Declaring Flint‘s drinking water now safe, the Michigan government announced Friday that it would stop providing free bottled water to the city’s residents, Reuters reported. A statement from the office of Republican Governor Rick Snyder said that tests taken over the past two years had shown the water to be just as safe as or […]
By Mary Anne Hitt A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t make this up. One day after new data revealed widespread toxic water contamination near coal ash disposal sites, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt announced a proposal to repeal the very 2015 EPA safeguards that had required this data to be tracked and released in […]
Climate change is already making people sicker, according to a deep-dive written by Renee Cho for Columbia University’s Earth Institute on Monday. Cho pointed to the example of doctors in Florida who are noticing that their patients run through prescriptions faster as conditions like asthma worsen due to heat waves. Indeed, Florida doctors have observed […]
By Wenonah Hauter The new Food & Water Watch report Take Back the Tap: The Big Business Hustle of Bottled Water details the deceit and trickery of the bottled water industry. Here’s one more angle to consider: The bottled water business is closely tied to fracking. The report reveals that the majority of bottled water […]
By Jessica Corbett A team of researchers on Tuesday released a “blistering” report on the serious public health threats—from headaches to asthma to cancer—posed by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process of injecting a mix of water and chemicals into rocks to release oil and natural gas. The study—described as “the most authoritative” of its […]
By AnaChristina Arana President Trump has released his 2019 budget proposal, and when it comes to environmental policy, it’s full of bad ideas. The proposal he sent to Congress on Feb. 12 threatens our health, safety and economic future through major cuts to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), essential environmental programs and our judicial […]
By Tom Neltner On March 12, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be leading the U.S. delegation in the Netherlands proposing that the Codex Alimentarius Commission adopt a maximum lead limit of 40 parts per billion (ppb) in grape juice. The current limit, set by Codex in the 1980s, is 50 ppb. While it’s […]
By Veronica Herrera When Cape Town acknowledged in February that it would run out of water within months, South Africa suddenly became the global poster child for bad water management. Newspapers revealed that the federal government had been slow to respond to the city’s three-year drought because the mayor belongs to an opposition party. Cape […]
On Tuesday, a trial over Minnesota’s $5 billion lawsuit against manufacturer 3M Company—the biggest environmental lawsuit in state history—was set to begin with jury selection. But on that very same day, the Maplewood-based manufacturer agreed to an $850 million settlement, finally putting an end to eight years of litigation over the water pollution case. The […]