EHN Originals

People who are live in areas that come with long-term exposure to high levels of air pollution face a 51% higher chance of dying from Covid-19, and thousands of lives could have been saved during the pandemic if air quality standards were met, a new public health research study has found. The study, which focused…

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Irony abounds as we close out a summer that brought the death of the climate truthteller, scientist James Lovelock, along with news that more countries in Africa and South America have decided to exploit, aggressively, their fossil fuel production – protected areas and former promises be damned. The Democratic Republic of Congo, had, less than…

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Pity the poor climate reporter. Tasked to write about the costly future and gloomy topic of climate change, we often turn to food to try to relieve our misery. But in our case, that means writing about it, not eating it. This past week, I distinctly heard the sound of a butter knife clinking against…

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A 2021 state law linked Virginia vehicle emissions standards to California’s as part of efforts to combat climate change.

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Editor’s note: Researchers at Northwestern University last week published a breakthrough paper in the journal Science touting a new way of destroying PFAS molecules – dubbed the “forever chemical” for its engineered longevity. Carnegie Mellon University chemist Terry Collins offers a counterpoint on the optimism. This is neat chemistry, but it is not a potential…

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The fervor surrounding so many environmental issues makes our subject matter so vulnerable to being fertilized with B.S. Years before fake news about supposedly stolen elections, eco-myths filled news space. Here are four pernicious examples, including one that environmentalists helped promote. Natural resources and the rapture “The Secretary of the Interior must have to be…

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The title of supervisory wildlife biologist for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service does little justice to Linda Welch (pictured above). In practice, she is the housing and unusual development secretary for seabirds on Maine’s Petit Manan Island. This was clear as she led me to nesting areas there for Atlantic puffins. Over the…

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Unless you’ve been off the grid, you know that Congress passed – and Biden yesterday signed – the biggest package of climate change legislation the United States (and the world) has seen. At Environmental Health Sciences, we put news and science into context. What we’re seeing right now is optimism: Those in the trenches working…

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“What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Charles Wilson, 1953 As President Biden turns his victory lap for squeaking a major climate victory through a 50-50 Senate, the ghost of Charles Wilson remains. Wilson was the first defense secretary in…

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Twenty years after first suggesting it, federal regulators on Monday proposed adding a group of plastic additives common in toys, flooring and fabric coatings to its list of toxic chemicals, concluding that it can “reasonably be anticipated to cause cancer and serious or irreversible chronic health effects in humans.” The ruling by the U.S. Environmental…

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