For the first time since 2012, the US Environmental Protection Agency is proposing an update to the federal air quality standard for fine soot – a long-awaited step to reduce deadly air pollution. The current standard, which has been in place for more than a decade, limits the average annual amount of fine particle pollution to 12 micrograms Read More…
Category: Other
California Air Resources Board Adopts Updated Scoping Plan
After conducting a series of workshops over the last year and a half, the California Air Resources Board approved an updated version of their scoping plan in December 2022. The plan itself is essentially a roadmap on how the fourth largest economy in the world will achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 and reducing GHG’s by 48% by Read More…
Toxics Release Inventory List Now Includes Nine Additional PFAS
The EPA announced in early January which PFAS, also called forever chemicals, were added to the list. Nine per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as forever chemicals, have been added to the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) list. Under the TRI, facilities that use quantities of any of the nine PFAS greater than a specific Read More…
How many miles before an electric car is greener than a gas car
[Source: SlashGear News] Electric vehicles have often been hailed as the future. Major motoring companies are aiming to produce nothing but electric vehicles in the future, and some aspire to hit that target by the end of the decade. Cars that are traditionally seen as so-called gas guzzlers — like pickup trucks, muscle cars, and Read More…
The future of EV batteries could be found under the sea
[Source: AXIOS] All the battery metals we need to power a billion electric vehicles could be lying on the floor of the Pacific Ocean — but collecting them and turning them into EV batteries is a major challenge. Why it matters: It’s going to take a lot of batteries to replace the world’s gasoline-powered cars with Read More…
Antarctic ozone hole has closed in near-record time for 2019
[Sources: ESA | NASA Ozone Watch] Seeing the ozone hole permanently vanish won’t be for another decade, but for 2019, it has sealed itself up in near-record time. Just a month or so ago, the 2019 Antarctic ozone hole was declared the smallest seen since it was first discovered back in 1985. Now, data from Read More…
Growing corn is a major contributor to air pollution, study finds
[Source: Jonathan Lambert, NPR Science] You’ve probably heard statistics about how our diet affects the health of the planet. Like how a beef hamburger takes considerably more water and land to produce than a veggie burger or that around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions stem from food production. In fact, there are websites that can calculate the Read More…
Scientists just pulled CO2 from air and turned it into coal
[Source: Forbes] Scientists have discovered a breakthrough technology, a way to pull CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it back into coal. This new discovery has the potential to change the way we think about CO2. The research, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, provides a step-by-step guide in turning CO2 into coal, acting to remove the greenhouse gas Read More…
Cooking roast dinner produces air pollution as bad as heavily polluted city streets, study reveals
[Source: The Independent] Cooking a roast dinner drives indoor air pollution up to levels found in some of the most polluted cities in the world, according to new research. The act of roasting and boiling meat, potatoes and vegetables pushes particulates in the air up to 13 times the levels recorded on the filthy streets of Read More…