Climate Health

As summer temperatures rise, so does deadly coal pollution

Coal-fired power plants are a huge source of air pollution, which poses an immediate threat to health on hot summer days when smog levels are highest.

PhillyTreeMap: Crowdsourcing the urban forest

PhillyTreeMap, an open-source mapping system, helps Philadelphia keep track of an urban treasure -- its trees.

Critical List: Canada’s pushing tar-sands oil; cutting methane also helps cut climate change

In 110 meetings over less than two years, the Canadian government tried to convince Europe to delay or derail legislative changes that could affect the imports of tar sands oil. Basically, Canada doesn’t want Europe to know how carbon-heavy the oil is, because that could affect U.S. and European imports. So they’re pushing it as environmentally friendly. Because hey, if you don’t know how dirty something is, maybe it’s clean!

We often talk about cutting carbon, but here's a reminder that cutting gases like methane and nitrous oxide can also slow climate change.

The EPA found that, left to their own devices, companies don't tell consumers that their processes release or their products contain chemicals harmful to children.

Give me my fish

Tomorrow is the last day for public comment on a long-overdue EPA plan to capture airborne mercury.

Fishing for change

Recycled Fish turns anglers into conservation stewards, in the hopes that future generations will be able to fish in healthy waters.

Here’s how the debt deal could spell doomsday for climate and energy

The debt deal Washington just passed is going to pit defense spending against the budgets of the DOE, EPA and incentives for clean energy production, GOP strategist Mike McKenna tells Politico.

NASA will clean up contaminated soil with salad dressing

There's an upside to the end of the space shuttle program: Now that the shuttle has been grounded, NASA can turn its attention to acres of contaminated soil and groundwater, the result of chemical spills from shuttle launches. And they're doing it in a novel way: with an oil-based emulsion that's made of corn and looks like dressing. The technique was first designed in scribbles on the back of a napkin, perhaps after eating a salad.

Here's what an hour's worth of ocean trash looks like

This artwork by Chris Jordan is made up of 2.4 million pieces of plastic, all collected from the Pacific Ocean. (You can see details here.) This is already staggering, but it's actually only a fraction of what gets pumped into the ocean every hour. If every one of these pieces were a pound of plastic, […]

Chesapeake Bay dead zone could be the largest ever

One-third of the Chesapeake Bay is a dead zone this year. The Washington Post reports:

Especially heavy flows of tainted water from the Susquehanna River brought as much nutrient pollution into the bay by May as normally comes in an entire average year, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources researcher said. As a result, “in Maryland we saw the worst June” ever for nutrient pollution, said Bruce Michael, director of the DNR’s resource assessment service.

The dead zone could grow to be the largest ever.

Sunlight can disinfect water

Turns out the nonsensical yuppie idea that bottled water is “cleaner” is actually true, in very very specific circumstances. In areas where it’s hard to find drinkable water, plastic bottles and sunlight can save lives.

SODIS, or solar water disinfection, is a fancy way of saying, "Leave germy water in a plastic bottle out on your hot roof and eventually all the bad stuff will die." It's a simple idea, but remarkably effective at dealing with water contamination.