Tuesday, March 19th, 2019
Kai Kupferschmidt, Contributing Correspondent - Science
Stephan: Few Americans pay much attention to the World Health Organization (WHO), perhaps because the organization doesn't do much in the United States. But in the developing world WHO's involvement may mean the difference in whether your mother dies in childbirth or your sister dies of some infectious disease. Here is some good news about this vitally important part of the world health picture.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus visited an Ebola treatment center in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 9 March.
Credit: L. Mackenzie/WHO
In a speech last week, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recalled the posters about smallpox that he saw as a child in his hometown Asmara, in what is now Eritrea. “I remember hearing about an organization called the World Health Organization [WHO] that was ridding the world of this terrifying disease, one vaccination at a time,” he said. Much has changed since then. Smallpox was vanquished; Tedros, who’s Ethiopian, is the first African head of WHO; and in a series of reforms laid out in the same speech, he is trying to restore the storied organization to health.
The changes aim to bring more talent to WHO and improve coordination between its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and six regional offices. But some observers say Tedros’s agenda doesn’t address long-standing problems, including a chronic shortage of money, little power over how to spend it, and the regional offices’ prickly independence. “The main problems of WHO are unsolved by […]
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Tuesday, March 19th, 2019
Jimmy Tobias, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: As I have told you, again and again, the media seems able to only focus on a couple of stories a day, with some 30-second mentions of others. Trump has figured that out, so while he is running his fog machine out of the White House, his agencies, at the functional operational level, are wreaking all manner of damage to the structure of governance. Here is an example of what I mean. If Trump stays in office two more years the government dismantlement may be beyond repair.
The Trump administration has spearheaded an effort in recent years to open undeveloped federal waters to oil and gas drilling.
Credit: Eugene Garcia/EPA
A top US official told a group of fossil fuel industry leaders that the Trump administration will soon issue a proposal making large portions of the Atlantic available for oil and gas development, and said that it is easier to work on such priorities because Donald Trump is skilled at sowing “absolutely thrilling” distractions, according to records of a meeting obtained by the Guardian.
Joe Balash, the assistant secretary for land and minerals management, was speaking to companies in the oil exploration business at a meeting of the International Association of Geophysical Contractors, or IAGC, last month.
“One of the things that I have found absolutely thrilling in working for this administration,” said Balash,“is the president has a knack for keeping the attention of the media and the public focused somewhere else while we do all the work that needs to be done on behalf of the American people.”
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Stephan: Today's SR I am dedicating to a major trend that touches all our lives, and yet which is undergoing fundamental change with very little public awareness. It is going to change your life and mine indeed the whole of our society.
Scrap metal at a dock in Liverpool, England, waiting to be exported.Christopher Furlong/Getty
This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting downwhat had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem—and this one not of its own making.
In the year since, China’s plastic imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. While the glut of plastics […]
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MICHAEL CORKERY, - The Indiana Gazette/The New York Times News Service
Stephan: For years now many of us have carefully and diligently recycled. That trend may now be coming to an end because what was once the developing world has, now, become the developed world and they no longer need or want our waste. We in the west, in America, must change our ways, make things differently, develop different technologies. And we don't have much time.
Recycling bins
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.
Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.
Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. That stopped when Chinese officials determined that […]
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Dominique Mosbergen, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Here is the dark truth few of us have known about the careful recycling we have been doing.
A Greenpeace personnel walks in a dumpsite in Kelebang, Ipoh, Malaysia, Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2019. Credit: Joshua Paul/Huff Post
IPOH, Malaysia ― Bales of plastic garbage, stacked 15 feet high, shimmered in the 100-degree heat. They gave off a faint chemical smell as they warped and softened under the equatorial sun.
A canary-yellow Walmart clearance tag poked out from one of the dirty heaps. Wrappers and packages from American products were visible nearby. These items had likely traveled 10,000 miles to this unmarked and apparently unauthorized dumpsite in a quiet industrial neighborhood in northwestern Malaysia.
Ad hoc dumps like this one, teeming with foreign waste, have popped up across Southeast Asia in recent months ― each an ugly symbol of a global recycling system that regional activists and politicians have described as unjust, inequitable and broken. In January and February, HuffPost visited several of these sites in Malaysia to see what really happens to much […]
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