Gee, Ya Think?

Following reports of massive noise, an inexhaustible demand for water, and massive pollution, polling is now showing that data centers are about as popular as hemorrhoids.

Well, I am shocked by this. 

A silent war is playing out across rural America.

Residents are packing themselves into local county meetings in incredible numbers and calling on their representatives to oppose gargantuan data center projects, developments that could cause electricity prices to spike, drain water supplies, and generate copious amounts of noise.

Farmers are being hailed as heroes for rejecting millions of dollars to turn their land into data centers, while claims of the facilities bringing jobs to the area are being met with incredulity and frustration.

In short, the AI backlash has grown immensely over the past year or so — and the latest numbers put the trend in stark relief.

According to a new Heatmap poll, at least seven in ten Americans would oppose a data center being built near their home. That’s a seismic shift from last September, when a similar poll found only 42 percent of Americans were opposed.

By February, the same question resulted in just 51 percent saying they were against having a data center project near their home, indicating that the opposition grew substantially in a strikingly short period of time.

“The public has swung 49 points against data centers in just nine months, underscoring the heightened political salience of the facilities and the AI industry that they embody,” Heatmap noted in in its writeup.

Gee, why would the public object to projects that pollute their air, take their water, and throw them out of work?  I have no clue. 

Least Surprising News of the Day

Elon Musk is poisoning Texas.

I guess some people do get to mess with Texas.

After Texas regulators said Tesla’s lithium refinery near Corpus Christi wasn’t violating its permits by discharging what local officials reported as black wastewater into a drainage ditch, independent water testing there this month found two toxic metals and other contaminants.

Eurofins Environment Testing, an accredited lab with locations across the globe, reported traces of hexavalent chromium, a well-known carcinogen, and arsenic, an environmental poison. Nueces County Drainage District No. 2, which manages the ditch, commissioned the test.

Neither hexavalent chromium nor arsenic is included as an allowable discharge pollutant in Tesla’s wastewater permit.

If you are rich in Texas, you do not have to follow the law, I guess.

………

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality sampled and tested Tesla’s wastewater discharge in February and confirmed that the company is in compliance with its permit, Bevan said.

But the state environmental regulator, known as TCEQ, didn’t look for heavy metals in February. Its water sample tested for dissolved solids, oil and grease, chlorides, sulfates, temperature and oxygen—all of which were within the bounds of Tesla’s permit.

TCEQ didn't test for heavy metals because they did not want to find heavy metals.

Can we give them back to Texas? 

There Has Already Been the Bear Movie

And now we have to deal with cocaine sharks.

I hate remakes.

The expression “coked to the gills” has never been more apt.

Scientists from Brazil have discovered that sharks swimming in the Bahamas are testing positive for a potpourri of substances, ranging from caffeine to cocaine and painkillers — as if they, too, are ready for a party in an island paradise.

The implications of the findings, detailed in a study in the journal Environmental Pollution, make for quite the comedown. That the substances are turning up in detectable quantities in sharks points to an “urgent need to address marine pollution in ecosystems often perceived as pristine,” the authors warned in the study, with divers in the area being the most likely culprit.

The first urgent need is to keep cocaine sharks from completely losing their sh%$.

It will make Sharknado look like a trip to the kiddie pool. 

We Are F%$#ed

It turns out that the emissions creating anthropogenic climate change may not just broil us, it mayd strangle us directly as well.

Short version of this study: They collected blood test results over the past roughly 20 years, and there are increasing signs of CO2 toxicity, and the trend indicates that there may be acute health impacts from this by 2075 or so.

On the bright side, I'll be dead then.

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. There is mounting experimental evidence that lifetime exposure to these increasing atmospheric CO₂ levels can negatively impact the normal physiology of organisms. However, directly assessing this in humans is very difficult. We analysed serum bicarbonate (HCO₃⁻), calcium (Ca) and phosphorus (P) levels from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1999 to 2020 as indirect proxies for atmospheric CO₂ exposure. Over this period, average bicarbonate levels in this population show an increasing trend which parallels rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. Both Ca and P have decreased steadily over the same period. If these trends continue, blood bicarbonate values could be at the limit of the accepted healthy range in half a century, and Ca and P will be at the limit of their healthy ranges by the end of this century. Studies indicate that, after this time, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to CO₂ accumulation in the body, has the potential to cause a range of adverse health effects. These findings highlight the urgent need for significant reductions in anthropogenic CO₂ emissions to safeguard public health.

 

This is Gonna Get Ugly

I do not know how he does it, but Ken Klippenstein has gotten another bombshell scoop, in this case it's a leaked memo confirming that DHS is bringing in the military to support them when they target Chicago for mass abductions and violence.

I hope that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have a plan to deal with.

One common sense measure that I would suggest is that when Illinois law enforcement encounters a masked aand heavily armed man without obvious and visible identification, that they arrest them.

Once they are fingerprinted, gotten their mug shot, and have had their names put on the police blotter, they can phone someone to bail them out.

The Department of Homeland Security has requested military assistance for upcoming ICE operations in Chicago, according to a “For Official Use Only” memo that I’ve obtained. A military advance team has already arrived.

The document requests “immediate Department of Defense support” for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) activities “to address public safety and national security.” It suggests that the support will be provided by active duty troops, making no mention of the Illinois National Guard.

The request specifically seeks “support infrastructure,” including highway access, fuel, and “other logistical nodes…” with the military staging out of the Great Lakes Naval Station in North Chicago, some 30 miles from downtown.

Dated August 27, the request is from Department of Homeland Security Executive Secretary Andrew Whitaker to Defense Department Executive Secretary Anthony Fuscellaro. Whitaker is a former Ralph Lauren Brand Ambassador and a longtime Trump politico.

Not good. 

Exceeding My Capacity for Cynicism

The Trump administration is making plans to reverse the ban on the import of asbestos.

Seriously?

The inexorable march of American public health forward into the past goes merrily onward. From The New York Times:

Known as “white” asbestos, chrysotile asbestos is banned in more than 50 countries for its link to lung cancer and mesothelioma, a cancer that forms in the lining of internal organs. White asbestos, however, has been imported for use in the United States for roofing materials, textiles and cement as well as gaskets, clutches, brake pads and other automotive parts. It is also used in chlorine manufacturing.

Last year the Environmental Protection Agency, under President Joseph R. Biden, adopted a ban on the use, manufacture and import of chrysotile asbestos. It was the first legal constraint on a deadly substance since 2016, when Congress updated and strengthened the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act by requiring testing and regulation of thousands of chemicals used in everyday products.

Lord above, I thought we’d all agreed on asbestos. The scientific consensus is undeniable. Huge settlements have been paid out in lawsuits on behalf of hundreds of thousands of victims over the years. Everybody knows how to spell mesothelioma. (Hell, it killed poor Warren Zevon at 56.) But we had not reckoned with the new philosophies of American public health—No Carcinogen Left Behind and Truncated Lives Matter.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

Seriously Old School Public Health

By, "Old School," I mean bloodletting, the technique likely responsible for the death of George Washington.

To be fair, there are therapeutic uses for the procedure, such as the treatment of excessive levels of iron in the body, and, in this case, excessive levels of the PFAS family of chemicals in their systems.

These chemicals, popularly called, "Forever Chemicals," accumulate in the body for a very long time, and so the treatment is to repeatedly remove blood until the levels are low enough.

Rather unsurprisingly, the victims in this case are in New Jersey:

Residents of Jersey have been recommended bloodletting to reduce high concentrations of “forever chemicals” in their blood after tests showed some islanders have levels that can lead to health problems.

Private drinking water supplies in Jersey were polluted by the use of firefighting foams containing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) at the island’s airport, which were manufactured by the US multinational 3M.

PFAS, a family of more than 10,000 chemicals, can build up in the body and are linked to conditions such as kidney and bladder cancer, thyroid disease and immune deficiency.

Bloodletting draws blood from a vein in measured amounts. It is safe and the body replenishes the blood naturally, but it must be repeated until clean.

“I just want this out of my body. I don’t want to end up with bladder cancer,” said Sarah Simon, one of 88 residents of the polluted area in whose blood tests found high levels of PFAS.

………

Worried about their health as a result of the mains water findings, more than 100 residents outside the plume area had their blood independently tested. The unverified results showed that 57% had levels of PFHxS above US safety thresholds and 15% exceeded levels for PFOS. Many reported health problems they thought could be linked to PFAS exposure. 

Everything old is new again, I guess.

Hello, SyFy? I Have a Treatment for You

It appears that sharks may be binging on cocaine dumped off the Florida coast.

So, how do I get an option to write the script?

Move over, Cocaine Bear. Here come cocaine sharks.

In what could be the plotline for the next cheesy marine-themed disaster movie, scientists think crazed and hungry sharks could be feasting on bales of hallucinatory drugs dumped off the Florida coast.

Yet while Cocaine Sharks – a highlight of Discovery’s upcoming Shark Week – does indeed examine if the ocean predators are chomping on floating pharmaceuticals cast overboard by passing traffickers, marine scientists who made the TV program say its purpose is beyond gratuitous entertainment.

………

Cocaine Sharks is expected to be among the biggest draws of Shark Week, the Discovery network’s popular annual showcase of the species from great whites, hammerheads and tiger sharks down to the smallest varieties.

In their research, conducted during six days at sea in the Florida Keys, the ecologically sensitive island chain off the state’s southern tip, Fanara and British marine biologist Tom Hird observed sharks exhibiting peculiar behaviors.

………

They also conducted experiments, including dropping dummy bales in the water, which many of the sharks took bites out of, and loading balls of bait with highly concentrated fish powder to simulate cocaine.

OK, that is going to look weird on a resume.

The effect, the researchers said, was akin to catnip on felines. “It’s the next best thing [and] set their brains aflame. It was crazy,” Hird says on the show.

I have cats, and I give them catnip every Saturday, I call it their Shabbos Schnaps.

I am not officially terrified.

………

“At the end of every research publication you read ‘more research must be done’, and that’s definitely the conclusion from this,” she said, noting previous in-depth studies of polluted inland waterways suggesting fish had become addicted to methamphetamine.

Not so terrifed about sharks on meth.  It makes your teeth fall out.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

Took You Long Enough

Again, the New York Times OP/ED page recognizes reality before its front page, finance, or transportation sections do.

In this case, the author is shocked to discover that the Gypsy cab companies have increased pollution, congestion, and costs. 

Their "Profit" model (There is no path to profitability) is to exploit the public good for their own financial gain:

Piece by piece, the mythology around ridesharing is falling apart. Uber and Lyft promised ubiquitous self-driving cars as soon as this year. They promised an end to private car ownership. They promised to reduce congestion in the largest cities. They promised consistently affordable rides. They promised to boost public transit use. They promised profitable business models. They promised a surfeit of well-paying jobs. Heck, they even promised flying cars.

Well, none of that has gone as promised (but more about that later). Now a new study is punching a hole in another of Uber and Lyft’s promised benefits: curtailing pollution. The companies have long insisted their services are a boon to the environment in part because they reduce the need for short trips, can pool riders heading in roughly the same direction and cut unnecessary miles by, for instance, eliminating the need to look for street parking.

It turns out that Uber rides do spare the air from the high amount of pollutants emitted from starting up a cold vehicle, when it is operating less efficiently, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found. But that gain is wiped out by the need for drivers to circle around waiting for or fetching their next passenger, known as deadheading. Deadheading, Lyft and Uber estimated in 2019, is equal to about 40 percent of rideshare miles driven in six American cities. The researchers at Carnegie Mellon estimated that driving without a passenger leads to a roughly 20 percent overall increase in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions compared to trips made by personal vehicles.

The researchers also found that switching from a private car to on-demand rides, like an Uber or Lyft, increased the external costs of a typical trip by 30 to 35 percent, or roughly 35 cents on average, because of the added congestion, collisions and noise from ridesharing services. “This burden is not carried by the individual user, but rather impacts the surrounding community,” reads a summary of the research conducted by Jacob Ward, Jeremy Michalek and Constantine Samaras. “Society as a whole currently shoulders these external costs in the form of increased mortality risks, damage to vehicles and infrastructure, climate impacts and increased traffic congestion.”

……….

Take urban congestion. Uber and Lyft envisioned a future in which software algorithms would push each car to host three or more passengers, easing traffic and providing a complement to public transit options. Instead, passengers have largely eschewed pooled rides and public transit in favor of private trips, leading to downtown bottlenecks in cities like San Francisco. The duration of traffic jams increased by nearly 5 percent in urban areas since Uber and Lyft moved in.

………

Underwritten by venture capital, Uber and Lyft hooked users by offering artificially cheap rides that often undercut traditional yellow cabs. But labor shortages and a desperate need to find some path to a profitable future have caused rideshare prices to skyrocket, perhaps to a more rational level.

After burning through billions of venture capital dollars, Uber said it was on a path to profitability last year, using an accounting metric that ignores many of the costs that actually make it unprofitable. By the same measure, chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi is projecting this quarter could be profitable. That remains to be seen. Sure, the pandemic had an outsize impact on ridesharing, but even though food delivery helped prop up Uber’s results, the company still lost a staggering $6.8 billion last year, following $8.5 billion in 2019 losses, in supposedly better times. Lyft hasn’t fared much better, racking up $4.4 billion in combined losses over the same period.

………

Now, despite the cynicism of the California fight, Lyft and Uber are trying to foist a similar law upon Massachusetts with the promise of “historic new benefits” for “app-based rideshare and delivery drivers.” Voters shouldn’t fall for it.

So, everything that the Uber and Lyft claimed were a lie.  This should surprise no one.

The fraudulent ethos of the Silicon Valley "Disrupters" is literally on trial right now, as the former management of Theranos is in the dock.

Perhaps, more attention should be paid to the corrosive nature of companies like SoftBank, who are clearly trying to establish a situation where they can extract monopoly rents by driving competitors out of business.

Guess Which President Did This?

In 2011, the EPA approved the use of PFASs and other chemicals in fracking. 

Just to remind you, Barack Obama was President then:

For much of the past decade, oil companies engaged in drilling and fracking have been allowed to pump into the ground chemicals that, over time, can break down into toxic substances known as PFAS — a class of long-lasting compounds known to pose a threat to people and wildlife — according to internal documents from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The E.P.A. in 2011 approved the use of these chemicals, used to ease the flow of oil from the ground, despite the agency’s own grave concerns about their toxicity, according to the documents, which were reviewed by The New York Times. The E.P.A.’s approval of the three chemicals wasn’t previously publicly known.

The records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by a nonprofit group, Physicians for Social Responsibility, are among the first public indications that PFAS, long-lasting compounds also known as “forever chemicals,” may be present in the fluids used during drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

………

The E.P.A. documents describing the chemicals approved in 2011 date from the Obama administration and are heavily redacted because the agency allows companies to invoke trade-secret claims to keep basic information on new chemicals from public release. Even the name of the company that applied for approval is redacted, and the records give only a generic name for the chemicals: fluorinated acrylic alkylamino copolymer.

………

The presence of PFAS in oil and gas extraction threatens to expose oil-field employees and emergency workers handling fires and spills as well as people who live near, or downstream from, drilling sites to a class of chemicals that has faced increasing scrutiny for its links to cancer, birth defects, and other serious health problems.

Obama repeatedly touted fracking throughout his Presidency, and now it appears that he blithely allowed some of the most toxic chemicals out there to be dumped in people's ground water and their back yards.

Of course, it wasn't done in rich people's yards and water, so it's all good.

Well, It's a Good Thing We Didn't Buy Greenland

Anthropogenic climate change is triggering a massive, and perhaps irreversible melting of Greenland's ice fields.

It now appears that in addition to causing sea level rise, it appears that it is also triggering a massive release of mercury into the environment.

I had though at first that this was pollution from coal use over the past few hundred years, but this is far more extreme than would be predicted by this mechanism.  It appears that much of this mercury is natural and has been sequestered by the ice:

Greenland's melting ice sheet is unleashing an astonishing amount of mercury into the nation's rivers and fjords.

Downstream of three glaciers in the southwest, researchers have found coastal ecosystems are swimming in high concentrations of the heavy metal, which can build up in the food web to toxic levels.

The quantity of mercury observed in three glacial rivers and three fjords in Greenland was among the worst in recorded history. In fact, researchers say the concentrations here are only matched by the polluted waterways of Industrial China, which overall produces about one-third of the world's mercury pollution.

As Greenland's glaciers continue to melt in line with our worst-case scenarios, experts are worried even more trapped mercury (Hg) could one day be released into the environment.

………

Previous studies have shown moderate mercury concentrations in run-off from melting glaciers, but the concentrations found in Greenland are two orders of magnitude higher than what scientists have found in other Arctic rivers.

"We didn't expect there would be anywhere near that amount of mercury in the glacial water there," says climate scientist Rob Spencer from Florida State University (FSU).

"Naturally, we have hypotheses as to what is leading to these high mercury concentrations, but these findings have raised a whole host of questions that we don't have the answers to yet."

………

If the hunch is right, Greenland may very well be a neglected hotspot of natural mercury emissions, which have been trapped in ice for millennia. Even if we curb industrial mercury emissions tomorrow, the rapid melting of all this ice could sabotage human efforts to reduce pollution from this heavy metal to safe levels.

………

"But mercury coming from climatically sensitive environments like glaciers could be a source that is much more difficult to manage."

Given that Greenland is a major exporter of seafood, and the region is home to precious marine ecosystems, we'd best find out what's going on.

The study was published in Nature Geoscience.

The fact that this may be a natural source is potentially even more concerning, because it can be far more extreme and unpredictable.

We are in for a bumpy ride.

If I Were to Say, "Toxic Radioactive Flood," What State Would You Assume?

If you said Florida, we have a winner.

A waste pond once operated by Borden Chemical is now leaking and threatening a massive flood of toxic radioactive waste into Tampa Bay. 

This has to be the most Florida thing ever:

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, declared a state of emergency on Saturday after a significant leak at a large pond at the old Piney Point phosphate mine threatened to burst a system that stores water polluted with radioactive materials.

Officials ordered more than 300 homes evacuated and closed off a highway near the large reservoir in the Tampa Bay area north of Bradenton.

………

The state department of environmental protection said a break was detected on Friday in one wall of a 77-acre pond that has a depth of 25ft and holds millions of gallons of water containing phosphorus and nitrogen from the old phosphate plant.

Officials brought in rocks and materials to plug the hole but were unsuccessful.

………

Workers were pumping out thousands of gallons per minute to bring the volume down. Pumping the entire pond would take 10 to 12 days. Others were working to chart a path for controlling how the water can flow from the pond into the Tampa Bay.

………

The pond at the old Piney Point phosphate mine sits in a stack of phosphogypsum, a waste product from manufacturing fertilizer that is radioactive. It contains small amounts of naturally occurring radium and uranium. The stacks can also release large concentrations of radon gas.

Obviously, DeSantis is not to blame, this time. 

This is more a consequence of "Same old, same old," corruption that has characterized Florida politics since at least the days of Carl G. Fisher.

Why people want to live there, or move there, is completely beyond my understanding.

This is Completely Unsurprising

It turns out that former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder knew about the dangerous toxicity of the City of Flint's new water supply months before he admitted it.

In fact, he knew before there were any adverse health consequences, and he knew tht there WOULD be adverse health consequences, which makes him a murderer.

Here is hoping that he goes to jail for a very long time:

During the inauguration of his successor, outgoing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder needed a favor.

At the January 2019 event, Snyder approached Karen Weaver, who was then the mayor of Flint, a city of nearly 100,000 people that was still reeling from financial decay and a toxic-water crisis. He asked whether she could meet with Congressman Elijah Cummings.

“You have a lot of influence with him,” Weaver remembered a worried Snyder saying to her about Cummings. At the time, Cummings was the incoming chairman of the powerful U.S. House Oversight Committee.

Throughout the water crisis, Cummings led the charge as Congress demanded Snyder and his administration provide more information about what he knew about the poisonous water that ravaged the impoverished majority-minority Rust Belt city after it switched water sources to the corrosive Flint River in 2014, and when he knew it. More specifically, Cummings pushed for more information on when Snyder first learned of the lethal Legionella pneumophila bacterial outbreak in Flint. Snyder testified to Congress that he first became aware of Legionella in January 2016 and held a press conference the next day. Flint residents didn’t believe the governor; their doubt intensified after Harvey Hollins, the director of the state’s Urban and Metropolitan Initiatives office, contradicted the governor, testifying to Congress that he informed Snyder about Flint’s Legionella outbreak in December 2015.

Back at the inauguration, Weaver said, Snyder asked her to get Cummings to “back off” from investigating him, emphasizing that he wanted to move on with his life as a private citizen. He said “it would go a long way” if the request to the congressman came from her, Weaver recalled to VICE. Weaver’s former spokesperson, Candice Mushatt, as well as two other sources, confirmed that she had described the governor’s request to them after it occurred. (Snyder did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story).

………

After a VICE investigation spanning a year and a half across the state of Michigan, overwhelming evidence indicates Snyder had good reason to worry.

Hundreds of confidential pages of documents obtained by VICE, along with emails and interviews, reveal a coordinated, five-year cover-up overseen by Snyder and his top officials to prevent news of Flint’s deadly water from going public—while there was still time to save lives—and then limit the damage after the crisis made global headlines.

All told, the waterborne bacterial disease may have killed at least 115 people in 2014 and 2015, and potentially more whose pneumonia wasn’t officially considered Legionnaires’ disease, the illness caused by Legionella. In addition to the outbreak, Flint's water supply was contaminated with lead and other heavy metals, harmful bacteria, carcinogens, and other toxic components. This wreaked havoc on Flint residents, leaving them with a laundry list of illnesses, including kidney and liver problems, severe bone and muscle pain, gastrointestinal problems, loss of teeth, autoimmune diseases, neurological deficiencies, miscarriages, Parkinson’s disease, severe fatigue, seizures, and volatile mood disorders.

………

VICE has learned that prosecutors leading the criminal investigation secretly subpoenaed key members of Snyder’s inner circle, including chief of staff Dennis Muchmore, Snyder's “fixer" and top adviser Rich Baird, and state treasurer Andy Dillon, as they built a case against the governor. Documents reveal the governor’s chief legal counsel, Beth Clement, knew Snyder’s top officials were subpoenaed by prosecutors, suggesting Snyder knew as well (a spokesperson for Clement, now a judge, said she couldn’t comment on a case pending in any court). The aggressive investigation into Snyder may explain why the governor’s office’s legal fees, paid for by state taxpayers, came to at least $8.5 million in the years after the water crisis made national headlines.

Snyder and his administration were investigated by a team led by special prosecutor Todd Flood from 2016 to 2019. The team concluded that the administration had “committed conspiracies of ongoing crimes, like an organized crime unit,” a source with knowledge of the probe told VICE.

But before a case against Snyder could develop, the state’s newly appointed attorney general, Dana Nessel, fired top prosecutors and investigators pursuing the case.

Investigative subpoena documents obtained by VICE, along with details from sources with knowledge of the Flint water criminal prosecution, reveal that:

• Snyder was warned about the dangers of using the Flint River as a water source a year before the water switch even occurred.
• Snyder had knowledge of the Legionella outbreak in Flint as early as October 2014, six months after the water switch—and 16 months earlier than he claimed to have learned of the deadly outbreak in testimony under oath before Congress.
• communication among Snyder, his top officials, and the state health department spiked in October 2014 around the same time state environmental and health officials traded emails and calls about the Legionella outbreak in Flint.

According to sources familiar with the criminal investigation, as well as Flint residents VICE spoke to, during those 16 months, Snyder’s top advisor, Baird, attempted to pay off sick Flint residents to keep quiet and silenced a whistleblower sounding alarms over the city using the Flint River while there was still time to save lives. And Snyder himself “punished” Weaver, Flint’s mayor, she said, after she repeatedly refused his administration’s requests for her to declare the water safe in Flint to residents.


What follows is the full, never-before-told story behind the cover-up of a government poisoning tens of thousands of innocent people—and the ongoing, six-year-old crisis.

………
But that latter proposal wasn't free of flaws either. Genesee County, which Flint is part of, was the majority owner of the proposed KWA; oddly, the county’s elected drain commissioner, Jeff Wright, doubled as KWA CEO. Wright had a checkered past: In 2005, he was accused of laundering funds during his 2000 drain commissioner campaign; he ultimately wasn’t charged and denied the allegations, but the FBI did seize his campaign records. Years later, Wright became an FBI informant.

………
In March 2013, more than a year before the Flint River switch, Stephen Busch, a supervisor with MDEQ’s drinking water division, emailed other environmental officials in preparation for a call about Flint’s water options with state treasurer Dillon, Busch, and MDEQ director Dan Wyant. Busch warned that continuous use of the Flint River would pose “an increased microbial risk to public health” along with an “increased risk of disinfection by-product (carcinogen)” to Flint residents.

In the investigative subpoena interview between treasurer Dillon and special prosecutor Flood obtained by VICE, Dillon didn’t deny that Busch repeated his email’s warnings on the call they had the same day. Soon after the call, a source familiar with the details of the Flint water criminal investigation told VICE that Dillon and MDEQ director Dan Wyant—whom, VICE learned, prosecutors interviewed—briefed Governor Snyder in person on Busch’s warning about the hazards of the Flint River.

………
By the time Snyder received Busch’s October 2014 memo about the potential for a dangerous bacteria to be in the water, Flint residents had already been poisoned for six months.

“The source of the outbreak may be the Flint municipal water,” state epidemiologist Shannon Johnson wrote in an email to colleagues on October 13, 2014. This was the same day General Motors announced it would discontinue using the Flint River because high levels of chloride in the river water corroded its parts. A state health spokesperson told VICE that Johnson couldn’t answer questions “due to the ongoing criminal investigation.”
………


“He’s a fixer, he’s an old-fashioned fixer,” a source familiar with the criminal investigation told VICE. Baird’s M.O. was “by any means possible: threaten, coerce, whatever, to fix these things for Snyder.”

Baird’s “fixing” for Snyder expanded as the water crisis unfolded, allegedly descending into identifying Flint residents who could damage Snyder—and trying to pay them off.

By 2017, Flint resident Adam Murphy had become ill with seizures, memory loss, and double vision. Things grew so bad he could no longer work as a millwright welder. His then-wife Christina developed severe skeletal and muscle pain. Their newborn son Declan’s umbilical cord blood tested positive for lead in 2016 (the CDC cites no safe lead level for children).

Angry and desperate for help, Adam unleashed his rage at a water-crisis town hall in January 2017. A police officer removed him from the event and said she’d connect him with a top state official who could help his family, Christina recalled to VICE. Adam’s outburst received attention in the Flint Journal and the Detroit News.

Weeks later, Baird, an imposing man with broad shoulders and white-grey hair, stood in the Murphys’ living room, bizarrely flanked by former Army National Guard colonel Scott W. Hiipakka, a state trooper, and Sheryl Thompson, an official from the state health department, according to Christina. Baird was there representing Snyder, or as he told them, his “best friend.” He told the Murphys that the Snyder administration would fully pay for a medical treatment for Adam called chelation therapy, which injects agents into the body to bind to heavy metals like lead and extract them.

………
The Murphys weren’t the only Flint family Baird allegedly tried to silence, according to sources familiar with the details of the criminal investigation.

………
According to Mays, Baird approached her in May 2018, not-so-subtly trying to pay her off.

“Rick and I are out at the end of the year, so we have nothing to lose,” Mays recalled Baird saying. Baird allegedly said he was so tired of Flint residents’ complaining and lacking appreciation for all Snyder had done for them that he unilaterally, without the governor knowing, decided to end free water-bottle sites throughout Flint.

Mays told VICE she offered Baird to shower in her home as a demonstration of how unsafe the water still was. She also emphasized the need for transparent, non-state or EPA-funded water testing.

Baird’s response wasn’t subtle, according to Mays. “How about I do this: If I come in and replace your interior plumbing, your fixtures, the water heater, and your service line, would that make you happy and would that make you quiet?”

She didn’t flinch: “I just looked at him and said ‘If you do that for everybody,’” she remembered. “He turned beet red.”

Unfortunately, it does appear that the Snyder coverup will work, because the statute of limitations will expire in just a few months.

Look Out Below

Interesting charts from Morgan Stanley. Recent drop of air pollution in 4 major Chinese cities. 2 conclusions. #Corona does 10 x more than EU Green Deal to environment. The drop in Chinese manufacturing is unseen in history and should bring Q1 GDP of China in negative territory pic.twitter.com/DRfh2wl6J9

— Gino Landuyt (@GinoLanduyt) February 14, 2020

If the Chinese economy is headed for an actual recession, we are headed for profoundly interesting times.

Not Only Choking the World, Making the World Glow in the Dark.

I am referring, of course, to the the oil and gas industry, which has taken to spreading highly radioactive well waste water on roads, and selling it as a deicer.

Seriously, energy companies exceed my imagination for rat-f%$#ery:

………

One day in 2017, Peter pulled up to an injection well in Cambridge, Ohio. A worker walked around his truck with a hand-held radiation detector, he says, and told him he was carrying one of the “hottest loads” he’d ever seen. It was the first time Peter had heard any mention of the brine being radioactive.

The Earth’s crust is in fact peppered with radioactive elements that concentrate deep underground in oil-and-gas-bearing layers. This radioactivity is often pulled to the surface when oil and gas is extracted — carried largely in the brine.………

Through a grassroots network of Ohio activists, Peter was able to transfer 11 samples of brine to the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University, which had them tested in a lab at the University of Pittsburgh. The results were striking.

Radium, typically the most abundant radionuclide in brine, is often measured in picocuries per liter of substance and is so dangerous it’s subject to tight restrictions even at hazardous-waste sites. The most common isotopes are radium-226 and radium-228, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires industrial discharges to remain below 60 for each. Four of Peter’s samples registered combined radium levels above 3,500, and one was more than 8,500.

………

Peter’s samples are just a drop in the bucket. Oil fields across the country — from the Bakken in North Dakota to the Permian in Texas — have been found to produce brine that is highly radioactive. “All oil-field workers,” says Fairlie, “are radiation workers.” But they don’t necessarily know it.

………

Tanks, filters, pumps, pipes, hoses, and trucks that brine touches can all become contaminated, with the radium building up into hardened “scale,” concentrating to as high as 400,000 picocuries per gram. With fracking — which involves sending pressurized fluid deep underground to break up layers of shale — there is dirt and shattered rock, called drill cuttings, that can also be radioactive. But brine can be radioactive whether it comes from a fracked or conventional well; the levels vary depending on the geological formation, not drilling method. Colorado and Wyoming seem to have lower radioactive signatures, while the Marcellus shale, underlying Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York, has tested the highest. Radium in its brine can average around 9,300 picocuries per liter, but has been recorded as high as 28,500. “If I had a beaker of that on my desk and accidentally dropped it on the floor, they would shut the place down,” says Yuri Gorby, a microbiologist who spent 15 years studying radioactivity with the Department of Energy. “And if I dumped it down the sink, I could go to jail.”

………

In an investigation involving hundreds of interviews with scientists, environmentalists, regulators, and workers, Rolling Stone found a sweeping arc of contamination — oil-and-gas waste spilled, spread, and dumped across America, posing under-studied risks to the environment, the public, and especially the industry’s own employees. There is little public awareness of this enormous waste stream, the disposal of which could present dangers at every step — from being transported along America’s highways in unmarked trucks; handled by workers who are often misinformed and underprotected; leaked into waterways; and stored in dumps that are not equipped to contain the toxicity. Brine has even been used in commercial products sold at hardware stores and is spread on local roads as a de-icer.

………

he levels of radium in Louisiana oil pipes had registered as much as 20,000 times the limits set by the EPA for topsoil at uranium-mill waste sites. Templet found that workers who were cleaning oil-field piping were being coated in radioactive dust and breathing it in. One man they tested had radioactivity all over his clothes, his car, his front steps, and even on his newborn baby. The industry was also spewing waste into coastal waterways, and radioactivity was shown to accumulate in oysters. Pipes still laden with radioactivity were donated by the industry and reused to build community playgrounds. Templet sent inspectors with Geiger counters across southern Louisiana. One witnessed a kid sitting on a fence made from piping so radioactive they were set to receive a full year’s radiation dose in an hour. “People thought getting these pipes for free from the oil industry was such a great deal,” says Templet, “but essentially the oil companies were just getting rid of their waste.”

Oh, yeah, the oil companies are literally disposing of radioactive waste on playgrounds.

This is a complete mind f%$#.

Radioactive oil-and-gas waste is purposely spread on roadways around the country. The industry pawns off brine — offering it for free — on rural townships that use the salty solution as a winter de-icer and, in the summertime, as a dust tamper on unpaved roads.

………

“There is nothing to remediate it with,” says Avner Vengosh, a Duke University geochemist. “The high radioactivity in the soil at some of these sites will stay forever.” Radium-226 has a half-life of 1,600 years. The level of uptake into agricultural crops grown in contaminated soil is unknown because it hasn’t been adequately studied.

………

But the new buzzword in the oil-and-gas industry is “beneficial use” — transforming oil-and-gas waste into commercial products, like pool salts and home de-icers. In June 2017, an official with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources entered a Lowe’s Home Center in Akron and purchased a turquoise jug of a liquid de-icer called AquaSalina, which is made with brine from conventional wells. Used for home patios, sidewalks, and driveways — “Safe for Environment & Pets,” the label touts — AquaSalina was found by a state lab to contain radium at levels as high as 2,491 picocuries per liter. Stolz, the Duquesne scientist, also had the product tested and found radium levels registered about 1,140 picocuries per liter.

………

Mansbery said that he tested for heavy metals and saw “no red flags.” Asked if he tested for radioactive elements, he stated, “We test as required by the state law and regulatory agencies.”

Mr. Mansbery needs to be in jail, so do a lot of other people who are a part of this atrocity.

Looks Like FCC and SpaceX are in for a World of Hurt

It appears that the FCC's approval of the SpaceX Starlink satellite constellation may have made a complete dog's breakfast out of their review and approval process:

A battle for the sky is raging, and the heavens are losing. Upcoming mega constellations of satellites, designed to blanket Earth orbit in spacecraft beaming high-speed Internet around the world, risk filling the firmament with tens of thousands of moving points of light, forever changing our view of the cosmos. Astronomers who rely on unsullied skies for their profession and members of the general public who enjoy the natural beauty of what lies above stand to lose out. The arrival of such a large number of satellites “has the potential to change our relationship, and our connection, with the universe,” says Ruskin Hartley, executive director of the nonprofit International Dark-Sky Association. But with no binding international laws or regulations in place to protect the night sky, anyone opposing the advancement of mega constellations is surely fighting a losing battle. Right?

Wrong.

A new paper to be published later this year in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law argues that the Federal Communications Commission—the agency responsible for licensing the operation of these constellations in the U.S.—should have considered the impact these satellites would have on the night sky. In ignoring a key piece of federal environmental legislation, the FCC could be sued in a court of law—and lose—potentially halting further launches of mega constellations until a proper review is carried out.

“Astronomers are having these issues [and think] there’s nothing they can do legally,” says the paper’s author Ramon Ryan, a second-year law student at Vanderbilt University. “[But] there is this law, the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA, pronounced ‘Nee-pah’], which requires federal agencies to take a hard look at their actions. The FCC’s lack of review of these commercial satellite projects violates [NEPA], so in the most basic sense, it would be unlawful.”

Enacted in 1970, NEPA obligates all federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of any projects they approve. Such impacts cover a variety of issues, from the effects of casino barges on rivers to any project’s contributions to climate change—the latter has been a recent target of the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks. The reviews can take multiple years, producing anywhere from hundreds to thousands of pages of paperwork. Federal agencies can circumvent NEPA, however, if they are granted a “categorical exclusion” for some or all of their activities—usually by arguing that such activities do not impact the environment and thus do not require review. The FCC has had a sweeping categorical exclusion since 1986 across almost all of its activities—including its approval of space projects—despite other agencies involved in space—most notably NASA—being required to conduct NEPA reviews.

“There are other agencies that use categorical exclusions, but I don’t think there is one that’s as broad as this,” says Kevin Bell, staff counsel at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit organization that works with government whistle-blowers on environmental issues. “It is a policy that was designed for another time, before large scale space exploration.”

In light of the concerns about the impacts of satellites on the night sky, Ryan says, this categorical exclusion would be unlikely to stand up in a court of law. SpaceX alone has been licensed by the FCC to launch 12,000 satellites in its Starlink constellation in the coming years, dwarfing the current number of approximately 1,500 active satellites in orbit—and the company has plans for 30,000 more. It has already launched about 180 Starlink satellites, with another 1,500 scheduled for 2020. Following the first launch of 60 satellites in May 2019, many observers were surprised by their brightness at dawn and dusk—popular times for both astronomy and simple stargazing. “That’s the time that most people enjoy the sky,” Hartley says. “These new satellites are brighter than 99 percent of [those] in orbit at the moment. And really, that’s the root of this concern.”

In its reasoning for its categorical exclusion, the FCC states that its actions “have no significant effect on the quality of the human environment and are categorically excluded from environmental processing.” Ryan says that the FCC may have been wrong in this assessment, however. “The FCC has never performed a study showing why commercial satellites deserved to be classified as categorically excluded from review,” he says. “And the evidence shows that these satellites are having an environmental impact. If the FCC were sued over its noncompliance with NEPA, it would likely lose.”

………

A key question is whether the night sky could be argued to fall under NEPA in a federal court. According to Section 1508 of the policy, there are both direct and indirect effects that can warrant NEPA review, with the latter including “aesthetic, historic, [and] cultural” ones. Ryan says that these factors could, in a court of law, be argued to apply to the night sky. “I definitely think that the night sky would fall under [that],” he says.

Considering Elon Musk's record of "regulatory arbatrage", and general lack of concern for the consequences of his actions, the creation of PayPal was an exercise in evading banking regulations, the FCC should have gone over his application with a fine toothed comb.

And Yet Hickenlooper Literally Drank Fracking Fluid

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has released a long delayed study on the health impacts of fracking, and it's pretty much as bad as anti-fracking activists have claimed:

A long-delayed public health study commissioned by Colorado regulators found that oil and gas drilling poses health risks at distances greater than current minimum "setback" distances, a development that is poised to send shockwaves through a regulatory environment already in a state of transition and uncertainty.

"Exposure to chemicals used in oil and gas development, such as benzene, may cause short-term negative health impacts…during 'worst-case' conditions," the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in a press release. "The study found that there is a possibility of negative health impacts at distances from 300 feet out to 2,000 feet.

………

State toxicologist Kristy Richardson said in a press conference Thursday afternoon that the results of the study are consistent with the health impacts that have been reported by Colorado residents near oil and gas sites in recent years.

I wonder how former Colorado Governor, and current Senate candidate, John Hickenlooper will justify poisoning his own constituents.

That Gonna Change the World Thing………

We know that MIT Media Lab, and the entire senior management of MIT, conspired to keep donations from Jeffrey Epstein.

In the ensuing furor, one has to wonder what they could possibly do to make themselves even more toxic.

I mean, it would have to be something really bad, like illegally dumping toxic waste down the public sewers, which they also did:

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab have dumped wastewater underground in apparent violation of a state environmental regulation, according to documents and interviews, potentially endangering local waterways in and near the town of Middleton.

Nitrogen levels from the lab’s wastewater registered more than 20 times above the legal limit, according to documents provided by a former Media Lab employee. When water contains large amounts of nitrogen, it can kill fish and deprive infants of oxygen.

Nine months ago, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection began asking questions, but MIT’s health and safety office failed to provide the required water quality reports, according to documents obtained by ProPublica and WBUR. This triggered an ongoing state investigation.

After ProPublica and WBUR contacted MIT for comment, an institute official said the lab in question was pausing its operations while the university and regulators worked on a solution. Tony Sharon, an MIT deputy vice president who oversees the health and safety office, didn’t comment on the specific events described in the documents.

………

The lab responsible for the dumping is the Open Agriculture Initiative, one of many research projects at the Media Lab. Led by principal research scientist Caleb Harper, who was trained as an architect, the initiative has been under fire for overhyping its “food computers”: boxes that could supposedly be programmed to grow crops, but allegedly didn’t work as promised.

Throughout early 2018, the lab’s research site in Middleton, about 20 miles north of the main MIT campus in Cambridge, routinely drained hundreds of gallons of water with nitrogen into an underground disposal well, at concentrations much higher than the lab’s permit allowed, according to documents and interviews. The nitrogen came from a fertilizer mix used to grow plants hydroponically.

This is what happens when you create an institution, like Media Lab, where the principals believe that they are a priori virtuous people who are saving the world.

Also:  What the f%$# does hydroponics have to do with media?

Of Course He's Poisoning Us

The Trump administration is looking to eliminate California's auto emissions waiver, which allows them to enforce stricter air standards.

I am not sure how they can do this, this waiver is written into the Clean Air Act, but when has the law ever stopped Trump and Evil Minions^™:

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration will use a meeting at the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday to announce the revocation of California's ability to set its own air pollution standards. The state's authority was granted by a waiver that allows it to set pollution limits that are stricter than the federal government's, which is now threatening the administration's ability to roll back Obama-era standards for automobile fuel economy. This move has been rumored to be under consideration for months and sets up a legal showdown that will pit the federal government against California and the 13 states that plan to follow its lead.

………

During the initial implementation of the Clean Air Act, the Golden State was suffering from extensive smog problems and was granted a waiver that allowed it to set stricter pollution standards than those under the Clean Air Act. The waiver has since given the state significant leverage in negotiations regarding national automotive pollution controls, a position enhanced by the decision of a number of states to adopt whatever standards California sets. Due to the vast size of these states' collective economies, car companies are compelled to meet its pollution standards or generate two different products: one for California and one for the rest of the country. Most have found it easier to simply involve California in negotiations from the start.

………

All of which would explain why the Trump administration would be interested in revoking the state's waiver and why it's already laid out arguments to justify doing so. The Times reports that this isn't an indication that the EPA has decided what the new standards should be yet, simply that the agency is clearing the way to impose the standards when they're ready.

But the Clean Air Act waiver mechanics are set up so that the EPA administrator must grant a waiver to any state wanting stricter standards unless the state is acting in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner or its standards don't address "compelling and extraordinary conditions." California would certainly have compelling arguments that climate change represents a compelling and extraordinary condition. And it's near certain that the state would be willing to test those arguments in court.

Unfortunately, it will be a very close thing in the Supreme Court, because there are now a majority of right wing hypocrite hacks on the bench there.

Parody is Dead.

Not the Onion

Reality has so far outstripped parody that the latter has become irrelevant.

Case in point, following an EPA proposal to re-legalize asbestos, a Russian asbestos manufacturer has put Donald Trump's on their packaging:

On 25 June 2018, a Russian mining company named Uralasbest, which is one of the world’s largest producers of asbestos, posted a message of support for President Trump on their official Facebook and VK (a Russian version of Facebook) pages. The post included photographs of packed asbestos material adorned with the face of Trump and the text “Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States.”

Asbestos is a mineral that was once widely used in construction projects for its fire resistant properties, but research has since linked it to a variety of cancers, most notably lung cancer and mesothelioma.

………

In June, when Uralasbest posted their message of support, then-Administrator of the EPA Scott Pruitt had recently announced new interpretations of the Toxic Substances Control Act that could allow for “new uses” of asbestos to be approved in the United States. While this move would not allow for previously banned uses to be considered, it was a reversal of Obama-era rules that barred the EPA from considering any new uses for asbestos.

While I've always thought that the Donald Trump was toxic, I had no idea that they were taking this concept so literally.