Lead is vicious stuff. When inhaled or ingested, your body can't tell the difference between lead and calcium, so it tucks lead away in your bones -- making the bones weaker and being sucked back out into the bloodstream when the body is looking for calcium. Lead in the bloodstream can reduce a child's IQ. Reducing lead levels in children provides $213 billion in economic benefits per year. There have even been studies suggesting a correlation between reductions in lead levels and drops in crime rates.

We've nearly eliminated lead from all gasoline and removed it from paint -- two of the most common sources of it 40 years ago. But American University and NBC News found another common vector that's still in place: water systems.

Photo by Nic McPhee.

The problem stems, ironically, from the EPA's efforts to remove lead pipes from water conduits. The 1991 Lead and Copper Rule required that utilities test home water systems. If samples exceeded a certain level of lead, the utility had to reduce lead in the water either through a chemical process or by replacing lead service lines. That latter instance, in "partial pipe replacements," is where the problem arose.

The regulation began to derail as early as 1993, when the American Water Works Association (AWWA), which represents more than 4,000 public and privately owned water systems, sued EPA. The trade group argued that EPA had adopted the Lead and Copper Rule without proper notice about how it planned to define “control” of -- responsibility for -- the service lines. The group also claimed that utilities did not have authority to replace the sections of lines on private property, and that ordering them to do so exceeded EPA’s mandate. ...

[T]he agency amended its rule in 2000 to permit the utilities to perform so-called “partial pipe replacements,” from the water main to the private property line. In the vast majority of cases, homeowners would be responsible for paying to finish the job.

Few homeowners have done so, to their detriment.

Bad news for Californians who drive. All of you -- gas, electric, whatever.

Another depressing photograph of Californian squalor. (Photo by naotakem.)

An explosion Monday night at Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, Calif. -- the 13th-largest refinery in the U.S. -- knocked a significant chunk of the facility offline. And, sure enough, the Aug. 7 fire quickly resulted in a gas-price hike.

California gas prices from GasBuddy.com. Click to embiggen.

From AP:

The average price of regular gasoline jumped in California from $3.86 a gallon on Tuesday to $3.94 on Thursday, according to the website GasBuddy.com. ...

The Richmond refinery produces 16 percent of the region's daily gasoline supply. The fire knocked out a unit that makes a specialized blend of cleaner burning gasoline that satisfies air quality laws in California, Oregon and Washington.

Aha! It's because they were trying to make the gasoline "cleaner." If they hadn't done that, everything would be OK. Once again, green technology fails.

Yes, it's this photo again.

This morning, the Department of Agriculture released new projections for the nation's crop output in 2012. In a word: withered.

From the New York Times:

This year’s corn yield is projected to be the lowest since 1995, according to an Agriculture Department report that sharply cut production estimates for some major crops because of damage from the nation’s worst drought in 56 years. …

After favorable spring weather, United States corn production had been projected to hit a record high, approaching nearly 15 billion bushels, as farmers had planted the most acreage since the late 1930s to capture profits from what were already the highest corn prices ever. ...

The new corn yield forecast was a bit worse than some private analysts had expected.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal posted an article about July being the hottest month in America's recorded history. As Columbia Journalism Review notes, the article didn't mention climate change once.

Behind the record temperatures was a dome of high pressure over the center of the country, which combined with a powerful drought to create the scorching temperatures, said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's] National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

Oh, is that the cause, esteemed Wall Street Journal? One of those "heat domes"? Just quotin' Mr. Crouch, are we? Crouch also suggested to the Associated Press that the cause was a "double whammy of weather and climate change" -- something that hundreds of other media outlets ran with.

As Media Matters noted last week, the Journal has been downplaying threats to the environment since 1976. And while bad habits are hard to break, the paper's squirming attempts to downplay climate change have a distinct look-out-there's-something-behind-you! vibe, making them kind of amusing in a morbid way. It's like a shopkeeper who is caught in a deceit but refuses to admit it.

Even in good years, farmers in the Midwest supplement rainfall with irrigation from the Ogallala Aquifer. The map below shows irrigated areas in blue; the darker the color, the heavier the irrigation. That big, dark patch in the middle, to the left of the little icon, is irrigated by both surface water and water from the Ogallala and other aquifers in the High Plains system.

Image courtesy of ESRI.

The Ogallala spreads across 174,000 square miles, providing drinking water and irrigation to a huge swath of the United States, replenished slowly by rainfall in the region. It's a critically important resource, which is why it's been a big part of the Keystone XL fight -- if it's polluted by tar-sands oil, the damage could be catastrophic.

The Ogallala and other aquifers around the globe are also threatened by overuse. According to research published this week in Nature, "about 1.7 billion people live in areas where groundwater resources and/or groundwater-dependent ecosystems are under threat." Researchers estimate that the amount of water being used is 3.5 times the size of the aquifers.

Texas' county of Dallas (home to the city of the same name) yesterday declared a state of emergency because of the West Nile virus. Nine people have died of the virus [PDF] so far this year.

Having grown up in the Snow Belt, I recognize that my attitude toward winter is more hospitable than most. But regardless of your hostility to the season, there is an unquestionable benefit to cold weather: mosquitoes vanish. They don't all die, unfortunately, but those that live are in hibernation, nestled into nooks in the slightly warmer earth.

Which is why climate change means that we'll see more mosquite-borne diseases. With warmer winters (like the one the Northeast just saw), mosquitoes will remain more active, longer. And warmth also improves transmission:

Apparently, Harry Reid no longer gives a fuck. At least, as much as an older, tie-wearing elected official can be said to not give a fuck.

Not that he's ever been a demure, quiet guy, but the senior senator from Nevada, the leading Democrat in the Senate, has been on a media tear of late. This is due largely to his willingness to accuse Mitt Romney of not having paid taxes for 10 years, knowledge he claims to have gotten from that classic shit-stirrer, Some Guy.

This is an actual photo of Harry Reid in the boxing ring. As far as I know, it was taken this morning.

But it goes further than that. Closer to home, Reid is also coming out swinging on green issues, as befits a former amateur boxer. During an annual clean energy summit he hosts, he called out climate change deniers. WHAM.

These people aren't just on the other side of this debate. They're on the other side of reality. It's time for us all -- whether we're leaders in Washington, members of the media, scientists, academics, environmentalists or utility industry executives -- to stop acting like those who ignore the crisis or deny it exists entirely have a valid point of view. They don't.

The easiest way to deal with a problem, as any little kid can tell you, is to ignore it. Wish it away. Mature? No. Effective? Temporarily.

The Food and Drug Association has a problem. It knows it has to set rules for the use of antibiotics in meat production, but it doesn't wanna. Like a petulant teen, kicking at stones and moaning under its breath, the FDA is dragging its feet.

An antibiotic junkie.

But a federal court in New York put its foot down yesterday, insisting once and for all that the FDA had to do its chores. ("Fine. I didn't want to be a federal agency anyway. See if I care.") The FDA now has roughly five years to get the job done, and it can't delay just because an appeal is pending.

Next time you're walking through a forest, enjoying the calm, natural splendor of your surroundings, you should probably know this: The tree right next to you could explode at any moment.

Think I'm kidding? I'm not, just exaggerating. As proof: here's a fire, burning on the methane contained in a diseased -- but still living -- tree.

A flame fueled by methane shoots out of an oak tree being cored at Yale Myers Forest. (Photo courtesy of Yale University.)

Researchers from Yale describe what they found:

Sixty trees sampled at Yale Myers Forest in northeastern Connecticut contained concentrations of methane that were as high as 80,000 times ambient levels. Normal air concentrations are less than 2 parts per million, but the Yale researchers found average levels of 15,000 parts per million inside trees. …

The estimated emission rate from an upland site at the Yale forest is roughly equivalent to burning 40 gallons of gasoline per hectare of forest per year. ...

“If we extrapolate these findings to forests globally, the methane produced in trees represents 10 percent of global emissions,” said Xuhui Lee, a co-author of the study and the Sara Shallenberger Brown Professor of Meteorology at Yale. “We didn’t know this pathway existed.”

Forget America’s fiscal cliff, Europe’s currency troubles or the emerging-markets slowdown. The most important story in the global economy today may well be some good news that isn’t yet making as many headlines -- the coming surge in oil production around the world.

Um, the what?

Oil boom.

Thanks in part to technologies like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, we are entering a new age of abundant oil. As the energy expert Leonardo Maugeri contends in a recent report published by the Belfer Center at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, “contrary to what most people believe, oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption.”

What a nice way to celebrate the day after the hottest July in U.S. history!