Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times, Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals, Saturday, 31 August 2024: “For decades, farmers across America have been encouraged by the federal government to spread municipal sewage on millions of acres of farmland as fertilizer. It was rich in nutrients, and it helped keep the sludge out of landfills. But a growing body of research shows that this black sludge, made from the sewage that flows from homes and factories, can contain heavy concentrations of chemicals thought to increase the risk of certain types of cancer and to cause birth defects and developmental delays in children. Known as ‘forever chemicals’ because of their longevity, these toxic contaminants are now being detected, sometimes at high levels, on farmland across the country, including in Texas, Maine, Michigan, New York and Tennessee. In some cases the chemicals are suspected of sickening or killing livestock and are turning up in produce. Farmers are beginning to fear for their own health. The national scale of farmland contamination by these chemicals — which are used in everything from microwave popcorn bags and firefighting gear to nonstick pans and stain-resistant carpets — is only now starting to become apparent. There are now lawsuits against providers of the fertilizer, as well as against the Environmental Protection Agency, alleging that the agency failed to regulate the chemicals, known as PFAS. In Michigan, among the first states to investigate the chemicals in sludge fertilizer, officials shut down one farm where tests found particularly high concentrations in the soil and in cattle that grazed on the land. This year, the state prohibited the property from ever again being used for agriculture. Michigan hasn’t conducted widespread testing at other farms, partly out of concern for the economic effects on its agriculture industry.” See also, 5 Takeaways From Our Reporting on Toxic Sludge Fertilizer. The Times dug into the widespread use of sewage sludge as fertilizer, which is sometimes heavily contaminated by ‘forever chemicals.’ The New York Times, Hiroko Tabuchi, Saturday, 31 August 2024.
How 3M Discovered, Then Concealed, the Dangers of Forever Chemicals
Sharon Lerner, The New Yorker and ProPublica, How 3M Discovered, Then Concealed, the Dangers of Forever Chemicals. The company found its own toxic compounds in human blood–and kept selling them. Monday, 20 May 2024: “Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination. Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals. In a spray called Scotchgard, fluorochemicals protected leather and fabric from stains. In a coating known as Scotchban, they prevented food packaging from getting soggy. In a soapy foam used by firefighters, they helped extinguish jet-fuel fires. Johnson explained to Hansen that one of the company’s fluorochemicals, PFOS—short for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—often found its way into the bodies of 3M factory workers. Although he said that they were unharmed, he had recently hired an outside lab to measure the levels in their blood. The lab had just reported something odd, however. For the sake of comparison, it had tested blood samples from the American Red Cross, which came from the general population and should have been free of fluorochemicals. Instead, it kept finding a contaminant in the blood. Johnson asked Hansen to figure out whether the lab had made a mistake. Detecting trace levels of chemicals was her specialty: she had recently written a doctoral dissertation about tiny particles in the atmosphere. Hansen’s team of lab technicians and junior scientists fetched a blood sample from a lab-supply company and prepped it for analysis. Then Hansen switched on an oven-size box known as a mass spectrometer, which weighs molecules so that scientists can identify them. As the lab equipment hummed around her, Hansen loaded a sample into the machine. A graph appeared on the mass spectrometer’s display; it suggested that there was a compound in the blood that could be PFOS. That’s weird, Hansen thought. Why would a chemical produced by 3M show up in people who had never worked for the company? Hansen didn’t want to share her results until she was certain that they were correct, so she and her team spent several weeks analyzing more blood, often in time-consuming overnight tests. All the samples appeared to be contaminated. When Hansen used a more precise method, liquid chromatography, the results left little doubt that the chemical in the Red Cross blood was PFOS. Hansen now felt obligated to update her boss. Johnson was a towering, bearded man, and she liked him: he seemed to trust her expertise, and he found something to laugh about in most conversations. But, when she shared her findings, his response was cryptic. ‘This changes everything,’ he said. Before she could ask him what he meant, he went into his office and closed the door.” See also, Nine Takeaways From Our Investigation Into 3M’s Forever Chemicals. What you need to know about the inside story of how the company allowed PFOS to seep into all of us while sitting on research that showed the chemical is toxic. ProPublica, Friday, 24 May 2024: “As a 3M scientist in the 1990s, Kris Hansen found the company’s forever chemicals in almost every human blood sample she analyzed. Then she discovered that the company had known about the problem for decades.”
A Tangle of Rules to Protect America’s Water Is Falling Short
Dionne Searcey and Delger Erdenesanaa, The New York Times, A Tangle of Rules to Protect America’s Water Is Falling Short. The Times asked all 50 states how they manage groundwater. The answers show why the country’s aquifers are in trouble. Friday, 2 November 2023: “AMERICA’S STEWARDSHIP of one of its most precious resources, groundwater, relies on a patchwork of state and local rules so lax and outdated that in many places oversight is all but nonexistent, a New York Times analysis has found. The majority of states don’t know how many wells they have, the analysis revealed. Many have incomplete records of older wells, including some that pump large volumes of water, and many states don’t register the millions of household wells that dot the country. Even states that do try to count wells or regulate groundwater use often have other problems: Some carve out exemptions for powerful industries like agriculture, one of the nation’s biggest users of groundwater. And every state relies to some extent on well owners self-reporting their water use, the Times analysis found. That policy raises the risk of under-reporting or deception by users big and small. Regulations in some states, including Oklahoma, are guided by a principle of letting users extract groundwater at rates that exceed an aquifer’s ability to recharge. Some hydrologists call it groundwater ‘mining.'”
Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change
Christopher M. Matthews and Collin Eaton, The Wall Street Journal, Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change. Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Rex Tillerson era. Thursday, 14 September 2023: “Exxon Mobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action. Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives. Exxon’s public acceptance in 2006 of the risks posed by climate change was an early act of Rex Tillerson, an Exxon lifer who became CEO that year. Some viewed him as a moderating force who brought Exxon in line with the scientific consensus. The documents reviewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, cast Tillerson’s decadelong tenure in a different light. They show that Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial. Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public.”
The United States Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow
Mira Rojanasakul, Christopher Flavelle, Blacki Migliozzi, and Eli Murray, The New York Times, The United States Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow. Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a New York Times data investigation revealed. Monday, 28 August 2023: “Global warming has focused concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view. Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole. The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. The investigation reveals how America’s life-giving resource is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won’t come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are draining aquifers that could take centuries or millenniums to replenish themselves if they recover at all.”
How Americans’ Appetite for Leather in Luxury SUVs Worsens Amazon Deforestation
Manuela Andreoni, Hiroko Tabuchi, and Albert Sun, The New York Times, How Americans’ Appetite for Leather in Luxury SUVs Worsens Amazon Deforestation. An examination of Brazil’s immense tannery industry shows how hides from illegally deforested ranches can easily reach the global marketplace. In the United States, much of the demand for Brazilian leather comes from automakers. Wednesday, 17 November 2021: “A New York Times investigation into Brazil’s rapidly expanding slaughterhouse industry — a business that sells not only beef to the world, but tons of leather annually to major companies in the United States and elsewhere — has identified loopholes in its monitoring systems that allow hides from cattle kept on illegally deforested Amazon land to flow undetected through Brazil’s tanneries and on to buyers worldwide…. A luxury vehicle can require a dozen or more hides, and suppliers in the United States increasingly buy their leather from Brazil. While the Amazon region is one of the world’s major providers of beef, increasingly to Asian nations, the global appetite for affordable leather also means that the hides of these millions of cattle supply a lucrative international leather market valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.”
Washington Post investigation finds many countries underreport their greenhouse gas emissions in their reports to the United Nations
Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin, Desmond Butler, John Muyskens, Anu Narayanswamy, and Naema Ahmed, The Washington Post Investigations, Washington Post investigation finds many countries underreport their greenhouse gas emissions in their reports to the United Nations, Sunday, 7 November 2021: “Across the world, many countries underreport their greenhouse gas emissions in their reports to the United Nations, a Washington Post investigation has found. An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be versus the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm. The plan to save the world from the worst of climate change is built on data. But the data the world is relying on is inaccurate. ‘If we don’t know the state of emissions today, we don’t know whether we’re cutting emissions meaningfully and substantially,’ said Rob Jackson, a professor at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. ‘The atmosphere ultimately is the truth. The atmosphere is what we care about. The concentration of methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is what’s affecting climate.’ At the low end, the gap is larger than the yearly emissions of the United States. At the high end, it approaches the emissions of China and comprises 23 percent of humanity’s total contribution to the planet’s warming, The Post found.”
A Wrenching Choice for Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change
Erica Goode, A Wrenching Choice for Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change. The New York Times, 29 November 2016. Part 6 of an 8-part series on Carbon’s Casualties. “Articles in this series explore how climate change is displacing people around the world…. Laid out on a narrow spit of sand between the Tagoomenik River and the Bering Sea, the village of 250 or so people is facing an imminent threat from increased flooding and erosion, signs of a changing climate. With its proximity to the Arctic, Alaska is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the United States and the state is heading for the warmest year on record. The government has identified at least 31 Alaskan towns and cities at imminent risk of destruction, with Shaktoolik ranking among the top four. Some villages, climate change experts predict, will be uninhabitable by 2050, their residents joining a flow of climate refugees around the globe, in Bolivia, China, Niger and other countries.”
Resettling China’s ‘Ecological Migrants’
Edward Wong, Resettling China’s ‘Ecological Migrants.‘ The New York Times, 25 October 2016. Part 5 of an 8-part series on Carbon’s Casualties. “Articles in this series explore how climate change is displacing people around the world…. China calls them ‘ecological migrants’: 329,000 people whom the government had relocated from lands distressed by climate change, industrialization, poor policies and human activity to 161 hastily built villages. They were the fifth wave in an environmental and poverty alleviation program that has resettled 1.14 million residents of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a territory of dunes and mosques and camels along the ancient Silk Road. Han Jinlong, the deputy director of migration under Ningxia’s Poverty Alleviation and Development Office, said that although the earlier waves were not explicitly labeled ecological migrants, they had also been moved because of the growing harshness of the desert. It is the world’s largest environmental migration project.”
Living in China’s Expanding Deserts
Josh Haner, Edward Wong, Derek Watkins and Jeremy White, Living in China’s Expanding Deserts. The New York Times, 24 October 2016. Part 4 of an 8-part series on Carbon’s Casualties. “Articles in this series explore how climate change is displacing people around the world.” [T]he Tengger desert “lies on the southern edge of the massive Gobi Desert, not far from major cities like Beijing. The Tengger is growing. For years, China’s deserts spread at an annual rate of more than 1,300 square miles. Many villages have been lost. Climate change and human activities have accelerated desertification. China says government efforts to relocate residents, plant trees and limit herding have slowed or reversed desert growth in some areas. But the usefulness of those policies is debated by scientists, and deserts are expanding in critical regions.”