Daniel Wolk, Faculty of the Bryn Mawr Family Medicine Residency Program and Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Philadelphia and Thomas Jefferson University - truthout
Stephan: You don't matter. Nor does your wife or husband. Your mother doesn't matter, nor your father, nor your children if you have any. Here is a report of another action by the Trump administration that confirms what I am saying. I confess I am amazed that anyone supports Trump, and that tens of millions do I think historians will record as one of the hallmarks of this age, and a symptom of a failing America.
Coal-related mercury pollution from power plants such as the one pictured here in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, has so contaminated the state’s landscape that pregnant women are advised to limit local fish consumption to one meal per week.
Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty
Americans have one day left to tell the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to preserve life-saving pollution standards.
Last year, the Trump administration proposed a plan to move forward with dismantling safeguards on dangerous mercury and toxic pollution from power plants. Doing so would boost levels of mercury, soot and other hazardous pollution into our nation’s air, water, food and communities. These standards — the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) — were developed in consultation with medical and public health experts in order to keep Americans healthy and safe.
As a doctor in Pennsylvania, I have seen just how important these standards are. Children are especially vulnerable to mercury’s harmful effects on the brain before birth and during early childhood. Coal-related mercury pollution has so contaminated Pennsylvania’s landscape that the state’s Fish and Boat Commission […]
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Christopher Flavelle and Jeremy C.F. Lin, - Bloomberg Businessweek
Stephan: Civilian nuclear power was created for reasons few people today seem to understand. To build and maintain military reactors for ships required a stable force of nuclear-trained plumbers, electricians, welders and the like, and that required enough business to make it profitable to sustain such a force. The people who created this industry understood the risks but deemed them worthwhile at the height of the Cold War.
It turned out to be a bad bet, because they miscalculated. If you go back and read the archival material you understand that they thought a technology would develop in time to effectively deal with nuclear waste, and they hadn't a clue about coming climate change. That technology never developed so we now have thousands of tons of nuclear waste, and the climate change no one saw coming is now upon us.
In 2011, after an earthquake and tsunami caused a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi power plant, Gregory Jaczko, then the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, had to worry about two things: whether radioactive fallout would harm the U.S. and whether a similar accident could befall an American plant. The answer to the first question turned out to be no. The second question preoccupies him still.
The NRC directed the operators of the 60 or so working U.S. nuclear power plants to evaluate their current flood risk, using the latest weather modeling technology and accounting for the effects of climate change. Companies were told to compare those risks with what their plants, many almost a half-century old, were built to withstand, and, where there was a gap, to explain how they would close it.
That process has revealed a lot of gaps. But Jaczko and others say that the commission’s new leadership, appointed by President Donald Trump, hasn’t done enough to require owners of nuclear power plants to take preventative measures—and that the risks are increasing as climate change worsens.
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Scott Waldman, Science Reporter - Science
Stephan: Trump apparently thinks if he stacks the science committee on climate change with deniers that will settle the issue. It's so pathetic that if the issue wasn't so serious it would be funny. Instead, it is just dangerous and stupid.
A controversial plan by the White House to review the connections between climate change and national security might be led by a former official with the Department of Energy (DOE) who oversaw talks about nuclear weapons tests with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Former Ambassador C. Paul Robinson, who served as chief negotiator for the Geneva nuclear testing talks from 1988 to 1990, is favored to lead the review panel, according to two sources involved in the talks. Robinson also directed DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from 1995 to 2005 and was head of the nuclear weapons and national security programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Robinson has been quietly recruiting researchers outside the government to participate in the review panel, the sources said. He has been working with Steven Koonin, a New York University professor and former undersecretary for science at DOE during the Obama administration, to find participants.
They have focused their recruitment efforts on a small number of climate skeptics with academic credentials, including Judith Curry, a former professor at Georgia Tech’s […]
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FRANK NEWPORT, Senior Scientist - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: You will remember the research report I ran the other day about the correlation between damage to the prefrontal cortex and fundamentalist religiosity. And I noted that when you add that to low IQ you get the Trump base. As this Gallup survey shows, this group worships Trump above the teachings of their Lord.
Trump and his Fundamentalist minions
One of the fascinating aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency so far has been the stability of his support among Americans. His overall approval rating has varied little over his first 2 1/4 years in office. And, significantly, his approval rating has varied little among one of the most important segments of his base — highly religious, white Protestants.
Support for Trump among this group (an approximation of what are sometimes called evangelicals) has been high and rock steady during the Trump presidency so far. White, highly religious Protestants gave Trump an average 67% approval rating in Gallup surveys conducted in 2017, and an average 69% approval in both 2018 and in the first quarter of 2019.
The president’s overall ratings in 2017, 2018 and the first quarter of 2019 — using the same polls from which the evangelical job approval ratings are calculated — have been 40%, 41% and 40%, respectively. Given this overall stability, our default expectations are that Trump’s ratings would be equally stable among subgroups, as has […]
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George Goehl, Director of People's Action - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I went to Europe for the first time in 1956, and before we left I was counseled to be careful about drinking water from the faucet. In those days Americans were very proud of the fact that you could go anywhere in the country and drink the water that came out of the faucet. How sad it is that this is no longer true, although that hasn't really penetrated into the consciousness of most Americans. Now we read this in a European newspaper. Highly symbolic to my mind.
The disaster of lead-laden drinking water in Flint, Michigan illustrated the vulnerability of our water supply.’
Credit: Carlos Osorio/AP
I was a teenager in southern Indiana when news broke that Westinghouse Electric had dumped polychlorinated biphenyls at multiple sites across Monroe county, contaminating our community’s water supply. It was an early lesson not to take clean water for granted in America.
Every day, millions of Americans wake up and drink tap water that is unsafe. According to one study, up to 21 million Americans are getting water from systems that violate health standards. Reporting by the Guardian shows that at least 33 major US cities have skirted water quality testing in much the same vein as Flint and the state of Michigan.
People throughout the country are more concerned about water pollution than they have been in nearly 20 years. Urban or rural, Republican or Democrat, […]
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