Climate Health

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.

The EPA does not want you feeding arsenic to your baby

It's only 16 months until the next election, and you know what that means: We are in the thick of political ad season. Mostly that makes everybody want to crawl under a sofa, but sometimes you get arresting ads like this one from American Family Voices.

A body of evidence for bodily harm from air pollution

An op-ed writer for the Washington Times demands the EPA "show him the bodies" of victims of power plant emissions. Sadly, that is all too easy to do.

Why 107-degree overnight temperatures should freak you out

Government conspiracy heat wave or no government conspiracy heat wave, this summer is setting records -- not just record maximum temperatures, but also record minimums. On June 27, Oman recorded the world’s highest ever minimum temperature when the mercury failed to drop below 107.1 degrees F, even overnight. And that’s more important, in a global sense, than the record highs.

States can't be trusted to monitor their own drinking water

Lest you think we were getting all worked up for no reason, here is some evidence that states should not be left to their own devices when it comes to making sure our water is clean.  A GAO report released yesterday found that states were underreporting or misreporting 84 percent of safe drinking water monitoring violations.

Google science fair winner stands up for air quality

Naomi Shah, winner of the Google science fair in the 15-16 age group, isn't just a budding research scientist. She's also an environmentalist. And her project, which focuses on the effects of air quality triggers on asthma sufferers, highlights why other people should be environmentalists too.

Critical List: Republicans vote to give states power over clean water; deer ticks in the Great Lakes

House Republicans voted yesterday to let states decide whether a company is living up to the Clean Water Act or not. The EPA's decision to prevent West Virginia coal companies from dumping waste into rivers prompted the bill to begin with, so it's pretty safe to assume that the bill's not meant to strengthen CWA protections.

The federal government says the cost of carbon is $21 per ton; a group of pro-environment economists says the cost is closer to $900 per ton.

China's feeding its "strategic pork reserve" with soybeans grown in Brazil on environmentally sensitive land.

As Moscow more than doubles in size, it will raze acres of forestland.

Why closing NYC's only nuclear power plant would be a really bad idea

Rawwwrrr! It's a progressive cat-fight! On the one side is New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who wants to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant on the Hudson River, just 25 miles north of the Bronx.

On the other side is Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who thinks this would be a really crap idea, mostly because it would mean replacing fully a quarter of the power delivered to NYC with greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuel power plants. Also, it would probably lead to brownouts.

How many lives did the EPA just save with coal pollution regulation?

New EPA air pollution standard protects public health

Recognizing that pollution doesn't stop at the border, the rule will reduce power plant emissions of soot and smog that travel downwind across state lines.