Tag: environment
Is Los Angeles As Toxic As Manhattan After 9/11?

Is Los Angeles As Toxic As Manhattan After 9/11?

While I've been mainlining local news to see if my house, on the edge of an evacuation zone, was going to survive, my daughter (who I've been staying with) has been doing research on the air. As depressing as it has been to see these fires destroying my adopted hometown, it's been worse to hear my daughter's reports on the air around us, and to be reminded of what we should have learned from 9/11.

"L.A. is Toxic, and We Need to Talk About It" is the title of my daughter's post on Substack. Read it, and then think about those pictures you've seen of people returning to their burnt out neighborhoods, combing through the rubble in their flip-flops, with no masks. It's terrifying. Would you go wading in a toxic dump unprotected? Is "protection" good enough?

This is what we know from 9/11, when only two buildings — granted, two very big buildings — were destroyed. More people have died from exposure to toxic pollutants in the air after 9/11 than died in the collapse of the Twin Towers and the crashes of the planes.

According to the New York Times in 2021, more than 400,000 people who lived, worked or studied in Lower Manhattan were exposed to toxic materials from "the pulverized towers" leading to health issues, many of which took years to emerge and diagnose. Two buildings — in Los Angeles, thousands and thousands of structures and cars have been equally pulverized. The CDC, in 2018, released a list of hazardous 9/11 chemical agents put together by the World Trade Center Health Program. The list is 19 pages long and includes some 352 chemical compounds. In Los Angeles, there is no list, and also no reason it would be significantly shorter. Why is no one talking about it? Why is the only question people seem to be asking is when the fires and hot spots will be controlled enough for civilians to return to their homes?

In New York, anyone who spent time within a one-and-a-half mile radius of the World Trade Center within an eight-month period after 9/11 is eligible to apply for federal health benefits. Is Los Angeles also going to be toxic for eight months?

As of 2024, there were 127,567 people enrolled in the WTC Health Program, 82,000 of them first-responders and volunteers who took part in the rescue and clean up. As of 2023, some 7,000 of them were dead from illnesses linked to the disaster. In September 2024, the New York Fire Department announced that it had lost more members to WTC-related illnesses than it lost on 9/11 itself.

At the time, though, no one warned them. At the time, it apparently seemed best for city officials to tell people that the air, the water and the food supply were safe — that the best course was to keep on keeping on, just as Los Angeles officials are saying that the first priority is to get people back to their homes and begin the process of rebuilding. Really? It took the New York City Council until this past fall — the 23rd anniversary of the attacks — to take up a bill aimed at finding out when and what city officials knew at the time about the toxins in the air after 9/11. How long will it be before we find out what officials know — or should know — about the air in our toxic site here?

It's not clear what we do with the information. The fires stretched across the city, and the winds blew ash and debris everywhere. Three million people can't up and move away for 8 months. But we can wear masks and protective gear. We desperately need professionals to do the cleanup. Children should not be rifling through the rubble. Reporters covering the fires should be dressed the way firefighters are.

First responders deserve protection and health care in the future. Thirty percent of the firefighters are convicted criminals. Kim Kardashian is right: They should be fairly paid for risking their lives and their health. We owe them nothing less. And city, state and federal officials owe us the truth, as we have learned it from 9/11, about the risks we face and the steps we can take to mitigate those risks.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Don't Buy Coca-Cola's Plastic Trash Promise

Don't Buy Coca-Cola's Plastic Trash Promise

Former New Mexico Gov. Bruce King was renowned for his frequent malapropisms and contorted logic.

For example, he once refused to back a bill pushed by loan-shark lobbyists — but he pledged that it if the legislature passed the thing, he would sign it. Well, the bill did pass ... but Bruce vetoed it! The lobbyists swarmed him, crying that he had given his promise. Yes, the governor conceded, but "we all know that a promise is not a commitment."

Apparently, Coca-Cola executives have been studying Gov. King's verbal backflip, for the multibillion-dollar corporate behemoth suddenly announced this month that it was adopting his "a-promise-is-not-a-commitment" ploy. The beverage barons are using King's dictum to squirm out of the widely ballyhooed promise they made just a few years ago to curtail the corporation's contamination of our planet with plastic waste.

Coke has been the world's No. 1 plastic polluter six years in a row, so its previous pledge to cut its plastic trash in half by 2030 would've had a major impact. But, oops, the honchos now say that was never a commitment — just a "voluntary environmental goal." That goal, they explain, has "evolved," so now they're focused on imposing "efficient resource allocation to deliver lasting positive impact."

You don't need a BS detector to translate that corporate gobbledygook. Coke's "resource allocation" will defund its environmental efforts to further enrich its wealthiest shareholders, delivering a "lasting positive impact" for those few. And for the many who will continue absorbing the deadly petropolymers that Coca-Cola carelessly discharges into our air, water, soil, food and bodies — well, tough luck.

Don't be fooled by voluntary anti-pollution requirements. I promise you, they are hoaxes.

Let's all sing the holiday classic: "All I want for Christmas ... Is Something Not Made of Plastic."

Easier sung than done. Plastic is now ubiquitous in toys, electronics, tools, air, water ... and us. And don't forget the plastic Baby Jesus in Christmas tableaus.

What is plastic, anyway? It's a toxic synthetic material mostly manufactured from petroleum by such giants as ExxonMobil, the globe's top purveyor. So much is produced by these profiteers that plastic trash is now a planetary disaster.

But not to worry, for Big Oil's lobbyists assure us gabillions of plastic bags, bottles and such are being recycled, keeping them out of our landfills, water, bodies, etc. Swell! Except ... they're lying.

After all, Exxon is the same for-profit contaminator that lied for years that fossil fuels were not causing climate change, even though top executives knew they were. Their ethic of deceit continues today — Big Oil knows that 94% of U.S. plastics are not recycled. Indeed, they can't be.

Faced with growing public alarm about the ever-growing glut of plastic pollution, the industry has doubled down on deceit by offering a snappy new PR slogan: "Advanced Recycling." They say it's a magical process dubbed "pyrolysis." Only ... it doesn't work, it's inordinately expensive, and it increases climate change emissions. Still, Exxon exclaims its AR will soon be processing half a million tons of plastic waste! But that's not even a drop in the plastic bucket, for more than 400 million tons of plastic waste is discarded each year — and the oil industry is planning to double plastic production by 2040.

The only real way to stop runaway plastic pollution of us and our planet is to use less plastic. To learn more and help, go to Beyond Plastics: BeyondPlastics.org.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Former President Donald Trump

Trump Vows To Suspend 'All Environmental Approvals' For Any Billion-Dollar Investor

President-elect Donald Trump pledged to fast-track permits and tamp down regulations, including environmental, for any entity that wants to invest $1 billion or more in America, while offering no specifics or parameters, including how the federal government could arbitrarily overrule state and local laws.

“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.

During the campaign, Trump told oil and gas executives and lobbyists at a closed-door Mar-a-Lago fundraiser that if they invested $1 billion in his campaign, he would scale back or remove environmental regulations.

“Attendees included executives from ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry,” The New York Times had reported in May. “The event was organized by the oil billionaire Harold Hamm, who has for years helped to shape Republican energy policies.”

Trump has announced his nominee for Secretary of the Interior will be North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

“Under the National Environmental Policy Act,” Forbes reports, “the federal government is required to conduct environmental reviews before approving energy production plans, infrastructure builds and other projects. How Trump will help investors get around regulations isn’t clear, but Trump has vowed to increase domestic production of oil and natural gas, projects that are often stymied or killed in the regulatory process.”

Critics blasted Trump’s statement.

314Action, which says it is “the only organization in the nation focused on recruiting, training, and electing Democrats with a background in science to public office,” wrote: “To tackle the climate crisis, Congress needs to pass and enforce bold, evidence-based legislation. However, Donald Trump doesn’t believe that billionaires should have to follow the law. In his world, they can pay-to-play and bypass crucial environmental protections. That’s why we’ll always fight to #ElectScientists who will fight back against his anti-science agenda and hold these bad actors accountable.”

“A government of oligarchs that will exist to solely serve the interests of oligarchs while distracting working people with culture wars. Foreign corporations & persons can loot & pollute the US and bypass regs that protect the health of Americans as long as they got lots of cash,” observed MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski.

Journalist David Leavitt asked, “How many animals will go extinct because of this? How much quicker will this hasten the destruction of our planet?”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Why We Need Not Obsess Over Declining Birth Rates

Why We Need Not Obsess Over Declining Birth Rates

Americans have this big obsession over population numbers. One reason is that reports related to population come with numbers. Numbers give politicians and journalists something concrete to either agonize or crow over.

The problem with this approach is that the numbers don't necessarily reflect the living reality of people being counted. Americans felt OK with their country in 1960, when the population totaled 179 million. But with birthrates falling and population growth flattening, there's allegedly a crisis even though the number of Americans today, 336 million, is almost double that of 1960.

The Boston Globe frets that cities like Omaha, Nebraska, and Bakersfield, California, are producing far more babies per capita than Boston and Seattle. The reason is that highly educated workers are more likely to delay starting a family until their 30s. About 53 percent of Bostonians aged 25 and older have at least a college degree, compared with just under 40 percent of Omahans in the same age group.

Needless to say, Boston and Omaha are both wonderful cities, each in its own way.

This counting also fails to consider land area. Older coastal cities have tight city limits whereas the newer ones in the interior tend to have large land areas. Omaha has about 500,000 people living in an area of about 145 square miles, while Boston's 675,000 residents squeeze into 90 square miles. Thus, one can more easily live in a suburban-type setting — where many families prefer to raise kids — in a place like Omaha than in Boston. Boston has huge far-flung suburbs outside the city limits that don't make it into this kind of count.

There are problems attached to fewer babies. Many argue that falling birth rates combined with rising life expectancy will lead to economic crisis as fewer young people are available to support growing numbers of retirees.

Another word for problem, however, is challenge. One reason for higher life expectancies is that Americans are healthier at older ages. It's undeniable that for many, 65 isn't what it used to be.

Picturesque rural areas like Sevier County, Tennessee, are now growing rapidly as older Americans, who once hiked there on vacation, now want to hike there in retirement, The Wall Street Journal reports. Long-time locals may resent the heavier traffic, but robust younger retirees need relatively little health care, and they tend not to have kids in school. Thus, they go light on use of public services.

Furthermore, retirement is not what it used to be. The older workforce — defined as Americans 65 and up — has nearly quadrupled since the mid-1980s, according to The Pew Research Center. Those 75 and older are the fastest-growing age group in the workforce. Their participation has more than quadrupled in size since 1964.

Of course, these numbers also reflect there being more older people. And many have not saved enough for a long retirement and must continue working. But many healthy "retirees" simply want to stay engaged.

Today's older Americans tend to have higher educational levels than their parents. Their jobs are less likely to require heavy physical labor, which can wear out a body. That brings us to "phased retirement," a trend whereby a worker stays with the same employer but puts in fewer hours.

There's the related phenomenon of "bridge jobs" — jobs in the same industries that involve a different kind of work or fewer hours. An example would be a manager moving into a sales position.

In the last century, the global population nearly quadrupled from 1.6 billion to 6 billion. Continuing that trend would have led to environmental catastrophe. Today's flatlining birth rates should be far preferable.

They come with challenges, yes. But it can all be worked out,

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

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