Category: ClimateJustice_MN PATA_West_Wildfires_2022_Related Pollution_Air_MN Wildfires_MN

On July 29, 2021, Li Boyd woke up to the smell of smoke. It was her birthday — she was turning 38 — and she had rented a boat to take her parents and aunts out on the lake near her home in central Minnesota, about 90 minutes north of the Twin Cities. But that morning, when she looked outside her window and found a thick, yellow-gray haze, she figured it was best to avoid going outside. Her older family members all had respiratory issues, and as the day went on and the smoke grew thicker, she worried about how it would affect them. They celebrated in her house, sealing the windows as tightly as they could.

Environmental advocates are asking the Biden administration for a federal ban on new natural gas-powered heating appliances in homes and commercial buildings.

In a petition submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday, 26 health, environmental and consumer protection organizations asked the agency for the ban.

In a first, the measure legally defines greenhouse gases as pollution. That’ll make new regulations much tougher to challenge in court.

MEMPHIS — It’s rare for a Black community to notch a win against a large industrial polluter, but that’s what happened on this city’s south side.
Residents stood up to a proposal by two oil and gas industry giants to build a pipeline under their properties and forced them to back down. When the news broke last year in July, the rejoicing began.
But it didn’t last long.

When wildfire smoke turned the skies of the San Francisco Bay Area red in the summer of 2020, Dr. Kari Nadeau, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, thought about the people who were most vulnerable. She worried about the workers at local wineries who raced to protect their harvest; and the children who lived near refineries and breathed in pollutants every day.

In Massachusetts, no community — from the Berkshires to Boston — is spared the lethal consequences of air pollution, according to a new study from researchers at Boston College.
The researchers estimated that about 2,800 people in Massachusetts died of conditions attributable to air pollution in 2019, and in a first-of-its-kind analysis, they broke down that number for each of the state’s 351 cities and towns. Their findings are available in a searchable public map.

It is a sad truth that many parts of the world – including various parts of the United States – are now facing an increased risk of wildfires.

The Clean Air Act, which some legal experts call the most powerful environmental law in the world, was enacted in 1970, at the birth of the environmental movement.

A new scientific review article published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows just how dangerous climate-related threats are to children’s health. The researchers analyzed data about the specific effects of a rapidly warming planet and found that climate change, driven in large part by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, harms children’s mental and physical health from the time they are in the womb through childhood—with potentially lifelong effects. These dangers threaten many aspects of children’s health, from the development of their lungs, to their intellectual ability, to their mental health. Socially and economically disadvantaged children are especially affected, but all children are at risk. “It’s not just polar bears on melting icebergs,” says study co-author Frederica Perera, director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health. “There is direct harm, now, to children’s health—and certainly their future is being jeopardized in a major way.”

First, he had the symptoms. Then he saw the yellow fog. A thin layer of gold-coloured dust coated the patio furniture, the patio, his children’s swing set – everything in the garden of Ubaka Ogbogu’s home in the Canadian city of Edmonton.