Saturday, Oct 25th
Last update08:50:45 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
More than 1.5 million people were ordered to evacuate their homes along the U.S. southeast coast as Hurricane Florence, the most powerful to menace the Carolinas in nearly three decades, barreled closer on Tuesday.
Florence, a Category 4 storm packing winds of 130 miles per hour (210 kph), was expected to make landfall on Friday, most likely in southeastern North Carolina near the South Carolina border, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.
Puerto Rico's governor raised the island's official death toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975 on Tuesday after an independent study found that the number of people who succumbed in the desperate, sweltering months after the storm had been severely undercounted.
The new estimate of nearly 3,000 dead in the six months after Maria devastated the island in September 2017 and knocked out the entire electrical grid was made by researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.
Prominent US climate scientists have told the Guardian that the Trump administration is holding up research funding as their projects undergo an unprecedented political review by the high-school football teammate of the US interior secretary.
The US interior department administers over $5.5bn in funding to external organizations, mostly for research, conservation and land acquisition. At the beginning of 2018, interior secretary Ryan Zinke instated a new requirement that scientific funding above $50,000 must undergo an additional review to ensure expenditures “better align with the administration’s priorities”.
Puerto Rico has conceded that Hurricane Maria killed more than 1,400 people on the island last year and not just the 64 in the official death toll.
The government acknowledged the higher death toll with no fanfare in a report submitted to Congress this week in which it detailed a $139 billion reconstruction plan for the island.
Scott Pruitt’s deputy, Andrew Wheeler, will take over for the embattled former head of the Environmental Protection Agency — and is expected to pick up where Pruitt left off in the fight against regulations designed to protect Americans’ health.
Wheeler, 53, shares Pruitt’s drive to implement a deregulatory agenda.
Unlike Pruitt, however, the former coal lobbyist is known among colleagues as a spotlight-averse politician who could be more adept than his predecessor at rolling back regulations governing clean air and water, the New York Times reported.
TVNL Comment: How in Hell can this agency pretend to work for Environmental Protection? It must be labeled the Environmental Destruction Agency. Wake up, America.
The adoption of clean energies to power electric grids won't be sufficient to meet the Paris climate targets established by the United Nations.
According to new research published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the continued use of fossil fuels for a variety of industrial processes, to power vehicles and heat buildings, is likely to push CO2 emissions beyond manageable levels.
Ireland’s abortion laws, anchored in the Eighth Amendment to the country’s constitution, are among the most restrictive in Europe, with abortion effectively outlawed in nearly all cases, including rape, incest or crisis pregnancies.
That could change. Irish voters cast ballots on Friday in a referendum to keep or repeal the Eighth Amendment. Repeal will mean that abortion will be made legal throughout the country.
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