Inhaling wildfire smoke may affect your body’s immunity towards coronavirus. A recent study discovered that excess exposure to fine particulate matter in wildfire smoke could lead to more covid-19 cases and deaths.
During an unprecedented fire season in the U.S. West, a new study reveals that air pollution from 2020 wildfires in Washington, California, and Oregon was linked to a high risk of getting covid-19 and even dying from it.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
Day: August 16, 2021
By: Julia Weil, Organizing Intern
While switching to green energy is typically beneficial for human health, a higher standard for what is classified as “green energy” is required to protect vulnerable communities. An example of this is the definition of renewable resources, which allows Europe, which pledged to decrease fossil fuel use, to consider biomass a viable renewable alternative, though it is not carbon neutral.
What is Biomass? Biomass can be made up of wood, wood processing wastes, agricultural crops, agricultural waste, and manure. When this type of renewable material is burned, energy is produced. However, the production of some of these materials can be particularly harmful. In this case, Europe’s outsourcing of biomass includes a crucial “loophole,” which causes damage to the environment. For example, trees that are still rooted are leveled in order to produce greater quantities of wood pellets.
Because of the definition of biomass used by the European Union, they were able to declare themselves to be the first to use more renewable energy than fossil fuels. However, the enormous increase in the use of biomass caused people in the US – specifically, people living in the South – to suffer.
Enviva, the largest producer of “industrial wood pellets” – a type of biomass – was operating two facilities in North Carolina, processing this type of biomass far away from the location where the benefits of the “green energy” would be reaped. It should be noted that this type of biomass is not produced in the EU, therefore, Europe is able to report fewer emissions than were emitted throughout the entire process. The Enviva website, www.envivabiomass.com, advertises clean, green energy, and uses language promising a decrease in emissions from importing materials, however, there is no mention of the consequences suffered by the communities where these plants are located. The locations of the Enviva facilities highlight yet another case of environmental racism – eight of the nine plants located in the United States are in areas with a higher Black population than that of the entire state. Furthermore, “all of Enviva’s plants are in census tracts that have lower median household incomes than their states, and eight of the nine…are in tracts with higher poverty rates than their states as a whole.” Two of the major health concerns experienced by communities affected by Enviva’s production of biomass include defects from the significant increases in air pollution and sleep deprivation from noise.
As is true of most environmental concerns, the production of this type of biomass is one example that can be linked to the harmful effects it has on the environment and to the communities where biomass is produced. There are clean alternatives to energy that are less damaging, and they should continue to be championed as replacements for fossil fuels, such as wind and solar power. However, even with these sources of energy, it is crucial to take into consideration what communities will be adversely impacted by the expansion of our infrastructure, and what is needed to ensure that affected communities are the first to benefit from “green energy.”
Photo Credit: https://www.yourdailyjournal.com/news/74166/dogwood-alliance-concerned-citizens-of-richmond-county-mount-last-ditch-opposition-to-enviva-pellet-plant
For 15 years, the industries responsible for the nation’s worst toxic pollution helped pay into a federal trust for cleaning up waste sites through special taxes on petroleum, chemical components and corporate income. That program became known as “Superfund.”
But in 1995, the Republican-led Congress allowed those taxes to expire. They have never been reinstated, and the money for fixing many of the most noxious public health hazards in the U.S. has come entirely from taxpayers. That funding has dwindled, creating a lengthy cleanup backlog and leaving poor communities and fragile ecosystems exposed to deadly pollutants.
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Photo Credit: The Washington Post via Getty Images
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Photo Credit: The Washington Post via Getty Images
One of the first Superfund sites in the United States remains one of the most polluted.
From the late 1800s through the 1960s, miners extracted lead and zinc from the ground beneath the Tar Creek area in northeastern Oklahoma. But 50 years after the mine was shuttered, the region’s toxic legacy still seeps from boreholes into the water and drifts in the wind from tailings piles. Even now, the unstable ground threatens to swallow up homes.
Neighboring residents — including those of the Quapaw Nation and Ottawa County’s other eight tribes — have paid a heavy toll. The mounting environmental and human health threats led the federal government to declare 40 square miles of the area a Superfund site in 1984.
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Photo Credit: Clifton Adcock/The Frontier
Many agencies of our national government suffered from neglect during the four years of Donald Trump’s anti-governmental reign as president, but EPA was already damaged when Trump arrived. Writing on this issue a year ago, I noted that EPA reduced:
“…staff during the Obama years from 17,049 in 2009 to 14,777 in 2016 and was further reduced [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][under Trump] to 14,172 in 2019. Funding has been reduced from a peak of $10.3 billion in FY 2010 to $8.8 billion in FY 2019. These data do not account for inflation so the reductions over the past decade are underplayed by these figures.”
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Photo Credit: N.C. Department of Environmental Quality[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
The Senate on Monday voted to confirm Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., as President Joe Biden’s secretary of the Department of the Interior, making the second-term Democrat the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.
The vote was 51-40, with four Republicans joining Democrats in favor.
Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, earned bipartisan support to run the Interior department, which has a staff of 70,000 employees and is charged with overseeing the country’s natural resources. The agency manages nearly 500 million acres of land, or one-fifth of the surface area of the United States.
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Photo Credit: Sarah Silbiger/Pool/Getty Images
President Joseph Biden Jr. has promised to up the ante for environmental justice (EJ) communities by “rooting out the systemic racism in our laws, policies, institutions, and hearts.” Although a complete rollout of Biden’s plan has not yet been revealed, his campaign plans and initial actions allow for some educated analysis as to what industry can expect for future regulations and enforcement actions.
To reach an understanding of likely industry impacts, it’s important to look at the evolution of EJ regulations to date.
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Photo Credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock.com
Environmental advocates have largely been critical of President Trump, but some still offer praise for the Trump EPA’s attention to toxic sites.
The Trump administration has also touted its successes in deleting Superfund sites, which allows those areas to begin revitalization efforts and apply for grants to bolster economic growth.
Under the leadership of former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and current chief Andrew Wheeler, the agency prioritized Superfund delistings as well as partial delistings. Pruitt, in particular, said Superfund cleanups would be a focus of his EPA when he took the reins in 2017. After Pruitt’s departure in July 2018, Wheeler continued to emphasize the Trump administration’s “renewed focus” on Superfund.
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Photo credit: Claudine Hellmuth/E&E News(illustration); Francis Chung/E&E News(Wheeler); Gage Skidmore/Flickr(Pruitt); markzvo/wikipedia(Superfund sign)