…humanity was placing too many pressures on the natural world with damaging consequences and warned that failing to take care of the planet meant not taking care of ourselves.Read more >>
… the Covid-19 outbreak was a “clear warning shot”, given that far more deadly diseases existed in wildlife, and that today’s civilisation was “playing with fire”. They said it was almost always human behaviour that caused diseases to spill over into humans.
To prevent further outbreaks, the experts said, both global heating and the destruction of the natural world for farming, mining and housing have to end, as both drive wildlife into contact with people.
For the third year, Americans are greeting the unofficial start of summer shadowed by the specter of the coronavirus amid rising covid-19 cases and hospitalizations across the country.Read more >>
The United States is recording more than 100,000 infections a day — at least five times higher than this point last year — as it confronts the most transmissible versions of the virus yet.
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| Chestnut tiger butterflies take to the skies at Himeshima Island, Japan. Photograph: Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images |
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| Gun lobby money to members of US Congress |
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| Lawrence O’Donnell news anchor >> List of school shooters in the US, their ages and their killing locations |
"How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion - mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he's about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, and an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because). Let's close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun.
(I do not know who wrote this, but vote this person into Congress! Hell, why stop there, put her on the Supreme Court!)
Damage to the body’s organs including the lungs and kidneys is common in people who were admitted to hospital with Covid, with one in eight found to have heart inflammation,Read more >>
Previous studies have revealed that fewer than a third of patients who have ongoing Covid symptoms after being hospitalised with the disease feel fully recovered a year later, while some experts have warned long Covid could result in a generation affected by disability.
Now researchers tracking the progress of patients who were treated in hospital for Covid say they have found evidence the disease can take a toll on a range of organs.
[I have] this mounting feeling that I need to do more. I have a sense of desperation, because of the wide gulf between what the science says society needs to do and how it feels like everything is heading in the opposite direction. World leaders and people not understanding that we’re in an emergency.Read more >>
Then the question comes to me, if I’m sitting with the science every day, and I want to protect my kids and young people and non-humans, what do I do? I’ve been on this 16-year journey trying to answer that question, and civil disobedience seemed like something good to try. I’m ashamed to say that it took me this long.
NPR examined COVID deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across the U.S. from May 2021, the point at which most Americans could find a vaccine if they wanted one. Those living in counties that voted 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.26 times the death rate of those that went by the same margin for Biden. Counties with a higher share of Trump votes had even higher mortality rates.Read more >>
The scale of the preventable loss of life is staggering. According to a recent analysis by Brown University, nearly 320,000 lives nationwide could have been saved if more people had chosen to get vaccinated. The Brown analysis also shows a partisan split in how those preventable deaths are distributed. States that went most heavily for Trump – including Wyoming and West Virginia – have among the highest rates of preventable deaths, while states that voted heavily for Biden – such as Massachusetts and Vermont – had among the lowest.
More than 1m barriers - dams, weirs and other river obstacles - are estimated to exist on Europe’s rivers, with many built more than a century ago. At least 150,000 are old, obsolete barriers that serve no economic purpose.Read more >>
[These] block fish migration routes, often leading to the loss of breeding areas and reduced numbers of species such as salmon, sturgeon, trout and eel, which affects the wider biodiversity of ecosystems, including species ranging from eagles to otters. Free-flowing rivers also transport sediments and nutrients.
[Now] at least 239 barriers, including dams and weirs, were removed across 17 countries in Europe in 2021, in a record-breaking year for dam removals across the continent.
Spain’s Pao Fernández Garrido, project manager for the World Fish Migration Foundation, who helped produce Dam Removal Europe’s annual report, said, “An increasing number of governments, NGOs, companies and communities are understanding the importance of halting and reversing nature loss, and buying into the fact that dam removal is a river-restoration tool that boosts biodiversity and enhances climate resilience. We’re also seeing lessons being learned from previous dam removals, new countries kickstarting removals, and new funds, including crowdfunding.”
A group of the world’s richest nations offered South Africa debt guarantees as part of a proposed $8.5 billion deal designed to cut the nation’s reliance on coal for power generation, people familiar with the talks said, potentially resolving one sticking point in the negotiations.Read more >>
The guarantees would enable South Africa or companies such as state power utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. to borrow money needed to close down coal-fired power plants and enable the generation of renewable energy, one of the people said. The people asked not to be identified as the talks aren’t public. Such an arrangement would alleviate pressure on the South African government to guarantee any debt Eskom may need to fund its transition to renewable energy….
Since the early days of the pandemic, the Bay Area has been seen as a model for how to minimize the spread of the coronavirus.Read more >>
The region instated the nation’s first stay-at-home orders in March 2020 and has since consistently seen lower levels of transmission than its southern counterparts. Today, the Bay Area has one of the country’s lowest COVID-19 death rates.
But over the past few weeks, the region has been getting a different, and less welcome, kind of pandemic attention.
The Bay Area has emerged as the state’s latest COVID hot spot, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among California’s 58 counties, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda currently have the highest rates of COVID transmission….
On Friday, health officers from 11 counties in and around the Bay Area warned of a new swell of cases fueled by highly contagious omicron subvariants.
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| © Zapiro, zapiro.com |
Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha explained that since Saturday evening Tutuka, Camden and Majuba power stations each experienced a breakdown on one of their units.Moreover, “Stage 4 load shedding was implemented on Wednesday morning to prevent Eskom’s diesel and pump storage dam supplies from reaching ‘critically low levels’. Should it run out of diesel and water supplies, South Africans could face Stage 6 blackouts, the power utility warned.”
Mantshantsha said, “we currently have 2,094MW on planned maintenance, while another 17,640MW of capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns.”
… Mantshantsha ended his statement by reminding South Africans that “load shedding is implemented only as a last resort to protect the national grid,” and appealed to the nation to help limit the impact of load shedding by using electricity sparingly by switching off all non-essential items, especially between 5am and 9am and 4pm and 10pm.
… On Wednesday morning, Eskom announced that Stage 4 would be implemented from 9am and continue until 5am on Friday. Thereafter, load shedding will be lowered to Stage 2 until 5am on Monday, 14 March.
CEO André de Ruyter said in a state of the system briefing on Wednesday afternoon, “I think it’s important to emphasise that we should not accept load shedding and the lack of generation capacity as the new normal.This is also a ubiquitous problem of corruption and theft. “A sophisticated crime syndicate – in cahoots with Eskom officials, police and trucking companies – is stealing fuel by exploiting a design flaw at the Kriel Power Station in Mpumalanga. And it all has to do with a weighbridge on the wrong side of a gate.
“While it’s been going on for 14 years now, we need to take urgent steps to address load shedding.”
This year to date we’ve had 32 days of load shedding compared with 26 days of load shedding in close to the same period last year.
As of the end March 2022, Eskom’s Energy Availability Factor — the amount of energy generation a plant is capable of supplying to the grid — was at 62%, below their target of 74% for the financial year.
The most urgent issue to be addressed is that Eskom needs at least 4,000 megawatts (MW) of additional generation capacity to serve the country’s energy demand.
It needs the space to take some of its units off for planned maintenance. Until this capacity is met, the risk of load shedding remains.
For every 100,000 residents, 291 [Americans] have died from Covid-19, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. Among the 20 worst affected nations, only two other countries – Brazil and Poland – have higher mortality rates per 100,000 people.Read more of this depressing reality of Life in the United States in 2022 >>
Deaths directly attributable to Covid-19 are only one measure of the pandemic’s toll. Deaths from drug overdoses hit a record high in 2021, killing at least 100,000 Americans. Chronic conditions such as heart disease, hypertension and dementia have contributed to the number of “excess deaths” – a number which includes other ailments exacerbated by the pandemic, as well as those deaths caused directly by Covid-19. This number crossed the one million threshold in mid-February.
The extraordinary toll has set the US apart among wealthy, peer nations, exposing inequality, a unique and fragmented health system, and polarized politics – all of which likely made the crisis worse, researchers said.
…the disproportionate likelihood for people of color to lack the same quality housing, employment and healthcare access as white Americans – are well known and documented. Such disparities are the “intended or unintended consequences of policy decisions”….
…“The US has been experiencing worse health outcomes for some years now. Life expectancy in the US is the lowest of any high income country”….
Over the next fifty years, thousands of new viruses will spread among animal species as a result of climate change and that — in turn — is likely to increase the risk of infectious diseases making the leap from animals to humans. Also, this process may already be underway.Read more >>
This alarming finding emerges from a new modelling study published in the journal Nature. An abstract of the study — which is titled Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk — explains the findings saying that “At least 10,000 virus species have the capacity to infect humans, but at present, the vast majority are circulating silently in wild mammals.”
The heavy rains that caused catastrophic flooding in South Africa in mid-April were made twice as likely to occur by climate change….Read more >>
An analysis of the flooding, which killed more than 400 people in Durban and surrounding areas in the eastern part of the country, found that the intense two-day storm that caused it had a 1-in-20 chance of occurring in any given year. If the world had not warmed as a result of human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases, the study found, the chances would have been half that, 1 in 40.
An increase in infections that began in places including the Northeast and Puerto Rico is now being seen in other parts of the [US]. Cases will rise and fall going forward, but more worryingly, hospitalizations have started to increase as well — up 20% over two weeks. The decline in deaths has bottomed out at some 350 a day.Read more >>
…the U.S. is at a dramatically different point now in the pandemic than in earlier periods. Even as cases have increased — to 80,000 a day, up from less than 30,000 in late March — they’re still far below the heights of earlier this year, and started rising from very low levels.
…There are a range of factors that contribute to cases rising and falling — climate, behavior, and mitigation efforts (or lack thereof) among them. Scientists are trying to zero in on what the latest increase in cases says about the durability of protection and the ongoing evolution of the virus.
Manufacturing and quality issues led to canceling a $628 million Covid-19 vaccine contract with Emergent Biosolutions.Read more >>
Millions more AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines — 400 million in total — were destroyed as a result of the lack of standards. … The company allegedly hid batches with potential quality issues from federal regulators in February 2021 following months of internal communication about the substantial problems at the facility.
…[such] quality-control issues led to a contamination of 15 million Johnson & Johnson doses in March 2021, when the company accidentally mixed in AstraZeneca drug substance.
The year the world breaches for the first time the 1.5C global heating limit set by international governments is fast approaching, a new forecast shows. The probability of one of the next five years surpassing the limit is now 50%, scientists led by the UK Met Office found. As recently as 2015, there was zero chance of this happening in the following five years. But this surged to 20% in 2020 and 40% in 2021. The global average temperature was 1.1C above pre-industrial levels in 2021.Read more >>
It is also close to certain – 93% – that by 2026 one year will be the hottest ever recorded, beating 2016, when a natural El Niño climate event supercharged temperatures. It is also near certain that the average temperature of the next five years will be higher than the past five years, as the climate crisis intensifies.
New versions of Omicron are again causing a surge of COVID-19 cases in South Africa, and studies show that these new subvariants are so different from the original version of Omicron that immunity generated from a previous infection may not provide much protection.Read more >>
BA.4 and BA.5 are nearly identical to each other, and both are more transmissible than the Omicron BA.2 subvariant. In South Africa, they replaced the BA.2 strain in less than a month. They are now responsible for a spike in South Africa’s COVID-19 cases, which have tripled since mid-April.
According to a new five-year climate outlook from the World Meteorological Organization, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase since the pact was signed, and the WMO found there is now a 50-50 chance that the world will temporarily cross the 1.5-degree threshold sometime in the next five years.Read more >>
Since the floods damaged Transnet railway lines at the beginning of April, Acsa says there have been 14 flight cancellations by two airlines from April 24 to May 1, mostly at OR Tambo, affecting approximately 3,150 passengers. So far, international, domestic, and regional flights have been affected. Domestic and regional flight operators can plan around the fuel shortages because they can easily refuel at other SA airports.Read more about this unsettling circumstance >>
The cancellations have affected Acsa’s revenue, with the state-owned enterprise losing at least R1.5-million. Acsa generates fees by charging airlines when their aircraft lands at its nine airports across the country and when passengers go through its airports.
In a briefing with journalists on Monday, Acsa group CEO Mpumi Mpofu said OR Tambo is operating “lower than normal” in terms of its available jet fuel stock. But the supply “remains stable”. OR Tambo usually has six or seven days’ worth of fuel stock to meet the demands of airlines and for the airport to function without any disruptions. But at last count on Monday, OR Tambo had 3.5 days’ worth of fuel stock.
Engineering News reported that Eskom expects a R20.9-billion diesel bill by April next year, while Fin24 said the utility is burning nine million litres of diesel a day to keep the lights on. Diesel prices are skyrocketing because of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and South Africa buys at spot costs.Read more >>
Eskom currently has almost one-tenth of its fleet capacity in essential maintenance and probably needs more due to the age of its fleet.
While President Cyril Ramaphosa lifted the licensing cap on power generation to 100MW for own generation and onward sales in June 2021, the regulator, Nersa, and the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy have not cut the attendant red tape to get the power into the system.
… officials warn that there could be 100m Covid-19 infections this fall and winter, potentially spurring a surge in hospitalizations and deaths. The White House is preparing backup plans for providing vaccines to US residents if lawmakers refuse to provide more funds for coronavirus response efforts….Read more >>
The US coronavirus death toll is expected to reach 1 million this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said last week that 60% of US residents have been infected with Covid-19….
The official’s dire projection was based on several models, not new data, and was not a formal prediction. These models operate with the premise that Omicron and its sub-variants will keep driving community transmission – and that a significantly different strain will not emerge….
This prediction was also made with the assumption that there will not be additional federal aid…[and that] many vaccinated people, and persons who were previously infected, would get Covid-19 again.
That tally is the number of “excess deaths” compared to a baseline of expected deaths in a world without Covid-19 [and] includes not just the people who died from the virus, but also those who passed away in the ensuing chaos as hospitals filled up and workplaces shut down.Read more >>
It’s a stunning snapshot of the sweeping devastation the Covid-19 pandemic unleashed around the world, showing that the virus wreaked havoc far beyond the infections it caused. The WHO attributed about 5.4 million deaths to the virus itself.
The burden of these deaths was not spread equally. India suffered the highest toll from the pandemic with nearly 4.7 million fatalities, about 10 times the country’s official estimates. India’s per capita excess fatality rate average for 2020-2021 — 171 per 100,000 per year — was roughly in the middle of the pack among countries. The highest per capita rate was in Peru at 437 per 100,000 per year. The US meanwhile saw 820,000 official deaths from Covid-19 by the end of 2021, but the WHO estimated an additional 110,000 fatalities over this time frame, with a per capita rate of 140 per 100,000 per year.
After a weeks-long plateau, coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are once again rising in the U.S. as a new, highly transmissible omicron subvariant rapidly makes its way toward becoming the next dominant virus strain.Read more >>
The current seven-day rolling average of cases is back to where it was in February, with an average of 64,000 cases tallied Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s roughly three times what it was toward the end of March.
The seven-day average for hospitalizations is also up by 20%, with the CDC reporting an average of 2,215 admissions over the last seven days ― up from the prior week’s average of 1,845.
Deaths from COVID-19 have stayed near record lows.
A nurdle is a bead of pure plastic. It is the basic building block of almost all plastic products, like some sort of synthetic ore; their creators call them “pre-production plastic pellets” or “resins.” Every year, trillions of nurdles are produced from natural gas or oil, shipped to factories around the world, and then melted and poured into molds that churn out water bottles and sewage pipes and steering wheels and the millions of other plastic products we use every day. You are almost certainly reading this story on a device that is part nurdle.Read more >>
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An estimated 200,000 metric tons of nurdles make their way into oceans annually. The beads are extremely light, around 20 milligrams each. That means, under current conditions, approximately 10 trillion nurdles are projected to infiltrate marine ecosystems around the world each year.
Hundreds of fish species — including some eaten by humans — and at least 80 kinds of seabirds eat plastics. Researchers are concerned that animals that eat nurdles risk blocking their digestive tracts and starving to death. Just as concerning is what happens to the beads in the long term: Like most plastics, they do not biodegrade, but they do deteriorate over time, forming the second-largest source of ocean microplastics after tire dust. (A nurdle, being less than 5 millimeters around, is a microplastic from the moment of its creation, something also known as a primary microplastic.)
