The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is mainly off the coast of Louisiana. This is a screenshot of a NASA animation of changes in the area from 1999 to 2008.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has proposed cuts in water pollution regulation that would increase the 5,772-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the area where fish and other living things must swim away or die.

Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s nominee to lead the EPA, wants to remove thousands of streams, swamps and other bodies of water from regulations approved under former President Barack Obama to curb water pollution.

Scientists think a 45% reduction in nitrate and phosphorus, much of it from fertilizer, running into the Mississippi River is needed to shrink the dead zone, which was the size of Delaware last summer. In 2008, a task force set a goal of reaching that target by 2015 which didn’t happen.

A rule published in 2015 under Obama could […]

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The most corrupt president in American history

Trump once again is trying to cut most of the funding to clean up the polluted Chesapeake Bay even as the Trump EPA undermines the cleanup with legal footnotes and inaction.

Trump’s latest sabotage, for the 2021 budget, would cut more than 91% of the funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program created under President Ronald Reagan who called the bay a “national treasure” and long supported by Republicans and Democrats. The program got $85 million, the most it’s ever received, in the fiscal 2020 budget.

Dana Aunkst, the director of Chesapeake Bay efforts for the EPA, said 2025 pollution goals are “an aspiration,” not an enforceable deadline. The head of EPA’s Office of Water, David Ross, represented the American Farm Bureau Federation in its 2012 lawsuit against the EPA over plans to clean up the bay. Scott Pruitt, Trump’s first pick to head the […]

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Credit: AP Photo/Ben Neary

Trump’s Bureau of Land Management, now run by attorney William Perry Pendley, wants to take our nation back to the 1930s Dust Bowl.

That was when ranchers lorded over public land and their cattle grazed away the natural vegetation, destroying topsoil.

The bureau has scheduled meetings this month in Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming about “updating and modernizing regulations” and “improving permitting efficiency.”

The bureau administers almost 18,000 permits and leases for livestock, mostly cattle and sheep, grazing on 155 million acres of public land in the western United States.

Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, compared livestock grazing to “a slow and invisible cancer.”

Cattle, unlike bison, evolved in northern Europe where rain is plentiful. They are basically unsuited to the Dry West where sagebrush is sometimes the most common plant. Cattle like to gather in or near streams where they wallow in the water and manure.

Cattle have helped transform deep, narrow streams of the west into wider, warmer streams where silt smothers trout eggs and salmon eggs. Bacteria from the cows’ […]

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Melania, Donny, and Vlad

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow read bombshell excerpts from a new book set for release on Tuesday.

The host interviewed David Enrich, finance editor at The New York Times, about his forthcoming book Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction.

The host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” read excerpts from the book.

“There was no doubt that Deutsche Bank had extensive business dealings with Russia, and those dealings included acting as a conduit for dirty money to get out of Russia and into the western financial system,” Enrich wrote.

“Deutsche, of course, was the only reliable connection that Trump, his family, and his company had to the mainstream banking world. And Eric Trump had blurted that Russians financed the family’s golf projects — even though it was Deutsche who had made the Doral loans,” he explained. “Perhaps this was more than a coincidence. Maybe Deutsche was what connected Trump to Russia. The rumor that had been ricochetting around Washington, New York and London was that VTB had in the […]

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Graphic image of a thin film of protein nanowires generating electricity from atmospheric humidity. UMass Amherst researchers say the device can literally make electricity out of thin air.
Credit: UMass Amherst/Yao and Lovley labs

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine.

As reported today in Nature, the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at UMass Amherst have created a device they call an “Air-gen.” or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.

“We are literally making electricity out of thin air,” says Yao. “The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7.” Lovely, who has advanced sustainable biology-based electronic materials over three […]

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