Tag Archives: pollution

lies, lies, and more lies to the U.S. public about greenhouse gas emissions

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The “endangerment finding” through the Clean Air Act may not have been the ideal way to incentivize clean energy technology in our country. But it was one dial we had to turn, and now it has been turned back. This is just a temporary giveaway to the short-term interests of corporate donors in the automobile and fossil fuel industries. In the case of the auto industry, it is not in their long term interests to subsidize inefficient outdated technology, then use propaganda to swindle the public. The lie about “affordability” is particularly egregious.

Affordable vehicle ownership is essential to the American Dream and a primary driver of economic mobility out of poverty in the United States. The Endangerment Finding led to vehicle and engine regulations with an aggregate cost of more than $1 trillion and played a significant role in EPA’s justification of regulations of other sources beyond cars and trucks, resulting in additional costly burdens on American families and businesses. Americans rely on vehicles to reach jobs, education, health care, and essential services. This is especially true in rural areas and regions without robust public transit. The costs imposed by these climate policies have placed new cars out of reach for many American families and harmed Americans’ ability to climb out of poverty or reach essential services. The Trump EPA is expected to deliver Americans over $1.3 trillion in cost savings, which includes reduced costs for new vehicles and avoided costs of purchasing equipment related to EVs. This action will result in an average cost savings of over $2,400 per vehicle. By lowering vehicle and regulatory compliance costs, EPA is improving affordability and expanding consumer choice and ultimately advancing the American Dream by making it easier to reach jobs, grow small businesses, and participate fully in the transportation and logistics systems that power the U.S. economy.

Here is what Gemini has to say about this. And the analysis below is true in the United States. In China, most new vehicles being sold are electric and you can buy one for $10,000. We are being lied to, and as we have withdrawn even more from the world, we are even less aware what is going on elsewhere, but still U.S. consumers are intelligent enough that we will catch on even if there is some delay. Our legacy auto companies will fail again and again, and eventually need to be bailed out again and again, until eventually the economics of electrification is just too obvious to lie about and get away with it.

While the sticker price of an EV is typically higher, the savings in fuel and maintenance usually “pay back” that difference within 3 to 7 years. By the time a car reaches the end of its life, an EV owner in the U.S. has typically saved between $6,000 and $11,000 compared to a gas-car owner. [generated by Gemini]

There’s another sleight of hand. There is rock solid scientific and economic work showing the costs of air pollution, and here I am talking about good old fashioned toxic smoke from factories and tail pipes. There is also solid (but controversial) economic work over decades quantifying the economic value that people place on a year of worker life. For example, a construction worker on a roof might get paid more than one doing the same job on the ground, because there is a greater statistical risk of death on the roof. Aggregate these numbers over many workers, jobs, and time, and you can say the “value of a statistical life” is a certain number of dollars. It seems cold, but it provides a sound data point when a new regulation with some cost is being considered. Put these two things together and you have the scientific and economic basis to compare the costs and benefits of a policy decision. This is old school environmental economics and really a basis for some pretty conservative policy because you are acknowledging it may be rational to sacrifice some human health and life for economic production. And we are not really assigning the environment any intrinsic value in this equation, unless knowing the environment is a little better brings people some pleasure which some value can be placed on, which economists sometimes try. Of course, real world policy decisions are some combination of science, economics, and politics, as they probably should be in a democracy. But what the EPA has recently suggested it is prepared to do is set the value of a statistical life to zero when analyzing costs and benefits of air pollution. [See pp. 214-217 of the document I link to above. I acknowledge this not a crystal clear policy directive, then again, it may be intentionally buried to try to avoid scrutiny, when in fact if you dig deeper EPA is departing from official directives of the federal government, including the President’s own Office of Management and Budget.] In other words, they propose to assume the cost of pollution is zero. This is wrong, fake, naked propaganda! Their policies are killing us AND stealing our money. It is time to get rid of these immoral people claiming to lead us.

November 2025 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.

Most hopeful story: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.

Project Censored’s State of the Free Press

Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026 is out. They sell this only as a hard copy book as far as I can tell. It’s a good cause in my view, should you choose to invest. I don’t want the hard copy cluttering up my already bursting house however. The summary on Google Books gives a few clues as to what is in there.

Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026 includes: Project Censored director Mickey Huff’s Foreword, where he writes about the history and continued relevance of the Project, and why media literacy and press freedoms are more important than ever, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary; editors Shealeigh Voitl, Andy Lee Roth, and Mickey Huff introduction to this year’s book, discussing the siege on public knowledge in the age of Trump 2.0, envisioning an interconnected and imaginative resistance to censorship; a Déjà vu News chapter, which updates on previous year’s top stories, including how a Monsanto “intelligence center” targeted journalists and activists, journalist Abby Martin’s challenge to Georgia’s BDS “gag law,” and the Justice Department’s secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rules; a Junk Food News section that spans from Snow White and actress Gal Gadot, to Drake versus Kendrick and the gutting of public education, not to mention Elon Musk’s chain saws, Cybertrucks, and creeping fascism, surveying the dubious reporting that’s Making America Junky Again; John Collins of Weave News discusses the Long Shadow of News Abuse in the case of Elise Stefanik, Israel, and Antisemitism; Media Democracy in Action, featuring inspiring contributions by Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, Maya Schenwar and Lara Witt of the Movement Media Alliance, Joe Lauria of Consortium News, Lauren Harper with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Jodi Rave Spotted Bear of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance; and Shealeigh Voitl and Reagan Haynie’s zine-style guide to infographics equips social media users with the tools to responsibly evaluate the content they see online and become empowered media makers.

Top stories from 2025 (which I might have reported on last year) are posted for free here. Below are a handful that caught my eye. My own thoughts in brackets.

  • #12. PFAS, Other Toxic Chemicals Found in Products Meant to Keep Us Safe [Yes, it’s everywhere, and it’s disturbing. I don’t want to downplay it, but I kind of figure it is just one chemical (technically a family of chemicals) we have put a spotlight on. Kind of like we did with the Covid-19 virus. We don’t know much about all the different chemicals and viruses impacting us all at the same time, and how they interact with each other. We should work on this, but at the same time remember that we are mostly not dying of horrible, easily prevented infections and injuries that took out our ancestors at much younger ages than we succumb to cancers and brain diseases that may or may not be linked to these chemicals and viruses.]
  • #9. Antarctic Ice Sheets Approaching Tipping Point, Studies Find [I don’t think this is underreported, just ignored.]
  • #8. Underreported, Often Deadly Abuses of Police Authority US police kill “nearly four people per day” on average. This is disturbing. 1500 people per year. Compare to the order of magnitude of gun violence more broadly, car crashes (with each other and unprotected pedestrians and people using light forms of transportation), suicides and drug overdoses. 1500 additional deaths don’t make any of these other tragedies better, of course, and in some cases these happen because the police are the last line of defense in a society that has failed to solve so many social, health and economic problems.
  • #3. Indigenous Communities in the US Underfunded and Exploited by Federal and State Governments [With all the other social problems, the plight of Native Americans remains one of the most disturbing and shameful situations in the country. And in my view, a cautionary tale of trying to use policy to (helpfully) target an ethnic group. Much better to raise revenue and provide benefits to the masses, which will disproportionately help the most disadvantaged groups, while also helping everyone else and building the broad political support necessary to sustain the programs. Call this “socialism” if you want, but it just means efficiently deploying our society’s ample wealth to make sure everyone have the basics. This might not work on the scale of a city, btw, it needs to be society-wide.]

neonicotinoids

The problem with neoniconitoid pesticides, according to this Intercept article, is not that they kill bees directly, but that they weaken their immune systems so that they succumb to fungal infections. Sick bees have an instinct to fly away from the hive and die quietly somewhere to protect the hive. And the concentrations that cause this are so low they are not even detectable in monitoring data.

Hasbro phasing out plastic packaging

Hasbro has announced they are phasing out plastic packaging. Now, they are not phasing out all the stuff they make out of plastic, which is most of what they make and sell. But I think it is a good sign that the companies that produce all the packaging might be willing to think of the role they play in waste/pollution/litter/climate crisis, rather than just trying to pin all the blame on consumers. Governments can get involved by either taxing plastic packaging or banning it outright.

UK solid waste framework

The UK is tackling the idea of making companies responsible for the packaging they produce. This makes perfect sense because it will raise revenue in the short term, but hopefully give them the incentive they need to design with “reduce, reuse, recycle” in mind in the longer term.

Businesses and manufacturers will pay the full cost of recycling or disposing of their packaging waste, under a major new government strategy unveiled by the Environment Secretary today (Tuesday 18 December 2018).
The move will overhaul England’s waste system, putting a legal onus on those responsible for producing damaging waste to take greater responsibility and foot the bill.
The announcement forms part of the government’s ambitious new Resources and Waste Strategy, the first comprehensive update in more than a decade. It will eliminate avoidable plastic waste and help leave the environment in a better state than we found it for future generations.

more on Americans for Carbon Dividends

This group, which includes Exxon Mobil, is proposing a four-part plan:

  1. A $40 per ton tax on carbon rising annually at a gradual rate;
  2. Tax revenues generated would be refunded to all citizens (hence the name, “Carbon Dividends”);
  3. This plan would terminate the EPA’s regulatory authority over carbon emissions and specifically terminate the recently enacted Clean Power Plan;
  4. Require “border carbon adjustments to level the playing field and permit American competitiveness.” (Other relatively high CO2 emitting countries apart from the US are China and Russia).

This article I am linking to is highly skeptical, as are some prominent environmental groups, due to the restrictions it would place on EPA regulation. I’m not sure yet whether I would support it. So far EPA regulation has not accomplished anything. Oil and gas companies must be afraid that it eventually will, and see this as a choice between a predictable and manageable business cost versus an unknown but potentially unlimited risk. What isn’t mentioned here is protection from litigation, which I have heard might also be part of the deal. They might be afraid of that too.

I support pollution taxes in general. I have made a career of helping regulated entities (water utilities in my case) deal with EPA regulations, and I don’t see them as particularly rational, effective, or economical even when the underlying laws are well-thought-out. It might be worth trying something different. Once we have a carbon tax on the books, the actual amount can be adjusted until it is effective, and the concept can potentially be applied to other types of waste and pollution.

freshwater salinization syndrome

The National Academy of Sciences has a new study out on “freshwater salinization syndrome“. If I understand it correctly, it goes something like this: Air pollution and acid rain leach minerals like calcium out of all the concrete we use for pavement and buildings. All the road salt we apply leaches minerals like calcium out of soil and replaces it with sodium. The result is a lot more minerals like calcium in freshwater, which changes its alkalinity, or in high school science terms, its pH and ability to resist changes in pH.

Salt pollution and human-accelerated weathering are shifting the chemical composition of major ions in fresh water and increasing salinization and alkalinization across North America. We propose a concept, the freshwater salinization syndrome, which links salinization and alkalinization processes. This syndrome manifests as concurrent trends in specific conductance, pH, alkalinity, and base cations. Although individual trends can vary in strength, changes in salinization and alkalinization have affected 37% and 90%, respectively, of the drainage area of the contiguous United States over the past century. Across 232 United States Geological Survey (USGS) monitoring sites, 66% of stream and river sites showed a statistical increase in pH, which often began decades before acid rain regulations. The syndrome is most prominent in the densely populated eastern and midwestern United States, where salinity and alkalinity have increased most rapidly. The syndrome is caused by salt pollution (e.g., road deicers, irrigation runoff, sewage, potash), accelerated weathering and soil cation exchange, mining and resource extraction, and the presence of easily weathered minerals used in agriculture (lime) and urbanization (concrete). Increasing salts with strong bases and carbonates elevate acid neutralizing capacity and pH, and increasing sodium from salt pollution eventually displaces base cations on soil exchange sites, which further increases pH and alkalinization. Symptoms of the syndrome can include: infrastructure corrosion, contaminant mobilization, and variations in coastal ocean acidification caused by increasingly alkaline river inputs. Unless regulated and managed, the freshwater salinization syndrome can have significant impacts on ecosystem services such as safe drinking water, contaminant retention, and biodiversity.

It’s a little ironic that this is happening to fresh water at the same time we are worried about ocean acidification. There is also a larger context to me though – even if our waters meet numerical standards we set for water quality, they just don’t have the same chemistry, biology, or links to the land that they used to. This would still happen even if we were able to eliminate all pollution that is directly toxic to aquatic life.

no more antibacterial soap

The FDA is finally banning antibacterial soap. Companies have about a year to phase out triclosan and triclocarban, the two toxic chemicals people have been putting on their bodies and in their mouths all these years.

Evidence suggests that the chemicals used in antibacterial soaps can alter hormone cycles and cause muscle weakness, NPR reports. Triclosan also kills good bacteria and could help create germs that are resistant to antibiotics; the chemical has been known to contaminate streams and has been found in human milk and dolphin’s blood, according to Vitals.

While antibacterial soap is often marketed as being more effective than soap and water, experts say that it actually isn’t. Washing your hands with regular soap (if you do it the right way) is just fine.

Hospitals and the food industry can still use antibacterial soap, but otherwise, companies have until September 2017 to rid their products of the banned chemicals or remove those products from the market altogether.

Here’s how to wash your hands like a surgeon:

 

environmental regulations and profitability

If I understand this somewhat convoluted abstract from Ecological Economics correctly, empirical evidence shows that environmental regulation can actually increase corporate profitability by incentivizing innovation. The data also show that investors believe the exact opposite.

The Porter hypothesis asserts that properly designed environmental regulation motivates firms to innovate, which ultimately improves profitability. In this study, we test empirically the Porter hypothesis and the competing hypothesis that regulation undermines profitability (“costly regulation hypothesis”). In particular, we estimate the effect of clean water regulation, as reflected in the stringency of firm-specific effluent limits for two regulated pollutants, on the profitability of chemical manufacturing firms. As our primary contribution, we contrast the effect of clean water regulation on actual profitability outcomes and its effects on investors’ expectations of profitability. Our results for actual profitability are consistent with the Porter hypothesis, while our results for expected profitability are consistent with the costly regulation hypothesis. Thus, our empirical results demonstrate that investors do not appear to value the positive effect of tighter clean water regulation on actual profitability.