A week before Trump took office, the EPA issued the chemical safety rule, which required industries to take steps to prevent disasters. Those included more analysis of safety technology, third-party audits, incident investigation analyses and stricter emergency preparedness.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the Trump administration to immediately implement an Obama-era chemical safety rule introduced in response to a 2013 explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas that killed 15 people.
The D.C. Circuit Court ruling was the latest to counter efforts under President Donald Trump, a Republican, to delay environmental regulations introduced by former President Barack Obama, a Democrat.
The court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to implement the Chemical Disaster Rule, saying the agency did not have authority to delay the rule for 20 months.
The EPA cannot delay the rule ?by invoking general rulemaking authority under a different statutory provision,? of federal clean air law, the court said in the ruling. ?EPA’s action was arbitrary and capricious in any event,? the ruling by two judges on the court said.
Scientists call on the World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer to re-evaluate the carcinogenicity of cell phone radiation after the Ramazzini Institute and US government studies report finding the same unusual cancers.
The Facts: A groundbreaking study shows the strong connection between Cell Phone towers and cancer. It’s one of many showing how electromagnetic radiation is harming human health at an exponential rate, and another example of industry trumps science.
Reflect On: There are thousands of scientists creating awareness about this, but the industry has become so powerful that they can do whatever they want. How are they allowed to continue when we have definitive proof of harmful health effects? What’s going on?
Scientists call on the World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer to re-evaluate the carcinogenicity of cell phone radiation after the Ramazzini Institute and US government studies report finding the same unusual cancers.
I am posting this article with the permission of Environmental Health Trust and can be found online at ehtrust.org
War-torn Syria is rebuilding after the successful expulsion of militants from large parts of the country. RT’s crew visited strategic factories and roads, as well as peach orchards, as they return to normality.
A cable and electrics factory located in the town of Adra outside Damascus was looted clean by militants during the war. As the Syrian government got it back under its control, nothing but a bare, badly damaged building was remained. The factory is now back online, once again producing much-needed power cables which are used to fix the disrupted and ransacked electricity lines across the country.
Apart from the electricity network, Syria’s road infrastructure has been badly damaged during the war. Two major cities – Hama and Homs – are located only 40km from each other, yet people were forced to take long detours though jihadist-held territories if they wished to travel from…
The first thing to understand is that this is simply a problem of the industry being greedy. The oil producers are drilling too many wells in close proximity to one another, and when they frack the newer wells — known as child wells — those “bash” or “hit” the older wells and cause problems.
The Fracking Industry Is Cannibalizing Its Own Production, Increasing Spill Risks | DeSmogBlog
The first thing to understand is that this is simply a problem of the industry being greedy. The oil producers are drilling too many wells in close proximity to one another, and when they frack the newer wells — known as child wells — those “bash” or “hit” the older wells and cause problems.
In a typical frack site, the production begins with a first test well, which is known as the parent well. The wells drilled in proximity to the parent well are called child wells.
What is happening is that not only are the child wells cannibalizing the production of the existing parent well, but when the child wells are fracked they can create “frac hits” that damage the parent well. These frac hits can reduce the pressure in the parent well leading to lower production, they can damage the…
Just a week or so after Spotify, Google, Apple and Facebook made the curiously synchronized move to kick Alex Jones and InfoWars off their platforms, and just days after Facebook shut down Venezuelan news network TeleSur’s facebook page (for the second time), the war on the free internet has opened up another front.
Small independent blogs are being shut down, seemingly without reason and certainly without explanation.
AmericanEveryman.com has been closed without notice or warning, according to the blog’s owner Scott Creighton. Allegedly for violating WordPress’ “terms of service”, although they have apparently been entirely vague about how.
Other such blogs – fellowshipofminds.com and jaysanalysis.com – have suffered the exact same fate, on the exact dame day. There is undeniably a push to silence dissent and purge it from the internet. There may well be dozens – even hundreds – of other examples.
If you object to censorship, of any kind, please fill out a form on automattic.com and request that these blogs are reinstated.
Please support our friends who wish to do nothing but tell the truth. If enough of us make an appeal, they will listen.
…and if this website disappears, well, you know what happened.
The following are two jaw dropping presentations by former Army Corps Engineer Jim Waddell. Prior to his retirement, Waddell assisted in preparing a seven-year $30 million Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on four Snake River* dams that prevent salmon from returning upriver to breed. Released in 2002, the EIS explores a number of potential options for preventing impending salmon extinctions. Predictably the Army Corps rejected the cheapest and most effective, namely incrementally “breaching”** the four dams
The lower Snake River dams became operational between 1961 and 1975, with the goal of providing hydropower for Bonneville Power Administration.*** Ironically BPA has always produced a surplus of electricity, which until a decade ago they sold to California. With California’s big uptake of solar and wind generation, they no longer buy power from BPA. This means the dams operate at a loss to taxpayers.
On top of growing maintenance costs, the Army Corps of Engineers and BPA have spent $1 billion over the last 15 years on fish hatcheries and salmon recovery schemes that have done nothing to increase the salmon population.
Impending Orca Whale Extinction
Because declining Chinook salmon are their sole source of food, the resident Southern Orca population also began to crash in the early 1990s. Orca calves essentially starve to death before they can reach maturity. The current population has been steady at 75 since the species was first declared endangered in 2002.
Orca biologists estimate the whales need 580,000 Chinook salmon a year to breed successfully. At present, the Snake River is only returning 40,000 per year to the ocean.
December 1 Deadline to Breach Two Dams
When the first video was made two years ago, Waddell was stressing an the urgent need to breach the first dam by October 2016 – with a plan to breach the other three in successive years. Owing to the deteriorating condition of the 20 breeding Orcas, he now maintains the two lowest damns must be breached by December 1, 2018. He estimates this would return 1-3 million Chinook to the ocean after 8-12 months.
The entire cost of the operation would be funded by the Army Corps of Engineers and BPA – in lieu of costly dam maintenance and costly and ineffective salmon recovery schemes – at great savings to taxpayers.
Although maintaining the four dams is extremely wasteful to taxpayers and of no real economic benefit to business or farming interests, dam breaching is being blocked by a handful of professional lobbyists and bureaucrats in Washington governor Jay Inslee’s office and Washington senator Patty Murray’s office.
You can sign a petition supporting the urgent dam breaches at Time is Running Out
*The Snake River is a major river of the greater Pacific Northwest and the largest tributary of the Columbia River.
**In the first video, Waddell explains the difference between “breaching” and “removing” a dam. The latter is prohibitively expensive. In contrast, breaching only requires two bulldozers to dig a notch in the earthen berm to one side of the dam. This allows the river to flow around the dam.
***The Bonneville Power Administration is a US federal agency operating in the Pacific Northwest charged with marketing power produced by the Snake River dams and constructing facilities necessary to transmit that power.
The second video is an August 14, 2018 update on the Snake River dam controversy.
With Russia no longer even figuring among the top holders of US Treasurys following two straight months of liquidations in April and May, which brought Moscow’s holdings of US government bonds to virtually nil amid a major push to diversify away from the dollar…
… bond traders were looking to see if the example set by Putin would be copied by another nation in the month of June.
The answer is that, indeed, the month of June saw aggressive selling of long-term US Treasurys, with foreign official (central bank, reserve fund managers) and private investors selling $48.6 billion in Treasurys, the largest one month total since October 2016.
Who were the sellers?
Continuing its trend of gradual divestment, Chinese holdings of US Treasurys dropped by $4.4BN from $1183.1BN to $1178.7BN, a modest drop following last month’s $1.2BN increase.
Perhaps the most notable seller of US paper was Japan, which dumped…
