron diameter, PM2.5, is "particularly dangerous for human health and emitted in really large quantities," Rebecca Hornbrook, an atmospheric che......

New York (AFP) - Smoke from Canadian wildfires shrouded New York in a record-breaking apocalyptic smog Wednesday as cities along the US East Coast issued air pollution warnings and thousands evacuated their homes in Canada. The devastating fires have displaced more than 20,000 people and scorched about 3.8 million hectares of land in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described this wildfire season as the country's worst ever. More than 100 million people across the northeastern United States, and extending west to Chicago and south to Atlanta, were under pollution warnings after the ......