“I will propose legislation to dedicate the revenue generated by our carbon pollution reduction rule to adaptive infrastructure,” Governor Northam said at a speech in Williamsburg last week. “Instead of sending tens of millions of dollars back to the companies creating the pollution, we should set those funds aside, take the chance to begin tackling these problems in a meaningful way.”
Executive Order 24, released today, lays out a series of actions the Commonwealth will undertake to limit the impact of flooding, extreme weather events, and also wildfires. This includes improving resilience of state-owned buildings by taking sea level rise projections into account, as well as creating a long-overdue “Virginia Coastal Resilience Master Plan” that will detail specific actions to adapt and protect Virginia’s coastal regions.
A big win for Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN ) who first proposed this idea in 2014 and has been advocating for it nonstop ever since. Read more.
Tag: water
Baltimore, Maryland voters made history today by voting in favor of passing ballot question E, a city charter amendment that bans privatization of the city’s water and sewer systems. The Baltimore City Council voted unanimously to ban water privatization earlier this year. As of 11:15 p.m., Baltimore voters voted 77% in favor of this amendment with 91 percent of precincts reporting. This confirms Baltimore is now the first major city in the country to amend its charter to prohibit the sale and lease of the city’s water and sewer system.
“With water corporations circling around Baltimore over the past several years, ramped up privatization ploys last Spring, and a federal administration hellbent on propping up corporate power over peoples’ rights, it is momentous that the city has voted to keep its water public,” said Rianna Eckel, Maryland Organizer, Food & Water Watch.
“This vote makes it clear that grassroots organizing and people power have taken precedence over deep-pocketed corporate fat cats in Baltimore. Voters have chosen to resist pressure to sell and outsource one of the most vital and precious resources we have and have vowed to keep control, accountability, and transparency of our water.
Now that privatization is out of the picture, Baltimoreans can work with our elected officials to improve the accountability and affordability of our water system and ensure every person in our city has access to safe water at a price they can afford to pay. Food & Water Watch looks forward to working with other cities to protect their water systems from corporate control and using Baltimore as a model for water justice for the nation.”
A heated community meeting, in Michigan over water concerns in Otsego was conducted Saturday afternoon at the city’s middle school. The Allegan County Health Department hosted an open house for residents, followed by a presentation and Q & A. But, those there say they left the meeting with more questions than answers causing tensions to run high at that meeting in Otsego.
“It’s just due to the time frame and waiting and anticipating these results,” says Mary Zack. Zack was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at just 17, she started the group Justice for Otsego to get some answers about water and health concerns in her community.
But, after waiting 60 days for results on environmental testing of the city’s water, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality says the lab they used made errors when testing Otsego’s water. Read more.
Environmental activists want more testing and accountability following coal ash breaches at two Duke Energy sites.
Critics contend that officials have been too slow to collect water samples and hold the utility accountable after gray muck from ash pits flooded into the Neuse and Cape Fear rivers last month.
Read More.
Hurricanes Michael, Florence, Harvey, Sandy, Katrina. Once in 500-year superstorms that are hitting land once every 3 years including twice this year. Deadly wildfires that have devastated parts of California. Torrential rains that have caused massive flooding in parts of Asia. A punishing heat wave that killed dozens in Japan, South Korea and parts of Europe. Melting glaciers in both the north and south poles.
Are these events related to climate change? While there’s growing evidence that they are, some climate deniers continue to ignore it all and point to what scientists have been saying for years – that no one weather event can definitely be blamed on climate change. However, it’s getting tougher to say this with so many crazy weather events occurring.
Last week the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading scientific panel on climate change, released a report that supported the link between these and similar weather events and climate change. One of the co-chairs of the research group that released this report put it this way, “One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes.”
The report goes on to talk about the need to make “…unprecedented changes…” and for “rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport and cities.” It provides “policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change…” Debra Roberts, co-chair of the IPCC working group, called the next few years “probably the most important in our history.”
The media did cover the release of this powerful report, as it covered the impact of the superstorm hurricanes Michael and Florence and other incredible weather events that have struck the world in recent years. But for how long? These events are quickly pushed off the front pages and soon forgotten except for a brief follow-up as the media moves on to the next big story, whether it’s the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice, the killing of a Washington Post reporter in Turkey or the latest crazy tweet by our president. Of course these other news stories need to be covered, but the impact of climate change is becoming the most important news story of our time.
Instead, there’s so much going on every day, at times at every moment it seems, that it’s hard to sustain interest in the intense weather events that just won’t stop. As the planet goes through drastic changes, Trump continues to tweet about nonsense. Something has to change. If we believe the scientists like the IPCC work group who continue to provide evidence that man-made carbon emissions are causing an increase in world-wide warming, then the media needs to help the public understand the importance of this situation. The media needs to tell the story of climate change in a way that will help bring about the changes we need to survive. Who else has the reach? How else do we get to unprecedented changes?
As communities along the Gulf Coast await Hurricane Michael, it’s easy to forget the devastation that Hurricane Florence wrought on North and South Carolina. As described in the news story by Ring of Fire, “It is easy to forget about the plight of the Carolinas with all of the insanity taking place in Washington, D.C., but for the people who were impacted by Hurricane Florence, that’s all that matters right now. And while we weren’t paying attention, the EPA was testing flood waters and found that many areas are being impacted by potentially deadly corporate toxins that have leached into the flood waters, threatening the health of everyone in their way.” Read more …
I wonder how many parents, in the excitement of this new school year, were stunned to read this week that there is a good chance that their children’s school drinking water is tainted with lead?
More concerning to me is how many more parents still have no idea whether there is lead in their kids’ school water fountain. Children are more at risk from the danger of lead poisoning than adults and the damage lasts a lifetime. Yet the majority of schools nationally don’t test their water, or if they do, they don’t provide the information to parents.
Despite the danger, there is no national requirement for water in public schools to be tested. In April Scott Pruitt and other high ranking EPA staff told me that they are going back to basics. “Basics” was defined as Superfund and getting lead out of water. EPA created a new website just for lead and water, and hired Dr. Hughes to run the program within EPA.
This raise the question in my mind if they are really serious. If so, wouldn’t public schools be the first place to make a significant impact? In the big splash headlines of their initiative EPA said, “EPA is committed to taking action to address this threat, and improve health outcomes for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens – our children.” Clearly they know what population is at highest risk so where’s the action? Children are the most vulnerable and it’s clear that even a small step toward testing and repairs would go a long way to protect children.
Trump and EPA still have an opportunity to really make a difference by supporting the legislation that has been sitting on the senate floor for months with no movement. Republicans can champion this bill and show the country that EPA meant what they said and are moving to remove lead within the most vulnerable, this country’s children and future leaders.
There is a solution, the “Get the Lead Out of School Act (SB 1401) requires every school in the country to test drinking water for lead. The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-IL) would require school administrators to share the results of the water testing with parents and the community. Unfortunately, the bill has been languishing on the Senate floor for months.
If the lead level is greater than the EPA’s 15 parts per billion standard, then the Get the Lead out of Schools Act also provides funding to solve the problem.
We take clean water for granted, at least until we don’t have it anymore. We also expect that our children will be safe when we send them to school each day. I know I did. As a young parent 40 years ago, I sent my own children to school, never connecting it with their frequent rashes and assorted health issues, or the high rate of birth defects and other health problems in my neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, called Love Canal.
My own grandchildren go to school in Texas where a study last year by Environment Texas, showed that 65 percent of the schools there that tested their water for lead found levels that exceeded recommendations b the American Academy of Pediatrics. Still, the state government has refused to pass legislation requiring schools to test drinking water.
It’s not that unusual. Most states don’t require schools to check for lead-tainted drinking water, which makes the national legislation that much more critical if we are serious about protecting our kids.
“It’s sending the message to students, parents and employees that we really don’t care about public education in Detroit, that we allow for second-class citizenry in Detroit,” Vitti said then. “And that hurts my heart and it angers me and it frustrates me that I can’t fix it right now.”Nikolai Vitti, is the superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Read more.
Elevated levels of PFOA were found in the village of Hoosick Falls public water system in 2014. The state Health Department and village officials were later criticized because they waited roughly 16 months — and faced pressure from the EPA — before they warned the public to stop drinking the water. Read more.
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Fracking Industry’s Water Use Rises
Water use for fracking by oil and gas operators in the Marcellus Shale region rose 20 percent between 2011 and 2016 as longer laterals were drilled to fracture more gas-bearing rock, even though the pace of well development slowed in response to low natural gas prices, a Duke University study said on Wednesday.
The rise was the smallest of any of the six U.S. regions studied, including the Permian Basin area of Texas, where water use surged by 770 percent over the period.
The study also said the volume of fracking waste water produced in the Marcellus – which includes Pennsylvania, West Virginia, eastern Ohio and southern New York, where fracking is banned — rose four-fold to 600,000 gallons in 2016, forcing energy companies to rely increasingly on holding the waste in underground injection wells. Read more.