Official figures from the Chinese government show that Beijing’s ongoing seven-year “war on pollution” has netted significantly improved air quality in the capital city, as the South China Morning Post reported. Data released by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environment showed that concentrations of fine particulate matter known as PM2.5 fell 14.3 percent […]
A major conglomerate in the global shipping industry wants to start a fuel tax to raise money for zero-carbon ships within a decade, as the AP reported. The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), which represents 80 percent of the global shipping industry, is proposing to create an NGO called the International Maritime Research and Development […]
By Sharon Kelly Dark Waters, the new film starring Mark Ruffalo as attorney Rob Bilott, is set in the Ohio River Valley city of Parkersburg, West Virginia — a place about 150 miles downstream from where Shell is currently building a sprawling plastics manufacturing plant, known as an “ethane cracker,” in Beaver, Pennsylvania. Ruffalo’s film, […]
The bushfires that have been tearing through New South Wales and Queensland, decimating koala habitats, taxing the water supply, and choking the air since August have claimed six lives. Now, new NASA data shows that the fires have emitted 250 million tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of half thee country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, […]
The Montreal Protocol, a 1987 international treaty prohibiting the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to save the ozone layer, was the first successful multilateral agreement to successfully slow the rate of global warming, according to new research. Now, experts argue that similar measures may lend hope to the climate crisis. “By mass CFCs are thousands of […]
The brushfires raging through New South Wales have shrouded Australia’s largest city in a blanket of smoke that pushed the air quality index 12 times worse than the hazardous threshold, according to the Australia Broadcast Corporation (ABC). Still winds on Tuesday left a stagnant haze over the city so smoky, it set off fire alarms […]
The Trump administration pushed through an exemption to clean air rules, effectively freeing heavy polluting, super-cargo trucks from following clean air rules. It rushed the rule without conducting a federally mandated study on how it would impact public health, especially children, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Inspector General Charles J. Sheehan in a report […]
By Julie Dermansky A plume from the Texas Petroleum Chemical (TPC) plant hung over Port Neches, Texas on Thanksgiving as emergency workers continued to fight the fire following explosions at the plant on Nov. 27. A mandatory evacuation that called for 60,000 people within a four-mile radius from the plant to leave their homes the […]
South Korea will close up to a quarter of its coal-fired plants for the winter months to tamp down on air pollution that the country declared a “social disaster” after several cities experienced record high levels of air pollution last winter, as CNN reported. The shutdown is noteworthy for its timing, since South Korea’s demand […]