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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>October 4, 2020</b></font></i></p>
[fires still burning, but...]<br>
<b>After Wildfires Stop Burning, a Danger in the Drinking Water</b><br>
Experts are warning that existing water safety rules are not
suitable to a world where wildfires destroy more residential areas
than in the past...<br>
- - <br>
After the fire that destroyed Paradise, for example, tests reported
in a new study showed benzene levels in drinking water at 2,217
parts per billion. The Tubbs Fire led to levels as high as 40,000
parts per billion. California health authorities say 1 part per
billion is dangerous over the long-term, and 26 parts per billion is
dangerous for short-term exposure. And many other compounds that end
up in water after fire can also create health risks...<br>
- -<br>
After a fire, water in houses and in the underlying pipes "can
become contaminated with an array of volatile organic compounds and
semi-volatile organic compounds" at levels that exceed the
regulatory limits set by the state of California as well as the
federal Environmental Protection Agency, said Amisha Shah, a water
quality engineer at Purdue University. "It's very clear it needs to
be addressed."...<br>
- -<br>
During the chaotic aftermath of a wildfire's destruction, members of
water districts can feel overwhelmed and confused about the best
course toward ruling a system safe to use again. While many local
water districts and other water utilities test for volatiles, most
are not looking for semi-volatiles.<br>
<br>
In the case of the San Lorenzo Valley pipes, for instance,
regulators have been told to test only for the 80 or so compounds in
the E.P.A.'s volatile organic compounds screening, despite evidence
that burning plastic pipes release some semi-volatiles, too.<br>
<br>
Advice for residents has also been inconsistent. While the state
recommends "do not use" orders when there is "an unknown
contaminant," most utilities are being told to issue "do not drink,
do not boil" orders to prevent ingestion. But scientists worry that
even taking a shower or washing may not be safe if the water has
high levels of the compounds. Some toxins can be inhaled when the
water is aerosolized...<br>
- -<br>
As wildfires worsen and grow increasingly common, experts like Dr.
Shah are calling for clear federal or state guidelines that local
water utilities can follow.<br>
<br>
They recommend testing for a wide range of compounds, throughout
entire water systems, and the need to issue "do not use" orders for
residential water until results are available. Pre-emptive measures,
like installing one-way valves at home water meters and shutting off
water systems ahead of a fire's encroaching threat, could isolate
contamination. San Lorenzo Valley Water District shut down part of
its system, for example, which might have helped avoid some spread.<br>
<br>
Mr. Phillips said that as wildfire dangers persisted, states and
towns needed to be more "prepared for the unknown.<br>
<br>
"You have to put the worst-case scenario into a stress test and then
build a response around that."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/science/wildfires-water-toxins.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/science/wildfires-water-toxins.html</a><br>
<p>- - - <br>
</p>
[2 pages, one state]<br>
<b>Post-wildfire VOC sampling guidance</b><br>
Oregon Drinking Water Services<br>
September 2020<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/HEALTHYENVIRONMENTS/DRINKINGWATER/PREPAREDNESS/Documents/post-wildfire-VOC-sampling-guidance.pdf">https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/HEALTHYENVIRONMENTS/DRINKINGWATER/PREPAREDNESS/Documents/post-wildfire-VOC-sampling-guidance.pdf</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Future legal conjectures]<br>
<b>Trump's Pick for the Supreme Court Could Deepen the Risk for Its
Most Crucial Climate Change Ruling</b><br>
Amy Coney Barrett's views on precedent could undermine Massachusetts
vs. EPA, the case ruling that greenhouse gases are pollutants under
the Clean Air Act.<br>
- - <br>
Barrett practiced law briefly, then spent 15 years as a law
professor at Notre Dame before she was picked in 2017 in the first
tranche of Federalist Society-endorsed nominees in Trump's project
to remake the federal courts. She was confirmed in October 2017 for
a seat on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago by a
55-43, mostly party-line vote, after a contentious hearing. Sen.
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) grilled Barrett on whether her judicial
decisions would be influenced by religion. "The dogma lives loudly
within you," said Feinstein.<br>
<br>
Less remembered, but at least as important, was the questioning of
Barrett on her views on stare decisis, or legal precedent. In a
number of law review articles, Barrett examined cases in which she
argued that other principles--such as a jurist's view of
Constitutional intent--could outweigh the imperative for a court to
abide by its previous rulings...<br>
- -<br>
Some environmental law experts think there's another factor that
could encourage the justices to be more receptive to climate cases,
even on a high court that is dominated by Trump appointees.<br>
<br>
"The effects of climate change are much more in evidence around us"
than they were when Massachusetts v. EPA case was heard 13 years
ago, said Ann Carlson, co-director of the Emmett Institute on
Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law School. "When you
read that case, the Massachusetts coastline getting inundated seems
a bit far off. Today, you have hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves
like we've never seen before.<br>
<br>
"I do think when we're getting slammed like this, it's going to be
harder for the court to say, 'No one action will solve the climate
problem,'" as its reasoning for rejecting a case on climate change,
said Carlson.<br>
<br>
The fact that the Supreme Court, even with conservatives in the
majority, delivered surprising rulings this past term in cases
involving transgender rights, abortion, and the so-called "Dreamers"
who immigrated to the U.S. as children of undocumented parents,
shows that societal and cultural change can make a difference in how
justices address legal questions, said Lazarus. "Climate change is a
much bigger deal and the science of cause and effect is much more
clear than it was 13 years ago," he said. "That's why I'm not quite
ready to surrender yet on Massachusetts v. EPA."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29092020/amy-coney-barrett">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29092020/amy-coney-barrett</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[ice melts, seas rise]<br>
<b>Climate change responsible for record sea temperature levels,
says study</b><br>
by Taylor & Francis<br>
Global warming is driving an unprecedented rise in sea temperatures
including in the Mediterranean, according to a major new report
published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Operational Oceanography.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://phys.org/news/2020-10-climate-responsible-sea-temperature.html">https://phys.org/news/2020-10-climate-responsible-sea-temperature.html</a><br>
- - <br>
<b>Copernicus Marine Service Ocean State Report, Issue 4</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1755876X.2020.1785097">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1755876X.2020.1785097</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[risk of further loss]<br>
<b>Battered, Flooded and Submerged: Many Superfund Sites are
Dangerously Threatened by Climate Change</b><br>
The Obama administration directed the EPA to focus on
climate-related threats. Now, the Trump administration refuses to
even use the word.<br>
<br>
BY DAVID HASEMYER, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS, AND LISE OLSEN, TEXAS
OBSERVER<br>
SEP 24, 2020...<br>
- - <br>
The most notorious of the sites, the San Jacinto Waste Pits, was
smashed by 16 feet of water that undermined a concrete cap covering
the site's toxic contents, washing dioxin downriver. A dive team
from the Environmental Protection Agency later found the potent
human carcinogen in river sediment at 2,300 times the agency's
standard for cleanup. <br>
<br>
Several miles upriver, Barrett, a historically Black town, shares a
wooded area with the French Limited Superfund site. That toxic dump
was built so close to the Barrett family homestead that, as a young
man, Fred Barrett could hear the rumble of tractor-trailers hauling
chemical waste, including carcinogens, down the Gulf Pump Road to a
foul pond...<br>
- -<br>
Among the findings:<br>
-- More than 700 of the 945 sites vulnerable to climate change are
in 100-year flood plains, meaning they have a chance of 1 percent or
more of flooding in any given year, and over 80 regularly flood at
high tide or are already permanently submerged. Forty-nine of the
sites face triple threats--they are in 100-year flood plains,
regularly flood and are vulnerable to hurricanes, according to EPA
and GAO data. The San Jacinto Waste Pits site is on the triple
threat list, as is the LCP Chemical site on coastal marshlands in
Glynn County, Georgia, which is contaminated by mercury and PCBs.<br>
<p>-- Seventy-four sites threatened by climate change nationwide
contain toxic wastes that remain uncontrolled and could damage
human health, according to the EPA's own risk assessments. Nine of
those sites are in New Jersey, including the Diamond Alkali site
in Newark, a shuttered chemical plant that pumped the herbicide
Agent Orange into the Passaic River. <br>
</p>
-- The Trump administration has largely abandoned plans written by
all 10 EPA regional offices that factored climate change risks into
Superfund planning and remediation, former officials say. The plans
were written in response to a 2012 Obama administration directive;
the following year, President Barack Obama issued an executive order
that made climate change preparedness a national priority. President
Donald Trump rescinded the order in March 2017. The GAO found that
the EPA's current five-year strategic plan makes no reference to
climate-related risks in relation to Superfund site management,
planning or cleanups. <br>
<br>
-- Rather than cleaning up toxic waste at Superfund sites, the EPA
began in the 1990s to cap the sites with soil, clay or even
concrete, a less expensive method that leaves the chemicals in
place. Experts and former EPA officials argue that practice has left
those sites increasingly vulnerable to hurricanes, sea level rise,
flooding and wildfires. At the San Jacinto Waste Pits, a concrete
cap that was installed in 2011 after a previous hurricane didn't
stop the site from flooding and leaching chemicals during Hurricane
Harvey, the EPA's own inspectors found.<br>
<br>
Molly Block, an EPA spokeswoman, said in response to written
questions that none of the 76 Superfund sites within the path of
Hurricane Laura in late August were damaged, providing evidence that
"our remedies over the years are demonstrating to be storm resilient
in the field."...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23092020/climate-change-epa-superfund-sites-hurricanes-floods-fires-sea-level-rise">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23092020/climate-change-epa-superfund-sites-hurricanes-floods-fires-sea-level-rise</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Follow the money]<br>
<b>Deloitte scraps report on climate change benefit for GDP</b><br>
Global accounting and consulting firm Deloitte said Friday it had
withdrawn a report that had concluded extreme climate change would
benefit a third of the world's economies over the course of the 21st
century.<br>
<br>
Published online by Deloitte's Prague office last week, the analysis
said that countries in colder latitudes such as Canada, Norway and
Russia "should benefit the most from rising temperatures."<br>
<br>
The Czech Republic's GDP, for example, would likely rise 25 percent
by 2100 "in the fastest warming scenarios," according to a summary
of the report.<br>
<br>
In a statement obtained by AFP on Friday, Deloitte, one of the
world's "Big Four" accounting firms, said it had withdrawn the
report from its website.<br>
<br>
"The unfortunate wording does not represent Deloitte's global
viewpoint on the impact of climate change, therefore the report has
been withdrawn and is no longer publicly available," the firm said
in the statement.<br>
<br>
"Deloitte believes it's essential that everyone -- from governments
to businesses to NGOs and individuals -- act to protect our planet,"
it added.<br>
<br>
The findings of the report, based on the relationship between
average annual temperatures and GDP, ran counter to most research on
the long-term economic impacts of climate change.<br>
<br>
Recent studies in peer-reviewed journals show the world economy
taking a huge hit from global warming by century's end, shrinking up
to 20 percent by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced.<br>
<br>
Experts asked by AFP last week called the report "naive and
misleading" as well as "perfectly insane".<br>
<br>
Deloitte's worldwide operations pulled in more than $45 billion for
the fiscal year ending in May 2019.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://today.rtl.lu/news/science-and-environment/a/1589307.html">https://today.rtl.lu/news/science-and-environment/a/1589307.html</a><br>
<p>- - <br>
</p>
[read the Deloitte report]<br>
<b>Climate Change and Business</b><br>
Responding to the pressing crisis<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/my/Documents/risk/my-risk-sustainability-risk-climate-change-business.pdf">https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/my/Documents/risk/my-risk-sustainability-risk-climate-change-business.pdf</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Important breakthrough invention for electric power]<br>
<b>Physicists build circuit that generates clean, limitless power
from graphene</b><br>
Researchers harnessed the atomic motion of graphene to generate an
electrical current that could lead to a chip to replace batteries.<br>
October 2, 2020<br>
University of Arkansas<br>
Summary:<br>
Physicists have successfully generated an electrical current from
the atomic motion of graphene, discovering a new source of clean,
limitless power...<br>
- -<br>
A team of University of Arkansas physicists has successfully
developed a circuit capable of capturing graphene's thermal motion
and converting it into an electrical current.<br>
<br>
"An energy-harvesting circuit based on graphene could be
incorporated into a chip to provide clean, limitless, low-voltage
power for small devices or sensors," said Paul Thibado, professor of
physics and lead researcher in the discovery.<br>
<br>
The findings, published in the journal Physical Review E, are proof
of a theory the physicists developed at the U of A three years ago
that freestanding graphene -- a single layer of carbon atoms --
ripples and buckles in a way that holds promise for energy
harvesting.<br>
<br>
The idea of harvesting energy from graphene is controversial because
it refutes physicist Richard Feynman's well-known assertion that the
thermal motion of atoms, known as Brownian motion, cannot do work.
Thibado's team found that at room temperature the thermal motion of
graphene does in fact induce an alternating current (AC) in a
circuit, an achievement thought to be impossible.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201002091029.htm">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201002091029.htm</a><br>
- -<br>
<b>Physicists build circuit that generates clean, limitless power
from graphene</b><br>
In the 1950s, physicist Leon Brillouin published a landmark paper
refuting the idea that adding a single diode, a one-way electrical
gate, to a circuit is the solution to harvesting energy from
Brownian motion. Knowing this, Thibado's group built their circuit
with two diodes for converting AC into a direct current (DC). With
the diodes in opposition allowing the current to flow both ways,
they provide separate paths through the circuit, producing a pulsing
DC current that performs work on a load resistor.<br>
<br>
<b>video graphene animation</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/KiLTEjm8zLw">https://youtu.be/KiLTEjm8zLw</a><br>
<br>
Additionally, they discovered that their design increased the amount
of power delivered. "We also found that the on-off, switch-like
behavior of the diodes actually amplifies the power delivered,
rather than reducing it, as previously thought," said Thibado. "The
rate of change in resistance provided by the diodes adds an extra
factor to the power."<br>
<br>
The team used a relatively new field of physics to prove the diodes
increased the circuit's power. "In proving this power enhancement,
we drew from the emergent field of stochastic thermodynamics and
extended the nearly century-old, celebrated theory of Nyquist," said
coauthor Pradeep Kumar, associate professor of physics and coauthor.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://phys.org/news/2020-10-physicists-circuit-limitless-power-graphene.html">https://phys.org/news/2020-10-physicists-circuit-limitless-power-graphene.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
October 4, 2014</b></font><br>
<p>New York Times columnist Gail Collins observes:<br>
<br>
"There was a time when Republicans were leaders in the fight to
slow climate change -- particularly for the concept called 'cap
and trade,' which had a marketplace-friendly tilt. Among the
co-sponsors of a cap-and-trade bill in 2007 was Senator Lisa
Murkowski, a Republican of Alaska. Murkoswki had to run for
re-election as an independent in 2010, having lost her party's
nomination to a Tea Party favorite who complains about
'climate-change alarmists.'<br>
<br>
"These days, it takes courage for a Republican to acknowledge that
human beings have anything to do with climate change at all."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/opinion/gail-collins-the-walrus-and-the-politicians.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/opinion/gail-collins-the-walrus-and-the-politicians.html</a>
<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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