Climate Health

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.

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.